Gay novelist toasting slowly

Sunday. Hot afternoon with nothing much happening. Picture it: brazen blue sky, a restless wind stirs the canopy trees while birds call out in the forlorn hope of a cool change ... but they're out of luck. The forecast for the coming week is nineties and 100 degrees until next Sunday. Joy.

In fact, so bloody boring that the "artwork" to your left actually looks interesting. It says "Mel Keegan" in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. We were scrambling about for photo references to make up fresh artwork for the LEGENDS project (see below), and I landed on one particular site that translates whatever text you type into a field. Neat. So, my initials must be an owl and a basket. Right.

The a/c split system we were waiting for the other day never did get installed. I should be sitting in a coooool draft right now, sailing through LEGENDS. Instead, I'm still pounding away in something of a sweatbox (I wonder if that's two words? In fact, I'm too hot to care) while we wait for the a/c company to figure out the wiring. Next week, maybe?!

Anyway, the heat must have finally gotten to me, because in a moment of rashness I agreed to be the site administrator for Digital Kosmos, and officially went over to Google and registered it in the Keegan zone there. In fact, I actually don't mind doing this at all, because the new blog is looking so good. There's about 40 posts (meaning, images) "up" already, and Jade just finished off building in the store. I'm pleasantly astonished. These things usually take months to build, grow painfully slowly, and are abandoned before they're old enough to breed. DK looks like a full-on, mature site already, and it's going to be big fun to watch it grow through 2009.

In other news ... there really isn't any! I spoke too soon regarding the situation with Google: my page rankings are still zero for searches performed in the USA, where 90% of all searches happen. It's curiously aggravating to see Aricia winning Google searches from the US at the rate of about a dozen a day, while Keegan languishes in the boondocks.

Anyway -- work continues, albeit in a sweat. LEGENDS is a matter of days away from launch now, with a healthy wedge of it already keyed in, and a goodly amount of art composed. Speaking of the art: yesterday was hair-ripping-out time, when it was discovered that the files for the existing LEGENDS art are corrupt. As in, kaput.

Nothing you can do to save them. So it's back to the drawing board and start composition again, while the existing pieces are "static" -- they can't be manipulated any further. They're JPEGs, pure and simple.

(If you heard a sound of screaming about 24 hours ago, that would have been Jade discovering that all four copies of the files are corrupt ... because three perfect backups were made of the corrupt original. Bliss, right?)

As you can surmise, you find me blogging in a vacuum! And it's too hot to be doing this for long so, if you'll excuse me ... I'll go and find something cool to drink, flake out in the least-toasted place I can find, and take five!

Ciao for now,
MK