Ten Little Chances to be Free

Hey, my webhost gives me unlimited subdomains! Awesome. And it's easy as pie to hook one up to an FTP account. I should probably have noticed this earlier.

Who wants a subdomain of chanvrerie.net for webhosting?

BEHOLD MY UPDATE OF DOOOOOOM

Okay, it's not the full update. But I added information and corrections to the Field of the Lark page; added photos of Père Lachaise and the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas; added additional photos of Montfermeil, the place where Javert jumped into the Seine, the Café Musain, the Rue Plumet, Marius and Cosette's wedding, the Gorbeau tenement, the Field of the Lark, the Rue de l'Homme-Armé, and La Force. And fiddled with the gallery pages so they'd be less dialup unfriendly. And I'm going to do the rest of the updates sometime this year, I swear.

(Rest of the updates = pages for Père Lachaise, Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, and the Rue de l'Ouest; photos and a page for Saint-Sulpice; additional photos of the site of the barricade, Jardin du Luxembourg, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, Rue de la Verrerie, stuff around Saint-Merry, the Panthéon, and the sewer museum. And at some point I should try to find out where the hell that convent was, but my head hurts at the very thought.)

I'm alive, I've just had sort of a crap week. And boring, aside from the still-mysterious allergic reaction.

Proposal for CRAZY TRIP OF CRAZY to Digne and Montreuil-sur-Mer has been submitted! A little under €750 total, for two people. Don't know if we'll get fully funded, but might as well ask!

Have been working valiantly on a website update, mostly to the Mizzie Tour Guide. Those photos from the summer 2008 trip might see the light of day sometime, I swear! Currently dithering about whether to try to get it all done at once and have a HUGE UPDATE OF DOOM AND SHINY, or several updates as I finish things. So, flist, I turn to you!

[Poll #1527580]

So I decided it was silly that I had all the Les Mis Paris revival lyrics translated except three of the most difficult songs, and still hadn't put most of it on the internet. I mean, there were translation threads running on a couple forums, but they're long-since buried, and I haven't been keeping up with putting new translations on LJ.

And so I put them on that website I neglect like the Thénardiers neglect baby Cosette. There's now a shiny new Paris Revival Translations section and everything. Go look! Tell me if there's any buggy HTML or if I've made stupid-ass translation errors.

Yes, slang translates awkwardly. Deal with it. There's a reason I still haven't done Attack on the Rue Plumet.

Homg. So, as I'm sure I've bitched about a thousand times, my computer is experiencing ongoing fail including the inability to play mp3s. Well, I am really fucking sick of not being able to listen to most of my music, so I set up an exchange with a couple of my friends: I give you music, you burn my stuff to CD so I have access to it. And--I haven't listened to Der Glöckner von Notre-Dame in almost a year, and now I have it on CD and I am reliving how much utter WIN it is. For serious. I've never actually seen the Disney movie, and I don't think I ever ever want to because I can't bring myself to think of any of that music as being part of a "kiddie movie." It's hard to articulate, but--Glöckner is so wonderful and dark and beautiful, and I don't want the movie to become my mental image of it. Yes, the conflicts and character motivations have been substantially changed from the book, but I feel like Glöckner isn't disrespectful to the book--unlike a version where Esmeralda miraculously survives and Quasimodo is too virtuous to push Frollo off the tower and Phoebus is a snarky hero instead of a womanizing jackass and Clopin is a glorified clown. Hell, I even like the gargoyles when they're there to play Hobbes to Quasimodo's Calvin instead of being silly kid-pleasing comic relief.

So I don't know. I've heard the animation for the movie is spectacular, but it feels almost like it would ruin Glöckner for me.

Also burned to CD: the bootleg of the Québec Les Mis. FINALLY. Since the PRC translations are almost done (all but four and a half songs are translated and put on HTML pages and ready to go up on my website), I'm playing with the idea of transcribing the parts that weren't on the CD, so that the full French libretto could be made available. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but really wasn't feasible with nothing but eighteen-year-old Paris bootlegs to go on. I'd still need help from fluent French speakers for some parts, but the Québec audio is clear enough for me to get a lot of it without help.

There's also the question of whether I should be putting the French libretto and/or the translations on my website at all, because so far the site is scrupulously free of copyright infringement*. It would be really unpleasant if Cammack & Co. decided to stage another crackdown on sites that reproduce the lyrics and I got hit with a C&D or DMCA takedown notice on a site whose domain I own and which is therefore my responsibility and also directly connected to my real name. Make no mistake, the translations are still going up, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't do it through Freewebs or something so any trigger-happy lawyers would have to go through a lot of shit (and at least two subpoenas) to go after me personally. And who'd want to go to the trouble of getting subpoenas when you can just get Freewebs to take down the infringing material?


* Yes, this is why the site doesn't have my scans of the Montréal production photos. It's also why I host my trade list elsewhere. And I just realized some of the icons I have on the site are made from production photos, but those are small fry, and Cammack's lawyers can't exactly Google them like they can with lyrics.

O hai guyz, I updated the website. With the long-awaited (ha!) Mizzie Tour Guide. And if nobody goes and looks I will be a sad puppy, because I worked my ass off on it and it's huge. It has twice as many pages as the rest of the site combined.

And--not that I'm biased or anything--it's pretty damn nifty. Gallery of 100+ photos? Check. Directions for how the fuck to get to Montfermeil and Montreuil-sur-Mer? Check. Links to all sorts of tourism websites? Check. Museum info? Check. Pages for every single goddamn place Hugo mentioned in Paris, from the Field of the Lark to the site of the barricade, with directions and photos and notes and maps both current and historical? Fuckin' check. I am proud of this baby, oh yes I am.

Have been working diligently on the horribly, awfully nerdy tour guide of Mizzie d00m, which has given me some lovely time with Google, Googlemaps, and old maps of Paris. This has led to an ever-growing list of things I didn't know when I actually visited Paris:

1. Legend has it that Hugo stayed in an inn in Montfermeil, Place de la Halle, called "Au rendez-vous d'Austerlitz." Sneaky bastard. On the one hand I wish I'd known this, but on the other hand I was already lost as fuck in Montfermeil just looking for the Fontaine Jean Valjean. Lord only knows what would've happened if I'd tried to find this.

2. If I'd read this article more closely I would've caught on that 40 rue des Archives is not where Valjean lived. It just happens to have a plaque mentioning that that part of the street used to be the rue de l'Homme-Armé. No. 7 would've been the fourth building on the other side of the street. D'oh.

3. The Jardin du Luxembourg used to be kinda diamond-shaped, with the rue de l'Ouest along its southwest side. Now only the top half is left, but the rue de l'Ouest is still there as the lower half of the rue d'Assas. I think I actually knew this, sort of, when I visited Paris, but couldn't be arsed to check it out. Oh well.

4. I had no way of knowing this before I got my giant .pdf map of 1830s Paris, but the Gorbeau house would've been somewhere down near where the rue Rubens intersects the blvd de l'Hôpital. I had a suspicion that the current No. 50 and 52, which I photographed, were nowhere near where Hugo intended, but not having any idea what had become of the Marché aux Chevaux/rue du Petit Banquier/rue des Vignes/whatever, I couldn't exactly pinpoint where he was talking about.

5. And, as I posted about back in November, the present-day rue du Champ de l'Alouette isn't the same as the old one. *headdesk* Rue Corvisart. Not that it freaking matters, because I'm betting the only remnant of the Field of the Lark is a few scrubby trees planted outside some ugly '60s apartment complex, but still.

Obviously the tour guide of nerdy doom will be updated to reflect all this, I just wish I had photos.

(Also, how sad is it that just writing this post led me off on a bunch of random tangents through gallica.bnf.fr and a whole bunch of random websites? Oops.)

So yeah, I recently saw a really nice promotion for cheap webhosting and pounced on it, without really considering whether I needed my own webspace. Then I realized I didn't have a domain, and bought one. Then the webhost lost my order after the promotion ended, and I would've just let it go except that I'd just registered a domain and didn't want it to sit there while I found another host. So much back-and-forthing with tech support ensued...

...with the end result that Carpe Horas is now located at Chanvrerie.net.

The old version on frenchboys.net will stay up, it just might not get updated. (Not... that it got updated much anyway.) Hell, I haven't even changed the link in my profile yet--mostly because it goes all screwy if you type in the domain without the index.html, and I'm not even sure if it's because the DNS isn't fully propagated yet or if my domain registrar just sucks. In the meantime, I'm having fun fiddling with the admin panel--logs! error pages! hotlink protection! Ooh, shiny.

Can a substantive update to the site be far behind?

...well, yes, it can; the question is, will it.

*flail* Work was evil and hectic today, I can't find my debit card, and then I come home and find out that I somehow saved a couple of the pages on my website in a bizarre encoding that makes them display as a random string of Chinese characters. (Fixed, by the way.)

And... okay, calming down a bit now that I've figured out what was screwing up the site and dealt with it. But I think after I post this I'm going downstairs for a glass of wine or something, because my nerves are totally fried.

Edit: I have found the spitting image of Hugo's Enjolras, and he was a leader of the insurrection in the Vendée. The irony is so delicious. (Closeup!)

You know that place I haven't touched since October?

Well, I updated it.

I put the whole damn thing in a new, shiny, more-readable layout, doubled the size of the Book section, added all my new fic, put the translations side-by-side with the original French, added random fun Javascript things... oh yeah, and I gutted that fucking essay section because it was preventing me from getting the update done. I've been meaning to rewrite the stuff in there for such a goddamn long time to get it out of idiosyncratic LJ-style, but I procrastinated on it for ages and ages. Will be putting them back up one-by-one as I finish them.

Go check it out and see if anything's broken; it works fine on my computer, but the old version was cantankerous on some machines and worked fine on others. So a bit of outside testing would be welcomed.