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May 27th, 2012
May 26th, 2012
zoethe
 | 07:40 pm - Riding in a Critical Mass
Last night I attended my first Cleveland Critical Mass bike ride. Don’t feel badly that you don’t know what that means; I didn’t know about it until a few weeks ago. Critical Mass rides happen on the last Friday of the month in about 300 different cities all over the states and in some other countries. Here in Cleveland we had about 400 riders. In other places they have over 1,000.
400 riders strung out along a roadway was an incredibly impressive sight. We must have stretched out close to half a mile. I can’t even imagine 1,000.
The point of Critical Mass is not speed or getting to a destination first. The point is to raise local awareness of bicyclists and our right–nay, requirement–to share the roads. Did you know that in many states, including Ohio, it’s a misdemeanor for adult cyclists to ride on the sidewalk? This is because sidewalks are for walking, and people walking are generally traveling at 2-5 miles per hour. Whereas cyclists are generally traveling at least 8 miles an hour, and easily can be traveling 18, 20, or more. Cyclists are a hazard to walkers. They are operating vehicles, and belong on the street.
And the fact is that cyclists are safer on the street. I have been clipped by a car once on the street, it’s true. But I’ve had many near-collisions when riding on the sidewalk, because people are not looking for a bike on the sidewalk moving at 12 mph when they back out of a driveway or pull up to an intersection. They see me when I’m on the street.
Still, there are people who don’t understand the law who still honk at cyclists, yell at them to get on the sidewalk, and even assault them. A recent instance I read about was someone whose kid was pelted with a milkshake that was thrown from a car window. I’ve had people swerve at me, and someone open a passenger-side door in my face just to frighten me.
I’m not sure where this level of anger comes from. Yes, you might have to slow down and pull over to the left to get around a cyclist. But you’d have to do the same if a UPS truck was stopped there, and I don’t see anyone honking at the UPS guy. I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion that some of the resentment comes from thinking that the cyclist feels superior to people driving the car, or a guilt that the driver feels for driving along, drinking a milkshake while these cyclists are exercising.
I know that I’ve been cursed at with “fatso, get off the road!” As if my wide hips are taking up more space. My very presence offends some people.
I’ve learned to be more assertive in my biking, and also more cautious. I try to stick to roads with four lanes, and to bike toward the middle of the right lane so people don’t try the slip past me when there really isn’t enough room. I also bike at off hours or against the rush hour traffic so that I’m not frustrating tired people who just want to get home from work as soon as possible. I take my share of the road, but try to do so with respect for drivers.
And I obey traffic laws. I stop for red lights. I yield at stop signs–a full stop is incredibly wearing on the knees, so I cheat a bit, but I give up the right-of-way when it’s not mine to take. I signal my turns. I try to be a good citizen.
Still, it’s hard to be a cyclist at times. And cycling alone always seems more subject to verbal abuse than cycling with a group, or even just two.
So last night, cycling with 400 people, was a kind of empowerment. We rode through neighborhoods where kids ran to the fences, waving wildly at us, adults smiled and called out encouragement, and drivers waiting at intersections honked their horns not with impatience but in celebration. We were a novelty, this enormous group of cyclists.
We were a parade.
Maybe the people who smiled at our dinging bells and honking horns and smiling waves will remember us. Maybe when they come along a solitary cyclist pedaling down a narrow street, they will recall the crazy, happy atmosphere of last night’s ride.
And maybe they will be just a little more patient, give just a little more room, and we can all be better citizens on the road together.
Crossposting from Dreamwidth now. Sigh. If LJ won't let you comment, you can comment here: http://zoethe.dreamwidth.org/795282.html?mode=reply:
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theferrett
 | 07:38 pm - Tales Of A Fourth-Rate Nothing: Busking On The Wrong Street Corner
During Clarion, I coined the phrase “busking on the wrong corner” to describe the phenomenon of “entertaining writing that doesn’t serve the story.” It’s the reason writers have to kill their darlings. It’s the trap that stops a lot of good writers from making the transition to great.
“Busking” is the practice of playing in public spaces for donations – you know, that guy playing the guitar, his guitar case open before him, full of scattered singles and quarters. Buskers are often some of the most talented musicians. But the buskers’ art is also partially a knowledge of where the crowds are.
You can sing your fucking heart out on a corner where there’s no foot traffic. If you’re really good, you might make a few bucks. But if you’re really good and really smart, you’ll position yourself near the subway where people are pouring out by the hundreds as rush hour ends, a place where even a mediocre musician can clean up. Part of your strength is not just the raw force of your musicianship, but knowing where to place that skill so it’s maximized with silver rains of spare change.
Writers (me included, oh so included) are often putting their talents to use on the wrong corner. This chapter is brilliant writing, it’s got great characterization, it’s exciting. But underneath, the scene is at odds with what the story is trying to do, and what you’ll wind up with is a great scene that advances the story in the wrong ways.
Lemme give you the real-life example: the lead character of the novel I’m plotting right now, Autumn Akeley, is a taxidermist. In the beginning of the book, Autumn is deep in the woods on a rumor, searching for the Hulk.
Why the Hulk, you ask? Because she’s not just any taxidermist – she makes wild viral videos online parodying recent movies in order to drive business to her online taxidermy shop. Autumn’s latest planned video (“The Bearvengers”) needs a gigantic, light-skinned animal she can dye green to play the part of the Hulk. Autumn does not kill animals for her entertainment (she takes the death of any creature very seriously), but she just got a tip from a hunter that there’s a decaying grizzly in the woods she might be able to use. She tracks it down with her friend Karla and examines the corpse – it’s a little too moldy for her liking, but it has very light fur. She thinks she can salvage it.
Then a shot rings out across the forest: there are poachers in the woods. As someone who hates to see an animal killed senselessly, she does not take lightly to poachers. She sets off to investigate, starting the chain of events that sets up the novel….
…Now, that’s a pretty good scene. It’s got an interesting character doing something we’ve never seen done before in a book, it displays her odd compulsions, it allows us to watch her work (if you have a character with an odd profession, people love to see the fine details), and for a short intro it’ll do quite nicely.
And yet we are busking badly here. Why?
Because this novel is about Autumn’s friendship with Karla.
Okay, unfair, I didn’t tell you that – but the whole point of the novel is that a new man in town with a shadowy past begins to romance Karla, causing a rift when Autumn discovers the man’s past as a serial killer. And this scene, while good in a vacuum, utterly fails to set up the dynamics of Karla and Autumn and their friendship. In fact, you’d be excused for forgetting the existence of Karla in this summary, because while we can put in some nice dialogue and characterization to set up Karla’s character, the underlying structure of the scene is not about her at all.
This is a great scene for a novel featuring bold Autumn Akeley, bold adventurer. It’s a terrible scene for Autumn and Karla’s big fight – especially since the next scene involves Autumn tracking down poachers, which has even less to do with their friendship. And if you’re not a careful writer, you’ll think this is an awesome scene because it’s got it all – humor, good characterization, a quick hook to action – without realizing that it’s an awesome scene that’s structurally at odds with what you want to do in the long run. It doesn’t set up the things that need to be established.
It’s a good scene in isolation. In context, it’s a darling that needs to be killed… Or at least dramatically changed so that Karla does something so interesting here that the scene metamorphosizes away from Autumn’s search for the Hulk and into an expression of how Autumn and Karla couldn’t get along without each other.
The point I’m making here is that had I written that chapter, I’d have been very proud. It’d be a nice, 1,500 word opener that would grab the reader, full of lovely details and fun stuff.
And then I’d have to place it into my trash folder, because ultimately it doesn’t do what it needs to, then hunt for the right scene to write.
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/214853.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.
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sandratayler
 | 04:53 pm - Pre-Orders, Shipping, and Travel
Pre-orders for Sharp End of the Stick close in just five days. That is also when we’re expecting a truck to show up with four pallets of books. The arrival of those books will usher in the next stage of book shipping work. Howard and Travis will spend a day signing covers while the kids and I stamp the sketch editions. Howard will begin sketching and I will begin shipping. This time we’re changing our shipping process. Instead of having a single big shipping day, we’re going to have many smaller shipping days. It will spread out the work and thus lower the pressure, rather like spreading out weight over a larger surface prevents breakage. It is possible that we’ll hate this new shipping method, but we’re committed to trying it this time. I’ve got two teenagers to help me in addition to my regular shipping second in command. I think that the end result will be all the books shipped by June 12th. Which is pretty important because on June 14th Howard and I depart for DeepSouthCon in Huntsville Alabama. If you’re in that area, hope you stop by.
For this Memorial day weekend, I plan to catch up on sleep and watch entirely too much Sherlock.
Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.
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difrancis
 | 02:28 pm - Greetings from Miscon
Hello~
I’m currently attending Miscon and it’s slightly overcase, a bit sprinkly, and tons of fun.
It’s also very crowded. This is what happens when GRRM attends a con. The unhappy news is that Patty and Mike Briggs both came down with a nasty bug and aren’t able to attend. So I’m missing seeing them. However there are a ton of other old and new friends that I’m getting to see and that’s hugely enjoyable.
I got here yesterday with the kids and set about getting ensconced in the hotel and getting registered. Then I went to the writers workshop meet and greet, followed by a panel on Mystery crossing over into Genre. On that panel was Maggie Bonham, Steve Fahnestalk, JA Pitts, and me. It was a good panel, though it felt a bit meandery. Then we went to dinner with a bunch of friends at the Irish place a couple of parkinglots away. It was excellent food and conversation and I got to see S.A. Bolich and Andrea and Jeff How, all of which I haven’t seen in at least a year, and Brenda Carre, who I haven’t seen since . . . well, it’s been a few years. I tried to absorbe some house selling vibes from her, since she just sold hers.
Then it was back to the hotel room where the kids, the man, the dogs and I goofed off and eventually slept. Both dogs and the girlie ended up in bed with me. How does that happen? So I’m dragging.
Then up early for breakfast and for the writers workshop. It was a really good group. And then I snuck out for a bite and came back and did a panel on writing realistic languages in fantasy and sf with George RR Martin, and Jim Glass. That was fun. George is very funny. Next up is a panel on Urban Fantasy Noir, and then the next is on Monsters, both of which will be very very cool. I’m doing my level best to stay out of the dealer’s room, but I hear things calling my name. I’m so trying not to answer.
Hope you’re having a great weekend!
Originally published at www.dianapfrancis.com. You can comment here or there.
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bradhicks
 | 02:26 am - Yet Another "Why Are You Depressed, Brad?" and "Why Do You Hate America?"
Read this. I don't give a fat fuck if you want to or not, read this: Sebastian Rotella, "Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala," Pro Publica, 5/25/12. Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castaneda was raised to love and honor, as his father and as a beloved role model, the man who did this to his real family:
The commandos herded the men into a school and the women and children into a church. The violence began before dawn. One of the soldiers, César Ibañez, heard the screams of girls begging for help. Several soldiers watched as Lt. César Adán Rosales Batres raped a girl in front of her family. Following their superior officer, other commandos started raping girls and women. ...
The commandos brought the villagers one by one to the center of the hamlet, near a dry well about 40 feet deep. Favio Pinzón Jerez, the squad's cook, and other soldiers reassured the captives that everything would be all right. They were going to be vaccinated. It was a routine health precaution, nothing to worry about.
Commando Gilberto Jordán drew first blood. He carried a baby to the well and hurled it to its death. Jordán wept as he killed the infant. Yet he and another soldier, Manuel Pop Sun, kept throwing children down the well.
The commandos blindfolded the adults and made them kneel, one at a time. They interrogated them about the rifles, aliases, guerrilla leaders. When the villagers protested that they knew nothing, soldiers hit them on the head with a metal sledgehammer. Then they threw them into the well. ... By the end of the afternoon, the well overflowed with corpses.
As with everyone who actually read multiple news sources at the time, I knew about this while it was going on. I linked, a couple of years ago, to the video for Bruce Cockburn's 1984 song and music video, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher:" this is what that article is about. And I knew it at the time. Bruce Cockburn was only one of hundreds of reporters and aid workers who had, for years by that point, been coming out of Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua and telling us that this, right here, is what Ronald Reagan's direct report subordinates, CIA director Casey and NSC director North, were doing there. More kept doing so, month by month and year after year, until well into the first Bush administration.
I was alive at the time. I was working and paying taxes at the time. I was working at a god damned defense contractor at the time, not one that was directly supplying material to the US backed death squads that were raping little girls and murdering nuns and stealing children to raise as pets, but still, I drew my salary at the time from a Reagan-era defense contractor. I paid some of the taxes that paid for this. I did this. It was done in my name, supposedly to keep me safe from Communism. I tried to stop it at the time. God's honest truth, I tried. It wasn't enough. Did I do enough? Do you think I did everything I could have done? Because I never will. I keep saying, not just about this but about a lot of things, that you can't be held morally responsible for something that you were physically incapable of doing. But there were things I thought of trying. And I didn't try them. They would have been risky things. They might well have cost me my life. They probably wouldn't have worked. But I'll never know if I could have stopped the man who murdered his entire village from keeping him as a trophy. All right? I can never know that.
But I know this: after the Iran/Contra scandal, when incoming President Bush had to pardon everybody involved for fear of how much more would come out if they were tried? I thought we were at least ashamed enough of what we'd done that we wouldn't do it again.
If you think that this shit isn't going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and god only knows where else that your tax dollars are being used to save you from Islamist terrorism? You're ignorant, at best. Are you doing everything you can to stop it? Are you sure you are? Or are there things you've thought of trying that you don't have the confidence or the bravery to try? Maybe they wouldn't work. But you're not trying them. Which means that when you are confronted, decades from now, with the memories of what you didn't do to stop the War on Terror, after Iraq and Afghanistan veterans came home and told you what was going on? When you remember, then, how powerless you feel now, but also remember that there are things you've thought of trying but don't have the guts or the faith to try right now? Decades from now, you'll understand, then, how I feel now.
Current Mood:  depressed
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May 25th, 2012
scalzifeed
| 11:06 pm - Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Notes
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/25/galaxy-tab-2-7-0-notes/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18694 
You’ll recall that when I lost my Mac and bought the emergency netbook, I also picked up a Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 inch tablet, on the rationale that, damn it, I was grumpy and I wanted a toy. This is not an excellent reason to buy a piece of electronic equipment, I am the first to note. That said, I’d had my eye on this particular tablet for a bit, so it wasn’t entirely impulsive. I’ve lived with it now for a week and I’m ready to mention what I like and don’t like about it.
First, a general note: I like it. We have an iPad here in the Scalzi household (it’s primarily Krissy’s) and while it’s surely a nice piece of equipment, I’m not in love with its size. A ten-inch tablet is too large for my tastes; unless you’re Shaquille O’Neal, it’s not something you can carry around or use in a single hand, and in other respects it’s also unwieldy. I understand the boffins at Apple have decreed that the iPad is the perfect size for a tablet and that if we have a problem with that there’s something wrong with us, not them. But screw them, they’re just wrong. In my case, a 7-inch tablet is just about perfectly sized: Large enough to give you enough space to see a lot of things, but small enough to operate with one hand. It’s paperback book-sized, basically, and there’s a reason paperbacks are the size they are: Because they make ergonomic sense for humans.
I am using my tablet primarily as a reading appliance, and to that respect it’s been pretty great. Both the Kindle and Nook apps look good and perform well on it, and the screen is a high enough resolution (1024×600) that I can read books without eyestrain (and, because its an LCD screen, I can read it without a nightlight). I’m also trying the Next Issue app, which works like a Netflix for magazines, and it’s for me at least a nice way to cruise through various magazines without them cluttering up my house.
Web browsing is fine — text is small in portrait mode (one needs to pinch zoom) and perfectly readable in landscape. One thing I do like that is that things don’t automatically default to mobile versions of Web sites. I also like that I can access my own site’s backend via the browser, so I can go in and moderate comments more completely than I can do on my phone. The Android 4.0 system means all the Google toys work in a fairly optimized manner, which is especially useful with GMail, which I use. The keyboard in portrait mode is easy to operate with two thumbs.
Although I don’t use it much for video, it handles video just fine; I ran a bit of Serenity on it via Netflix and didn’t have any problems. Haven’t played any games on it so far, but that’s not why I got it, so even if it were to choke on that I wouldn’t care much. The camera is definitely meh, but it’s another function that I did not buy the tablet for, so that’s fine.
Things not to like: It only comes with 8GB of resident memory and half of that’s devoted to apps that I didn’t pick and probably won’t use but come with the thing anyway. This is mitigated by the MicroSD slot and the fact that I just got a 32GB card in that format for $20 (and that it comes with a deal with Dropbox for something like 50GB of space for a year, which does not suck). The power button and the volume rocker button are close enough to each other that I’m always pressing the wrong button. This is annoying. The screen is occasionally less than perfect with touch response (particularly with small type websites), and gets smeary real fast. It’s slightly weird to think the 4.5-inch screen on my phone has a higher resolution than this 7-inch screen.
However, to be blunt, these criticisms for me are blunted by the fact that a) I paid $240 bucks for the thing, which is not a lot, all things considered, b) the tablets closest to it in capability/design — the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire — have similar or lesser specs and are crimped by design in order to keep you in their respective ecosystems. With regards to a), I was not expecting genuinely top-flight specs for what I paid, and what I got for the price is more than satisfactory. With regards to b), why pay for crimped tools when you can get them uncrimped for essentially the same price?
So, for the price and for what I use the thing for, the Galaxy Tab 2 pretty much hits my needs dead on. If you’re looking for a solid, basic tablet in a smaller form factor and for not a whole lot of cash (relatively speaking), it’s worth giving a look.
       
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montecook
 | 05:19 pm - A Couple of Quick Follow-Ups
A Couple of Quick Follow-Ups
In regard to my last two blog posts, I have a couple of things to add or clarify.
1. On Crowdfunding: Although my post was really about being a contributor to crowdfunded projects, and not a creator, I will say that I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I am so in favor of crowdfunding as a means to launch creative projects, and so certain that I'll be launching my own crowdfunded project in the next few months, I'm already consciously kicking "it" forward.
2. On Character Creation: It was not my intention to imply that people who like hours spent creating the perfect character were in the wrong. I just think that it's also valid to want to do it a different way. Most current games cater to people who love detailed character creation, and I think it would likely be a mistake to launch a game without doing so. I am interested, however, in exploring ways to do both--provide for in-depth chargen, and also provide for both low-intensity (simple) chargen and no-intensity (pregen) chargen.
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e_moon60
 | 05:14 pm - Green One Off Needles
Green One, (3rd pair of socks, first green) seemed like such an easy-going, cooperative pair of socks at first. The cuff ribbing...the careful decrease to a narrower part of the ankle below...the successful eye-of-partridge heel flaps. All was well, it seemed.
Until the rejoin, at which point...the heel flaps weren't as stretchy (besides being 2 stitches narrower and the top of foot also being 2 stitches narrower. I had to change gussets to help with that...and then try to adjust (with frequent try-ons. First they'd be really tight, then (when I let off on the decreases) suddenly they'd be overly loose. And the attempt to graft/Kitchener the toes shut...worst so far. Each pair has been harder--this pair was impossible. I was trying to do it flat, off the needles, using cooking twine to hold the stitches:
The idea was to stuff the end of the sock to make a rounded-nearly-flat work surface, and I'd be able to see what I was doing. There's a separate piece of twine through each needle's worth of stitches--6 front, 6 back. (Tied up here to they couldn't come loose I *still* could not see what I was doing. The stitches "shrank" without the needles in them. I had directions. I had watched the video again. I had directions in front of me; I understood the directions...but I could not see the stitches, or the results of what I was doing, except as a confusing mound. The first rounds tried to crawl back down into the fabric...I undid them and started over. Yes, I'd done things in the right order but they didn't look right. I did them again. And again. By the second or third stitch, there was a mound of yarn...and time (more than an hour...considerably...) was passing. Frustration built. Laundry needed to be put out. The other sock had barely started its toe decreases.
I gave up and ran yarn through every stitch and pulled the toe together. OK, it's a sock, it's not the best sock, but it's a sock.
The second sock, I left on needles, except changing to a smaller size needle right before trying to graft the toe, thinking that might help. No. This time I gave up faster (family had come back from the city--the solitude in which to say things to the yarn, the needles, etc., and the lack of interruption was over) and purse-stringed that one, too. It's annoying--I was able to do it with Red One and Blue One, both of whom have imperfect but definite grafted toes. But here they are, Green One socks on feet, off the needles. They're comfortable. I can walk in them, in shoes or out.
 
The thicker heels do help with my wider-heeled walking shoes, but also (and understandably) push my foot forward in the shoe a little. Although these fit better in some areas than previous pairs, they're still a bit big where I had to change the rate of decrease at the gussets. Learned a lot, but it's still not the perfect pattern.
On the very bright side, I now have three pairs of socks.
Current Mood: accomplished
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makinglight
| 03:04 pm - "Felony Interference with a Business Model"
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013973.html Fox, CBS, and NBC have sued DISH Networks over its "Auto Hopper" feature, which allows viewers to auto-skip commercials in programs they record.
What's wonderful isn't that the TV networks are claiming that skipping commercials is "copyright infringement." I mean, that's insane, but no, there's more. The networks are also claiming that if you record a bunch of shows intending to skip the commercials...and then, the next day, you watch the commercials anyway...you're guilty of "copyright infringement" anyway, because you intended to skip the commercials back when you recorded the shows. They're arguing that this supposed "infringement" (which is, of course, not actually infringement) inheres in the intent.
It goes without saying that the word "copyright" is here being used in ways that would be utterly unrecognizable to the people who originally devised the concept. Beyond that, this is Because-We-Say-So legal reasoning of the purest, most flamboyant kind.
The problem isn't that these loopy arguments are going to win in this particular case. The problem is that the entertainment conglomerates have the resources to keep doing this kind of thing nearly forever, endlessly wearing away at the legal system and at our notions of what's just and unjust.
Pretty much the same way the energy conglomerates have nearly unlimited resources to keep propping up the notion that there's a "controversy" over whether we're undergoing anthropogenic global climate change.
The problem is that in order to spur economic development, we created a class of human organizations that are sociopathic. Our army of killer robots has made it clear: they work for themselves, not for us, and they will break the world.
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theferrett
| 10:36 am - More FetLife Posts
I’ve been quiet here as I’ve been slogging through the usual Seasonal Depression, but I did post two essays over at FetLife (TheFacebookforkinksters) that you may be curious about: “Depression. Fucking. Depression.”, which deals with how depression affects my sex life, and “Ropeweasels,” which deals with the issue of me being tied up. (There’s also “Fireplay and Me,” an oddly poetic musing on setting women aflame, which I don’t think I linked here but maybe I did.)
In addition, my humor essay “So I’m Going To Become A Dom” may be my most popular essay ever, with 612 comments and 965 loves. I guess it’s all about the specificity.
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/214628.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.
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theferrett
| 10:30 am - An Odd Change In A Dying System
Back in The Day, when I had infinite people reading me on LiveJournal, I’d post an entry and the comments exploded. I’d hit “post,” and five minutes later I’d have fifteen comments.
Now, I make a big ol’ important post and sometimes I don’t get a comment for half an hour. That used to unnerve me – is this a bad entry? Did I say something wrong? – until I realized what was happening. English LiveJournal is slowly dying.
What used to happen was that the LJ friends page was like Twitter or Facebook now – so constant a stream of data that you just refreshed your friends’ page and wham, new entries. Maybe you didn’t check it twenty times a day like I did, but the friends page was a ritual where my latest entry popped up in real time. I was a part of the info-stream.
As LJ use has declined, though, the traffic patterns have changed for me. People no longer read my blog as part of a daily pulse; it’s in their RSS feeds, or bookmarked separately, or they wait for me to post the interesting links to Twitter (since I don’t Tweet-spam every post). I still get roughly the same number of comments, but as opposed to arriving in one explosive comment-dump, they now arrive scattered over the course of two days, like late passengers departing a red-eye connection. I’m read at their convenience, not the convenience of LJ.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a little weird. Some days I post a SRS ENTRY and then wait until I get one comment just to ensure someone’s listening. By the time I get out of the tub, I have like three comments, which used to be the sign of an entry falling on its face. Now, I’m patient; the user feedback will arrive in due course.
If you write it, they will come.
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/214409.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.
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scalzifeed
| 01:31 pm - The Computers of Scalziland
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/25/the-computers-of-scalziland/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18684 
Since the disappearance (and eventual reappearance) of the MacBook Air, and the emergency purchase of the most recent Acer netbook, there has been some curiosity in among Whateverians about the current state of electronics at the Scalzi Compound. While I choose not to go into complete detail on the grounds that I would hate to give thieves a shopping list, I will note that as far as laptops go we have six functional ones at the moment, one for each human and each of the cats (the dog prefers not to go online). In chronological order, they are:
1. A 15-inch Toshiba (the one in the back on this picture), which I bought in 2007 when I was on my “Last Colony” book tour to replace the 12-inch tablet computer I had at the time, which died when I was in Ann Arbor. This computer wheezes and clicks and we bought a replacement for it because we were sure it was going to die, but like a silicon version of that old guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it is Not Dead Yet. This is my wife’s primary computer.
2. A 17-inch Asus (not pictured) which I inherited as President of SFWA; the previous president bought it for business purposes and then shipped it to me when I ascended. It’s a desktop replacement, and as I had a desktop, I sent it into my daughter’s room (after removing anything confidential to SFWA, of course). Its keyboard is partially broken (the computer works fine when you plug in an outboard keyboard), so at the end of my tenure rather than passing it on I’ll probably purchase it from SFWA at current value; giving my replacement an only-partially operating piece of equipment is laden with too much metaphor, I would say.
3. A 12-inch CR-48, the prototype Chromebook I was sent by Google two Decembers ago (it’s to the left in the picture), which I wrote about half of Redshirts on. I’ve written about this one a bit; I liked the form factor of it but the trackpad was (and still is) awful, and at the time I was trying to use it, it had bugs integrating with Google Docs, which is what I needed it for. I still use it from time to time for Web browsing.
4. The MacBook Air (facing you in the picture). Lovely computer, for which I would note I paid more for than all the other computers on this list (a fact mitigated by inheriting one computer and being sent another by Google). From a practical point of view I’m not at all convinced that the premium I paid for the thing is justified; on the other hand when I use a non-Apple laptop I want to scream at its trackpad. I’ll be curious to see if Windows 8 mitigates the UI advantage Apple has to any serious effect. This is my primary computer at the moment.
5. A 15-inch (widescreen) Hewlett Packard (to the right of the picture). This is the replacement for the Toshiba, which hasn’t died yet, although probably will at some point in the reasonably near future, so we’re prepared, as it were. The HP is at the moment the “family computer” in that it sits at a built-in desk in the living room area, which makes it easily accessible when we’re all downstairs. You’ll often find Athena here, checking in on Facebook, or Krissy looking up something. I used it yesterday to make a video for a thing I’m doing after iMovie on my Mac made it clear to me that it didn’t want to be used.
6. An 11.6-inch Acer: Bought a week ago and the emergency replacement for the Mac, since I needed an actual computer while I was traveling. Right now it lives in my office and stays on the desk; the Mac tends to wander around the house with me.
I’m the first to admit that six laptops in one house is ridiculous, but I like to think the number is mitigated by the following facts: a) I was gifted one by Google, b) inherited another, c) bought a third to replace a computer that’s in the process of dying, d) bought a fourth to replace on I had every reason to suspect was lost forever. Nevertheless: SuperNerd, Thou Art I.
From a practical point of view I will say it’s easier now to have a bunch of laptops in the house than it used to be, because almost everything I write/do on a computer these days is stored online in some way. I do a lot of writing on Google Docs at the moment, store documents in Google Drive and/or Dropbox, and otherwise store material redundantly. When I lost the MacBook Air, I didn’t lose any work, because I could access it by signing in with another computer. It’s nice basically to pick up what you’re doing no matter where you are or what computer you’re using, and I definitely use that to my advantage these days. I don’t even have to save things to a USB drive anymore. Mind you, if Google goes down, I’m doomed, but then, if Google goes down, we may all be doomed.
(Before anyone makes the objection: I still DO save things locally, because, you know what? Google might go down one day. Also, there’s some stuff I don’t want to put online. Like my collection of badger porn! Wait, forget I wrote that last sentence. Anyway: Redundant data storage is your friend.)
So there you have it: A Scalzi computer census.
       
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robin_d_laws
 | 09:30 am - Attn LJ Readers: Feed Switch Reminder
Ever since I switched to blogspot as my main blogging headquarters last summer, I’ve been manually mirroring posts here to LJ. In an effort to pare annoying tasks from my morning routine, I’ll no longer be doing this. If you still want to read me on LJ (as opposed to the main site, or by following me on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+), I have set up an LJ feed of the blogspot content, which you can subscribe to here.
If you want me to notice your comments, please make them on any of the above platforms.
To make sure everyone who needs to see this announcement catches it, I’ll be repeating it periodically over the next week or so. Apologies in advance for the redundancy.
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zoethe
| 08:39 am - Pedal to the Point--so close to $2,000
This is the last day for the initial push for Pedal to the Point, so one final nagging/begging for now, and I promise not to bug you again--at least not until July ;-)
I'm getting close to raising $2,000, and I'd like to reach that number before the end of the night. To those of you who've already given, thank you SO MUCH for your generosity!
A couple people were having problems with the main page link not leading to the donation page link. I think the site has that worked out now, but here's the link directly to the donation page.
And thank you thank you thank you!
Crossposting from Dreamwidth now. Sigh. If LJ won't let you comment, you can comment here: http://zoethe.dreamwidth.org/795060.html?mode=reply:
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officialgaiman
| 04:16 am - Quick Useful Sandman Slipcase post
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html posted by Neil
A hasty post... There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)
( Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.) DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase. According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/) (The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.) 
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May 24th, 2012
shaenon
 | 10:31 pm - The Hero Initiative is an excellent organization that deserves your support.
I don't like to rant on the Internet. I prefer the surgical strike. Precise. Cleansing. But sometimes a lady just gets all pissed.
( Read more... )
So the Cartoon Art Museum has a new show up, a retrospective of the history of MAD. Thanks to the generosity of many lenders and the hard work of the museum's tiny staff, the show includes Kurtzman cover roughs, classic Elder parodies, Jaffee Fold-Ins, Spy Vs. Spy strips by both Prohias and Kuper, one of the two covers ever drawn by Sergio Aragones, and work by present-day contributors like Keith Knight and Chris Baldwin. Andrew, the curator of CAM and my main squeeze, says it's the best show he's ever curated, but he says that a lot.
I wrote the wall text for the show; I do that for CAM shows when the staff is swamped. While I was at it, I also wrote up text for a set of extra labels, just fun facts: how many issues Sergio Aragones has appeared in, this funny thing Al Jaffee said, etc. One of the common criticisms the museum gets on places like Yelp is that we don't provide enough context for the pieces, and I'd like to correct that by giving visitors a little bit of inside information.
Yesterday I noticed that Andrew hadn't included my little factoids in the show. When I asked him about it, he confirmed that, no, the museum didn't print them. Because it couldn't afford to. The Cartoon Art Museum is on such a tight budget that it can't afford the cost of mounting a half-dozen extra labels on foamcore down at the copy shop.
This goes on all the time, of course. CAM survives by cutting its operations down to the bare bones. But that doesn't make each penny pinched any less painful.
So you can imagine my delight today when I learned that webcartoonist Scott Kurtz is busy trying to convince people not to donate to comics nonprofits.
To be fair, Kurtz's post isn't directed at the Cartoon Art Museum. His primary target is the Hero Initiative, an organization that pays the medical costs of cartoonists who lack health care. Many of the Hero Initiative's beneficiaries are older comic-book artists who, to put it bluntly, got screwed over by their publishers. Kurtz is opposed to the donating to the Hero Initiative because...
Okay, I don't know. I'm not sure if he even believes half the things he posts on the Internet. I hate responding to him at all, because, when he dismissed giving to the Hero Initiative as "slacktivism" and sarcastically mocked the people who do so, it's likely that the only thought going through his head was, "Holy shit, some people who aren't me are getting attention! And frankly, they're getting attention because they're better people than me! To my blog!" By acknowledging his little online asshole dance, I'm just giving him what he wants. So I'm a sucker. Sue me.
Kurtz doesn't like that a small online movement has started encouraging people who enjoyed the movie "The Avengers" to give to comics nonprofits--mainly the Hero Initiative, but also groups like the Cartoon Art Museum, MoCCA, the Cartoon Research Library, and the Pittsburgh ToonSeum--as a gesture of support for the artists who created the Avengers, because Marvel and Disney have been adamant in their refusal to do so. This little movement isn't telling people not to see "The Avengers." It's just saying, "Hey, the companies that made the movie aren't supporting the original writers and artists, so let's step up and support them ourselves."
Kurtz is mad about that. Because I don't know.
I don't get the mindset that makes people write this stuff. I just don't. I mean, okay, sure, sometimes we all think things like, "Man, I hope the artists I admire die penniless and suffering, and no one reaches out to them in their moment of need." But most of us, before we share this thought with the world, stop and think again, and we realize, wait, no, that's awful. If there's one thing the Internet has taught me, I guess, it's that some people don't have that crucial second thought.
Comics nonprofits run on the thinnest of shoestrings. They're not a popular target for grants or large donations. They live or die on the generosity of individuals who love the art form, people who can't give a lot but somehow manage, together, to give enough. Telling people not to give to these nonprofits--actually mocking people who do so--is rotten behavior.
Kurtz visited the Cartoon Art Museum a couple of years ago--in fact, at the same time the museum was putting up a show of work by artist Ed Hannigan, who has multiple sclerosis, to benefit the Hero Initiative. Kurtz seemed to have a good time. But maybe he was thinking what a shame it is that we get just enough help from fans to stay open, and hoping he could change that situation.
Or maybe he doesn't think about a blessed thing that pops into his head before he posts mean-spirited crap on the Internet.
Anyway. Rant over. And here's the Hero Initiative website again.
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scalzifeed
| 08:53 pm - The Redshirts Fan Art Contest Finalists: Vote For Your Favorite!
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/the-redshirts-fan-art-contest-finalists-vote-for-your-favorite/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18670  I’ve finally had a chance to look at the entries for the Redshirts Fan Art contest, and holy crap, there was some magnificent stuff in there. It was difficult to narrow it down to a final five entries for you folks here to vote on. But narrow it down I and my Jury of Awesomeness did, and here are you five finalists. At the end, you’ll be able to vote in a poll to pick your favorite. The poll will be open until noon Eastern Time, Tuesday, May 29. Please vote only once, but of course tell everyone you know to vote.
The winner will receive $250 plus an ARC of Redshirts, the 2nd place finalist will receive $100 plus an ARC, 3rd place will receive $50 plus an ARC, and 4th and 5th place will receive ARCs too. So everyone who is a finalist gets something (in the case of a tie for 1st, the 1st and 2nd place money will be split between the top two vote getters. In the case of a 2nd place tie, the 2nd and third place money will be split. In case of a tie for third place, what the hell, I’ll give them both $50).
And now, here are your finalists, in alphabetical order. Click on the picture to be taken to a larger version of the image!
FINALIST #1: DESIREE KERN
FINALIST #2: NATALIE METZGER
FINALIST #3: NATHANIEL PAYNE
FINALIST #4: ELIZABETH PORTER
FINALIST #5: TROY ZIMMERMAN
These are all fantastic.
Now:
Take Our Poll
Remember, vote only once! I don’t envy you the selection process you will have to make.
To the finalists: Congratulations and good luck! And to everyone who entered the contest: Thank you. You are all awesome.
       
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difrancis
| 12:31 pm - progression
I finished doing all the critiques for the Writers Workshop at Miscon. The workshop is free for writers and most of the attending pros do critiques. So if you went to Miscon, you could get critiqued by me, or Patty Briggs, among many others, or I think this year GRRM will be participating. Not sure though. Anyhow, I like to be detailed, so I spend a fair bit of time on each. I type out my comments and they usually are 3-4 single space pages long. It’s all content oriented–I’m not interested in talking grammar at this point, unless is seriously egregious (I didn’t get any stuff like that). I don’t think writers want to hear about grammar either.
I also made my head purple. Very purple. More purple than I planned for. Now I have to pack me, the kids, the dogs, and get on the road in the morning. In the meantime, I’m revising.
What are your plans for the weekend?
Originally published at www.dianapfrancis.com. You can comment here or there.
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matociquala
 | 12:21 pm - there will always be a faster gun. but there'll never be another one like you.
Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun," (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.
The artist is Richard Anderson.
Current Mood:  pleased
Current Music: the sound of thunder and the hum of the refrigerator
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scalzifeed
| 02:58 pm - The Big Idea: Catherine Lundoff
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/24/the-big-idea-catherine-lundoff/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18667 
For the big idea in her novel Silver Moon, author Catherine Lundoff looks at lycanthropy in the context of a “coming of age” story. What makes it unusual? Which age the protagonist of the story is coming into.
CATHERINE LUNDOFF:
Women have always been monsters.
From Lilith to Carmilla to the femme fatales of the silver screen, beautiful women are shown consuming men, and sometimes other women, as prey. Female monsters are thin and beautiful, ageless, if not actually young, the embodiment of seduction and desire: vampires, succubi, sirens, demons.
Against this backdrop of feminine monstrosities, depictions of female werewolves are rare. It makes some sense, given werewolf mythos. Werewolves are out of control, ferociously strong, unbelievably dangerous. They are, therefore, almost universally assumed to be male. Female werewolves simply aren’t sexy enough.
In a 2006 MTV interview about the Underworld films, actress Kate Beckinsale said that there were no female werewolves in the movies because “…that could be really horrifying. Hairy, thuggish women.”
That well-thumbed health reference, the InternetHealthLibrary.com, lists amongst the signs of menopause: “Psychological instability” and “Violent mood swings” and “…hair growth on the face, which is quite unlikely for a woman.” Or hairy and thuggish, if you prefer.
So I began with the impossible and the horrifying: a woman who is neither young nor thin nor beautiful who is wrestling with both psychological instability and hair growth. Lots of hair growth. A woman who has become a monster in her own eyes, but is otherwise like your mom or your friend’s aunt or perhaps one of your elementary school teachers: familiar, comfortable and ordinary. For a werewolf of “a certain age.”
Like female werewolves, there are very few middle-aged female protagonists in science fiction and fantasy. When middle-aged women appear at all, they are generally background players, secondary and tertiary characters in the flow of a larger tale. Always the monster food, never the monster.
But then, as my protagonist Becca Thornton says, speaking for herself, “Seems to me that when you go looking for monsters, that’s all you see. And sometimes you miss much scarier things.”
What’s scarier than monsters? It depends on your fears. Monsters are relative (and sometimes related, but that’s a different story). You can find them hiding in a graveyard waiting for dark, lurking in an alleyway on a lonely night or sharing your bed. For some people, gay, lesbian and trans people are monsters, to be stopped at any cost, whether that’s killing or conversion. Those people are the models that I used for my werewolf hunters. They don’t care about orientation or gender, but they do care deeply about changes they can’t control. Deeply enough to try and cure the local werewolf pack of being what they are: a Pack of middle-aged women from very different backgrounds, united by some common experiences.
The werewolves of Wolf’s Point are called into being by the ancient magic of the place where they live. It picks and chooses which women will serve as the valley’s protectors, deciding who will change and who will not, based on a logic all its own. Sometimes, it makes mistakes.
Becca thinks she might be one of the latter; it must have meant to pick someone else and somehow got her by mistake. But then, she thinks that about a lot of things. In this respect, Becca was a hard character for me to write. Like her, I’m a middle-aged woman just entering menopause. Unlike her, I’m not terribly introspective or insecure about what I’m doing. Of course, I’m also not dealing with the changes she’s wrestling with.
That, really, was what I was hoping to capture in this novel: the experience of change, both physical and psychological, that is absolutely earth shattering. I wanted to examine what an ordinary woman does with those kinds of events. Menopause is a time in a woman’s life where her body feels like it’s transforming into something else, something alien, and potentially monstrous. Not unlike changing into a werewolf, only less fun, at least from my perspective.
There’s an element of wish-fulfillment in that aspect of the book. The thrill of being something much bigger and stronger with fewer aches and pains, at least once a month, is pretty appealing to my middle-aged self. Apart from the whole uncontrollable killing-machine aspect of lycanthropy, who wouldn’t want that in some form? The werewolves of Wolf’s Point have some things that a lot of us might envy: a sense of purpose, of belonging, of newfound power at a time of life that can feel most disempowering.
Given that, I think Becca’s right; there are much scarier things out there than monsters. Perhaps monsters are more familiar than we realize. And maybe we’ve all got a bit of one inside us. It’s what we do with it that counts. Welcome to what I do with mine.
—-
Silver Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.
       
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makinglight
| 01:26 pm - Now available: DRM-free pirate LOTR e-text
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013962.html The Flying Moose of Nargothrond's Tolkien Sarcasm Page, already known for the first-rate synopses on its Tolkien homework page,* now offers a free pirate text version of the entire work.
To quote one of the perpetrators, "Anyone who has an interest in living authors, at least, should illegally copy this anyway because he's already dead."
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robin_d_laws
| 10:56 am - LiveJournal Readers: Please Switch To My New Feed
Ever since I switched to blogspot as my main blogging headquarters last summer, I’ve been manually mirroring posts here to LJ. In an effort to pare annoying tasks from my morning routine, I’ll no longer be doing this. If you still want to read me on LJ (as opposed to the main site, or by following me on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+), I have set up an LJ feed of the blogspot content, which you can subscribe to here.
If you want me to notice your comments, please make them on any of the above platforms.
To make sure everyone who needs to see this announcement catches it, I’ll be repeating it over the next week or so. Apologies in advance for the redundancy.
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zoethe
 | 09:17 am - BBA Challenge #10: Cornbread
This is the only bread in the book that isn't yeast-based, and I was looking forward to it because it involved bacon. It was a very different recipe from most cornbreads that I've had because it included actual corn kernels.'
It was also a huge disappointment. So huge that it honestly sort of threw me out of the BBA challenge mood. I baked this bread in February, and haven't tackled another bread since.
Now, I can't blame that entirely on the cornbread. I did get very sick in February, and then I started biking like a madwoman at the end of the month. But I'm not excited about the next bread in the book, which is another sweet fruit bread. So I've let the project lapse, with the excuse that I hadn't written up the cornbread yet. Maybe getting this out of my system will get me going again.
So, what was wrong with the cornbread? It was too sweet for the savoriness of the bacon on top, and I would have used half the kernel corn that they recommended. It just didn't tickle our fancies.
It's not even worth a picture. But with that out of my system, maybe I'll get back to baking.
Crossposting from Dreamwidth now. Sigh. If LJ won't let you comment, you can comment here: http://zoethe.dreamwidth.org/794873.html?mode=reply:
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May 23rd, 2012
makinglight
| 11:33 pm - English usage rant
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013955.html I realize that we're all traumatized from having been corrected when we would say "Dad and me went to the store" at age five, and that we suffer from hypercorrection as a result. But holy cow, it boggles my mind when really good writers use "I" when they should use "me," as in "Take a look at this picture of Melvin and I."
Some of my smartest and most well-spoken colleagues at Tor do this all the time, too, and I often wind up biting off bits of my tongue to avoid being an annoying real-time grammar cop. But this is Making Light, where I can be an annoying timeshifted grammar cop instead! Seriously, folks, forget any technical grammar explanations you may have been forced to learn. Instead, whenever you're making a sentence about yourself and another person and you're not sure whether to say "I" or "me," just cut the other person out of the sentence and see which one you'd naturally use:
Melvin and me immanentized the Eschaton.
WRONG, because would you say "Me immanentized the Eschaton"? You would not!
Melvin and I immanentized the Eschaton IS CORRECT.
The last survivors of the horrific massacre were Melvin and I.
WRONG, because you wouldn't say "The last survivor of the horrific massacre was I"</em>, now would you?
The last survivors of the horrific massacre were Melvin and me IS CORRECT.
(Disclaimer: I myself make all kinds of equally annoying usage and pronounciation mistakes. English is unruly. I'm just venting about the one that happens to get on my personal last nerve LIKE MAKING THAT SQUEAKY SOUND WHEN YOU RUB A BALLOON ARGH STOP. You know. How. It is. I'll go lie down now.)
UPDATE: See "pronounciation", above. This post is a self-demonstrating artifact. (H/t David Goldfarb in the comments.)
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kittylady
 | 11:20 pm
There is much wildlife around my house. I've already mentioned the skunk that poor Ash found, and then there's the squirrels that taunt the dogs every time they go into the yard and the stray cats that seem to think my garbage is their property. None of that was enough to encourage me to go out and get a livetrap.
Waking up a few days ago to find one of the sunroom windowscreens popped out and an unspayed Kitten missing? That will do it every time. Especially when I find raccoon prints all over the window where the screen was out. Damn thing's lucky that there's laws about discharging firearms in city limits.
So anyway, Kitten has an appointment for a fixing on tuesday, at a hideous hour in the morning that I've mercifully avoided for years. Who wakes up at seven in the morning without getting paid for it? But it will be worth it, and the next step is getting whatever is making that romping noise in my attic to go away.
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e_moon60
| 10:03 pm - Reality Versus the Fiction Writer
1) Do I really think everyone should be barcoded? Of course not. Seriously...you thought it was for real? After hearing about responses to the photographer who thought everyone should be limited to just one photo a day, you still thought this was a dead-serious part of the discussion? The term "Empress of the Universe" wasn't a clue that this was a science fiction writer making something up? 2) So why....? The format of "The Forum" has this sixty second idea thing in it. I was told it was the entertaining, fun part of the show. I interpreted that as "light-hearted interlude." Participants are asked to come up with an idea--however impractical, impossible, unnecessary, and/or undesirable. The BBC staff picks one and the person whose idea it was is then supposed to present and defend it. I don't know about the others, but I tossed out several ideas over the phone, and they didn't seem to create any interest. The idea is supposed to be related to the day's topic (there went my idea for putting solar panels on top of cars in all sunny climes...) It's not supposed to be related to things the participant has already given as points they might want to make in the main discussion (there went another idea or two, including an implant to manage aberrant brain chemistry in soldiers so they wouldn't commit stress-related errors, have rage episodes, maybe even prevent PTSD) or points put forward by the other participants when their main statements are known (and there went something else I didn't even mention to them.) When the first few got "Yes, but..." reactions, I thought "Oh, good, someone else's idea will be used." I'd been told the right one would be picked on the weekend. The weekend went by. Whew. Off the hook. Then came Monday. "We're really looking forward to your 60-second idea." What??!! I guess it's understandable...if you've got a science fiction writer on tap, let her come up with ideas. Maybe they'll be...off the wall. Exciting. Innovative.
( Read more... )
Current Mood: awake
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zoethe
 | 10:23 pm - Y'all rock!!
Just got back in from this evening's cocktail training ride and discovered that you have donated enough that I'm over the thousand dollar mark! Thank you! You are all wonderful!
And I am tired! Good ride this evening, but I don't think I was quite as recovered from the 41 miler on Monday.
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matociquala
 | 09:01 pm - i just know that i'm harder to console
I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:
luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,
Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...
Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!
Current Mood:  mellow
Current Music: Depeche Mode - Lilian (Album Version)
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wilwheaton
| 04:17 pm - in which i have a realization, and i am grateful
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/e5vpBn4hDGw/in-which-i-have-a-realization-and-i-am-grateful.html In the precious few moments I had today between work-related responsibilities, I stopped into my comic shop, and I saw this:
I made this!
I've been so busy, and I finished my part of this project so long ago, I wasn't prepared for how proud and excited I was when I saw a book that I had written in my own comic shop, right there down the shelf from Brubaker, Wood, Willingham, Fraction, Waid, and other comic book authors I respect and admire.
When I bought some copies, Amy (who some of you know from Tabletop) held it up and said, "Is this your first published work as a comic author?"
I thought for a second and said, "I've written manga before, but this is my first comic book."
And that's when it hit me: Today, I am a published comic book author. A real one, and if I work really hard, and have a little bit of luck, it's only the beginning.
I've been traveling and working so much the past few months, I haven't been able to slow down and look around very often (life moves as fast as Ferris Beuller warned us), so I haven't been able to just stop, reflect, and be grateful for what I have. I don't mean to suggest that I'm taking things for granted, or under the delusion that I'm some kind of big deal or anything stupid like that, I just mean that I can't think about more than what is immediately in front of me until it's done, and there's been a long list of somethings in front of me for most of this year (which is awesome; it's great to be busy making a living doing what I love.)
But it's all too easy to get so overwhelmed with all the responsibility, we forget to take a moment to be grateful for the opportunities we have.
Today, I am grateful.
And now I am going back to work. 
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sandratayler
| 06:43 pm - Monument Walk Washington D.C.
“Where are you headed next?” the docent asked as we walked back to the rotunda in the National Museum of Art.
“I wanted to walk down to the Lincoln Memorial.” I answered.
Her eyes grew wide. “That’s a long walk. I know it doesn’t look that far, because of all the open space, but it’s about two miles.”
I smiled at her. Two miles was not too far.
The docent was right about distances being deceiving on the Mall in Washington D.C. Much of this is because the architecture is so over sized. The first designers made everything huge and impressive, sized for the cultural giants they hoped that Americans would aspire to become. The buildings can be seen and admired from afar, then as one draws closer awe grows. They go up and up and up.
The walk was long, past museums and sculpture gardens. The sidewalks were full of tour groups and school groups, each rushing about to make sure they saw everything on their lists. For most Americans trips to D.C. are rare, every moment there is precious. I too came with a list of things I hoped to see, but more important to me was to be there, to experience the place. I decided from moment to moment whether to walk, sit, or photograph. It was a unique freedom not to have to consult the wishes of others about these things, my visit was my own.
I saw the World War II memorial long before I reached it. Like everything else, it is made large. So large that it is hard to fit into a single photograph.
I was impressed by the towers and fountains. I saw the from afar that each tower was labelled with the name of a state and that the matched structures on each end declared Atlantic and Pacific. The logic and planning was evident in the design. Then my feet stepped from sidewalk concrete and onto the flagstones.
Awe and reverence rolled over me in a wave, as if the stones themselves were steeped in them. My eyes began to water and I looked about with my mouth open. I was standing on sanctified ground. A hundred photos of the place will never capture that feeling, because the feeling does not exist in the shapes of the stones or the water. It does not even exist in the words etched into the walls at intervals.
Nor is it in the fountains as they shoot skyward.
All of these things contribute, are part of it, but there is something else there. I think that the builders gave it something and every one who visits adds their own piece. The collected awe and gratitude of a hundred thousand visitors are accumulated in that cirque and focused on the memory of those who sacrificed. One can not stand there without wanting to be a better person to live up to those sacrifices.
To be truthful, it was a bit over powering. I walked up the ramp to exit, curious to see if the feeling would leave as abruptly as it came. Stepping off the flagstones was rather like stepping through the down blast of air in an open-front grocery store. Despite the lack of barrier, the feel of things was different. I turned back for one more look, knowing I needed to come again someday.
The reflecting pools were all under construction, and had been for years according to a local. Someday they will reflect again, but years of wear needed to be fixed first. I followed a winding detour which led me to the Vietnam memorial. I was very curious to see if the Vietnam memorial would affect me as strongly as the World War II memorial. It was one I saw twenty years ago when I visited D.C. as a teenager. At that time it affected me profoundly, teaching me name by name the costs of war.
The Vietnam memorial is a quiet place and the feel of it was quiet. It invites reflection by showing us ourselves in the surface of the wall covered in the names of the dead. I ran my fingers along the names, feeling their roughness against the glass-smooth marble. The Vietnam memorial is a cautionary monument, telling me to be careful what battles I pick.
One thing saddened me. When I came as a teenager the most impressive moments were looking at the flowers and notes left for loved ones whose names were etched there.
This recent trip had an even more abundant litter of notes.
But none of the notes were personal. They were all from “The Students of Lincoln Middle School” or “Mrs. Jeffrey’s Fifth Grade.” That seemed sad to me. Our national memory is fading and the meaning of the monument is changing into something new. On the other hand, there is power in asking a child to pick a name on the wall, picture that name as a loved one, and then leave a note.
Once I knew I was coming to D.C. again, I was filled with a need to sit on the steps of the Lincoln memorial. It seemed powerful to my teenaged self, but she was distracted. By the time we reached Lincoln, I’d met a boy on the trip and things were edging into complicated territory. I wanted nothing more to sit there and absorb the feel of the place, but awareness of the boy was like pebbles thrown into a calm pond, changing the shapes of the reflections. Twenty years later, I wondered what my adult self would feel there.
You first spy Lincoln in his massive building as a lighter shadow in the darkness behind the pillars.
The steps are over-sized, forcing one to stretch to ascend to the heights where Lincoln sits enthroned. “Enthroned” is definitely the right word.
The creators of this monument wanted visitors to feel small and humble. This effect was somewhat mitigated by the crowds of visitors. It was hard to take a picture that didn’t have other people in it.
Yet I didn’t mind the other people. We stood together, pondering equality and freedom, all of us equal visitors no matter what our origins, skin color, or ethnicity. I don’t know what Lincoln the man would think of his giant statue and throng of visitors, but Lincoln stopped being a man long ago and is instead an icon. I think the icon would be pleased to see many who came to visit him.
After paying my respects to Mr. Lincoln I sat on the front steps with my back tucked into the curve of a pillar. Much of the walk had been hot, I was tired, but I closed my eyes in the cool breeze and felt peace. This was why I’d come two thousand miles on an airplane and two miles on foot. I came to feel peace, to tuck a small portion of it into my heart so that I could carry it home with me. I sat there for a long time at the end of my pilgrimage.
I watched the other visitors, including the child who managed to sneak a forbidden slide down the slanted marble next to the stairs. Mostly I thought of nothing in particular. Eventually I had to climb down and leave. I had a long walk back to the metro station. I passed the Korean War Memorial, but was too tired to enter. My path led right by the World War II Memorial. I went inside again to see if the feeling would roll over me again. Instead it sneaked in and filled me. I sat for a time near the Pacific fountain.
When I left to trek back to the metro station, I did so knowing that someday I would love to return. Washington D.C. is a place worth knowing.
Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.
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scalzifeed
| 06:12 pm - Final Notes For “Lowest Difficulty Setting”
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/23/final-notes-for-lowest-difficulty-setting/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18658 It’s now been a week and a day since I posted the “Lowest Difficulty Setting” piece, and the dust around is finally beginning to settle, so a moment for some final notes on it before I let it go off into the sunset.
1. Overall, it was interesting. If I had to do it over again I would have posted it yesterday instead of a week ago yesterday, because a week ago yesterday I had five days of travel and business ahead of me which kept me away from the site and led to the comment threads not as pruned for twits as I would have liked. This should be an indication that I honestly did not expect the piece to blow up like it did. I was occasionally accused of writing the piece for attention, which is an interesting thing to accuse a writer on a public blog of; I mean, duh, yes, of course I wrote it for attention. However, I did not write it solely for attention, nor did I expect the amount of attention it got. So: interesting experience.
2. I’ve been asked for whom the piece was written, as at least some of the Straight White Males who were the focus of the piece did not take kindly to it, and thus it could be argued that it failed. Well, the audience for it wasn’t specifically white straight males, it was everyone, including and especially those folks looking for a way to explain the concepts of under discussion, especially to white straight males, without hauling out the dreaded word “privilege,” into the discussion. This did make the subsequent discussion here and other places just a little bit meta, but that’s okay.
3. Do I still think the analogy is useful? Sure. For one thing, the piece was useful for some folks already, both in giving them a new way to articulate the idea, or to think about it. I’ve got enough anecdotal evidence for that. For another thing, while the piece has received hundreds of thousands of page views, both here and other places online, that means there are still millions of folks who have never heard the analogy. Could still work for them.
4. There were a number of complaints about the article, many of which I addressed in the first follow-up post, although of course there were complaints about those responses as well. One of the biggest complaints was lack of facts in the piece, and while I argued and would still argue that the piece was about the analogy rather than the (to me rather painfully obvious) underlying assumptions, it’s still something that sticks in the craw of some. So, fine. For those folks, the estimable Jim Hines has thoughtfully given you some facts to chew on, although it should be noted that those are the beginning of the wall of evidence, not the only facts to support the piece’s underlying assumptions.
The second major sticking point is the chunk of folks who really very truly believe that I should have put class/wealth into the difficulty setting in addition to or instead of race/gender/sexuality. Again, I’ve already explained why I designed the analogy as I did, and while I think it’s fine that people disagree, I haven’t been sufficiently convinced by their arguments that I was wrong in the manner in which I designed it. I think some people are suggesting that I don’t think wealth and class matter in a significant way; they need to reread the entry. It’s not about whether it makes a difference. It does. It’s about where it’s properly placed in the analogy. Some have commented this is set-up that really is specific to the US, not other places in the Western world; I’m not wholly convinced of this, but then I live in the US, not other places in the Western world.
Also, let me be blunt about this: I think there’s a relatively small but non-trivial number of people arguing the wealth/class thing who believe that if they can only and simply make this all about wealth and class, then they can flat-out deny (or at least hugely mitigate) the idea that the US in particular still has issues with race, sexuality and gender, and that directly related to that, they have unearned advantages as straight white males. Well, that’s just stupid, and I’m not in the least inclined to indulge these folks in their particular fantasy.
Finally, and in general, please note the piece is really not intended to be a be-all piece; it couldn’t and won’t do everything. It’s a start to a discussion or a stepping stone to another part of a discussion.
5. Among the straight white males (and some of their friends) who read the pieces, my guess is that the majority found it non-controversial or perhaps food for thought, or that if they disagreed, and many did, they did so at a setting somewhat below “froth.” But there was a loud but I suspect relatively small number who disagreed at a setting of “froth” or above.
This is of course their right. No one has to agree with me. What I do find interesting is the rhetoric that was often involved, which, for lack of a better way to put it, seemed to me like an attempt to de-legitimize my standing as, you know, as a white dude who loves him some women. And I suppose I get this; it’s true enough that most of the folks who point out the unearned advantages of straight white maleness are not at least one of those things. When someone from inside the fence makes the observation, a lot of the tricks and tools one might use to discount the message and demean the messenger just won’t work, and one has to fall back on some ridiculous ”No True Scotsman” sort of argumentation.
The silliest example of this I’ve seen are the fellows who’ve noted darkly (no pun intended) that I live in a little town that’s more than 98% white; I think the idea there is that I choose to live among the white folks and/or don’t know what it’s like to live among the dark folks. Leaving aside anything else about this assertion that’s racist and stupid (and ignores the idea that there might possibly be women and/or gays and lesbians in Darke County, Ohio), this is an interesting argument to offer about someone who grew up in the LA area, went to school in Chicago, and then lived in Fresno and the DC area prior to moving to Darke County, Ohio, and whose family here in Ohio is packed to the brim with people of Hispanic and African-American descent. Perhaps a little research — perhaps on this very site! — might have been in order. It’s been otherwise suggested that I’m a quisling to other races, genders and sexualities (which lead to my recent tweet which said “THE MATRIARCHICAL HOMODARKOSPHERE WANTS ME TO TELL YOU I AM NOT THEIR PUPPET”), that I’m a beta male and that I’m ugly, or at least “profoundly unhandsome.” And so on.
Dudes: You can’t demote me. You just literally cannot. Despite your best efforts, when I go out into the world, in 98% white Darke County, Ohio or anywhere else, I’m still me, and me is pasty, and Y-chromosomed, and very very fond of the opposite sex.
Beyond this, mind you, the idea that simply noting the concept that white straight males operate on the lowest difficulty setting is the equivalent to an attack on, or a call for guilt on the part of, people who literally had no choice to be born white, or male, or straight, suggests of a level of panic that makes me wonder how these particular fellows manage to get out the door every single day of their lives. Fellows: I haven’t a single trace of guilt or angst on the subject. I don’t know why on Earth you think I think you should. But if you want to work on making life better for everyone, well, that would be a mitzvah, don’t you think?
6. And that’s pretty much where I am on all of this at the moment.
(PS: I’m about to go out the door to the dentist’s, and depending on how things go I will be shot up full of painkillers for several hours and in no condition to deal with the comment thread this entry would inevitably spawn. Also, will anything be said that wasn’t already said in three other separate comment threads on the subject, positive and negative both? I’m thinking: Not really, no. So I’ll just go ahead and keep the comment threads closed for now. If I get back home with my head undrilled, I may unlock it then. In the meantime, don’t worry, there’s all the rest of the Internet to air your comments on. I like Twitter, myself.)
       
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montecook
| 01:28 pm - Character Creation
Character Creation
It took me a long, long time to sort of own up to it. It's a hard thing to admit, actually. But I hate character creation in rpgs.
I'm not a big fan of origin tales and the beginnings of stories anyway. I like to get right into the action. So I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that I was predisposed to dislike character creation. But there are other, more concrete reasons I don't like it, at least the way it is traditionally handled.
1. I don't like making decisions based on nothing. I don't like deciding that my character is this great diplomat before I even get a chance to see what the adventure or campaign is going to be like. Maybe it would have been better to devote myself to arcane knowledge or trapmaking. I don't know yet. And it's frustrating to have to decide ahead of time. It's like when someone invites you to one of those formal dinners where you have to choose from three entres ahead of time. I don't know what I'm going to want to eat some night four months from now. Similarly, I don't know what kinds of things I'm going to want to be doing three sessions from now. Or ten. Or whatever.
2. I don't like spending a lot of time making a lot of decisions at once. I remember, once, in a 3rd Edition game I was running, I introduced a new player to the game. After a lot of careful consideration, she decided she would play an elf rogue. At that point, I could tell that she felt like she was mostly done. So I could really feel her pain as I watched her face take on a look of horror as another player slid a pile of books, full of choices, at her. To the experienced player, the decision to be an elf rogue simply keyed to a number (dozens, really) of other choices she could now make. But she had thought she was mostly done. (I took her aside later, and advised her to ignore all those optional books and whatnot, and we made the character creation process as painless as possible.)
3. I don't like spending a lot of time on decisions that have little importance. It's kind of crazy, if you think about it, that the decision that my newbie friend had already made--race and class--were the "easy" choices, and then she had to go through and make a bunch of "harder" choices--skills, feats, weapon selection--that ultimately would affect her character a lot less. In other words, the choices that would define her most clearly were the ones that took the least time, and the ones that only barely mattered (should I put 2 points or 3 points into Move Silently) were far more laborious.
That's why any game I create from here on out will, if at all possible, feature the following:
1. Lots of pregenerated characters. When I got started in the rpg field twenty plus years ago, it was common wisdom that "real" gamers wanted to make their own charactesr, and thus hated pregens. Pretty much the only games that offered them were games for brand new players. It's sadly taken me a long time to shake that preconception. But I'm a real gamer, and I love pregens. If you're throwing together a new game this Friday, I'd much rather sit down with a stack of pregens to choose from than pull out my dice and a stack of books to create my own. Pretty much every time. If I don't know the system, this makes things go much faster. And if I do, even better because I then likely know how to make a couple of minor tweaks to the character to make it my own. Does this make me less creative? I don't think so. What it really means is, I get my joy from the game in different ways. It also means that I have created a gazillion characters over the years, and I don't need to have the experience of creating a haughty, scholarly guy (or any other cliche) or a sneaky dwarf (or any other goes-against-the-stereotype guy), or the paladin with a drinking problem (or any other character with "issues"). Those are all great characters, and I'd happily play any of them, but I've created them all already, so I don't need to do it again. Ideally, these characters would be either right in the core rulebook or available as free downloads.
2. Fast character generation options. There's great research out there that discusses how many choices people are comfortable with in a given situation, and the numbers are much smaller than pretty much any "mainstream" game's character gen system. I want to create a game where you can make three or four important decisions and have a cool character ready to go. Ideally, it would be configurable enough so that the people who do want a bazillion options, and want to tinker with every tiny aspect of their character can do so as well. And everyone in between can be happy too. To make this work properly, the affect of the choice should always be commensurate with the time and mental energy required to make it. In other words, if deciding between wookiee and blogon really is going to affect your character forever, there should be a lot to that choice. If the decision between the 4.5 crescent wrench and the 5.5 crescent wrench is not going to matter, then there shouldn't probably be a whole crescent wrench subsystem in the game.
3. Choices that are not entirely front loaded. A lot of people want to be able to shape their whole character to fit their character concept right out of the gate, I get that. But others don't want to have to make decisions way ahead of time. In real life, and even in (good) fiction, people change over time. They develop. I'd like to create a game that embraced that idea. Where not all your character defining choices had to be made before the first adventure even started. (When I was a kid, I had a friend who refused to name his character until he had played for a while, to get a "feel" for him. That's a bit silly and extreme, but the sentiment means a lot to me.) This would mean, potentially, that the game would grow as the characters grew. There might be rules that didn't come into play at the beginning of the game. Imagine (just as an example) a game where political affiliation--monarchist, populist, or anarchist--actually affected your character abilities. Now imagine that the game was set up so that you didn't have to make that choice until you'd played three or four sessions. The issues just wouldn't come up until then. Then, after you've got to know your character, you are presented with those choices, right when they are going to affect the flow of the game. That might be kind of cool, and possibly quite preferable to having to make those choices at the beginning, based on little or no information.
Sure, there are games out there that go down these avenues already. But I think there's room for further exploration.
Current Music: MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
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wilwheaton
| 11:55 am - something stirs and something tries and starts to climb toward the light
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wwdn/~3/HIBXmfaQhFA/something-stirs-and-something-tries-and-starts-to-climb-toward-the-light.html I worked on [REDACTED] today, and had more fun than I thought possible. I can't say anything more until July.
Tomorrow, I work on [REDACTED], which is different from [REDACTED], but should be really awesome, too. I can't believe I get to spend two days working with [ACTORS].
(It was a lot easier to talk about my job before the studios became obsessed with secrecy.)
So a couple of quick things before I get back to preparing for [REDACTED]:
- I'm going to the Phoenix Comicon this weekend. I'll be on a few panels, and I'm doing a special show on Saturday night.
- Next week, Felicia and I are going to Origins in Columbus, to play games and talk about Tabletop.
- My testing of the theory that it is not possible to have too many gaming dice continues, so if you're coming to either one of these cons and want to give me dice that I can add to my ever-growing collection, I'd love to have them.
- Today, the comic I wrote with Felicia for The Guild comes out. It's called FAWKES, and it is about what happens between the end of Season 4 and [SPOILER] in Season 5. It's getting generally good reviews, which delights me. The only negative is that I didn't spend several pages filling in people who don't watch The Guild why they should care about the story and who everyone is, which is a little silly, because I didn't write it for those people (who aren't going to buy it, anyway.)I'm especially happy with the artwork and both covers, and super-grateful to Dark Horse for supporting it.
Finally, my beloved Los Angeles Kings are in the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1993. This is what I looked like last night after they won in overtime:
Not actually taken last night, but I do this whenever the Kings win.
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