eddvick

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"None of you shall approach a close relative to have sexual intercourse with her. I am the Lord. You shall not disgrace your father by having intercourse with your mother. Besides, since she is your own mother, you shall not have intercourse with her. You shall not have intercourse with your father's wife, for that would be a disgrace to your father. You shall not have intercourse with your sister, your father's daughter or your mother's daughter, whether she was born in your own household or born elsewhere. You shall not have intercourse with your son's daughter or with your daughter's daughter, for that would be a disgrace to your own family. You shall not have intercourse with the daughter whom your father's wife bore to him, since she, too, is your sister. You shall not have intercourse with your father's sister, since she is your father's relative. You shall not have intercourse with your mother's sister, since she is your mother's relative. You shall not disgrace your father's brother by being intimate with his wife, since she, too, is your aunt. You shall not have intercourse with your daughter-in-law; she is your son's wife, and therefore you shall not disgrace her. You shall not have intercourse with your brother's wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother. You shall not have intercourse with a woman and also with her daughter, nor shall you marry and have intercourse with her son's daughter or or her daughter's daughter; this would be shameful, because they are related to her. While your wife is still living you shall not marry her sister as her rival; for thus you would disgrace your first wife.

"You shall not approach a woman to have intercourse with her while she is unclean from menstruation. You shall not have carnal relations with your neighbor's wife, defiling yourself with her. You shall not offer any of your offspring to be immolated to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; such a thing is an abomination. You shall not have carnal relations with an animal, defiling yourself with it; nor shall a woman set herself in front of an animal to mate with it; such things are abhorrent."
(Leviticus 18:6-23, New American Bible)

Tonight the energy shifted from pre-holiday frenzy to actually enjoying
the season.

I got out today and went up to Swanson's Nursery to spend my
holiday "Swan Dollars" on some white pansies for the doorstep planter.

There is a camel at Swanson's Nursery. He seems very friendly, and is
sharing his yard with shaggy burro (see photo of snorgling). There are
also a pair of magnificently antlered reindeer, who were busy attacking
two Christmas trees suspended from the rafters.

I stopped by the new gourmet shop on Market Street in Ballard, Savour,
and discovered the cheesemonger there is an old friend from Brie and
Bordeaux (the cheese shop in the old Meridian neighborhood in
Wallingford/Green Lake).

Savour has cheeses, Spanish ham, olives, and things you can't get
anywhere else in town (except Pike Place Market). It's expensive. It's
worth it. And they have gift certificates, one of which I bought for a
friend.

Finally, I swung by Classic Consignment and got a beautiful Banana
Republic A-line wool skirt for work ($18.99). I'm going to working in
Olympia two or three days a week in January and need "real" clothes.

• 23:18 have acquired Bob Dylan's Christmas From The heart ... so you don't have to. consider it a gift. I'm going in! #
• 00:10 over enunciated, at times croggling, sad, terrifying, naive, sincere, ultimately sweet. nice remedy to christmas meringue. #

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Things are coming along nicely with Candle-Craft.  I've got three POV characters set in stone, half of their arcs figured out (with intertwiney bits connecting the three plot-lines), new and improved world building, character backgrounds, minor character backgrounds, and some funky steampunk magic unique to the brain of the Fisch.  Some extras that are gruesomely cool :-)

And a couple of extra chapters have slowly emerged from the morass of hand-written notes and tinkerings of previous work.  I can't provide an exact word-count of this work-in-progress, but wouldn't want to anyway.  Those things feel counterproductive, I'm just gonna enjoy writing my story - as long as I keep things fun, it's dead easy to write because I WANT TO.  It's the equivalent of a slow-cooked roast, if I rush this I'm likely to fuck it up and leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

WOOH CHRISTMAS METAPHOR

Anywho, I hope you all jam with some ham and go berserky on a turkey.  Enjoy your holidays and your loved ones :-)


Edit:  Here is some brilliant plot/story advice.
http://www.tameri.com/write/plotnstory.html

• 11:30 Figured out how to get our Quick Nav up on the forum. It's ugly, but usable. Course, the whole thing is kinda ugly but usable. #
• 20:10 I have no idea what to do for whysper's layout. None of the backgrounds I have are sparking anything. #
• 20:10 Merry•*¨*•.¸¸ ¸¸.•*¨*• Christmas•*¨*•.¸¸ ¸¸.•*¨*•Merry •*¨*•.¸¸ ¸¸.•*¨*•Christmas Copy and paste~keep the wave going! #
• 20:28 I'm kinda lost on what to do. I'm thinking about whysper, but nothings coming to mind. Maybe throwing a movie in will encourage revisions. #

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Exile in Geeksville gives #2 a B+.

Money quote:

It’s great to be back in the Uncharted Territories, it’s been too long. O’Bannon, DeCandido and Sliney (and the rest of the fine folks working on this book) are putting out a product that looks great and is a fun read. It almost makes up for the fact that the webseries that was announced 3 years ago has not happened yet. I really think this book should carry a “Season 5″ title (Like Buffy’s season 8.)

Also, Andrea Speed at comiXtreme is slightly disappointed with #2, but gives it a 3/5 anyhow.

Over at theinferior4, Lucius Shepard recently posted ten excellent capsule stories of exotic Christmases past -- although I guess jail isn't an exotic location for everybody. It got me thinking about my own Xmases in foreign lands. There are only three I can remember, not counting the four we spent on Yap when we were living out there (besides which I don't remember those).

1) 1989, Schwäbisch Hall



In 1989 I was in the small town of Schwäbisch Hall in southern Germany. I was visiting my long distance girlfriend, Nahid, whom I had met in May of that year when she and a friend came through Seattle at the end of a cross country trip around the US that had started in San Francisco. We stayed at her mother's apartment in Schwäbisch Hall for a week, then headed up to Berlin, where Nahid was going to the Freie Universität. Nahid's mom, Frau K., had a Hungarian weightlifter boyfriend named Laszlo. Laszlo, who didn't speak any English, was very friendly to me and shared bottles of the local beer, which he thought (and I agreed) was quite good. (When Nahid got back into contact with me a couple of years ago, she said her mom and Laszlo were still together, twenty years later, which made me happy.) I don't remember much about Xmas itself, except that Frau K. talked me into calling home, and my dad answered the phone. I told him he'd love the spätzle, which is a German noodle dish. We'd had Frau K's homemade spätzle that evening, and I was an instant convert.

The other thing I remember about that visit to Schwäbisch Hall was that Nahid took me to a party. Was it on Xmas itself? The weather was freezing, and the party was a surreal "beach party" with sand and fake palm trees. I had one of those lonely-in-a-crowd times, since I didn't know anybody (including Nahid, really), didn't speak the language, and was at least nine years older than anybody else there. I mostly drank beer and played wallflower, although there was at least one awkward conversation with one of Nahid's friends. Nahid asked me to drive home, because she'd been drinking too and the roads were icy. Great! Better than that, we got stopped at a roadblock by the cops. Nahid did all the talking, and somehow she talked us through it. Maybe she explained that I was a poor, innocent foreigner who was driving her home because she was tipsy, I really have no idea.

( Two more under the cut )

The script for Farscape #7 -- which I really wanted to get done before Christmas -- has gone off to Rockne for his okee dokee. I'm going to give yet another once-over to Chapter 1 of the urban fantasy, then to bed, and then Christmasy things for a few days....

A wonderful music video by a Japanese group called Sour. The words are Japanese, but the words are of far less import than the amazing visuals. It's a masterpiece of coordination.

Thanks to louiseroho for the link....

Just spoke to the chemo nurse. I have been advised that due to me being on 5-FU (Fluorouracil), condoms are absolutely required for any relevant sexual act during chemo and for three months afterward. The drugs involved are too disruptive to risk passing on to my sex partners via my ejaculate. Also due to my immunocompromised status, I cannot perform oral sex without a dental dam, as the consequences of me contracting a bacterial infection are severe. This is not surprising, but it does not please me.

In other news, thanks to a prompting from a friend of calendula_witch, I queried about EMLA, an anaesthetic cream that's applied to the skin above the chest port an hour or so prior to the needle being set. The nurse said, "Well, that's a good idea. It will cut down quite a bit on your incidental pain." Which made me wonder why they didn't prescribe it proactively. She also indicated that I can continue physical therapy while under chemo, with no particular cautions. So my shoulder will progress further.

In other news, I'm mulling a post on cancer, stress and my atheism. It seems to need to be discussed — even my clinic is advising me to support my spiritual side through my faith, which seems to considerably privilege religious belief. I'm not planning to make an issue of it there, not at all, just wanting to answer the implied question, which was explicitly voiced by an acquaintance who recently commented, "I just don't understand how you can do this without faith in God."

That definitely deserves a thoughtful response.

I suppose I should make clear that what makes me most annoyed about Winterson’s The Stone Gods (see previous post) is that the Used Furniture problem is more pernicious than just a good writer “slumming” around inside the SF universe, borrowing from the warehouse, or failing to think clearly either the justifications for her setting or the consequences of it.

It’s that, for the past twenty years– longer, if we add in all the forward-looking material from Asimov through the early Cyberpunks (and even the proto-Biopunks like Rucker and Hansen)– there has been a serious, ongoing conversation within the SF writing and reading community about the consequences of our current setting.  We look at Real Dolls and bad phone voicejail trees, at insurance companies giving breaks to people who install GPS trackers on their cars, at the breaking point of Moore’s law and the attempts to keep going, and extrapolate out from there.  This conversation extends from Charlie Stross to Adam Warren (author of Hypervelocity, the most underappreciated posthuman novel of 2007, and inventor of the term “tachycognitive”), from Greg Egan to Masamune Shirow, and Elezier Yudkowski to, er, me.   We’ve been at this for most of our adult lives, thinking about what it means to share our cognosphere with thinking creatures of another substrate, and the moral and human consequences of creating those creatures out of whole silicon and steel.

Winterson apparently is unaware of that conversation.  She treats SF as if it were a Western In Space, a place where she can dodge the “real world” and write whatever she wants, without justification, explanation or extrapolation.  She didn’t do her research.  She didn’t reach out to anyone who reads SF and say, “What’s the state of the art in thinking about these topics?” or “Here’s where I’ve gone with my manuscript, what do you think?”  None of her pre-readers, if she had any, were SF fans.  Nobody pointed her at Accelerando, or Diaspora, or Ghost In The Shell, or even The Journal Entries.  Those are the state-of-the-art for the conversation about human/machine interaction.  Winterson was unaware, and chose to remain so.   I guess I expected better.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

It’s hard to describe just how disappointed I am in Jeanette Winterson’s novel-length stab at science fiction, The Stone Gods. Winterson’s contemporary and historical fiction has a poetic sensibility that is beautiful beyond measure, a deftness of metaphor and exposition that will at times leave me breathless, unable to read another paragraph without pause to recover:

This is my day. This is Rome. I need to be as true as an animal and as wise as a saint. I shall need the luck of the devil if I am to hold it all in my hands.

‘Ciao Bella!’ My grocer throws me an apple – a model of the world in little, original sin, and the spinning globe, and just an apple.

This day. Don’t drop it. It will be gone soon enough.

(from Winterson’s A Roman Short Story, first published in Weekend Magazine, Jan 2004)

About the only writer I can compare her to, in my recent experience, is SF writer Joanna Robson, who often acheive similar lyrical and metaphorical miracles with her own work. I especially like the following because, having been introduced as a work of SF, Robson’s names of things are so damned evocative:

Seraphs brought the news to General Machen first. They confirmed a sighting of Isol as she stole their wing space in the stratosphere and brushed sensor fields with the Heavy Angels surrounding Idlewild Base. They signalled him in official encrypted code.

(from Joanna Robson’s Natural History.)

I suppose, when it comes to metaphor, Mark Helprin might come in ahead of Robson, but he’s sorta out of favor now that he’d like to see the Odyssey and Illiad be returned to copyright and profits from their sale somehow channelled to Homer’s children.

I’m about 50 pages into The Stone Gods. The story is set about 150 years from “now”; mankind has acheived FTL and interstellar flight, but it’s a risky proposition and is basically being treated like the Apollo, only longer. The world has divided into three Orwellian states: The Caliphate, the MoscoSino Axis, and the Central Authority. The CA, where our story opens, is basically a humungous shopping mall, a kind of 1984-meets-Brave-New-World mashup. It’s still economically powerful enough that it’s the only state fielding interstellar missions, developing immortality regimens, and building a robot-based economy.

But the population is full of Shiny Happy People, all medically “frozen” to some attractive age– 18 to 24 for most women, 30 to 40 for most men. If you’re not Shiny and Happy, the state will send out Enhancement personnel, which will do what they can to help you find your shiny happiness. If you prove troublesome, they send out Enforcement.

The heroine is a troublemaking misfit who works for Enhancement and owns the Last Organic Farm on the planet.

In those first 50 pages, here’s what Winterson has laid out for us as propositions:

• Since everyone is a beautiful person at the height of their sexual attractiveness, everyone will become jaded. Those who wants to “compete” sexually will become absurdly hypersexualized: penises like pillars, balloon breasts and towering legs, eyes widened and bodies stretched beyond even anime superheroic proportions.
• When that’s not enough, almost all men will resort to pedophilia, young kids being about the only thing “exotic” left in the world. The kids are bought from The Caliphate, which naturally sells them; since they’re not citizens of the Central Authority, nobody really cares what happens to them.
• It’s against the law for women to compete against these children by having their own genecodes fixed below the age of 14. No reason is given for this.
• There are robots everywhere. Most of them are drudgery alleviation machines that do all the work. But there is a super-high-end robot that looks and acts for all the world like a human being, although it’s not and fellow citizens wink and nod and say how remarkable it is that simple silicon can act so human-like and still not be conscious.
• Despite being able to manufacture absolutely “drop dead gorgeous” robots that are outright chattel and perfectly loyal, humans and robots don’t boink. The narrator tells us without blinking an eye that “The penalty for inter-species sex is death.”
• Apparently, US CA law does not hold true on CA starships. None of the astronauts we meet ever face a penalty for boinking their on-board observer robot, one of those super-sexy human models, so often that despite her described better than human self-repairing capability, she “wore out three silicone vaginas.”
• We’re told time and again that robots don’t have feelings, but the robots we do meet frequently describe themselves as having “wants” and “desires” which are, uh, feelings.

There is, in science-fiction writing, a term we use to describe what happens when non-SF writers slum around in our genre: Used Furniture. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, the writers just goes to the Warehouse Of Old SF and picks out a bunch of tropes with which to decorate her college-apartment plot. It doesn’t really matter, she won’t be there long.

The Stone Gods is such a viciously bad example that, for every one of those points I highlighted above, I had to restrain myself from throwing the book across the room with great force. (It’s a library book.)

The reason I’m mostly so worked up with this is that Winterson is exploring the same space in which I work: immortality, human/robot relationships, interspecies sex. And she’s doing so, so very badly. She’s said in an interview that she likes to write “at the frontiers of common sense,” but good gods, have some common sense about the background. The economics don’t make sense: you can’t have everyone sated into that classic dystopian unproductive consumerist happy stupidity that has been done badly by lots of SF writers (most recently by Jon Armstrong in his book Grey) and have a viable research field producing robots, immortals, and starships. You can’t make me believe that we would degenerate to child-abuse sexual slavery wrapped in nationalist politics, but would somehow come as a nation to impose the death penalty for boinking the toaster.

Even Winterson’s usual voice is missing, that beauty and lyricism somehow replaced with a heart-not-in-it world-weary narrator.

I thought, for a while, that Winterson might be trying to acheive a parable, but the encounter in the brothel scene convinced me otherwise. The Heroine has been dispatched to try and make HappyShiny a woman who wants the legal right to be turned into a 12-year-old so her husband will boink her again; the Heroine goes to the pedophile’s brothel– the most popular place in the city, we’re told– to find him and ask how he feels about her court battle. A panoromic tapestry of how All Men Can And Will Abuse The Powerless and Innocent is on full display. Winterson has an Axe To Grind– about men, about progress, about beauty, I can’t tell, but there is an Axe, and in this scene it is Ground until there are angry sparks flying from the writer’s pen.

Look, I write this stuff to: human/robot relationships (even, gasp lesbian human/robot relationships, like Winterson’s). I struggle with a vision for how the human species will survive a post-Transcendence technology, and to do so I limit my vision to showing how humans and near-humans and quasi-humans live in such a place; doing so, I must also struggle with racism and sexism (sometimes, okay, I revel in it too). But I aim my ground axes at stupidity, mostly, and not at stereotypes.

And while I may have started out with Used Furniture, I eventually went out and built my own set with my own two hands. I make no excuses for the results.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Ursula K. Le Guin's letter of resignation from the Author's Guild:

18 December 2009

To Whom it may concern at the Authors Guild:

I have been a member of the Authors Guild since 1972.

At no time during those thirty-seven years was I able to attend the functions, parties, and so forth offered by the Guild to members who happen to live on the other side of the continent. I have naturally resented this geographical discrimination, reflected also in the officership of the Guild, always almost all Easterners. But it was a petty gripe when I compared it to my gratitude to the Guild for the work you were doing in defending writers’ rights. I went on paying top dues and thought it worth it.

And now you have sold us down the river.

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the "Google settlement." You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can’t. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the "Google settlement." They don’t have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Yours truly,

Ursula K. Le Guin


[This letter may be quoted or copied, with attribution.]

Brava!

(Thanks to suricattus for the link....)

With the exception of a tasty lunch in the congenial company of e_bourne I have been online almost continuously since I got up this morning. This has had to do with job search things, and the time is well-justified. I am, however, positively burnt out with being on the computer today, so I'm logging off, and expect not to reappear until later this evening or possibly not even until tomorrow morning.

Have a lovely afternoon, Internets. I bid you adieu.

So what did I do from 2000 to 2010? In roughly chronological order...

• I started working at Spümcø somewhere around the summer of 2000. Sometime over the next year I got to a point where I could honestly and humbly say that I was probably one of the ten best people in the world at the arcanities of Flash animation.
• I finally pried my cold dead Amiga from my hands and shifted to Macs.
• I discovered Adobe Illustrator.
• I started my gender transition.
• I killed off Peganthyrus, the muck character who was part of my run-up transition. This lasted about three years.
• I moved to San Francisco.
• I burnt out on Flash animation.
• I burnt out on mucking.
• I sold all my videogame equipment and vowed to stop giving my life to anything but the most amazing games.
• I attempted to move to New Orleans and got pretty much all my stuff destroyed when Katrina hit three days after I got there.
• I moved to Boston and started my relationship with Kin and Rik.
• I started smoking pot. There were a few brief encounters with E and LSD as well but they haven't become a regular feature of my life.
• I drew about 300 pieces of art, judging by what's on my site. I feel like there should have been a lot more but I'm not going to beat myself up over it.
• This art included an entire Tarot deck.
• I started letting the part of my brain that insists that magic works do things predicated on that. I'm still not sure which layers of reality this belief is true on.
• I had my first gallery show.
• I went to my grandmother's funeral and came out to the remainder of my family down in New Orleans.
• I started a comic book with Kin that I'll be doing until 2011 or so, with sequels planned that I might finish by the end of the next decade.
• I created an anagrammatic alias who draws insane fetish art for money. If you know who she is please don't mention the connection anywhere Googleable.
• I started going to cons and making enough to cover the trip.
• I started mucking again.
• I finished my gender transition. Or at least that's what the darkest corners of the back of my brain tell me. I still have a cock and it doesn't matter to me or my husbands in the least.

Next decade? I dunno. Find publishers for that deck, finish Absinthe, start other comics (I have about a half dozen things waiting; most are collaborations with Kin, and I really hope that most of them won't be as obsessively drawn as Absinthe has been). Move to Seattle. Possibly buy a house with a few other people once we sell my grandmother's place.

I so don't want to do my driveway!

My mom and I, inveterate planners--nay, a planning juggernaut--have spent this week carefully not planning, or not attaching to particular plans. "If Grandma's still in the hospital, then this," we say, "and if it's snowing heavily then that." "If greykev makes it to Omaha, this; if it's too nasty out for porphyrin's to come down, that."

We have reached the point on the flowchart of this year's shaky-but-determined Christmas where it just seems like the best thing for Ista, markgritter, and me to head down to Apple Valley to stay with my folks for the next few days. It'll make hospital visits easier, it'll make festivities--whether truncated or no--easier, and it'll mean that no one has to worry about whether we'll make it down when we wanted to. Because we'll just be there. So I am packing, in addition to my toothbrush and socks and like that, board games and DVDs and oranges and pepparkakor and shortbread and gjetost and wine. timprov was invited but decided to join us on Christmas Day if the roads and his health permit, and if not he has the fixings for an excellent Timprovian dinner.

There's very little about this Christmas that's the way we would have wanted if we'd been given the choice of planning it out last Christmas. But there can be really good bits anyway, and I think this is going to be one of them.

My folks have wifi, and I will have laptop and cell phone, so it's not like I'm going to the ends of the earth to hide under a rock. As far as most of you are concerned, it'll be just the same. I will almost certainly not liveblog it if we are sitting around in our pajamas playing Beat The Hell Out Of Richard. But y'know. Highlights reel maybe.

Chris called and interrupted my Tuesday night poker game by saying that Cybil was at a house on Cache La Poudre waiting to be picked up. Perhaps not, as she bailed out of the moving car twice and after committing to walking back across town was finally coaxed back into the car when we ran into a mutual friend. By now it was dropping buckets of snow as we skidded along our merry way.

Today, finally vacuuming and cleaning out the cupboards (a previous resident liked to use a bit of a package of bouillon or muffin mix or Jello powder and leave the rest to spill among the cupboard), disposing of some outdated items (Orange Peel I inherited from someone when they discarded their spices before leaving El Paso; expiration date: 1982), replacing a burn-out lightbulb with a compact fluorescent, clearing the dining table, hanging the photo I took of Crystal at Mt. Rushmore over the dining table, and generally straightening things out. Because, apparently, you never know when you're going to have unexpected houseguests.

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

The voice doing the curbside announcements has changed since I was a kid -- it's become more emotional, less robotic.  It sounds like they found someone with acting ambitions for the new voice -- "Let's see -- I'm a curbside announcer. What's my motivation?" In the end he seems to have gone with polite but firm: "The white curb is for immediate loading and unloading only.  Unattended vehicles will be cited and towed."

Yesterday was supposed to be the start of the pre-holiday family trip to Phoenix. We got about thirty miles out before the winter storm walloped us and everyone else on the roads. They were so bad twenty miles out that at the highway T in the next town, I couldn't stop the van. I slid around the guy in my lane and into the intersection. And it got worse from there - ten miles per hour, and STILL sliding all over. And then they announced on the road signs that chains were required, so we decided to turn around. Good call: both major routes to Phoenix are closed due to accidents, and then the Rim Country road was just closed entirely. If we'd gone farther, or left earlier, we'd have been stuck on ice-covered roads in the dark.

So, the trip has been postponed for a few days. We went home, ate good Mexican food by the fire, watched HOME ALONE, and I ended up working at the Studio. A good, fair night for drawing, I think - as it will be tonight.

AOSIS: Alliance of Small Island States

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change. It functions primarily as an ad hoc lobby and negotiating voice for small island developing States (SIDS) within the United Nations system.

AOSIS has a membership of 42 States and observers, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea. Thirty-seven are members of the United Nations, close to 28 percent of developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN's total membership. Together, SIDS communities constitute some five percent of the global population.

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Wikipedia:

Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small Island countries. Established in 1990, the main purpose of the alliance is to consolidate the voices of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to address global climate change. AOSIS has been very active from its inception putting forward the first draft text in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations as early as 1994.

Many of the member states were present at the COP15 United Nations on Climate Change Conference in December of 2009. Democracy Now! reported that members from the island state of Tuvalu interrupted a session on december 10 to demand that global temperature rise be limited to 1.5 degrees instead of the proposed 2 degrees.

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And yes, the Federated States of Micronesia (and thus Yap), are a member. Some of the Outer Islands of the State of Yap (many of which are low-lying atolls) will probably be submerged by rising ocean levels. Yap Island itself is not an atoll, but a chunk of continental plate that rises above sea level.

Submitted for your approval: I need help...help me name a character...she's the prince's young female companion...think more like a daughter rather than a "companion." Here's a physical description: When Ben had stepped into the main hall, all eyes were on him and the young woman on his arm. Shorter than Jess by a full head, she was curvy and voluptuous wearing a blue gown showing just enough cleavage not to be considered scandalous. An ornate necklace of sapphires and diamonds brought even more attention to her chest. She had a wicked grin and dark, sparkling eyes. Her dark hair was streaked with caramel colored highlights and cascaded over her bare, tanned shoulders. Alicia had told Jess that someone had said the girl’s name was (NAME). Some of the girls were saying she was half-Viili. The mere mention of the Women of the Wood sent Jess’s mind flying, thinking of the tales she loved. She found herself staring at the girl, seeing if she measured up to what Jess imagined. Poll #1502720 Name The Mysterious Female Companion
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

Which fits best?

I'll even throw this out there: those who help pick the winner will be entered into a drawing for a copy of my book...when and if it ever gets sold! (Even those of you that KNOW you are getting a free copy need to vote!) Thanks!

Saw this at the Varsity with holyoutlaw last night. It's a WWII movie based on a true story about the Danish resistance movement -- specifically about two hitman for the resistance (code names Flame and Citron) who specialize in assassinating Danish Nazi collaborators. In a lot of ways this felt like a standard WWII spy movie. As I said to Luke afterwards, "It's like Lust: Caution, except without all the sex." The focus is on deceit, betrayal, distrust, disinformation, the death of innocence/innocents, grey areas of morality. There's a neglected wife and a femme fatale. There's the scene where the Nazi villain tells the resistance hitman that they aren't that different. There's the patriotism in the face of certain death. (The latter is where Lust: Caution shockingly turned the tables.)

For all the familiar tropes, it's well done, and I wasn't familiar with the Danish resistance, so it was historically interesting as well. I think the most moving moment for me, however, came in the very opening shots, which are stock footage of the Nazis rolling into Copenhagen, with a voiceover in the second person asking, "Where were you when they came? Where were you on April 9th?" We don't yet know who the "you" is, so it could be us. The voiceover then talks about what it felt like to see the Danish Nazis come out of the woodwork. And it made me think: there would be Nazi collaborators in America too, even now. Which was a thought that hovered over the entire movie, as these two men went about cold-bloodedly killing collaborators, and then beginning to wonder whether they had killed the right people.

The film is very noir, too. Everybody is almost always smoking and drinking and hidden in shadow. I'm not sure how much spoken Danish I had ever heard before, and for some reason it sounded a lot more like English than German does.

So, the last day before vacation and of course I have a full schedule...three of my blocks get to watch Something, Something, Something Dark Side while my seniors "work" on their research projects. My fourth block "study hall" is the only one I haven't decided on. So of course, I left Winter's Discord at home...stupid. Second day in a row I've screwed the pooch on that one! I've discovered something though...the draft I sent my agent (tee-hee) is actually a mix of the start of 5.0 and 4.5, yet there were some good changes made to 4.5 somewhere along the line in my computer/thumb drive compared to the one I printed out. Makes me worried about how disorganized I really am!!!! And that on the computer!!!! Anyway, I'm going to look at all the drafts I have and see what I can get done for the rest of the day, I've got like 3 hours of writing time...go Team Ebenstone.

...no, that's not my house. :P

Anne KG Murphy & Brian Gray won the 2010 TAFF Delegacy with 49 votes. Frank Wu ended up with 30 votes, there were 13 No Preferences and 3 Hold over Funds.

You can find a full breakdown at TAFF.org.uk.

Congrats to Anne & Brian, and also to Frank for runnign a great race and raising more than 2 large for the FUnd during the race!
Chris

Day 13 In which we explore a castle
We were still in Hiroshima, and this was our last full day in Japan. We went to a Sukiya restaurant at the train station and had curry and rice for breakfast. We checked out of the hotel, and caught the 9:48 high speed Shinkansen to Himeji. The ride took just an hour. The train was very comfortable, with wide seats and plenty of leg room. Even so, when the woman in front of us reclined her seat, she first said, "Sumimasen (excuse me)," before reclining it a few inches.




The castle in Fukuyama is right next to the train station. This was taken from the train as we went through the station.

( click here to read the rest of the travel report )

We still haven't finished coordinating food with Mom. I meant to call last night, but after running to the pharmacy and finally finishing the last of the wrapping, I turned on the glowy box and watched a bunch of stuff off Tivo, having completely forgotten about calling.

Work is quieter than usual in one sense, since a lot of people are taking time off, so a lot of offices and cubes are empty. In another, lots of us wind up chatting about holiday plans and related things a lot more than usual.

It's always been the case that a number of my co-workers routinely come in very early and thus usually leave the office for the day at 3:30, 4:00, or 4:30. And it's also always been the case that when I leave at my typical time (ranging from 5:30-6:00, usually), that there are usually several people still working when I go.

Since my cube is on a corner where three hallways converge, I've always been somewhat aware of when folks leave. So far this week, the number of people hurrying by in their coats, et al, starting at about 3:00pm, seems to be be much greater. And by the stroke of 5:00, it's more quiet and deserted than a more typical 6:00 the rest of the year.

Which isn't a big surprise, just something you notice.

I need to remember to delete one of the free songs I downloaded from Amazon's Christmas music give away. I understand that adding a little ornamentation to some sustained notes is kind of a signature for some singers, but really, every single sustained note? And not just a little ornamentation, but four or five different flourishes on each note???

"Have yourself a merry little Chi-eh-eh-eh-stma-uh-as, let your heart be-ee. Li-i-i-ee-i-ee-i-ee-ight!"

There's a point where artisitic abuse rises to the level of being a crime against humanity, and I think that singer may have reached it.