 hat's that in the sky in Norway (a week ago, as it turns out)? A meteor? A black hole? Evidence of alien beings? A rocket from Russia gone awry? How unexplained phenomena are interpreted makes for an interesting view into the psyche of a culture. How might the sky spiral have been seen through the eyes of a 19th century viewer?
Hard to guess.
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Relationships, probably. Children, not so much these days. Actually, there's different GROUPS that exert different pressures; for instance, my wife and I belonged to an anime fan circle and a number of those were essentially offended when we dared have a child. Others in the group were fascinated by the baby, but it was actually possible to wander through the different groups of people I knew and see clear divisions of reaction. There were groups that didn't like young children, and thought people having kids (especially people they knew) were wasting time and energy and generally being stupid. There were other groups who felt children were wonderful. If I were to average out society as a whole, I'd say no, there's no pressure on either side for or against children. However, you are very unlikely to live in an environment where the average is actually seen.
Relationships of some sort are a bit different. While most of *MY* "relationship" pressure was purely internal, there is a clear assumption THROUGHOUT society that people tend to pair up.
Around the holidays *all* pressure is amped up. Which is why I prefer to ignore them for most of the time.
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 an Francisco's spoken-word variety show goes noir, with a slew of detective tales, plus literature, poetry and erotica.
When: Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009, 7:30 to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM
Who: Dan Fante, Joshua Mohr, Mark Coggins, Mollena Williams, Meliza Banales and Seanan McGuire
Where: The Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. St. between Mission and Valencia, San Francisco
How much: $3 to $5 sliding scale, all proceeds benefit the Center for Sex & Culture
About the readers/performers:
Dan Fante's latest book is 86'd. His previous books are Short Dog, Chump Change, Mooch and Spitting Off Tall Buildings. He's also the author of two plays, The Closer/The Boiler Room, which the L.A. Times described as "ferociously profane," and Don Giovanni. He's written a book of poetry, "A Gin-Pissing-Raw-Meat-Dual-Carburetor-V8-Son-Of-A-Bitch From Los Angeles." He's the son of legendary writer John Fante.
Joshua Mohr is the author of Some Things That Meant The World To Me, which Oprah's O Magazine included among its "10 Terrific Reads of 2009."
Mollena Williams is a founding member of the Crowded Fire Theater Company, where she's performed in three solo shows as well as many other productions. She's also an editor with Bondage.com and Alt.com's magazine. She was the co-host of the Queer Open Mic.
Meliza Banales is the author of Say It With Your Whole Mouth and the forthcoming 51 Poems About Nothing At All. She was the first Latina to win a poetry-slam championship in 2002, and won the People Before Profits Poetry Prize that year. Her work has appeared in Revolutionary Voices, Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working-Class, The First Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Change, Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing, and Word Warriors.
Mark Coggins writes mystery novels starring the wisecracking, jazz-bass-playing P.I. August Riordan. So far, they are The Immortal Game, Vulture Capital, Candy From Strangers, Runoff and The Big Wake-Up.
Seanan McGuire has written two fairy detective novels, Rosemary And Rue and A Local Habitation. Writing as Mira Grant, she's written the zombies-and-bloggers Newsflesh trilogy, which consists of the novels Feed, Blackout and Deadline.
About Writers With Drinks:
Writers With Drinks has won "Best Literary Night" from the SF Bay Guardian readers' poll five years in a row and was named "Best Literary Drinking" by the SF Weekly. The spoken word "variety show" mixes genres to raise money for local worthy causes. The award-winning show includes poetry, stand-up comedy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, literary fiction, erotica, memoir, zines and blogs in a freewheeling format.
Hostess Charlie Jane Anders blogs about science fiction and futurism at io9.com. She's the author of the Lambda Award-winning Choir Boy (2005 Soft Skull Press) and the co-editor, with Annalee Newitz, of She's Such A Geek (Seal Press 2007). She also published other magazine, which is on hiatus. Follow her on twitter as charliejane.
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 k, I have heard about nil happening for New Years this year...however...Dave Helfry, aka Baron Von Goolo of Frighttown fame has decided to extend your Halloween merriment with New Years Evil. The event is at the Bossanova which not only has amazing new wood floors but a redone stage and new sound system as well!
There's only one thing wrong with the Baby New Year.......IT'S ALIVE!!!!
The Producers of FrightTown Present
A Dark Costume Bash to Ring In The New Year
NEW YEAR'S EVIL!
New Year's Eve at the Bossanova Ballroom
On East Burnside In Portland, OR
Doors open at 9pm
DJs and Live Music by Toxic Zombie
"Miss Evil 2010" Costume Contest & sundry mischief
21+
Costumes encouraged.
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n account of LJ wanting everyone to completely switch over to Twitter/Facebook/Dreamwidth (I guess). I wondered what the virtual tumbleweeds (virtual crickets at night) were about. No offense, but you folks who repost all of your tweets don't make sticking around here any more attractive.
Sorry about the "preemptive flounce" tone to this post. Sorry also to my dad who didn't understand any of this gibberish.
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 s the United States the only nation where large numbers of literate people don't believe in man-made climate change? I believe in man-made disbelief of science, which is almost as scary as large-scale famine caused by droughts and floods. I did meet a nice Australian lady on my trip to Greenland who had her doubts about man-made climate change, and I wondered if the fact that her husband worked for the mining industry had informed those doubts.
If we are the only country that has a large influential population of climate change deniers, I think a little national shame is in order.
Speaking of which, human rights watchers may raise an eyebrow at Denmark, which has passed laws essentially allowing the arrest and detention of protesters who LOOK like they might start trouble.
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hen I drape my gaze over you like a mantle
light will wander from your soul in exodus
your tomb will sink into the sea and
the rock will weep water for a thousand years
when I scratch the mark on you like bone across wax
every door will make itself an open maw for you
death will become a paramour
animal animal animal animal
your body will lay on a bed of iron and weep blood for a thousand years
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Yup, it was snowy out there. It was easy to take a lot of pictures. I edited myself down a bit, but there are still probably too many, too much the same. We did make a fun animal discovery, so click to continue if you love collembolans. ( Read more... )
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We're dogsitting Jim while Alex is visiting her family. It's clearly a hardship.
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 irst snowfall that stuck this year. Very pretty light snow as seen from the window, and I'm actually very excited to get out and experience it in person. I know I'm the first to complain about snow but I don't have to drive anywhere, and it's not going to require any (or much) shoveling, and it will probably mostly melt today. I'm kind of anxious to get outside because I want to photograph it while it's still stuck to the trees and stuff.
I was going to post about where we are with deciding to move but I think I'll wait so I can use my "not complaining about the weather for once" tag.
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know from previous posts and comments here that many of you are fans of novelty music. I'm here to report that the video game world has not forgotten you. While there is not yet a Doctor Demento expansion to the Rock Band game (if anything, the game is heavily weighted toward being a Dave Grohl simulator) there might as well be.
Jonathan Coulton got a toe in the door by writing "Still Alive" (for the game Portal), which was then offered for a free download to Rock Band. Since then, two more JoCo songs have become available, with more promised. His long standing opening band Paul and Storm has joined the game with their song "Opening Band," naturally. In addition, there are nearly a dozen Spinal Tap songs you can buy, as well as a few Tenacious D songs. I'm not here to judge the relative merits of heavy metal parody acts, I'm just reporting how it is. It's up to you to decide whether Megasus and White Zombie (and Alice Cooper for that matter) count in this category, but they both (all) have songs in the game.
Meanwhile, there are no fewer than 6 songs from Spongebob Squarepants available, and even one from an outfit called "Stephen and the Colberts." Add in borderline novelty new wave acts Talking Heads and Devo and you're starting to get a bunch of music loving dweebs very happy. We dweebs are anxiously awaiting some They Might be Giants, also.
Now, I hasten to add that, as the time of this blog post, the reigning king of novelty music "Weird Al" Yankovic does not have any songs for the game. However there's nothing to stop you from singing the words to "The Rye or the Kaiser," "My Bologna," or "Smells Like Nirvana" instead of those that scroll across the screen.
I haven't played Guitar Hero World Tour or Band Hero, so I can't speak about the appeal of those games to the novelty music fan.
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 pdated POST: Got my appointment squared up. Went old school and made it work out http://is.gd/5dlHf #fb
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 rying to get out of Christmas by saying you aren't Christian is like trying to get out of prison rape by saying you aren't gay.
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John Scalzi has been disassembling a new "publisher" called Black Matrix (I'm not linking them for reasons that should be obvious) who are asking for pulp-style stories (a genre which would certainly have interested me) and offering the [sarcasm]princely[/sarcasm] sum of one-fifth of a cent per word -- i.e., $0.002 per word.
There are a lot of things that can be said about why this is a bad idea, but Scalzi has -- as usual -- said most of them.
What I want to do is just emphasize how very low this is. Many people don't really grasp what payment-per-word means, certainly not many starting authors, in terms of actually making money.
Grand Central Arena, my forthcoming novel, clocks in at about 155,000 words. At Black Matrix' prices, that would be a grand total of $310.
I'm known to be a very fast writer. I can average about 1200 words per hour when I get going. So -- ignoring the likelihood that there will be research, world design, etc., involved, assuming I can just sit down and the words flow like an undammed river from my fingers, needing no editing ever, they are offering to pay me $2.40 per hour. That's lower than minimum wage was when I was working jobs that might pay minimum wage. If I devoted a normal working year to writing, and never had any delays or problems writing (I'll assume two weeks off), that'd be 2,000 hours, or 2.4 million words, for a grand total of less than five thousand dollars (4800, to be exact) -- of which a significant chunk would have to be paid out in taxes (as it's self-employment).
This is not acceptable as "payment". This isn't even TOKEN payment. My advance for Digital Knight -- a first-time, completely unknown author selling a cobbled-together collection of shortish stories as a novel -- was $5,000 for 112,000 words, or TWENTY TWO TIMES what these people would pay. This is the difference in yearly terms between making $10,000 per year and making $220,000 per year.
Either pay a REASONABLE rate, or don't pay at all. But if you don't pay, you'd better be distributing your product for free.
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 OST: So much for technology. Going to have to close out a search old school http://is.gd/5ccaa #fb
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s anyone counting on whiskymas happening this year?
It's a lot of work and I'm thinking about punting on it. On one hand, a 20 year tradition is pretty cool, on the other hand, I've been doing it most years for two decades.
Another possibility would be to do a whisky tasting some other day on the weekend when people could actually show up.
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 ovember this year was more pleasant than June, by a long shot. December's started out pretty nicely as well. Today was almost 70 in Boston, way above that in the Berkshires, according to one friend. Meanwhile, it's about to snow for the second time this week in Austin. Does it really matter where we move? Saturday there is wintry mix in the forecast, so maybe I'll start feeling angry about the winter here again.
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 couple of idle questions which involve science I don't know much about... at least not at this level.
1) In many a disaster scenario (most recently seen in Sluggy Freelance), some super-technology device, such as a mega-drill, frickin' superlaser, etc., bores a hole from the surface down to some ridiculous depth in very short time, and this usually is shown as causing some sort of catastrophe like a sudden volcano. I'm wondering if there would, in fact, actually BE any significant consequences from such an event, assuming it didn't occur right on top of a volcano that already exists and is about to blow. Say, here, in the heart of New York State, if I were to just magically bore a hole straight to the earth's core in a matter of a second, would there be a catastrophe, a small eruption, or nothing at all except a big hole that closed itself up to (some depth)?
2) Another common scenario in some SF has been either a base on a world like Pluto, or an earthlike world cast out into the void, where something happens and the whole base/planet cools to interstellar void temperatures. My question is if -- assuming you DON'T have any macroscopic reasons to be able to tell (if there were any biologicals present, they were already long dead, maybe mummified so there's hardly any water left in them, etc. -- you could tell that they had been, in fact, in a -200 deep freeze before they thawed out. That is, you step out into, say, a bunch of dirt and examine it. Can you tell that it was once subjected to -200 degree temperatures for a long period of time -- and could you tell this a year after it thawed, a hundred years, a thousand? Assume no biological activity to mess up your analysis (i.e., if it's been thawed for ten thousand years, there still haven't been any bacteria, etc., to start decay or other stuff going.)
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 ust posted pix from my 21 year high school reunion. These are the official event pix; I'd already posted shots from the informal gatherings the days before and after on Flickr (though I just added a few shots from the main event to that set as well).
Thanks to my good friend Dana for hiring me for the event, and for taking this good shot of me and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) boyziggy:
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My grandmother, a talented seamstress, handmade all of these dolls (and many more) for me when I was a little girl. (Click through to see larger version on Flickr.) I visited her in Washington D.C. when I was growing up. Grandma Carolyn is now 95 years old and living with my mother in Pittsburgh. Go Grandma!
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'm really really really really really really tired. I'm only still awake because I'm trying to finish importing photos into Lightroom on my desktop machine. I've been up since 5 a.m. EST as we had a 7:30 flight from DC (with a transfer at LAX). Got almost no sleep on the plane (thank you screaming babies) and only about a 15 minute nap after landing before heading off to do a photo shoot for Blue Bear, followed immediately by a rock workshop rehearsal. I'll try to write more about the trip and other stuff after I've gotten some sleep...
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Trying out my new monopod. I need an actual tripod. This second one would have been my pic for the day but you can't actually see the river. I think I know my 2010 project.
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... Got a spam/Phish message purporting to be from the CDC and asking me to create a "personal vaccination profile" for use in controlling H1N1 spread.
I really wonder how anyone can fall for these things; it's asking for stuff that the Constitution would forbid the government from doing, and all you have to do is mouseover the link to see that it's not going to the CDC, but to some server in another country.
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Rather nice sunrise this morning. I wish I was the kind of person that would wait for it (and be late to work) in order to get the right photo for my project. Alas. Luckily my camera was on my passenger seat when I topped the Forest Hills Overpass.
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few quiet moments before the hustle and bustle of the week ahead sets in. Its another dip into the healthcare pool too. Say it, fun times
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 y Loyal Lieutenant (slrose) had informed me that Baker and Taylor listed Threshold, but the true sign of its impending release has just now made itself visible: it's listed, albeit without its lovely cover image, on Amazon.com!
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It's not even mine, it's a rental. (The bass, not the suit.) I just like this photo. Reunion pix will have to wait till after I've gotten some sleep and stuff.
P.S. The stuffed animals on the piano are my Mom's not mine
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would be derelict in my duties if I did not pass on the Boston Birders' report of two Barred Owls in downtown Boston. One is in the Public Garden, not too surprising since this park is fairly large and is full of the kind of big old trees that big owls like. The other, however, has staked out a callery pear tree at tourism ground zero: Quincy Market. If you are in town, you should probably go check it out.
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http://www.mikeycosm.org
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12/10/09 @ 10:04 am 
cheerful 
ow'd i miss this?