Worlds & Time

Gingrich in the lead

2012-01-23T14:15:00.002-05:00

I have just a quick response to Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina:

You can't vote for Gingrich and claim that you aren't defending outright corruption. This isn't a guy who can plausibly deny wrongdoing, and no matter what you think of Obama, you can't say that he's been investigated and found guilty of corruption like Gingrich has.

I can't really believe that Republicans have voted for him, and it's really kind of sad. I feel really sorry for people that support him, because I just don't understand them.

There has been a question that's been swirling around in my head recently about Gingrich, but it's on a more personal matter:

"Mr. Gingrich, as the candidate of the family values party and as a faithful Catholic, who do you think more exemplifies the family values that you want to see most Americans follow, you or President Obama."

He'd have to reject the premise of the question, but it would still be fun to ask.

BestSFBooks Ranking System

2011-10-29T11:50:00.004-04:00

So, since I'm sort of obsessed with Speculative Fiction awards (you may have noticed), my boyfriend emailed me a link the other day:

BestSFBooks

I took one look at it and decided that I have serious disagreements with the rankings generated by that site, although they generally do what I do, which is count various awards that books get and then rank them by the number of awards and nominations.

The first issue that I have with their method of ranking is that they count the wins and the nominations at the same value. Which has some merit, I admit. I also maintain a straight count of nominations and wins counted as "1" each. You can look at that and get a 2 vs. a 6 and generally tell that if that first book has two wins and the second book has six nominations, that second book is probably wider liked among a general audience.

But I also maintain a "weighted" score which provides me with a different look: where wins are worth 1 and nominations are worth .5. A book with three wins should have a higher ranking than a book with 3 nominations or even a book with 5 nominations. And so you can easily differentiate in that way between the big winners and the big nominations.

If you're looking for a list of the best speculative fiction, I don't think the straight number of awards gets you to that book. The BestSFBooks site gives second place over the last 3 years to Anathema and The Dervish House each with a count of 7. But The Dervish House has 4 wins and Anathema has 3. If you're looking for an actual ranking of the books, then I would rank Dervish House higher than Anathema, although I would still rate Anathema higher than a book that got 3 wins and two nominations (like Blackout).

The second quibble that I have with their rankings is that they're weighted toward British Books.

Several of the awards that they rank are international. Hugo Awards, Locus SF/Fantasy Awards, John W. Campbell Awards, and World Fantasy Award are (as far as I can determine) all open to books published anywhere in the world. Hugo Awards are explicitly open to books in any language, although the general voting membership is English speaking and I don't think a non-English book has ever made the shortlist.

But BestSFBooks also lists the British Fantasy Society Award, British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Awards, all of which are only open to books published in the U.K.

Those Awards directly compare to only one strictly American award: the Nebula Award. And, while the American Nebula Award can go to either a science fiction or fantasy book, those categories are split out amongst two of the previously listed British awards, giving double weight and twice as many nominations to the British awards before even taking into account the Arthur C. Clarke excess.

There is one more American award on their list, the Philip K. Dick award, but the Philip K. Dick award can't be directly compared to the British awards, or even the other American awards. The Philip K. Dick award is specific to a subset of American speculative publishing: original paperback science fiction publications, which means that usually the awards go to books that aren't nominated in any of the rest of the categories. There are notable exceptions (Yarn, Nova Swing, The Devil's Advocate), but mostly the Philip K. Dick award targets an entirely different category or book than the other American science fiction awards do, so it doesn't tend to boost the numbers of awards from American authors. In fact, since the Philip K. Dick targets some books that are paperback reprints of British books, it can further inflate the number of wins or nominations of British works (such is the case with Nova Swing, for example).

So the top books on the recent lists are British, and there are a lot of British authors on top as well. This year, skipping the obvious winner of The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (sometimes the out-and-out winner is British, I have no quibble with that) there are two British books and two British authors on top of the first American in either category. Overall, there are five British books and five authors writing in the British scene on the top 10 award winning lists of the last year.

Over the last three years, you can see much of the same. Five of the site's best speculative fiction books are from British authors, but there is a shift as 6 of the top 10 "best" authors are writing for a primarily British audience as well.

Over ten years, the 10 best books have Americans in only three spaces. And there are only four Americans on the authors top 10 list.

All of this shouldn't be construed as implying that British science fiction authorship isn't enjoying a bit of a golden age at the moment, with authors like Mieville, Stross, Gaiman, McDonald and Clarke, but I do think that the way that BestSFBooks counts it's points skews toward British writers and books.

Third, I'm not sure that I would count the SFsite Reader's and Editor's choices as awards with the same weight as the Hugos, Nebulas, and Locus awards. Or even smaller awards like the Philip K. Dick. That's just a personal choice though, in the same way that I count the "big three" as the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards (I freely admit my Amerocentrism, and my list is primarily for me) despite the John W. Campbell awards' claims.

Fourth, and I agree that this is a bit quibbly with regard to a website called BestSFBooks, but they're really doing a disservice leaving off all of the rest of the categories beyond novel. There are some amazing short stories out there, and there are plenty of novellas that get limited publication as their own books. Heads by Greg Bear jumps instantly to mind.

Finally, i wish they had an "all-time" option. There are lots of great older books that could easily rank against more recent books if BestSFBooks gave them the chance to compete. Let's see some Ursula K. Le Guin toward the top.

Kudos to them for maintaining a usable, clear and professional site though. That isn't easy and they should be lauded for that.

Why isn't Connie Willis really famous?

2011-08-21T21:01:00.007-04:00

So, one of my four favorite science fiction authors won another Hugo award yesterday. I haven't read her latest duet of novels, Black Out/All Clear, but I own them and they'll be read soon. Nearly everything that I've read by her has been brilliant though, even her book of science fiction Christmas stories (it works surprisingly well).

That Hugo Award win means that Connie Willis joins the tiny club of Robert Heinlein, Lois McMaster Bujold, Vernor Vinge and Isaac Asimov as the winner of more than two Hugo Awards for Best Novel, although Asimov and Heinlein have the slight asterisk of having won a retro Hugo (given for a year prior to the establishment of the Hugos in retrospect) among his honors. Bujold and Asmiov have four, and Vinge and Willis have three.

But that doesn't mean that she's just won three Hugo awards. She's won eleven total in all categories including short stories, novellas, and once for a novelette. All four major fiction categories. And she's won seven Nebula Awards, again in all four categories.

And there's the additional matter of the ten Locus awards, again in all four categories and the additional category of best collection (twice). Granted, she's missing the fantasy novel category at the Locus awards, but she was nominated once for it.

So, she's won all of the major science fiction awards, in all twelve of the categories that they have for them (and a Locus thirteenth).

Asimov was writing before and while the three major categories of awards here were being formed. His Foundation series, which is still brilliant, missed the start of the Nebula and Locus awards by more than ten and twenty years respectively, but did win the previously mentioned retro Hugo award for one of it's sections, and a special Hugo (ish*) award for "Best all-time series." Overall, he still won 6 normal Hugos (missed the novella category), 2 special Hugos, 2 Nebulas (for novel and novelette), and 7 Locus awards (again, no award for novellas but he did win for Nonfiction [twice] and for anthology). Were you to weight those wins the same, that's 17 major wins across his lifetime.

Bujold is next. She's won those four Hugo awards for novels but only one other Hugo category, novella for The Mountains of Mourning. Bujold also has 3 Nebula awards, two novels and a novella (again for The Mountains of Mourning). She also has three Locus award wins, two for science fiction novels and once for fantasy novel (the locus splits those two up). That's eleven total.

Heinlein, similar to Asimov, was writing before the major awards were completely established, and I actually suspect this hurt him more than Asimov. He's got those four Hugo awards for best novel, one retro Hugo, and one retro Novella Hugo for a total of six. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any Nebula awards, but again, they started late and he finished rather early, although he was still nominated for best novel four different times. He does have two Locus awards, once for Job: A Comedy of Justice (fantasy novel) and a nonfiction book. So that's only eight total.

Vernor Vinge, whose work I also love, has five Hugo award in total. Three of his Hugo awards are for best novel, and two are for novella. He also has no Nebula awards (that just amazes me, actually) even though unlike Heinlein he began writing after the start of these awards. He also has two Locus awards, one for novel and one for novella (The Cookie Monster, great story, I highly recommend it). That's only six major wins across the three major science fiction awards that I'm tracking here.

Before I get back around to Connie Willis, I'm going to throw two other names out there that are required on this list: the first is Ursula K. Le Guin. She's won an astonishing number of awards. Like Connie Willis, she's won all four of the major Hugo categories (and she was the first woman to win for best novel), plus a second Hugo award for best novel for a total of five Hugos. She's won six Nebula awards (four novels, one short story, one novelette). And get this, she's won twenty-one Locus Awards in basically everything that you can possibly win, all five of the major categories (sf novel and fantasy novel, novella, novelette, short story) plus nonfiction, plus collections (five of them). And, just to make this complicated, she's also won two World Fantasy Awards, one for best novella and novel, too. That's 32 major wins without the two WFAs, and 34 with.

The second is Neil Gaiman. He's won four Hugos, with two novels and a novella and short story. He's won two Nebulas, one each for novel and novella. And he's won 15 Locus awards, including being the only person on the list to win for the Locus best YA novel category (he's won it twice) although like Asimov he doesn't have one in the Novella category. Gaiman, like Le Guin, has also won a World Fantasy Award, although in his case it's for short story. That's 22 major wins with the WFA, and 21 without.

So let's get around back to Connie Willis. As I pointed out, she's won those eleven Hugos, seven Nebulas, and ten Locus awards. That's 28 major award wins. 28 major award wins including just about every major science fiction category and major novel wins. Doomsday Book won all three major science fiction awards for best novel, incidentally.

So, as far as this little survey goes, Connie Willis is the second most award winning science fiction/fantasy author in English, trailing Ursula K. Le Guin by four or six wins depending on how you count. And she leads Neil Gaiman, Vernor Vinge, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein by sizable margins. And, if this wasn't already clear she's the only person, ever, to dual win both the Hugo and the Nebula award in every single category.

And tonight, the day after she won her 28th major award, we had some friends over for dinner. We talked science fiction for a bit and I recommended Connie Willis. And despite being a consistent reader of science fiction, he'd never heard of her before. We would have loaned him a copy of To Say Nothing of the Dog on the spot, but apparently we've already lent it out. That still staggers me. She's one of the most award winning science fiction writers of all time, and she's still completely unknown, even among many devoted science fiction fans.

Why isn't Connie Willis really famous? I just don't understand.

* Just to be clear, the best all-time series was a special Worldcon award, but since the Hugo rules apparently allows the Worldcon to tack on awards, I'm not exactly sure why it isn't explicitly a Hugo award.

The American Downgrade

2011-08-06T17:06:00.005-04:00

What a boring subject to lead off returning after a year absence, but here it is, a post on America's credit rating.

The justification that S&P seems to give for the reduction in credit rating from AAA+ to AA+ of the United States seems to hinge on three main factors:

1. Government instability
2. The possibility of default in the future
3. Possible insolvency issues by not increasing revenues.

It's "the right" as a unified group that are arguing explicitly against new tax revenue (3) and the Tea Party/Michelle Bachmann groups that were against raising the debt ceiling on principal (2). Dems and the left are definitely a party to 1 though, and so they have some responsibility there. But really, if you want to assign blame for this (and really, let's) then it's pretty obvious that one side owns a much, much larger share of this fiasco than the other.

That's why it's hilarious when Michelle Bachmann tries to say that President Obama has "destroyed the credit rating of the United States." Really, she thinks that? Lol.

This is, pretty explicitly, what everyone said the consequences of the default would look like, and she's the one that had no problem arguing for going further than we did.

Prop 8 Overturned

2010-08-04T22:27:00.003-04:00

Congrats to Californians of all color, race, creed and sexual orientation. Today, a travesty of justice was overturned.

Gay people can and should be able to marry the people that they love: and it doesn't affect the rights of straight people to do the same thing.

If you're looking for good analysis, I recommend Towleroad's coverage, and their page of reactions as well.

One Line to Live By

2010-07-08T18:56:00.003-04:00

I'm not endorsing parenthood, but one line on page six of this article struck me as good advice to live by:

About twenty years ago, Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, made a striking contribution to the field of psychology, showing that people are far more apt to regret things they haven’t done than things they have.

If I do ever have kids, I'll try to remember to make sure that this is one of the pieces of advice that I drop on them. I know that it's true from personal experience. I've never been windsurfing, and I regret it.

/via Andrew Sullivan

NetGalley and Carina Press

2010-07-05T18:20:00.003-04:00

So, through something I have to deal with at work, I found the website "NetGalley" which allows you to request eARCs (electronic advance reader copy(s)). Basically, you can get a digital copy of a book to read or review before the actual book comes out in stores.

The Neil Gaiman edited Best American Comics 2010 is on there, which is pretty cool. There's also a version of the Little Prince as a graphic novel. But I don't expect those things really need my attention to sell them. Neil Gaiman and The Little Prince are both brands that aren't going to be helped by a relatively minor blog review. And I'm not really interested in either of them enough to want to request them.

But I do get some blog traffic around both my comments on gay porn and science fiction fantasy. So I was especially interested to find that there was a novel listed that actually fit into that niche: Savage Sanctuary by Jacqueline Barbary. I requested that one and another one that Carina Press publishes, Life After Joe by Harper Fox.

Both were denied, which was too bad. I wouldn't have bought either of them, especially from an unknown press. It's not the loss of a sale for them. Really, the best that could have happened was that I liked them an gave them a favorable review. Well, won't bother now.

So, I guess the whole point of this post is: what's the point of NetGalley if you can't get galleys from it? If you're wondering whether to bother signing up (and they ask you for a lot of personal information, including your real address and phone number), I would say no.

Way Down in the Hole

2010-05-31T14:09:00.003-04:00

Just got back from what should have been a pleasant excursion to Montreal. It was the first time that I'd ever been there, and we were attending the bachelor party of a friend.

Still, I find myself unusually depressed recently. Not even for any good reason, but rather because my natural state seems to be mid-level despair, and my slight deviations upward and downward are between tolerable and, well, the hole. And yes, I've been watching a lot of The Wire recently. Great show.

Getting back to that other thing, I have to say that most people seem to be able to live for the good moments. I don't. Can't. It would be nice, but so would having a million dollars.

So, that brings me to something that has been at the forefront of my mind recently. There's a list of five people:

My boyfriend
My mother
My father
My brother
Jeff

Those are the people that are keeping me alive, because those are the people that I would damage the most if I died. There are a few others that I love who aren't on that short list, however, I think they're strong enough to be sad but get over it. I'm looking at you, E and K.

These though, are the people that are so closely tied to me for some reason, that my death would disproportionately affect. These are the lives that remind me that, while I have nothing to live for personally, I need to smile and work for because they're looking to make sure that I do my daily rounds.

Strange though, that one of them is in a war zone, one of them is headed into a potential war zone. There's a strange inequity to life, that they're the ones that are putting themselves in harm's way while I sit here in Boston safe and sound.

It's unfair, is what it is.

However, I said I was unusually depressed right now, so I'll say what's on my mind: there are only five names. Just five. Two are living dangerously, two are getting older.

Only five names . . .

Health Care Reform Passage

2010-03-23T08:01:00.004-04:00

To anyone who thinks that Republicans will fight to repeal the recently passed health care bill:

GWB didn't end abortion. He didn't end Medicare or Medicaid. Massachusetts passed gay marriage on his watch. He didn't pull out of NAFTA and barely reduced regulation on any industry. He didn't even manage to get the 10 Commandments displayed in Federal court houses.

That was despite having majorities in the house and senate and having a plurality of Republican appointed Supreme Court appointees.

In fact, he really didn't try. But he made sure that every time there was an election, abortion and gay marriage were brought up so that people would go vote for the Republicans to repeal those things.

They had plenty of chances.

Republicans don't really want to repeal this bill. They like it when things get done because, hey, sometimes they need to get done. But they want the Democrats to do them so that they can demonize them and then retake power and then . . .

. . . well, you have to understand, Bush really didn't get any of his major initiatives done while in office. Not abortion, not gay rights, not economic deregulation. He managed a tax cut and that's about it.

So, that's what you're planning on voting for. Things aren't going to change in the future. The Republicans are going to keep doing the same old song and dance, but they're not actually going to do what you want them to do.

Boiling Water

2010-02-25T11:22:00.002-05:00

I was reading through some old comments on another blog today and I came across a point that I'd made when arguing about the origin of suffering and God's response to it. It's a small fragment of the Problem of Evil.

God could have prevented thousands of years of people's suffering without infringing on any person's free will if he had simply said that boiling water makes it sterile. He didn't have to explain why, all he had to do was say somewhere in the Bible that wounds should be cleaned with water that had been boiled and then allowed to cool. This would have allowed thousands if not millions of people to survive sepsis or infection. It would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives but wouldn't have prevented humans from stabbing, killing, or otherwise being evil to each other.

Further, boiled water is safe to drink (safer, that is). Why didn't God point that out somewhere? If he really loved us, shouldn't he have included in his many laws and instructions the best way to make water safe for everyone to use?

At the time I made that point, I ended with: "I’ll leave you to direct me to those passages of the Bible but I’d be waiting forever. They’re not there." That is about all there is to it.

More on the Amazon/Macmillan Thing

2010-02-07T09:53:00.013-05:00

I guess that I couldn't keep away. All the discussion that I've been reading last night and this morning have left me with a few more opinions. First though, I have to say that there are a lot of people screaming about slippery slopes and the end of the world. I just don't understand any of that in this case so I'm going to try to ignore some of it.

Before I get further, I don't think there are any slippery slopes. Amazon winning wouldn't have meant a dystopian future of $900,000 ebooks or authors starving in the streets. Macmillan probably isn't going to keep the cost at $15 forever (check out the "Fictionwise" section of this post out for a counterpoint that is very well written). Also, this is mostly about ebooks (although it temporarily affected the way that Amazon sold real books for a while) not "the future of all books, forever!"

To start with, there are four positions on this subject, none of whom is really wrong or right. They're just looking at things to figure out what would be best for them. They are:

1. Macmillan. Macmillan wants to sell titles for more to make more money. Note the phrase "more money." Not, "some money" because that would indicate that they were making nothing prior to this, which as far as I can tell is just untrue. They just weren't making as much money as they thought the "market could support" so they want to increase prices to that point, and will apparently get to do so.

2. Amazon. Amazon wanted to make more money as well. They were pursuing a different strategy. They were trying to corner the market in ebooks so they wanted low prices so that people would buy all of their ebooks from them. If they controlled the market, they would have the advantage of volume on something that would cost them very little to distribute. However, now that they've basically agreed to do what Macmillan wants, they'll make more money now but slightly less in the long term. Not much skin off their teeth. They'll still make money.

3. The Authors, represented by John Scalzi. They want to make more money too, and won't make the extra money that Amazon would if it controls the market, so they support Macmillan.

4. The Readers/consumers. They're going to pay more now, and would have paid less if Amazon had won. It's not really unfortunate or anything, but it's certainly not a gain for them in the short term or probably the long term. Macmillan has to make a profit, after all, so there's not much of a chance that any of that money would go into more "R&D" development of new writers. Not more than there already is. The reader isn't winning, but this isn't life or death. They're just going to pay a bit more.

*****

So, as I understand it, there are four major areas of cost that get factored into the price of a book before profit is made (for both the publisher and the author). They are editorial (and acquisition), marketing, printing and distribution.

For the sake of this post printing and distribution can be considered a single unit because that is the major difference between ebooks and printed books. Ebooks have a miniscule and nearly marginal cost of materials and distribution.

Let me speculate on these costs for the moment.

So, if you look at editorial, marketing, and P&D, P&D will cost the most by far. Probably between 35-50% of the cost of any book. Perhaps even more although right now all of the people working for publishers are furiously claiming that P&D is not the "majority" of a book's cost. Everyone that I talked with before this little battle says that it is the single largest cost of book making, so as I'm assuming thirds I'm assigning it the largest percentage.

Then there is marketing and sales, which is probably between 15-25% of the cost. From what I can see, actually selling the book requires a lot of staff and a lot of money suck (sending books to readers, buying advertising, creating promotional materials and events and sending authors on book tours). I haven't seen a company with a smaller marketing/sales department than editorial department, but again I'm simply making up these numbers so many I'm wrong.

Editorial is probably about the same or smaller than marketing and includes design and layout. True, it involves editors and lawyers and designers but sales involves lawyers and designers and has just as much staff to support.

Then, every author gets 5-10% of the list price on a book sold, often up front in the form of advances.

So, there are costs associated with putting out a good product, I don't dispute that at all. But to put out an ebook rather than a physical book removes the largest chunk, even if that chunk is not greater than 50% of the cost. That novel is going to be 35%-50% less expensive to produce at the same level of quality than a physical copy. And most of the cost to do this is shared between the physical and ebook versions. A book really should only need to go through copy editing for both print and digital because that print copy is based on a digital file.

(The only numbers that I've found [through the Ars Technica article below] indicate that 35-50% is in the ballpark or even optimistic. For the first book listed the "PPB" costs are 53.5% without shipping/distribution included.)

When I see an ebook being sold at $9.99 or $14.99 brand new for the early adopters/get it first crowd, I can see how that works. It's about half as much as a new hardcover, the cheapest of which that I've seen published in the last year is $26.00.

But, once a book is published, the cost to create it is fixed, or nearly fixed. If it took $100,000 to get the first printing of a book to the shelf of a bookstore, it isn't going to cost another $100,000 to do a second printing. With traditional publishing, it'll cost a bit more to print and ship more copies out, but the price goes down substantially. So we get trade paperbacks and mass-market paperbacks which cost $15.00 and $8.00, respectively.

Ebooks should be cheaper though. If a book is selling for $7.99 as a paperback, then it really should be selling for $4.99 as an ebook because the cost of printing is still going to be the major source of cost for that mass market paperback. And you can sell more of them, for longer, at lower expense.

If a book has already made it's production costs back, then it could drop even further in an ebook format to make even more money at little expense for the publisher. If it isn't a big seller at $4.99 any more, maybe drop it to a dollar cost somewhere down the line. People will still be buying it and the only thing that you need to do is change the number in a computer system. Authors will still get their 10%, and you can try to make up in volume over time what you never could have made up in traditional distribution. If you continue to offer it, that is, and occasionally do some limited marketing of your backlist.

*****

The costs for editorial review and novel creation are also dropping. A single person with a computer can do the job that five people with pencils used to do. The tools are getting better. Soon, a person with a computer will be able to do the work that five people with computers used to do because the computer can do things like spell check and auto-format and all sorts of nifty stuff like that.

It doesn't make sense to publish fewer works because tastes are fickle and you can't always know (or decide, as the case may be) what works will be the huge best sellers. The more things that you publish and get people into, the more books that you'll sell. With the cheaper distribution that I mentioned above, the more money you make per sale.

BAEN seems to be doing this right. Digital distribution to the hardcore fans to test out the waters and see what sells before printing the real books seems smart. I'm not saying that digital distribution for first works should be exclusive. If you know a book is going to sell physical copies, printing them up at the same time is fine too.

But pretending that ebooks are the end of the tail and not the tusks sometimes . . . that's not working either. Maybe digital distribution could increase the number and breadth of published works, even under the consolidation of publishers and distributors.

I hope so.

*****

Here are some other posts by people that are not crazy:

Lynn Abbey
Sean P. Fodera (read some of the comments, too)
Chris Meadows (who is also linked to above and has more comments all over the blogs about this)
Jane Fancher
Also, Cory Doctorow, of whom readers should already know that I am a huge fan, makes a good point about DRM

Not on this exact point, but there is an interesting Ars Technica article about ebooks by John Siracusa here that seems to confirm a bunch of the points that I'm trying to make.

The Amazon-Macmillan Thing

2010-02-01T20:45:00.002-05:00

Amazon and the publishing company Macmillan have been having a tiff recently. As far as I can tell Macmillan wanted to raise prices and break Amazon's monopoly and Amazon wanted to continue to make more per book and keep prices low.

What do I think about all this?

Neither of these sides represents the end consumer and no matter what happens the consumer loses. As Mr. Buckell says, there really isn't anything that we can do about this except watch from the sidelines. Amazon will continue to be the largest online retailer of physical books and Macmillian will continue to publish many of my favorite writers. I won't stop utilizing either of them.

A Really Wonderful Fantasy Interview

2010-01-31T19:29:00.002-05:00

I've been paying careful attention to the reviews that Jo Walton is doing over on Tor.com because she knows her science fiction and fantasy and is gives the books that she reads a good deal of thought.

I don't always agree with her reviews. My favorite Steven Brust book is still Issola. However she did bring up things to think about that I hadn't considered before.

She's done a short interview with Brust on the same subject as mine but does a significantly better job in less space. If you like Steven Brust it is a worthwhile read.

A Life in Summary

2009-12-31T11:38:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I missed a month in there, what with the Placebos and Patient Care post sitting around for more than a month in my tray while I tried to finish it by staring at it intently from across the room. I've covered part of the gap by thrusting P&PC forward four weeks into November to cover the posting gap in the sidebar history.

But I haven't talked about where I am in life for a while. A Ruairi has requested an email on how I'm doing, so I know that I need to type it all out anyway.

I've moved in with my boyfriend Ben, and I now live in Cambridge, MA. The place is beautiful, it's a third floor condo that Ben and a friend of his from high school bought. Ben's also a doctor now, which means that I'm dating a doctor. Sometimes I feel like I've fallen through the Sex in the City rabbit hole and come out on the side of respectability.

Jobs haven't been working out, ha ha. The kinds of places that I've been applying just haven't been hiring people like me. They look at my lack of experience and weak resume and simply don't call me back. It's beyond depressing and well into the numb. Failing out of New York was hard, and I'm glad that Ben was there to catch me.

I haven't been reading as much as I've wanted to be, either. I just finished "Miracle and Other Christmas Stories" by Connie Willis and it was lovely, but I think it was only the second or third book that I finished this month.

So, life it basically on a weird sort of hold. It's not that I'm not doing things. I just don't have much to show for it at the end of the day except for a few pictures and some vague memories.

As I type this, at the very end of the year, I'm in the same place that I started 2009: on Martha's Vineyard with friends of Ben. They have a big New Year's Eve celebration and we're preparing for this year. Andrea is making Chili. Ben is still asleep after drinking and trivia last night (we came in second after having a commanding lead through most of the second half but lost the tiebreaker at the win).

I've traveled a lot this year. I went down to Washington D.C. for the inauguration and I continued to make the trip from New York to Boston for the first part of the year to visit Ben. We visited Martha's Vineyard (to the same people) and also to Nantucket to visit another friend.

Ben had a conference in Hawaii as well, and then two weeks after that he had one in San Diego. So I flew to Hawaii (for the first time) and spent a week on the north side of O'ahu with Ben in a beautiful house with a pool and no wireless and basically lazed around for a few days. Then we flew to San Francisco for the night before Halloween and went out to the Castro for dinner and drinks. Lots of the guys were in their costumes already, so it was entertaining but I still know that I should have rearranged to spend the actual night of Halloween there.

Then we went home, and in this case by home I mean New Mexico. My grandmother is there now, having moved from upstate New York so that my mother can take care of her. My mother is managing a small shop in Santa Fe part time which benefits one of the local animal shelters. We only spent a couple of days there, which was rushed. Ben met my family and he was all cute and nervous about it.

And then we went directly to San Diego, which was in the sixties and so surprisingly cold. But I'd been traveling for three weeks and Ben for almost a month and so we were both a bit tired, so we basically went back and collapsed.

That last big trip that I took was to Virginia to meet all of his family for Thanksgiving. He's got a much larger "nuclear" family than I do. He's got three parent figures, two half brothers, two sisters and one half sister and they had the additional uncles and friends over as well. It was the youngest half brother's birthday as well so it was a very complicated few days but I had a lovely time and was happy to meet all the people that Ben was worried about me meeting.

It's weird. I'm usually the emotional one in this relationship. I'm depressed or excited or whatever, but Ben was much more concerned about our meetings with our respective families than I was.

So, that's where I am now and what's been happening in a general sense. There's more trivial stuff: we're not going to many movies but we did see Avatar in IMAX 3D. It was good but the more that I think about it I don't think it was great. I don't think that it'll be the Star Wars of our generation.

Ben and I got each other a half of a Playstation 3 for Christmas and so far we have only one game that was designed for the system on it: Flower, which is lovely and worth every penny of the ten dollars that it costs. All of the other games are ports from older systems. Ben is playing through Final Fantasy VIII, which is like some sort of weird dream come true for me. It's quite odd how much I'm enjoying him playing it. I'm almost done with Zelda on the Wii, which is a lovely game as well and very well done. All of us, Ben, Me and the roommate, are playing the New Super Mario Brothers. Who could have imagined that Mario sidescrollers would have made a resurgence.

I guess that's enough. Ben wants to use my computer for a while. So cheers everyone, and I hope that you all have a wonderful New Year and have had a blissful Christmas/Hanukkah season.

Iorich by Steven Brust

2009-12-05T15:14:00.004-05:00

It so happens that when I won the present of a book from Tor.com a while ago, instead of a copy of a book currently in print I requested and received an advance copy of a book that was not yet out: Iorich by Steven Brust.

This was particularly kind of Tor.com and especially Torie Atkinson for allowing me such a privilege and her secret source for making my Brust dreams come true.

I try to do reviews of books that I get in advance of their publications such as Little Brother, Julian Comstock, and Ender in Exile and so this is my review of Iorich by Steven Brust (2010).

Just be aware though that reviewing Iorich has massive spoilers for other Vlad Taltos novels, up to and including Iorich itself. Got that? This post contains massive Iorich spoilers.

First off, Iorich is better than Jhegaala. Don't get me wrong, I liked Jhegaala, but it wasn't anywhere close to the top of the Vlad Taltos cannon. Iorich is definitely a good Vlad book but it does have a few minor flaws.

With all of his books, Brust switches back and forth with his writing style and Iorich is a bit sparse in the wordplay compared with some of the other books. The way that Dzur focused on lavish descriptions of food and Jhereg focused on, well, the ceremony of jheregs, this book uses a legal situation as chapter leads and general tone. Thus, Iorich's style is direct and to the point, almost like reading a legal brief. This which works out fairly well for it but there are a few bits that seem tangential and thrown together, notably the elements of Vlad's personal life that appear.

Also, after Jhegaala, I was hoping for a bit more high flying action, flashy sorcery, and world threatening danger. This wasn't that type of Vlad novel, but I have to say that this type of Vlad novel is my second favorite.

Let me explain my weird theory about the types of Vlad novels which has been kicking around in my head for a while.

There are three types of Vlad novels, complicated by the fact that some novels, particularly Taltos are comprised of two or more of these types. I think these types are: 1, "Early Vlad" novels that deal mostly with Vlad's career in the Jhereg and the establishment of his area; 2, Questing novels revolving mostly around some task set by Sethra, Morrolan, or Verra and progresses the metaplot involving the gods; and 3, Politics novels in which Vlad gets to explore some particular facet of politics or society, usually at the expense of his social life.

Iorich fits solidly into the third kind of Vlad novel, following a similar structure to Orca. Where Orca was about the way trade and banking have an effect on people, Iorich is about dealing with the way the legal system fuctions, especially with regard to nobility and rank. It is set some number of years after Dzur, and apparently several years since Vlad has seen many of the major characters of the series, and is set predominantly in and around the Imperial Palace.

The general plot of the novel is that Aliera has been arrested by the Empress for the practice of Elder Sorcery, even though the Empire has been turning a blind eye to her practice (and Morrolan's, and Sethra's, and one suspects dozens of others) for many years. When Vlad hears about her arrest he rushes back to Adrilankha and begins to arrange for her defense despite the protests of Aliera herself while trying to keep himself alive from the Jhereg assassins that are still trying to kill him eight (nine?) years after the events of Phoenix.

There is, of course, a complicated and twisted reason for her imprisonment that basically boils down to Empire politics. To me, the twisted reasoning is a bit weak, but by the end I can certainly understand why the characters did what they thought they were doing, with the possible exception of Zerika's behavior toward Aliera which still is a bit of a headbanger.

So Vlad, in his efforts to clear Aliera's name in much the same way that he cleared Cawti's, is thrown into the middle of Empire politics again. Really, he almost should have been a private eye instead of an assassin, because his investigative skills shine in the midst of a high level political thriller.

As I've already mentioned, dealing with these things leads him to spend quite a bit of time in the Palace and dealing with some of the most important people in the Empire. Norathar features prominently and so does Zerika herself, the Empress putting in the most face time of any Vlad novel and seemingly almost as much as her roles in the Viscount of Adrilankha.

My favorite parts of this book involve the Empress, especially the section with the five steps. Just after that, in terms of favoritism, is the resolution at the end which really does work out nicely if you understand what's going on. Vlad's introduction to the new character of Perisil is also very nicely done.

Older characters also appear in this book, sometimes just as minor characters and sometimes as mere suggestions (if you're a big fan, you'll know the line I'm talking about when you come to it, personally I laughed out loud on the Boston T and got lots of weird looks). It's nice to see some of them, but I really want to see the resolution of the Phoenix affair. It's been a long time coming but there are suggestions that it's coming to a head.

That's really the best part of the Vlad books though. Even though each books stands on it's own and carries it's own weight and finishes with a satisfying resolution, there's a larger plot that progresses along as well. Not only do you feel good about the book that you've read but you can pick up bits and pieces from other books that fit together and provide another kind of satisfaction. The Vlad books, and the Khaavren Romances, for that matter, were meant to be read as a long, wonderful series, and I'm so very happy to have been given the chance to read this latest volume.

I want to end with a brief quote from the book, just a paragraph. But hopefully it will interest Brust fans enough to go out and buy it. A warning, it may have a few serious spoilers for the end of the book:

"I pulled the arrow from my eye, hearing myself scream. At that moment, a blast of magic from one of them hit me, and I saw my leg fly off at the knee. I fell to the ground, reaching for Lady Teldra, but one of them came in with an ax and took my right hand off at the wrist . . ."

* * *

Here's a link to the Amazon page for Iorich. If you haven't read any of the others, I recommend starting with Jhereg to see if you like the style (it is unfortunately only easily available as part of the Book of Jhereg right now). I plan on buying Iorich when it's released in a few months anyway because it is quite wonderful and I want to support Steven Brust's further writing.

Update: Tor.com's review is here.

Placebos and Patient Care

2009-11-23T12:29:00.001-05:00

I've had a single article open in my browser for a few days now: "The Cost Conundrum" by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. I think it makes an important case for a certain kind of health care reform and I would like to discuss it for a minute, and the use of placebos below.

There are a lot of great New Yorker articles and this is clearly one of them. It is written from the perspective of a medical professional but is clear, concise and compelling to read. It's an examination of the health care system of McAllen, Texas. McAllen has the second highest health care costs in the country, per capita, after only Miami.

The article points out that despite high costs McAllen doesn't have particularly good health care, scoring below average on 23 out of 25 items, and wonders what the difference is between McAllen and a place with well recognized excellence but low cost such as Rochester, MN.

My only criticism of the piece is that it buries it's conclusion a bit. What Dr. Gawande found is that there is a difference between doctors in high cost and low cost areas. In low cost/high quality areas, the doctors were more likely to focus on patient care above profits. They worked in systems designed to reward patient health and satisfaction and the ability to work with other doctors instead of maximizing doctor's profits.

In high cost/low quality areas, the doctors were more likely to share what is euphemistically called in one section of the article "entrepreneurial spirit." Instead of focusing on patient care they were more likely to focus on the bottom line. In one hospital doctors owned shares of the company and thus reaped the rewards of higher profits. They have a direct incentive to increase the costs for patients and by extension the health care costs for the entire region.

Increased costs for patients means higher taxes for Medicare/Medicaid, longer waits in emergency rooms and more wasteful bureaucracy. In order words, it basically costs all of us more money in the form of taxes.

This isn't something that can be controlled by the free market because health care costs are basically uncontrollable. It's difficult to choose what hospital an ambulance will take you too or what the general "patient care vs. profit" climate of a regional health care system is. Since the need for health care exists anywhere there are people and the ability to choose the best option is limited there has to be an outside influence to prevent the sort of behavior that drives up costs and good care down. As Dr. Gawande quotes Dr. Lester Dyke: "Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure."

I think that the reaction to the above issues for most humans is obvious: people want good health care and they understand the need for some sort of governmental intrusion into their lives to make sure that they get it. Because that conclusion is so obvious, I want to take a bit of a tangent for a moment.

There's another name for the behavior by doctors that results in high cost, low quality care. Some Christians that I know would call it greed. As much as greed is a problem for the deeply religious, it's also held up as an enshrined right by the libertarian segment of our population.

It's a weird divide, but it's a very clear cut one. You can't both believe in letting the market solve all problems and taking care of the poor. You can't believe that capitalism solves all problems while believing that greed is a bad thing.

I think that a lot of the current accusations of socialism and communism toward anyone who wants to impose limitations on a capitalism are a sort of fearful reaction to admitting that there is anything wrong with the acquisition of as much money as possible. If everything else is worse than what you're doing then you don't have to admit that what you are doing is bad. Since socialism and communism are bogeymen, any nuanced position has to be equated with them in order to prop up one's moral stance.

This leaves the libertarians in the Republican party with a clear and simple position: Anything interferes with the quick and vast accumulation of money is a bad thing. The sheep must negotiate with the wolves or else the world will end. Greed has to be good and pure and necessary.

Still, it seems clear that doctors that go into the business of health care with the primary goal of making money actually harm the people that are in their care. If, as a patient, you want to get better then you want a system that focuses on rewarding the doctor for the best outcome while restricting the direct profit that your doctors can make charging you for tests. Overall, that's going to mean that doctors are going to have to give up the lure of massive quick profits on the patients that they treat. That's going to require a major social shift though, because I can't imagine that greed is an easy habit to give up.

Speaking of cheap health care, there is another issue that I've been thinking about recently that is on the opposite moral spectrum but relates to the same issue of patient care.

This is something that most people have been taught not to do from a young age and the Bible specifically repudiates but may provide a basis for better health care: Lying.

I think that we need to establish medical guidelines for lying to patients in the form of prescribing placebos.

A recent article in Wired examines placebos from a perspective that challenges the view that most people have held since the discovery of placebos: not as something to be avoided during the testing phase of a scientific study but rather as a powerful effect in it's own right that can be used to help people.

Let's be clear, I'm not suggesting that doctors should lie to patients about their conditions or the possible outcomes of their diseases, but I do think that there should be ethical guidelines for doctors to prescribe placebos to patients that may help millions of people recover from their ailments.

There are two kinds of possible placebos; those that contain no medications whatsoever--the proverbial sugar pill--and real medications that are given in doses too low to have proper chemical affect. I can see some argument for the former as less harmful due to the decreased likeliness of side effects but I actually see the latter as more likely to be prescribed by doctors. With medications given below the indicated dose the doctors themselves can feel that they are giving the patient something that does actually clinically do something and decreases the chances that the patient may figure out that the medication that they're on isn't chemically relevant to their recovery.

It doesn't change the fact that the doctors would in some sense have to lie to the patients about the drugs that they are being prescribed. Just the phrase "studies have shown that patients that take this substance report less continuing pain" is a lie of omission. Some patients may force doctors into positions where they need to both be trusted and still prescribe a placebo, requiring a more direct lie.

Until there are ethical guidelines recognized by the wider medical community doctors may be at risk prescribing placebos for malpractice suits. Lawyers, not understanding the nuances of patient care, would probably seize any confirmed placebo prescription as evidence that the doctor didn't care enough about a patient to prescribe something "real." We'd see class action lawsuits against hospitals that didn't prescribe high enough doses of painkillers and psychiatric drugs. But placebos can help patients with a minimum of side effects and complications and generally recognized standards will prevent doctors from getting in trouble when they try to help their patients.

In this current climate of reduced spending and high pressure to cut costs there is a great incentive to get that placebo improvement with minimal production costs. Even using drugs at the subeffective dosing, that can mean substantially reduced costs to the patients and to the clinics and hospitals while improving the standard of care. I will say that personally I think that using the most expensive chemicals in doses that are not effective is unethical because it creates both a cost to the patient without a substantial enough gain. Any placebo medication should be on the ultra low end of the drug cost scale, not more than two to four dollars for a month's worth of pills, perhaps slightly more for a subeffective dose of a medication that a patient will have name recognition with.

Just looking back over the last couple of paragraphs, I want to explicitly clarify that when I say that doctors should be prescribing placebo medications they should be doing so in addition to the efficacious drugs that will actually help in the patients recovery. I would never suggest that we give out placebos in the place of cancer medications, but the judicial use of placebos may reduce the side effects of those drugs when given in tandem.

The effects that placebos have are in that vein: reducing side effects, lowing the perception of pain, perhaps improving general mood slightly. Since they are not clinically effective they should not be prescribed instead of something that actually works.

The question is, would the prescription of placebos help people? It seems clear that if they are prescribed in tandem with real medications for the purposes outlined in the previous paragraph then the answer is yes. Since placebos already have a measurable medical effect we shouldn't fear to use that effect to the benefit of the patients that we treat. Instead, we should incorporate it when possible as a cheap and surprisingly effective treatment for real symptoms and protect the doctors who want to use it to help their patients.

Beautiful Images

2009-10-18T15:40:00.003-04:00

Found this link via BoingBoing which probably means that all of my friends have seen it, but I thought it was worth a link here:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/all/1

There was another picture recently that I also thought was amazing. This link contains an image of both Earth and Jupiter from the surface of the planet Mars. Yowzers, that's cool. For this link, sorry, I don't remember who it was via.

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/05/22/

Anyway, here are some very small things and some very big things that have awestruck me recently.

Muad'Dib! The Musical

2009-10-14T12:35:00.002-04:00

Just for fun, I added some entries into Scalzi's little writing contest over at his AMC column. This is the only one that I didn't think was quite up to the contest standards, so I guess I'll post it here. You can see the others in the comments at the column.

Despite the angelic singing voice of Hugh Jackman, the latest screen version of the novel Dune, Muad'Dib! The Musical suffers from many of the problems that have plagued past adaptations as well as adding a host of new ones.
From the beginning some vocal critiques in the fan community have criticized the role of Paul being given to Jackman, but he does not feel quite as out of place as some more egregiously miscast members such as Fantasia Barrino as the Reverend Mother and Kenny Chesney as Duke Leto Atreides. Despite the many new action sequences the plot slithers along painfully when faced with a cast that seems to realize that this latest installment isn’t going to provide much momentum for their stalling careers. Even Jackman himself seems to react woodenly against with Chesney and his nameless love interest played by the disinterested Renee Zellweger.

Further, technical problems plague the many special effects, probably due to the rushed post-production schedule. If you are least hoping for a Star Wars like bonanza, prepare to be disappointed by flat looking backgrounds and positively uninspired art direction. Universal apparently believes that musicals no longer require any visual stimulation to carry them through.

Overall, you’re better served seeing one of the other musicals adapted from science fiction properties playing currently, Star Trek: The Next Tango or Babylon 6: Musical Disarmament.

I like my first entry particularly, so after the winners are announced, I'll probably repost that one (or perhaps all of them) here.

RG's Account of President Obama's Speech

2009-09-10T10:00:00.002-04:00

RG responded to President Obama's Speech last night, but he did get a few things wrong. Since this response is so long, I think I should post it here on my blog.

Obama's comments are the quoted text, RG's comments are in blue and mine are in red.

—————————————————————–

“But thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January, I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink.”

The bank bailout and the economic stimulus bill were passed under the Bush administration. All that the President has done is implement the measures taken by the Congress before he was elected.

Actually, the big economic stimulus bill and bank bailout were passed under the Obama Administration. Remember, $800 billion? And isn't your side accusing him of creating record deficits? How can he be creating record deficits if he isn't the one spending the money?

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

A nice piece of rhetoric (I mean it sincerely), but it reveals his ever-present arrogance. All the problems with health care will be forever solved by him and his administration? Wow!

Considering how little has been done for the last few decades, I suspect he means that he will be the last to implement necessary reforms, not the last to handle healthcare at all.

”There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”

That number seems to change a lot. I thought the President had said that there were 47 million uninsured people.

RG is simply conflating three different numbers here. Obama is talking about people with pre-existing conditions, that are two old, or facing substantial medical costs that are rejected by the insurance companies (in a way eerily similar to death panels). They may be able to afford insurance but are uninsured because the insurance companies don't want to pay.

There are other people who cannot afford coverage. There are a lot of children in this group.

The 47 million number that RG is talking about is the actual counted number of uninsured people in the United States. The people that don't have insurance because of one of the above reasons, a combination of the two, or just that they don't want it.

“And it’s why those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it — about $1000 per year that pays for somebody else’s emergency room and charitable care.”

I don’t get it. I thought he liked it when people pay for other people’s health care.

It's quotes like this that illustrate why the right doesn't understand progressives or liberals.

”We know we must reform this system. The question is how. “

Ah, but who is the “we”? I think that is the bigger question. I tend to be very cautious whenever people say that “we” need to do something. In meetings where people say that, I always ask, “Who do you mean when you say we?” Often they mean everyone else should pay for their big idea.

Perhaps he was talking to the people in the room with him: the elected representatives of our government.

“But either one[, single-payer public insurance or individual, private policies,] would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have.”

No, it would disrupt their health insurance. Why does the president continually equate health insurance with health care?

Lots of people without health insurance still get health care.

First, insurance pays for ongoing healthcare costs for many people so any disruption in health insurance is also a disruption in health care. If you lose your insurance, you'll also lose your ability to pay for your prescription medications.

Second, show me the "lots of people" without health insurance who have cancer or diabetes or other serious chronic diseases that manage to get regular care. I very much doubt that they make up more than one percent of the 47 million uninsured.

“But what we have also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have toward their own government.”

This is the same tired canard used by politicians on both sides. If it disagrees with my agenda, it is partisan. If it agrees with my agenda it is not.

Weren't you complaining about partisan spectacle yesterday, RG? Gee golly wilikers, that sure went away fast.

“Instead of honest debate, we have seen scare tactics.”

Maybe. But the President said some pretty scary things in his speech. Again, it’s a politically motivated rhetorical device. When the Republicans want something, they try to scare people in one way. When the Democrats want something, they try to care people in a different way.

The President didn't say that your Grandmother would be killed if you didn't assist him in health insurance/care reform. That was Palin arguing for the opposite point of view. The President said that we have a moral obligation to fix healthcare in this country, something that apparently Christians like RG disagree with.

“Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise.”

Yes, but both sides have done so. Compromise does not mean, do it my way.

The Republicans have shown that they are unwilling to pass any bill even with massive concessions. However, the American people decided to put the Democratic Party in control of the country. They reached out and now that they've been rejected the Democrats should get down to business and fix things.

“Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenge.”

I’m not sure what “political points” means. Is listening to the people who elected you scoring political points? Is being accountable to the citizens scoring political points? Is representing your constituents scoring political points? If so, I like it.

In this context it's obvious that Obama is talking about the scare tactics used by the Republicans, however I will say that fixing healthcare is one of the reasons why I voted for Obama. If he represents me and my fellow constituents (the ones that voted him into office) by overriding the Republican and reforming healthcare, I will probably vote for him again.

“Well the time for bickering is over.”

Does that mean that the Democrats will give in? Oh, he means that the Republicans should give in. Nothing partisan there!

So much for an end to bickering.

“It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance.”

Until they no longer have it and must resort to the government-run plan.

Some of the reforms that Obama talked about last night become relevant here. If the reform bill passes, then insurance companies couldn't just drop you for no reason for a pre-existing condition. If you like your insurance, this plan will allow you to keep it even if you start to cost the insurance company money and prevent you from becoming a victim of rescission.

“It will provide insurance to those who don’t.”

No it won’t. It will put even more people on government welfare rolls. A quicker, easier way would be to expand Medicare and Medicaid.

. . . RG supports the expansion of government agencies? Huh. I never would have guessed.

“And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.”

I have not seen or heard about one measure that is aimed at cutting costs. Not even one. The plan will not cap salaries or fees. It offers no incentives for people not going to the doctor for minor illnesses or for going to a private practice instead of to the emergency room. The only thing that comes close to a cost-cutting measure is counseling people about how they can die sooner instead of getting ongoing treatment.

RG may be a bit hard of hearing. Expanding insurance will lead to fewer emergency room visits and less back end taxes on all Americans. The "public option" will only be self-sufficient. Obama specifically mentioned capping fees. And perhaps RG missed the part where Obama specifically referred to the death panels as lies. These plans will be based on other plans that have been shown to work.

“First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”

Require, no. But it would make the government-run plan cheaper, which would entice many businesses and individuals to choose it.

It's possible that the government plan may be more expensive, especially if the insurance companies manage to remove the provisions that keep them from rescission or from dropping sick people. That will make a government plan more expensive medically, although the administrative costs will be lower.

“What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you.”

Until they go bankrupt or close up shop because they can no longer compete against a government plan that looks cheap because it is paid for with fictional dollars that our government churns out like a magical ATM machine.

RG fails to realize that countries with "socialized" medicine still manage to maintain private insurance companies. And they still make money even. However, instead of making billions of dollars rejecting the claims of dying middle class people they only make millions in profits. How sad.

“Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition.”

Which is one reason that some of them will fold or close. They are not in the business to be nice. And they do not have fancy money-making machines like Uncle Sam. They are in the business to make money. They do it by gambling that people will not get sick. They do not make money by kindly agreeing to pay all medical costs for everyone with chronic or terminal conditions.

So what are people like me supposed to do? I don't make that much money and if I can't get insurance why should I work if all of my money is going to go to medical bills? I would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt if I didn't have insurance and when it expires I'm probably not going to be able to get it renewed.

People that are all healthy are not the people that need health insurance.

The really scary thing is that RG doesn't realize that dying people are depending on these companies and that "not being nice" means that people will die. Not maybe die but will die. That's why I think that healthcare/health insurance is not something that should be done privately. I disagree with a business that makes money off of people that are hurt and dying.

“We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.”

Why not? Should all our medical treatment just be free? Should doctors who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for their training and thousands of dollars more for insurance just give away their services? And who, again, is “we”? And, in this context, what does “should” even mean? Is there some written code somewhere that says that people should not go broke because of illness? For thousands of years people have done so. It is one of the unfortunate facts of life. It should be a good incentive to get a good education, work hard, get good insurance, and take really good care of oneself.

. . . I just need to repeat this. "Is there some written code somewhere that says that people should not go broke because of illness? . . . It is one of the unfortunate facts of life." That must be the fabled Christian compassion on display. Debtors prison was also a fact of life. Does that mean we should bring it back for the United States? People should not go broke because of an accident or illness. Where's the empathy?

Also, I should point out that getting a good education and working hard won't prevent the accidents like mine. People that run red lights don't necessarily check education and job before they plow into you.

”And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies — because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.”

Some insurance plans already do so, because it saves them money in the long run. If not, individuals can pay for them out of their own pockets. How can the government tell a private company what kind of contract they can enter into with private citizens? Why don’t Obama and his rich friends open free preventative care clinics for people if he actually cares about this issue?

They have.

“We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange — a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices.”

That’s similar to what many Republicans want to do. Rather than have insurance companies restricted to particular regions, they want all insurance companies to operate freely across the country. It would bring health insurance premiums down and/or improve coverage. What Republicans do not want is for the government to be one of the participants in the exchange, providing unfair competition that will drive private companies out of business. That is the opposite of the way governments should treat private industry.

Unless that private industry operates unethically, and there is no way for a company that makes money on sickness and disease to operate ethically. There are some things that we shouldn't allow private companies to profit from, and this is one of them.

”If there are affordable options and people still don’t sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for those people’s expensive emergency room visits.”

Who is the “we”? It seems like “we” pay either way. Either through the taxes needed to fund the public health insurance option or with higher hospital bills. What difference does it make, except that one gives money to the government and the other gives money to a private company?

Well, one is definitely cheaper than the other. I guess RG doesn't care about reducing the cost that he'll have to pay in taxes.

Then there's that public option, which RG wouldn't have to pay for. Obama plans for it to be self sufficient.

“If some businesses don’t provide workers health care, it forces the rest of us to pick up the tab when their workers get sick, and gives those businesses an unfair advantage over their competitors.”

If you want insurance provided for you, don’t work at a company like that. I did once, and I got my own health insurance, and yes, it was expensive.

Lots of people don't have the same choices that RG had. I don't think he understands why Walmart is not most people's dream job.

”That’s why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance.”

That’s fair if people expect others to pay for their medical bills. If a person is prepared to pay for his own expenses or go without, it is not fair for the government to force him to buy insurance.

Whoa, going off talking points there. The insurance companies want everyone to have to buy insurance, and thus most Republicans are extremely pro insurance mandates. You have to wonder if RG supports Republicans that support these mandates.

Of course, weirdly, Obama is right that we should all be involved in this. It's weird to see a Republican with so little patriotism and community spirit. Maybe RG just doesn't realize that sometimes we do have to work together to improve this country.

Of course, it is really a way to push the government plan, since people will obviously choose it if they are required to have some kind of coverage.

Except it won't. Or we'll see, I guess, since RG probably won't believe it until he sees it.

“Now, I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business.”

But he naively believes that (1) they will simply accept these new regulations out of the goodness of their hearts and (2) they will continue to make money under the new regulations and with competition from the government. (Or maybe he doesn’t believe it and is duping us.)

First, welcome to the concept of government. They will accept them because it'll be the law.

Second, yes. They will continue to make money under the new regulations and even with the competition from the government.

“In fact, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, we believe that less than 5 percent of Americans would sign up [for the public plan].”

That’s absurd! Hawaii thought the same thing when they instituted their government-run plan for children. About 85% of the people who signed up for it dropped their private insurance to do so, and there simply wasn’t enough money budgeted. Some of those people could already afford their own private insurance policy, but chose the free government plan. (Duh!)

I'll trust Obama and the CBO over RG on this one. Let's see who's correct.

”But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers.”

No government program operates that way. While the government is churning out money in one building, it is sucking it up with a huge vacuum cleaner in all the others.

[citation needed] Of course, things are already bad. RG just doesn't want to change anything.

”And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.”

How could the President personally see to that? Is it even his job? Besides what does “need” mean. That is the part that scares many people out there. Does a 75-year-old man need a new heart? Does a baby with severe birth defects need life-support in a neonatal unit? In a free market, you can still pay for those things yourself if you are able, or you can beg the hospital and doctors to treat you at a lower fee.

And those for-profit hospitals and doctors will say no. And that 75-year-old man, that baby, and many other people will die.

Because in a true free market, people die because they can't afford medical care. And the people that support the libertarian ideals support that, just like RG does.

Very sad. I can't just watch people die like he does.

“I faced a trillion dollar deficit when I walked in the door of the White House is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for — from the Iraq War to tax breaks for the wealthy.”

His budget proposal, as widely reported, will have a deficit of around $9 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Why make a big deal of $1 trillion, if you plan to overspend by nine times that amount?

. . . Because the previous party was the "fiscally reponsible" party?

“The plan will not add to our deficit.”

How many times have we heard that before–from the Republicans and the Democrats? How can spending any money, even if it were only one billion dollars, not add to the deficit?

By cutting a billion from the wasteful spending in the budget at the same time?

Groundhog Day

2009-09-02T17:17:00.001-04:00

So, I got back to my old place a few days ago. It was the last trip before I was completely moved out, but really I was just there to clean up. All my stuff had been moved out.

But there was a package, an Amazon mailer, waiting for me on the stairs.

It was the Groundhog Day special edition. Which was on my Wish List, which was only linked from my Fark account. Someone apparently decided that they wanted to buy me a gift.

I've heard about that sort of thing before. People have been known to buy busty blond girls things online, and I'm sure some of the cute x-rate boys on various sites get presents. However, it's the first time that I've ever gotten something.

I don't know what prompted it, but it made me feel really good. Hopefully I said or did something special to the person that bought it because it made me very special.

So, thanks to Chris C. I very much appreciate your gift. I watched it today and enjoyed it. I'm feeling a bit under the weather it was lovely to have a movie that I love but haven't seen in a while.

Stories Through Pictures

2009-08-28T15:23:00.011-04:00

I've got a couple of pictures that I keep meaning to post. First one is from the hallway of the boyfriend's apartment building:

No, there was no other information nor do we know what was stolen. Mail, perhaps?

This image comes from a Federal building: The Library of Congress. Yes, the title there says "Erotica." No, she's not a Muse, as far as I can tell. I just think that she's a very interesting addition to be recognized.

Something tells me that I would like that soup. 'Cause I like instant soup.

What? Don't you like instant soup?

Finally, I got this the other day. Yes, I've already read it (basically all in two sittings, about five hours total) and it was good. Not his best but definitely a solid Vlad Taltos novel that made me squeal with delight and giggle on the T. I will of course review it, when it gets a bit closer to the anticipated release date.

I may ask TNH if I can post a paragraph from it, just because I have discovered the most spoilerific section of any book of all time.

Why yes, I am a fifteen year old fan girl when it comes to Vlad novels. Thank you for asking. As of this week I'm pretty sure I own just about every piece of writing that Steven Brust has ever published, including a couple of short stories, Agyar, Freedom & Necessity, and now I'm even ahead one book. Yay!

Update: Whoops, forgot one. This one is self explanatory:

The End of Mac Fandom

2009-08-08T21:43:00.004-04:00

or How Apple Screwed Me with a useless warantee extension.

There are so many ways that I could start this post:

I am having an absolutely miserable day . . .

So yesterday on the Red Line of the Boston T I got shoved at Park Street and fell into a bar. No worries about my stuff, my backpack is padded . . .

I'm a recent Mac buyer and a reluctant one at that but my friend Elliot has always been a huge Mac fan so when I bought my last computer I finally decided to switch . . .

All of these lead to the fact that the screen of my computer is now shattered.

I looked all over but even though I can find receipts for stamps from NYC, I couldn't find the receipt for my Macbook. I couldn't remember if I'd bought the three year extension but AppleCare is good for a year from purchase date though and I know that I bought my mac on October 29 of last year because I still have the email that they sent to me when I purchased it.

So I made an appointment for the Genius Bar for tech support (8:45pm @ the Boyston St. location) and crossed my fingers.

Carlos was my genius and he looked at the damage, scanned the serial number, looked at his screen and then started to apologize.

Apparently I did buy the extended plan, but it doesn't matter because it basically only covers manufacturing issues. So, what is the point for extending coverage for 3 years if it's only going to repair things that are going to be problems out of the box?

So, in order to get my screen fixed it'll cost $750 (to send away or $770 to have fixed in the store). A new laptop is only $450 more, at $1200 which I guess is their way of telling you that it really isn't worth it to replace a screen.

It doesn't matter much. I really can't afford either option at the moment. I'm jobless, out of work, unemployed, screwed.

So much for buying a newer, nicer computer after I finally have a job again. Now I guess I get to buy a replacement for this one and it's going to be a while before I get that dreamy Macbook Pro.

You know, I still feel misled about the extended coverage that apparently doesn't actually cover anything. I looked over the Apple Care and Apple Protection Plan that I apparently purchased for $350. It certain appears to cover repairs, and I guess I got suckered by that vague promise of "global repair coverage" because the fine print of it (warning, PDF) specifically excludes repairing any accidental damage. So much for "Peace of mind."

Of course, that wasn't the only thing that sucked today but it is the thing that is making me sit here about to cry. I'm at Ben's and for the first time in my life I just want to drink until I can't remember this day anymore.

A Question about Libertarianism

2009-08-07T09:57:00.000-04:00

Can anyone think of a libertarian argument against fraud?

It seems to me that in a truly libertarian system there would be no such thing as the prosecution of fraud. Is that accurate?

Specifically, can anyone explain why that isn't the case? Or about copyright? Theoretically, market forces would simply drive people to other vendors, no?

Understanding Anti-Gay Marriage Arguments

2009-08-06T20:15:00.003-04:00

So, as far as I understand it, the three main arguments against gay marriage are:

It's not traditional. (Also seen as: Marriage is the fundamental unit of society)
I don't like the thought of gay marriage. (Also seen as: Gay marriage is icky or I don't want my kids to see it)
Gay marriage is against my religious beliefs.
There isn't any reason that gays should want marriage anyway.

I'm not much for tradition, so I feel that 1. is a hollow argument. Americans try not to legislate our own personal prejudices so 2. is certainly not a valid argument.

3. is more complex. I feel that the best argument against it is pointing out that by legislating a person's religious beliefs you are egregiously violating the first amendment. You see, there are people with other religious beliefs out there that do favor gay marriage. The Unitarian Universalists, the Metropolitan Community Church, the United Church of Christ and many reform Jewish temples all support gay marriage. Those churches represent millions of Americans, all of whom are having their freedom of speech trampled by larger denominations that want to be able to have their own sacraments legally recognized but prevent the smaller churches from doing the same.

The reason for this post is number 4. though. You see, I've noticed that this response is usually related to a single argument against gay marriage. When you ask people why straight people should want legally recognized marriage but gay people shouldn't the answer is usually: for the children.

According to a lot of the anti-gay marriage Christians that I've had the pleasure of being disgusted by over the years, since gay people are incapable of creating a baby, they shouldn't have the legal status that straights have to take care of the child.

Personally, I thought this was ridiculous, and I've pointed this out numerous times. Gay people may not be able to have sex with each other and procreate but the can and do take care of babies through adoption or surrogacy or sometimes even heterosexual sex (we may refer to those people as "bisexual"). Recently, I finally got a response that floored me.

Gay people shouldn't be able to raise children.

Okay, that's a fairly serious negation of my counter argument. If gay (and bisexual) people were not allowed to raise children then that does in fact mean that there would be substantial difference in the necessity for legal protections from gay families.

It would also require tens of thousands of children to be forcibly removed from their parents (sometimes blood parents and often the only parents that the child has known).

Don't forget that this is a Christian that I was talking too. A Christian that apparently thinks so little of gay people that he finds nothing wrong with denying them the ability to raise their children.

You can see him say that in the comments to this post on his blog.

He'll think that I'm being hyperbolic. But I think that when someone gets the point that he is at: denying the ability of gay people to be decent, loving parents, then perhaps a little bit of hyperbolic language is justified.

So, that's his trump argument. Gay people don't need legal protections to protect their children because they shouldn't be allowed to have children. Not only should we not be considered able to make the choice to marry, but we also not be considered good enough to raise children.

If you were curious, that's prejudice. That's what gay people want to get rid of in this world.

Disorderly Conduct at Home

2009-07-26T23:07:00.002-04:00

So, I guess my big question about the whole Gates vs. the Cambridge Police is:

Do we really want police officers that feel it is necessary to arrest people that are verbally abusive?

I would think that we should hold our police officers to a higher standard.

A Confession

2009-07-11T16:18:00.003-04:00

No, not mine.

Wendell Potter is interviewed by Bill Moyers through this link. The interview is 30 minutes long, so if you don't have time to watch it all, let me sum up:

Michael Moore was absolutely correct on Sicko.

Mr. Potter is a former healthcare executive. On the PR side of things.

If you haven't seen Sicko, you should go rent it, because now we know what the industry did to cast Moore as radical crazy person and suppress his message which is basically: we shouldn't fear government involvement in healthcare.

There are a few talking points that are addressed that everyone should have now have counterpoints for:

Michael Moore is a radical leftist. No, he's a guy that asked around the world and then recorded the answers. It's the CEOs that are the radicals, trying to remove your ability to know what's going on in your healthcare system.
Michael Moore is part of the Hollywood elite. No, he's from Flint, MI. He started making documentaries after he saw how GM treated its employees.
Government should stay out of healthcare. In the countries where there is government involved healthcare the people like their healthcare more than we do. Germany, especially.
Getting government involved in healthcare would mean a beaureacrat between you and your doctor. Right now there's a CEO between you and your doctors. At least you could vote to replace the government beaureacrat.
Beaureacrats would be prescribing treatment, not doctors. Again, what we have now is corporate beaureacrats prescribing, not doctors. And what's worse, they have a bottom line to maintain.
Delayed care is denied care. Sort of like how people can't go to the doctor for a cough that may become pneumonia under the current system because it costs them too much out of pocket? That's denied care.
Medical services would be rationed! None of the proposals under consideration for the U.S. would stop someone from using private insurance or even themselves from paying out of pocket for services that they might need. If they can pay for it, more power to them.

I think one of the silliest things is that insurance might be able to make money from a government run system with less emphasis on "medical loss ratios" because the government would be paying for more of the normal services! Insurance would still be a good idea but the companies could afford to limit themselves to the least likely to get hurt and thus the least likely to need expensive proceedures but people more likely to get sick would still get the care that they need.

Maybe instead of a medical loss ratio of 77%, they'd start seeing medical loss ratios of 50% and people that need lifesaving treatment could still afford it.

(Interview via)

Heads by Greg Bear

2009-06-30T23:50:00.004-04:00

I just finished the Novella "Heads" by Greg Bear.

It was pretty good, the characterization could have been better and the end was sort of predictable but it had me worrying there for a while.

You see, it's been a while since I picked it up from the bookstore. Even then all I knew about it was that it was a Hugo winner. If I knew anything more than that about it, I'd forgotten it so it was a blank slate to me.

As I was headed into the last few pages (*cough*) I couldn't tell if it was going to be a ringing endorsement of Scientology or a scathing denouncement.

It is definitely about Scientology though. It's so thinly veiled that it's beyond gauzy and into the realm of body paint. Thierry is Hubbard.

I don't know much about Greg Bear. He could have been a convert, for all I know. He could have had some other reason to want to ingratiate himself with the Church or want to support them.

But he didn't. Instead, he shows in a novella why Hubbard should be disregarded. It might be a fictional work, but so's Dianetics.

Hate Crimes Challenge

2009-06-26T11:15:00.003-04:00

Here's a challenge for American Elephant or Renaissance Guy:

What is a hate crime?

Use your own words to describe what hate crimes legislation does, what effects it is intended to prevent or create and why we need them.

I may have to ask clarifying questions to determine if you've actually got the right idea.

Rescission

2009-06-19T00:22:00.002-04:00

Companies and governments have different priorities. They have to.

Companies are in it for the money, which is no more apparent than in the practice of "rescission" as seen here.

Governments have to worry about ethics though. At least in a marginal, theoretical manner. It wouldn't be ethical or possible for the government to do that. They have to worry about protecting everyone, not just the people that are willing to give them money because too many people getting dumped will hurt public perception and possibly votes.

The weird thing is, that protects us, somewhat. Anyone that thinks that we should let economics, the market, a company or anything like that govern us is abrogating the responsibility to maintain an ethical and publicly tolerable state.

Torture, eavesdropping, rescission. Who cares, when the drive is toward squeezing out the last little dollar?

Noird and Sushi

2009-06-08T12:05:00.006-04:00

On June 3 in Cambridge I got to hear China Miéville speak about his new book The City and The City, during which he let fly with the created word "noird." He was content to let it live in the wild: he refused to define it himself except for in the most general terms and refused to speculate on other authors that it may describe. (If you're interested, the first reference to it is here and Why Mice Sing delves into it here.)

During the signing, he told me that I should spread #noird, so I guess I'll have to go sign up for Twitter. China Miéville told me too.

I asked Ben to talk about his thoughts about noird, because he's substantially brighter than I am and more apt to clearly express interesting ideas. He said:

I went to see China Mieville give a reading and question and answer session last week, in which he declared that his most recent book 'The City and the City' is a member of the noir and new weird portmanteau: noird subgenre. Upon declaring this new subgenre, Mieville started the question and answer session. I fired off the first question: 'Who else would you put in the subgenre of Noird? For me, Richard K Morgan immediately springs to mind, but what do you think?' Mieville demurred and suggesting that we need to identify the authors for ourselves. To wit, I start with a modest proposal for what Mieville is defining.

Noird is a fusion of Noir and New Weird - Noir is fairly straightforward: hard-boiled detective/crime/police procedural story - I always thing of Raymond Chandler and Chinatown. New Weird is a bit more amorphous - presumably, this encompasses the new science fiction approaches, the speculative fiction which Neal Stephenson defines so cleanly here. There is certainly a current/modern component to this, so Golden and Silver Age of sci-fi/fantasy should probably be excluded.

On the author/book list (as Mieville implied that not all his work is Noird, but 'The City and the City' most certainly is) I suggest the following:

Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) series by Richard K. Morgan
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Something by Neil Gaiman [not sure what, but he's certainly New Weird, and there's got to be detective elements to some of what he's done]
Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde
Halting State by Charles Stross [possible others like Glasshouse have references along those lines]
The da Vinci Code/Angels and Demons by Dan Brown [possibly too mainstream to be new weird, but there's certainly elements that map onto this construct - stylistically, the noir component falls short here--there's not a lot of that hard-boiled feeling]
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami [though others from Murakami fits into this as well]

In many ways, I feel like Philip K Dick was a major founding influence in this Noird genre - looking at works such as Do Androids Dream, A Scanner Darkly, which wiki calls "a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural novels;" possibly may be the founding work. That being said, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is a worthy contender as well, with the heavy influence of the classic Noir style.

Obviously, there are other and further choices, but this is certainly a reasonable sub-genre which captures many works which sort of defy classification.

Personally, I'm not convinced that when Ben wrote this, his definition of New Weird was correct. I asked if he'd looked New Weird up on Wikipedia and found that he hadn't. Some of the works that Ben takes for granted as New Weird aren't necessarily part of that movement and some of them predate it by decades.

So, New Weird "subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy" and invents complex and believable worlds in which the plots are set in a more realistic and not particularly utopian setting. Basically it's fantasy set in a world that extends beyond the boundaries of the story that exhibits the traits of the real world.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is on the Library Thing list above and both Ben and I agree that it deserves it's place on that list. Ben, having just finished the Chalion series by Bujold, thinks that those books belong to that movement as well and I can't necessarily disagree. I would add George R. R. Martin's ASOIAF to the movement as well. His books are subversions of a romanticized fantasy setting.

Possibly Harry Potter by J. Rowling belongs to this movement as well. It's certainly an expansive world that belongs to a world with a past and future that exists regardless of the actions of Harry. It does push the limit on the "realistic" front though, although I would argue that the later books show that the world in which Harry lives is not the typical utopian fantasy setting. The Minister of Magic is voted out, isn't he? Characters related to the main characters die. Not everyone lives happily ever after and if we're defining this movement by expansive worlds and a step away from utopianism, then I would argue that it does fit.

Ben would point out somewhere in here that J. Rowling would never describe herself as "New Weird." Considering her separation from the mainline fantasy movement I would question though whether she'd even accept the term "fantasy," so why does it matter?

It matters because China is spreading New Weird himself, as sort of a self-promotional/sales technique. That doesn't mean that it isn't a valid sub-sub-genre but it does make me question how correct the pushed definition is to the way that people use it. And since Noird is a sub-category of New Weird, how specific are we willing to get?

There are only a few examples of Noird, but Ben feels (and I would agree) that the are categorical, there are ways to parse out the differences between New Weird and Noird. Figuring out what those were led me to at least one more subset that Noird must be distinct from: Victorianeird (pronouced with a hard e at the end).

Victorianeird is that part of the New Weird that adapts the literary conventions, styles and sometimes setting and characters of Victorian England. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is the obvious genre defining work, but there are others. Brust's Viscount of Adrilankha series is probably another. Although I haven't read them I would guess that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Graham-Smith (and Jane Austen, of course), the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik probably fit into that category as well.

So yeah, Noird and Victorianeird. If I have any more thoughts, I'll have to do a follow-up post.

Moving on to the sushi part of this post: Cafe Sushi on Mass Ave in Cambridge is excellent. Really, really good. I guess they've changed management recently but they're much better now than they used to be. So, if you happen to be looking for excellent sushi in the Cambridge area, I heartily recommend them.

Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson

2009-05-28T19:39:00.000-04:00

Written October 8, 2008 while I waited for the book to get published:

I got lucky again. I stopped by Tor when I got to New York to drop off a get well soon card for Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Patrick just happened to be there and he offered me a free book.

You should have seen my face light up.

The problem was, I was still staying with Jay at this point, and everything I owned was in two suitcases and a backpack, all stuffed to the point of bulging seams. I had nowhere to put another book, not even a free one.

But he popped back into his office and came back with an ARC, an advance reader copy, of book by Hugo Award winner Robert Charles Wilson. I'd already read Spin and I happened to have the sequel Axis in my backpack. (PNH pointed out that the final novel in the trilogy, Vortex, is currently being written.)

A free book I could turn down, but this was more than a free book. It was . . . special? Using that word seems forced and it implies things that I don't intend but it still comes closest to conveying what I'm trying to get at. I like having connections with the books I read. I like reading signed copies, I like reading books by friends or acquaintances. And I like advance copies.

This is supposed to be a review though, so I suppose I'll move on to the book.

Spoilers Galore

Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century by Robert Charles Wilson is a future history. That is, it's a novel about the future written from the perspective of someone that is recalling it as history. In this case it's a biography of Julian Comstock by his good friend Adam Hazzard.

Julian is the nephew of the President of the United States, Deklan Comstock, and the presidency has become something of a monarchy. There are still elections but there are little more than a formality. Senate seats have become hereditary. Still, things are not quite stable. Julian's father is declared a traitor and executed when he starts to rival his brother's popularity and Julian is sent away to what used to be Canada for protection from his uncle (I'm pretty sure that the place where he grows up, William's Ford in the Athabasca region of Alberta, is a reference to William Gibson who went to Athabasca University, but tons of the references went flying over my head so I may have gotten this completely wrong).

Adam's mother works at the Comstock estate and eventually Adam and Julian become friends and so when Julian is forced to leave home due to the machinations of his Uncle, Adam leaves with him.

This isn't the stereotypical science fiction novel. Instead of living in world where technology has progressed the characters live in a world that is much more like the late 18th century that the 21st. Oil has Effloresced, and combined with plagues and "the false Tribulation" the world has returned to what we would consider simpler times: horse drawn carriages and ships are the primary forms of transport, digital technology is lost, and conservative Christianity has fufilled its Dominionist dreams and taken over most people's daily lives and infiltrated the government. The sector of power that they've created is even referred to as the "Dominion" and is based in Colorado Springs.

Since this does take place in the future though, it's interesting to see what has been made of past by people that have trouble believing in things like cars, traveling to the moon, or flying to Europe in eight hours.

This is in some sense a bildungroman, and I suspect that aside from the modern in jokes it would have fit in well with literature from the 18th century. The level of technology, the overt Christianity and the greater emphasis on propriety and decorum through the reassertion of conservative value systems over an entire society are all more closely related to Gone With the Wind than 1984.

As such, this isn't the sort of book that I'd normally read. I like space ships and aliens and computers and that sort of thing, and I probably wouldn't have picked it up off a self as something that was required reading. However, I can say that it was engaging, entertaining and well-written.

The characters are for the most part three dimensional, especially Adam as narrator and Sam Godwin the Jewish bodyguard of Julian (I suspect his name is another subtle joking reference, this time to the internet meme). The plot is believable, and the setting is beautifully described from Alberta to British Columbia to New York City.

In order to do an honest critique, the rest of the review contains even more spoilers. Unless you've already read this book, aren't planning on reading it, or don't care about spoilers stop reading here.

My main quibble with the books is from one major element that is clearly implied in nearly every chapter of the book about Julian but isn't ever directly addressed. He's gay. There are several major jokes based on this throughout the novel, including one in the last few pages that is intended to endear the audience to Adam.

Trying to rationalize this from an authors perspective, I have problems coming up with something that I would agree justifies this. First, it's implied at the end that Adam never figures this out. On the contrary, several people have suggested this directly to him and he says as much in the first chapter. So he seems to have considered it and dismissed it.

Second, if Adam had attempted to hide his friend's sexual orientation, there are sections that would be differently written or completely left out. Considering that he describes the book as "a true and authentic portrait of [...] Julian Comstock" and in every other manner seems to hold to this seem to suggest that Adam didn't intentionally cover it up, he just didn't consider it.

But this doesn't make any sense. Considering Adam's issues with Christianity, he never shows discomfort with his friend's presence. Pardon my language, but bull crap. Given his reaction to finding out that Godwin is a Jew, he should have a significant discomfort or insecurity or curiosity about homosexuality and there is absolutely no justification for why he doesn't.

So, as a twenty first book written by a person writing as another, I have to ask: What the crap is so special about homosexuality that it's danced around?

It's obviously relevant to the story. Chekov's gun. But why write around it and pretend that it's not there? To be honest, this significantly bothers me to a large degree. Our society currently has enough problems being forthright about homosexuality. Look at Clay Aiken, who just came out of the closet (and Adam Lambert, who hasn't -- ST May, 2009), not to mention Ted Haggard and hundreds of others.

It can't pretend to address this though, because it's never explicitly addressed. It would be like writing a book in which one of the characters is implied to be Jewish and then claiming that it addresses the way that Jews pass in modern society. No. If the problem is that gay people can't be open or honest then a book that isn't honest is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And it is a problem. Do you know how many (human) homosexual characters I can think of in science fiction? Maybe ten, and almost all of them are minor characters. If I want to identify with a romantic situation in a science fiction book, I usually have to pretend that I'm the girl, or that the text says "he" instead of "she."

So here you have a central character (his name is on the cover, notice) that's gay. Julian is already a rebel in a situation where homosexuality is a crime and the most homophobic sections of our society have become the law of the land. Further, this is a book about how the character becomes a man and learns about life. What better situation is there to write about a gay character dealing with homosexuality in a world of conservative Christianity?

So why isn't a major part of his life addressed?

At some point I feel that I'm blowing this out of proportion but I can't emphasize how empty I felt at the end of the book when I got to the big homosexuality joke about men and their wives. Usually I can just laugh this stuff off, but this particular point has been festering for a couple of weeks now. I'm used to comments like the end joke from people that deride homosexuality, I guess I just don't feel like I need to take it from someone that is comfortable with gay people.

Yarg. Now it sounds like I didn't like this book. I did. I thought it was great. I enjoyed reading it, and carried it around the NYC subway with me for days, marveling at the Wilson's amazing ability to take us back and forward in time at once. I just had an issue with that one specific little part of it.

Anyway, despite the issues that I had with it, I recommend it, especially if you tend to like 17th and 18th century historicals or historical fantasies.

It's available for pre-order through Amazon here.

Expectations vs. Reality

2009-05-20T17:47:00.005-04:00

As more of my favorite writers desperately try to lower expectations about writers as a whole based on the case of GRRM, I suddenly realized that I really wanted to respond to something that Gaiman said as part of his "[GRRM] is not your bitch" post:

"Yes, it's unrealistic of you to think George is 'letting you down[.]'"

Which brings me to this graph I created in about ten seconds:

As we can plainly see, the reality of the situation is that George R.R. Martin isn't meeting expectations. So yes, people are unrealistic when they're expecting GRRM to live up to the expectations that he and his publishers created.

A couple of things should be obvious by now to anyone looking forward to the next book in Martin's series:

Martin's word can't be trusted. Even if he announced the book was on it's way to publication he's lied before and we shouldn't get out hopes up.
The editors who are paying GRRM apparently don't care or have given up on trying to push to finish the book.
If the measure of success of a writer is the ability to write, then George R.R. Martin is a failure.

From his online persona I would expect Scalzi to point to this as an example of one of GRRM's pissy fans.

Well, I'm not a fan any more. I don't remember the characters anymore, or really even their names. I have no idea what they're doing or where they started. I haven't read a GRRM book in years and I know that I won't be buying the latest book when it comes out because it would require me to reread the series and to be honest I just don't have the time. Who cares about the book? If GRRM would just admit that he's not going to finish it maybe everyone else could all move the f*** on?

So, the next question is, why do I still care about this? Specifically, why to I care that Gaiman, Scalzi, West and Stross are all faithfully defending George Martin as though he has men with knives at the throats of their children?

Because they're defending someone without honor.

Perhaps I'm slowly going nuts while reading Starship & Haiku by Somtow Sucharitkul or something but nobody likes being jerked around. Here in the west, honor seems to equal trust that now that's out the window lots and lots of people feel jerked around by George R.R. Martin and now they're treating him like crap.

That's what happens. Welcome to real life. I'm surprised you haven't noticed how it works before.

I realize that by defending him they're in essence defending themselves: they see something of themselves in Mr. Martin and they're afraid of what might ever happen if they're ever in his unenviable position. Still, it's sad to see them try because for the most part none of them really empathizes with the end user. "We know he sucks but look, this isn't the way to treat a person" would probably go a lot farther to defuse the situation than "Anyone who got personally invested in the characters is and idiot and anyone who thought that there is an implied agreement for an author to finish a series is doubly so."

So to all of the GRRM fans out there waiting for A Dance of Dragons: give up and leave the man alone. It's not going to happen and we need to move on and return to the authors that can still produce new works.

But at the same time to all of the writers out there considering defending GRRM without acknowledging that people feel screwed over for at least semi-legitimate reasons: don't. You can't empathize and therefore it's unlikely that you'll be able to make things better.

Last One to the Train Wreck

2009-05-11T13:49:00.002-04:00

I've got a job here in Boston and I'm not sure how well it's going. Most of the people that I work with are polite, nice people put in a bad situation by a company that cares nothing for them.

It's a lot like some of the other hotels that I've worked for in my life and so I've been having issues with one of my bosses in particular. I recognize that I'm not perfect but I have enough experience now to recognize a bad situation when I'm walking into it.

The focus on the company seems to be on the employee's interaction with the guest rather than technical training. Service, in the hospitality industry, is important. Especially if you want to maintain a high quality hotel.

But you can't ignore technical training. Computer skills at the desk are vitally important to the job. You need to have a working understanding of the hotel layout, the answers to common questions and know what you can do to resolve a problem as well.

This hotel took days to train me in any of that. I didn't even have a chance to see a guest room until my fourth day and only because I actively tagged along with a manager.

They're not particularly excited about me doing the job that the hired me to do, either. I still haven't started training for that job. Instead, I'm training for positions that I won't do and don't challenge me.

But it is a job.

Otherwise, the last week has been insane. I've been working to the point of exhaustion, of course, but I've also had a birthday and met my boyfriend's mom. And I've been trying to spend time with my boyfriend. I guess I never really truly realized what a massive time commitment a boyfriend is. I've been enjoying reading on the T though. It's everything that I imagined that it could be when I moved to a big city and gave up driving. Hallelujah.

OSC Joins NOM

2009-04-24T00:19:00.004-04:00

I don't usually offer responses on news stories. I figure that you've probably gotten your fill from the bajillion other sources out there. I do, so presumably you have your choice sites like Digg and Fark and GoogleNews that hunt down and tag stories for your pleasant engorgement.

I did almost miss this, for the most part though. Orson Scott Card is now on the board of the National Organization for Marriage, which is that group that created the oft mocked "Gathering Storm" video.

That doesn't surprise me, really. OSC's views on gay marriage are fairly well known. He's Mormon, after all, and he has that long running column over in the Mormon Times where his opinion has been made explicitly clear.

My first reaction to all of this was almost instinctual at this point: I remind myself that there's a reason that I don't buy his books new any more. Granted, it was Empire that spurred that more than his politics but the revelation of his beliefs certainly provided that last little FU that kept me from turning back.

Buying them used is fine, of course. No money goes to him or his publisher from that.

Then I reminded myself that it doesn't really matter whether I buy his books. He's trying to get a movie made of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow and he's going to be filthy rich and tithing loads of cash to an organization that hates me anyway.

But the movie has been floating around and hasn't been made yet. It's always in the works but never in production, seemingly.

Using this neat little writer's trick I learned somewhere, I imagined that I was a cappucino and coke snorting secular capitalist movie producer drone. Would I, as aforementioned mindless drone, want to make this movie still? Yeah, the book won some awards that I'm not familiar with and all my assistants assure me that it has a huge following but I also know that if I make this movie now I'm probably going to have to end up explaining to the gay director, star, and four fifths of the production staff why this author's position on gay marriage is not reflected by the production company.

With all of the crap that's been thrown, sometimes litterally, at the Mormons over Prop 8, there could even be protests. Protests with A-list stars speaking out against this movie just because author is in the news right now.

So, even though this property may eventually make me, the cappucino and coke snorting mindless secular capitalist movie producer drone, lots of money in the future, right now it would probably be a good time to quietly renew the movie rights and hope that gay marriage is decided soon so that this author can market his work for us rather than against us.

(Just found this, might be interesting to some)

1111 Books

2009-04-03T23:34:00.003-04:00

So, today I picked up a few books at a science fiction used book sale and after putting them in my incredibly geeky spreadsheet I discovered that I have one thousand, one hundred and eleven books. I'm not a numerologist, but it's still very pretty to look at so I decided to write a bit about it here.

If you want to know what books I have specifically, you can check them out over at library thing, which I've kept updated. However, it is missing a few text books and obscure books so the library thing count is only 1065.

Because of the obsessively anal way that I keep track of my books, I have a bit more statistics than even appear in my library thing profile. Especially since I don't use library thing to keep track of which books I've read or not.

Here are some random numbers that should be as boring as all get out to anyone else:

Of those 1111 books, I've read 575 or 52%. Some of those volumes contain more than one book, and if you count those, I've read 685.

732 of those books are paperback, 187 are trade paperback, and 146 are hardcover. 46 are textbook sized or larger. 30 are signed (13 are just signed, 13 are personalized, and 4 are personalized first edition hardcovers).

The best represented publisher is TOR/ORB with 144 books. In second place is Del Rey with 121. Third is a near tie between ACE (88) and Bantam (87).

444 of those books are fantasy and 519 are science fiction. Altogether my speculative/strange/sf/f collection is 989 books. Interestingly, while the ratio of fantasy to science fiction is around 77/90 I've read a lot more fantasy. The ratio of sci-fi to fantasy that I've actually read is around 41/73.

The average number of pages per book is 384, the median is 339. I've read 197,440 pages of fiction in my library and I have 166,443 to go. The total number of pages is 427,013. I would guess that the average words per book is around 86,479. That means I've probably read about 44, 424,000 words from the books I own.

My collection contains 168 Hugo Award nominees and 48 Hugo winners. It also contains 84 Nebula Award nominees and 34 Nebula winners. 15 have won both awards. I've read 31 of the Hugo winners and 19 of the Nebula winners (but as I mentioned, 15 of those have won both award). I've also read 40 of the Hugo nominees and 33 of the Nebula nominees.

I also track the Locus Award, John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, World Fantasy Award, James Tiptree Jr. Award, Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Lambda Literary Award. Usually good books will collect more than one award, so of 1111 books, 307 have won or been nominated for one or more of these awards. Of those, I've read 104, or around 34%.

If you were me, you'd be wondering what the most honored book in my little library is. Well, that depends. If you just go counting awards and nominations then China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh is by far the top with six. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, won the Locus for best first novel, the Tiptree and Lambda Litterary and garnered special recognition from the Gaylactic Spectrum folk.

If your a writer and you ever wonder if anyone has sold a novel through the slush pile, then be aware that during a Boskone panel, the editor of China Mountain Zhang pointed out that it was a slush pile submission. Also, if you've never read it and you like exceedingly intellectual science fiction, then I highly recommend it as one of the best novels that I've ever read.

You'll notice that it only was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula though, so you're probably also wondering what the biggest winner is, then I have a way of weighting books as well. I give a point for a win and a half point for a nomination (actually, it's more complicated than that, but I don't feel like explaining right now). If looked at that way then Shadow & Claw, the first half of the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is ranked highest. This is a omnibus edition of Shadow of the Torturer and Claw of the Conciliator. Between these two books this volume has one Hugo nomination, one Nebula win and one nomination, one Campbell nomination, one WFA win and one nomination and it won the Locus for best fantasy novel.

Alright, so what's the most recognized single volume work? Including the gay sci-fi awards, that's still China Mountain Zhang. If you discount those though, it's a tie between Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and Gateway by Fredrick Pohl both of which achieved the quad win: Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Campbell.

Here's a few other weird things that I know about my collection. 83% of it is in boxes right now because of my move out east. For every movie on VHS or DVD that I own, I own 18 (almost 19) books. Finally, if I read a book per week, it would take me more than 13 years to get to the number of books read that I have. Which is actually a little embarassing to me, considering that I've been reading novels a lot longer than that. It means that some weeks I've been slacking (or stuck on a particular book).

I have no idea why I so obsessively and compulsively keep track of my books. It's just this thing that I do, and sometimes it helps me keep track of things and sometimes it annoys the crap out of me (like just now, when I discovered that The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon did not win the Campbell and I had to go back and fix it and this post, grrrrr).

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Boston

2009-03-17T22:41:00.001-04:00

Yes, it's true, I've moved again.

Understanding Christians and Everyone Else Too

2009-03-05T00:13:00.004-05:00

I used to deal with lots and lots of Christians online. I was a moderator for one of the largest atheist message boards and dealt with the largest group of Christians there. I'm also a member of the largest "Christian" message board. Depending on your definition of Christian, obviously.

Renaissance Guy: We do not believe that Christians are good and other people are bad.

Great. That's definitely one of the biggest issues that I've had with Christians over the years. People like Angel4Truth, Emmy, angellica, or ShieldOfFaith absolutely believe that Christians are the only good people. It's really hard to evangelize when you've already set yourself up as perfect and morally superior.

I guess the question that I have for you is: When do you believe that you are saved? (Slactivist's answer is "About two thousand years ago" but his answer avoids a serious theological question that is absolutely necessary to answer before discussion about Christianity between believers and non-believers becomes possible.) When you become a Christian, are you wiped of any desire to sin? Do you stop sinning? Because if you believe this to be the case, the conversation ends. It's obvious that Christians do sin, that they are sinners. They are not more perfect than we are.

There is also the problem of pride, however. It isn't just the attitude that "we know what sin is" but "we know what's best for you." The former is not necessarily harmful during communication but the later is. When you are required, as you have previously said that you are, to tell people they are sinners you are absolutely a member of the later.

As an atheist, I know what's best for you. It's to give up Christianity and learn the Truth. Capital T, Truth.

Notice how your eyes glazed over during the first sentence in the previous paragraph? How you suddenly find me pushy and stupid as soon as I implied that I know what's best for you? And using Truth with a captial T? Ludicrous. How do I know? I'm just an atheist . . .

Right. That's also exactly how I feel when you tell me your Good News with the knowledge that I need to hear it.

The problem is that I have heard it. I know the Bible. Not as well as you, but better than a lot of Christians and I'm definitely familiar with the basic theological arguments and the story contained within the Gospel.

Let's bring this back on track. I said there was a problem of pride and it's the same problem of pride that Chick tracts have: If you assume that your audience isn't familiar with Christianity, you've already lost most of them by failing to understand where they're starting from.

You might be shocked at how many Christians came to the atheist message board where I moderated and thought that posting the story of Jesus would convert people. Or that letting us know that we're going to Hell would suddenly make us realize that we need Jesus in our lives.

I've previously mentioned that there are people that have seriously made me reconsider my atheism. Not a single one of them ever got me to that point by starting by telling me that I am going to hell. Or that Jesus died for my sins.

Rather, they listened. They realized that I am human and have human wants and needs. They listened to me and when I talked about my life they empathized. When I was lonely they were there, when I was sad they were sad, when I was happy they were happy.

They talked about their beliefs too. Never requiring them, never asserting primacy, but offering them up the same way that I would try to talk about atheism: this is what I believe and this is why I believe it.

I think that my point in all of this is that to understand non-Christians, Christians have to understand that to a certain extent we do understand them already. The difference isn't that great. The gulf between us is not vast. In most cases it's only a thin holy (or unholy) line.

I want to go off on a bit of a tangent now.

This is related to the treatment of gay people by "Bible-believing, orthodox Christians."

If you really do accept that all Christians are sinners, then accept that all gay people are sinners as well. They're just not lying about that particular sin. If Christians aren't led away from temptation when they become Christians (and they aren't) then it won't change homosexuals to become Christians. They'll just be gay Christians now, and they'll still have the same problems, inclinations, and sex drives as they did before. Only now they'll be saved in Christ.

It's fairly obvious to me that if becoming a Christian doesn't grant super powers, then one of the sins that homosexuals are going to have to have forgiven is the fact that they're going to be homosexuals. They can try to be the best people in the world and some gay Christians are going to choose a life of celibacy (I'll point them out, if you email me) but there are always going to be gay people for whom celibacy is not an option, just as there are Christians who can't live with celibacy.

So, they've got two options: monogamy or promiscuity. It makes me wonder when these Bible-believing, orthodox Christians are so weirded out by the fact that some people sin in this way that they will actively oppose these people from trying to form stable unions. If you're going to try to prevent sinners from getting married, don't you think that there are a lot of heterosexuals that they should be worried about first?

But they're not. They blithely vote against gay marriage, pat themselves on the back, and then go on to say that they can't support sin when in fact they just did. Support of gay marriage? It's a sin. But opposition to gay marriage also supports sin: more sins.

And to those that want to claim that marriage is a Christian institution that shouldn't be changed? The Jews are over there. Go talk to them about that.

Stross and Scalzi Are Wrong

2009-02-26T17:37:00.004-05:00

Right now there are five blogs by authors that I heavily follow right now: Scalzi, Stross, Wheaton, Gaiman and Duncan. While there are a lot of other authors that I like that have blogs, those are the blogs that I find interesting in and of themselves and post updates regularly enough for me to keep track of them on a regular basis.

The other thing is that I usually agree with them on stuff.

Not on everything, true, but often. And when I do disagree with them, it's usually an issue of personal taste.

The last couple of weeks though, the science fiction annex to the blogosphere has been a place where I can't seem to find a position that I agree with (excepting the dust up about the Kindle2 text to voice thing).

That GRRM thing though? I didn't even have to go read what GRRM said before I knew I vehemently disagreed with Scazli and Stross about it.

Yeah, people were rude. And they were bugging him (and, personal confession here, I bugged him about it one time in person under the mistaken impression that he'd find it funny. I apologized at the time, but I don't think he believed me).

But there are a lot of circumstances around what GRRM did that make Scalzi and Stross just plain wrong about what they said. Dealing with upset fans who you've misled (inadvertantly or not) is one of those things that you will have to do if you are a popular writer with lots of fans who has decided to provide easy access to himself online.

Further, there's been a huge kerfluffle about other stuff. Which I am not going to talk about. And do you know why? Because it scares me to talk about it here.

That's saying a lot. I've talked about being gay here without reservation. I've talked about being an atheist. I've talked about my problems with jobs. I've talked about being depressed and all sorts of other stuff without much regard for boundary. But there are very few subjects which I will not discuss out of fear.

Sides are being taken. People are angry. And while I have an opinion on the subject it's obvious at this point that it would be detrimental to my future plans to express it.

It's not my opinion that would get me in trouble. In fact, I've talked about this subject in previous posts. It's being involved that is a bad thing right now. Your associations are being held against you in a way that is making me uneasy.

I know how paranoid that sounds, but I've seen how far some of the people arguing are willing to take themselves and it's too far. These are people that I thought would be serious and reasonable but they're seriously unreasonable instead.

As such, I'm not going there, nor am I going to link to it or cite any of the participants by name because I don't want to associate myself and I know how easy it is to follow a link back to it's source.

The Latest Book Meme

2009-02-25T01:54:00.003-05:00

I know, I know. I have a thing for book lists. But I haven't done a post in a while. I'm working on a couple, including a response to Hal Duncan, but they're just not ready yet. I may do the 25 things about me meme as well, but not until the meme is near enough to dying to drown in a bathtub. Why? Because I'm enough of a sheep to follow the crowd but not until the crowd has moved on.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (New Testament)*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X+
52 Dune - Frank Herbert*
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie X
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce*
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

That's 27 that I've read, loosely. I've read a lot of the New Testament, including many chapters all the way through, but not all of it. There are only four that I'm currently anticipating reading. Finally, there are only five that I liked.

Darwinism

2009-02-12T19:36:00.003-05:00

Today would have been Darwin's 200th birthday. You know, if he'd lived for two centuries. For the occasion RG made an appeal to popularity (nizkor) and asks "Or is [Creationism] just so pervasive?"

Considering the millions of dollars that believers in Creationism have to build museums, I would have to respond "Yes it is."

They still don't have anything to back it up, but they're on a mission from their god. Religion rarely lets facts get in the way.

Disturbing Dreams

2009-02-07T10:33:00.005-05:00

I had some seriously disturbing dreams last night:

First, I dreamed about getting into Harvard. Not through long study and skill but through a bizarre ping pong competition. I know, I know, but at the time my subconscious overrode my common sense and convinced me that it was all happening. Emotionally I was so happy because then I'd get to live near Ben. It simplified so many things (housing, job, to some extent money) and I just felt so glowingly happy.

My mom was there (in the dream) and we were talking, and she was being her usual practical self, and she was asking me what I wanted to study. I was having a lot of trouble deciding because it seemed obvious to me from the last few years that English was not the way to go.

All the way through this, I was asking myself, could this really be happening? And the answer was "It doesn't seem real, does it? But look around, it's happening!"

I've thought the same thing recently while awake and in a situation that seems unbelievable: with Ben.

What eventually forced me out of my dream was that there was a "scene break" and like an episode of House I asked myself: "How did I get from that room to this hallway? I don't remember covering the intervening space." And then I woke up.

And my happiness about finding solutions to some of my problems disolved.

That was the first disturbing dream.

The second involved me flying. I can sometimes fly in dreams. I don't know what that symbolizes, but to me it isn't a big deal. I like to fly. I'm usually fairly decent at it in my dreams and my mind is good at convincing me that it's real.

In this dream, I was flying by swimming through the air. I realized that I could swim a lot faster and without so much thrashing around if I dolphin kicked through the air. So I was dolphin kicking and slicing through the water and suddenly I am rocked out of the dream by Ben. Ben said something like "You can't do that, you're waking me up." I mumbled something like "I'm dolphin kicking to fly" and he replied "you still can't do it though. I can't sleep." I reluctantly went back to sleep.

In the morning, I asked Ben about it and he gave me a blank look. "I didn't wake you up. You never kicked me."

So this means that in my dream of dolphin kick flying I also dreamed that I was awakened by a dream Ben who scolded me for kicking him.

So I guess I'm having multi-level dreams now.

The third dream somehow involved being upset about the bailout and pointing out that it was mostly a group of farmers that were against the bailout even though economists like Paul Krugman were for it. This was kind of a slur against farmers and I'm not saying that they can't be intelligent, but I thought it was interesting that people trained in economics kept having to fight against the people who did not have active experience or training in the field. I suppose this could have been some sort of Creationist representation: the frustration certainly felt the same.

I was so upset that I wandered over to the bar and had a Sam Adams, which was okay. In the dream it was sort of like drinking a German wheat beer. Yes, I know that they don't actually taste like that, and I've never had one in real life. It was definitely that brand though, in a pint glass. The Sam Adams didn't last long though. I asked the bartender for something else and he gave me three beers off the shelf/out of the cooler and a coke. I tried to push the coke away, and he looked at the Sam Adams and pushed it back saying something like "If you liked that, you're going to need this to dilute the taste. They're awful." One was a Heineken and there were others in green bottles. All of them had specific brand names and no, I haven't had any of them either.

<disturbing image warning. If you're squeamish, don't read the rest.>

Finally the bartender cut me off and because it was his break and I looked like he was in bad shape, he took me for a walk. We walked out to a park in Cambridge (I remember thinking, "Ben's place is just over there.") There were other people in the park and we sat down. After a bit, a dog wandered over. It was a Pug, but it had a huge cancerous growth on the left side of its face. The tumors were tubules and some of them went through the skin and revealed little clear structures that looked like malformed eyes. In a sense, they looked like grubs growing through the skin and bone.

Someone, one of the other people in the park, mentioned that they thought this was "Landis' disease" and passed over a magically present medical textbook with illustrations of a pug. But the pug in the textbook had only a few lumps on his face. The poor dog in front of my had several inches of growths. The text book didn't even imply that the actual aberration could be as serious as it was. In the dream though, I just sat and petted the dog and patted it on the head until I woke up. I still feel sorry for it.

Yes, I patted it on the growth. Yes, normally I'd freak out. No, I don't know why or how I managed to retain my sanity and stay calm.

First, disappointment. Second, weird meta dreams. Third, horror.

All in the same night.

I've had nightmares before but all that on the same night is still unusual. The first one upsets me the most though. All and all, it was a very disturbing night of dreaming.

Save Realms of Fantasy

2009-02-04T11:18:00.006-05:00

I don't read a lot of short fiction. I never subscribed to Asimov's or Analog or any of those magazines, but years ago I was in a Borders and found this magazine called "Realms of Fantasy." It was glossy, had amazing art and short stories that I liked.

I still have a few copies of it in my room. I know right where they are: in my main desk drawer in what, as a kid, I'd decided was a place of honor.

Realms of Fantasy is folding, and I hope it doesn't. So I'm blogging to save it, as the group "Save Realms of Fantasy" requests. If you've ever read it and liked it, I hope you'll join me.

The Facebook page for the group is here: Save Realms of Fantasy Magazine.

The LiveJournal group is here: Save Realms of Fantasy.

Good luck guys. And I haven't been doing my part: if you guys succeed, I promise to get a subscription to Realms of Fantasy.

Shout Out

2009-02-02T16:27:00.004-05:00

Kudos to Bank of America and especially associates Heather and Quinn. I hate calling in about customer service stuff, but both were polite and personable. Heather figured out what my problem was and transferred me to Quinn who was able to assist me.

Now, Quinn had a strong accent that he was covering up but I'm not going to hold the fact that he's a Texan against him.

Update: Well, kudos to Zulekha and Sarah, who also tried to help me who were also very polite. I have to wonder, though, why the fact that I'm from New Mexico means that Bank of America in New York seems powerless to assist me. I have no cash at the moment and no ability to use ATMs. Good thing for cash back when shopping, which I'll have to do tomorrow.

I do feel like Bank of America is treating NM . . . or NY like a foriegn country. Really guys, is it really so impossible to help me out?

The Depth of Observation

2009-01-31T20:45:00.000-05:00

In my email, I have three emails from myself, sent from my phone about my observations about New York City. The are, in order:

1. Today I saw a man burned so badly that he no longer had eyelids that blinked. He had a laminated cardboard sign with what appeared to be a newspaper article about his story on it. He was panhandling on the subway. I was too scared to make eye contact or give him any money. He had really good sunglasses though, and I can't say that I blame him.

2. Today, while I was walking through Brooklyn, I saw a kid in a camouflage costume. It wasn't the traditional green and brown of my childhood army or the digital prints of today's uniform. It was a ghillie suit; used by snipers to remain invisible in rough terrain by covering themselves with a thickly hairy fabric. Although it was sized for a kid and obviously made as a costume, it was impressive none the less. The only thing that spoiled the effect was its presence in a Brooklyn neighborhood of townhouses.

3. On the way our of my friend's apartment, I passed two kids, maybe thirteen or fourteen, singing "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel. Or maybe the gayer version by Westlife. They weren't even born when the original came out, and there they were, singing away while walking down a New York City sidewalk.

That's all New York to me. Not in the specifics, I guess. You could have seen any of those things in many cities, but these kinds of things are all around you in New York. I saw them in only a few days and I'm sure that there was something even stranger going on every minute that I failed to see. It's a function of the density, and I suspect that New York may be the center of the English speaking weirdness just because of its density.

Comparatively, those observations are very shallow compared to these observations (via Making Light).

I don't know enough about the New Guinea cargo cults to do anything more than superficially agree with the observations made by Mr. Peter Klausler, but I will say that one of the subsections (There will be justice) represents one of the most hateful, virulently horrible forms of Christianity that I've ever come across.

PNH said "The outlined principles divide up alarmingly well into 'stuff I recognize as generally true about the way Americans think' and 'stuff I just now realized I think.'"

Yeah, me too. Now there's a shallow observation.

The Inauguration

2009-01-20T19:22:00.004-05:00

I was in that crowd of 2 million people on the mall for the inauguration. I'll add more about it later, but if you want to know where I was in the crowd, I was behind the fourth giant big screen.

Update added 1/28/09:

So, Ben had tickets to the parade. I mentioned that already. But we really wanted to be on the mall. After all, that was the event, from a historical perspective.

I also had a friend that was going to be marching in the parade, Ian, in the first gay/lesbian delegation to ever appear in a presidential inauguration. So the plan was to walk the few blocks up from the mall after the parade.

So we woke up early, about 6 am and trudged down from near M and 12th st. to 7th, where we were led to believe there was going to be an entrance to the mall. There wasn't, so we ended up walking to the 3rd st. tunnel and through it, under the Capitol until we got to the other side. Then we had to walk away from the mall to the first open entrance on 12th st. We got to the mall around 7:30 am.

The crowd was massive. I mean, wall to wall people. We staked out a small claim behind the fourth jumbo tron, maybe 650,000-750,000 people back from the front. The Sunday concert was being replayed on the jumbo trons, but it was hard to hear what was going on. Occasionally something cool would happen. For example, everyone around us would sing when the concert musicians asked us too. "This land is your land" sounds fairly powerful when sung by thousands and thousands of people at a time.

Even from the first moment we got there, we didn't have enough space. I was thinking about sitting down, and I should have, but people would have been tripping over me left and right. People winding their ways through the crowd literally had to push their way through, sometimes so much that I had to hold my breath.

We stood there for hours. The live coverage of the event didn't start until about 10 am, I think. And even then, it was mostly just people being introduced. Ben played "name the congressman/congresswoman" from the big screen, and did a lot better than I did.

Finally we got to the heavy hitters. The Supreme Court, the former presidents, and then the (now former) moron-in-chief.

The music was beautiful. The oath was (as you're heard) bungled a bit. And then there was lots of cheering.

Then we tried to go north to the parade, but it was closed off. Yarg.

So we had to walk back through the tunnel, with a few stops for abortive attempts to get around various barriers and onto the Metro. When we finally got to security for the parade, my feet, which had been bothering me for hours, were killing me. Ben was nearly carrying me around.

So, we stood in line for twenty minutes or so, but due to our false starts and my problems walking, we realized that it was nearly 3:30. We'd probably already missed the majority of the parade, and by the time we got through security, it would probably be over. So we stopped off at a Tapas place to eat, and then headed back the apartment. Via cab, because even after having a chance to sit I could barely walk.

So, we get into the apartment, and what's on television? The parade. It had been postponed because of Kennedy's seizure. Of course, I ended up missing Ian in the parade live, so I don't have any pictures of him, but I do have some pretty cool video. You see, he was being filmed by a camera crew for a reality show that I've never before heard of called "My 1st Time."

His episode is currently available for viewing here.

Awesome! Congrats Ian!

I do have a few pictures of things that I've mentioned above:

The crowd at the fictional 7th St. entrance.

Walking into the 3rd St. tunnel to get to the mall at around 7 am.

Coming out of the tunnel on the far side of the mall from where we'd started.

The crowd behind us at the mall, looking toward the Washington monument.

An extremely zoomed in view of what I could see of the Capitol building behind the jumbo tron.

Zoomed out a bit. Everything that we could see was through the jumbotron.

Our first glimpse of Barack Obama as he comes through the halls of the capitol to approach the steps.

This image contains a live image of the crowd going wild for their first view of Barack Obama.

Obama taking the oath.

The crowd goes wild.

21 gun salute.

A better view of the Capitol, taken as we finally started to leave.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

2009-01-16T15:03:00.000-05:00

"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is something that I used to hear all the time when I spent a lot of time on sites like CF or IIDB. After all, there needs to be some way to dismiss Jesus' exhortation to "Love Thy Neighbor."

After all, "judging" people is bad in most Christian traditions. It usurps God's place. However, if what you judge is the intangible sin, then that's just fine. Completely acceptable. Informative even!

Recently, through a link over on Jesurgislac's blog, I came across a link to Renaissance Guy's post To judge or Not to Judge, where Renaissance Guy sort of backhands his way into that argument, arguing that Jesus shows what a great guy he is by telling the prostitute how she's a sinner and damned to hell. Or something to that effect. He thinks that being gay is a sin and he thinks that Christians should say so and speak out about it.

The point is, it got me thinking about that specific idea again; that you can love the sinner while hating the sin.

Then I just found a clip of a 20/20 investigation about same sex couples involved in public displays of affection. The police are called on a male gay couple making out in public in AL, but you don't have to watch the whole thing. The part that I'm concerned about starts at 8:38 and lasts about 10 seconds.

See it here:

20/20 official site

The voice over and the next line that I'm referring to are: "But while some like what they're witnessing, a silent minority can't hide their disapproval. Their faces say it all. 'To me, it's not that appropriate.'"

So, what is a gay person going to feel when they see that? I guarantee that it isn't going to be loved. As a sinner or anything else. All they'll feel is judged, even if the person says nothing at all.

Love the sinner, hate the sin may sound good to various denominations of Christians, but it's not the way that reality works. If you try it, hate of the sin is going to spill over onto the person no matter what.

I Want This

2009-01-13T12:26:00.001-05:00

My dreams right now are pretty simple. Usually they're pretty fantastic and out there, I write science fiction and fantasy, after all, but for the last month they've been sort of realistic.

That only makes me feel worse when I can't achieve them.

I want a job. The job that I see at the moment is a daytime position, 9 to 5, M-F. I want it to pay for an apartment here in the city, food, and a gym membership. I want to be able to go out occasionally with my friends and visit the guy I'm sort of seeing.

That's it.

That's all I want right now.

Inauguration

2009-01-12T13:22:00.000-05:00

Ben's invited me to the inauguration, and even though I'm on record saying that there is nowhere that I would rather be less than the inauguration, I'm going.

So, I would hope that all 300 million other Americans other than the ones that have to be in D.C. those days (Obama, Michelle, Biden, etc.) will take the hint and not descend like the ravening hordes of hell on our fair capitol city. Please, I know it's a historic moment, but since I'm asking nicely does this mean you won't form the unholy crowds that roil disturbingly in my unconscious mind?

Thanks.

The Anti Narnia

2009-01-11T16:29:00.001-05:00

A quick short story inspired by Hal Duncan's much more interesting Thoughts on Narnia over at his blog. Yeah, I know he writes long posts, but check them out some time. They're worth it.

It was the quiet and pensive Lori that discovered the door and it was only the dramatic change from her usual shyness that convinced her brothers and sister to go through it into the magic little world that she had found.

Edward struck out on his own almost immediately. He read adventure books and thought of himself as an explorer that didn’t need his siblings to get in the way. So he alone discovered the ruins of the great castle in this frozen world. Most of it had fallen in on itself but there were parts that were still covered, sheltering their contents from the omnipresent white snow that covered the ground.

In the otherwise empty great hall he found the gold coin.

It was about as big as a penny and shiny enough to look newly minted, although the image on it was still hard to discern. He’d always dreamed of finding an old pirate’s treasure and the gold coin represented all this. Wait till the others saw it, he thought.

So he tromped back to the door where Pete, Sarah and Lori all were waiting for him with a giant talking rodent of some sort.

“We’re going to go,” said Pete. “There’s apparently a crazy tiger around here killing people.”

“And Mr. Bumbles here says that we can’t try to take anything back,” piped in Lori. “He says that it’s wrong to go mixing up universes.”

“You haven’t picked something up, have you?” asked Sarah.

In his head, Ed weighed having his own treasure stash with which he could lord it over his siblings for several weeks back home against the wrongness of mixing up universes and came to a snap decision. “Nope. Nothing at all.”

With a roar, a giant red-orange tiger jumped into the snowy clearing in front of the door. It must have been twelve feet from the tip of the nose to the tip of it’s tail, and it looked like it could rip any of them to shreds in an instant with it’s three inch long bloody claws. All the children flinched back, not knowing that they should be running, but Mr. Bumbles scurried away so quickly it was like someone had edited him out of a film.

The tiger didn’t attack though. It turned to Ed and said aloud “Naughty boy.”

Before it could get out another word a huge white swan descended from the sky. All around it glowed a fierce golden light, like the aura from old paintings around the holy family done in gold leaf. “No fear children!” it called in a voice like rolling thunder. “I’ll protect you! Whatever the Tiger corrupts, I, the Swan, am here to defend”

Sarah rounded on Ed. “You did pick something up, didn’t you?”

He squirmed but held out his hand and opened it, revealing the coin. Sarah rolled her eyes, and Lori sighed pitifully. Pete just looked jealous.

Ed turned to the Swan. “So, uh, sorry about that. Look, here’s the coin.” He put in on the ground and scooted it toward the bird when it didn’t move to accept the token.

The Tiger laughed, and the branches shook snow off all around the clearing. “You have done more than steal, you’ve lied to your kin. A betrayal if I’ve ever heard one. You know what the punishment for that is?”

Ed shook his head.

“We’re going to pour boiling lead in your eyes and cut out your tongue. Then, I’m going to bite off your fingers and toes one by one before opening your stomach and knowing out your intestines.” The Tiger scrunched up its face as though it was thinking. “There’s something about rape in there too. I’ve got it written down somewhere. I’ll have to look it up. It’s part of the Great Laws of this land.”

All the children looked positively sick.

“I’m sorry,” Ed said, his eyes filling with tears. The Tiger was now licking its lips and inching closer to him, sniffing the air.

“He’s eleven,” Pete said. “I mean he’s just a kid. That’s ridiculous. This is a fairy tale, right? Surely there must be some quest he can go to make up for this.”

The Swan shook his head. “Nope. No quests. The boiling lead and the eating and the rape sounds about right.”

“What?” demanded Sarah. “Sounds about right? Are you kidding? I thought you said you were here to protect us.”

The Tiger reached out with a huge claw and poked Edmund in his shoulder. A stain of red started to spread slowly under his shirt and the Tiger licked at the blood like it was barbeque sauce.

“I am here to protect you,” the Swan said, apparently offended at Sarah’s insinuation that he wasn’t doing a great job. “But the Great Law is the Great Law and it needs to be enforced. I should know, considering that I wrote it myself back when I created this magical world.”

“Why on earth would you write torture and death into the law?” Pete asked.

“At the time it seemed like an good idea. I always thought that it would involve a grown man condemning his family to death, but it certainly seems like it applies in this situation too.”

“He’s a kid,” Pete said again. “Surely there must be some exception that you can make.”

The Swan shook its graceful neck. “The Great Law doesn’t have exceptions. I created it that way for a reason. It wouldn’t be just, otherwise.”

“You can’t possibly that punishment is fair,” said Sarah, even more upset than before. “We don’t care that he lied. We just don’t want to see him dead.”

“No, it isn’t fair,” said the Swan. “But this is Justice. Justice is rarely fair. It’s part of the Great Laws of this magical land. Ed betrayed his family by lying to them, so now he has to be raped, blinded, and then eaten or this magical land will disappear forever.”

“Oh,” said Lori, where she stood behind Pete. The children all looked at each other.

“I can live with that,” said Pete.

“Ditto,” said Sarah. Behind Pete, Lori nodded.

Now it was time for the Swan to look shocked. “But . . . it will mean the deaths of everyone that lives here! Mr. Bumbles! Me, the Great Swan! The millions of peons that support the few royalty that I pick to live in relative comfort!”

But already he was smaller. Less important. The golden glow that had surrounded him had diminished substantially and he seemed thin, as though he were made of paper.

Pete held out his hands. Lori took one and Edward took the other. Sarah looked at the Tiger. “Are you going to try to attack us if we leave?” she asked.

The Tiger shook his head. “No. I wasn’t ever interested in you. I was just trying to get the Swan in range.”

The Swan didn’t even have time to process what the Tiger had said before the cat was on him.

“Well, good. I will pay the price for the boy,” the Swan said happily. “And I’ll come back from death even stronger.

“You don’t understand,” the Tiger said. “I’m not going to mete out the punishment required. The whole idea of death as a punishment for lying is stupid. Besides, you’ve enforced slavery, murder and degradation on many others for years. Why should I care about a boy lying when there are so many more important crimes that you need to pay for first?” He paused. “After a jury trial, of course.”

It picked up the Swan in its teeth and wandered out of the clearing and out of sight.

Sarah went first to the door and opened it for her three other siblings. They all paused there for a moment, looking back. The trees were hazy now and papery thin now and the snow and mist were impossible to tell apart. The entire magical world was coming apart like erasing words from a sheet of paper.

“I really am sorry about lying to you,” Ed said as they closed the magical door and it began to fade away.

“We know,” said Lori.

Patronage and Publishing

2009-01-07T12:09:00.004-05:00

Via Neil Gaiman's blog I discovered this today, which quotes a very small section of this longer interesting piece.

I dutifully read the longer Dewitt piece and have to say that she makes a good point that I agree with: the current publishing model is extremely hard on the author in many respects, when they're delivering the product that is sold.

The best analogy that springs to mind to describe the situation of writers is that of growing drugs (marijuana, I guess) in the United States. Both authors and marijuana growers have to spend a long time producing their product without revealing it to anyone. Then they furtively cast around looking to secure a buyer, who will then go out and deal the product of the authors and the marijuana growers to the people. At most, both the author and the marijuana growers probably make a few dollars on each street level transaction.

I'm sure the first reaction to that analogy is "Growing marijuana is illegal! Writing a book isn't against the law!" That's true but to defend the integrity of my comparison I'll point out that authors like Dewitt fear the interruption of their work for lack of money just as much as marijuana dealers fear interruption by the cops. Both interruptions will shut down operations. Granted, in the case of the writer, that just means going out and getting a job instead of going to jail, but the loss or delay of the product is similar.

No analogy is perfect anyway.

There's a very obvious observation about patronage here that seems to have escaped Gough and Dewitt even though she's the one that brought up Virigina Woolf first. In a discussion of what writers need to write, Woolf is the fundamental source. "Money, and a room of one's own," does not just apply to women any longer.

And patronage, as Dewitt and Gough point out, would solve those issues. It's not like we're lacking in millionaires and multi-millionaries. According to wikipedia, one of every 176 people in the U.S. has a net worth of a million dollars. If a few of the richer ones decided to hire writers to take care of their summer homes in the winter, or lend out a room that they're not using in their town houses during the winter, there would be a lot more good writing from some upcoming authors.

Of course, as the internet has shown, mirco or collective patronage is possible as well, but I doubt that the collective as a total has a lot of summer homes to let out. In this case, it's probably better to approach the millionaires as individuals about it.

-*-*-*-

While I'm talking about publishing, let me just say that I've been thinking a lot about the future of publishing since most people, even some people in the publishing world, think that book publishing is dead. Or at least in serious need of change.

Publishing isn't going to die like the VHS tape has. Books, even ones that never get opened or read, are still a status symbol in certain parts of our society. To others, they're the ultimate repository of ideas.

But the traditional model of publishing (writing the book, getting an agent, getting accepted for publication, having the book go through the editing process, typesetting it, printing it en masse in quantities of at least 8k and then shipping it all over the U.S. to sell in bookstores) is probably dead.

Traditional models just don't have the alacrity to deal with the ever increasingly digital era. They're unresponsive and they don't know how to market aggressively or find their audience (see the criticisms leveled by Richard Laermer via the link embedded in the word "think" above).

But what is going to replace it? (see the link to the NY Mag embedded in the word "that" for some of their speculation.)

I don't know the answer yet and I'm looking for it, but if I had to point to something right at this very moment as the future of publishing, I would point at Scalzi's Your Hatemail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever 1998-2008.

That book is a collection of his blog entries, things that did not go through the traditional model of publishing. Instead it's almost all available for free, if you want to go through Scalzi's archives. Yet, people will pay for it because now it's gone through a bit of that process and ended up as a book, and that book offers both things that I mentioned that will keep book publishing from dying: it's a status symbol (to certain geeks) and it contains special ideas and memories that are worth having.

If it gets nominated for a Hugo, and I suspect that it might, that will only be further proof that it's probably worth looking at alternative models of publishing fiction in which the traditional model is avoided.

Spam 101

2009-01-06T23:32:00.003-05:00

I was just watching Bender's Big Score and something obvious occurred to me.

Here's a prediction about my (probable as per actuarial tables) lifetime. Someday, we're going to have to teach kids, probably in fifth or sixth grade, how to avoid getting suckered into phishing and infected with email based viruses.

Considering the amount of personal data that will be available electronically to the average sixth grader, they're going to have to be able to protect themselves. And if there's one thing going to a public school has taught me it's that there are a large numbers of people that need to be taught the basics, be it sex or defense against protection.

So, for the good of society, we're going to have give those classes in public schools, basically giving people anti-Turing test lessons to teach them how to avoid getting suckered.

The spammers will get better, of course, as will the swindlers and the scammers but perhaps once the lessons are common enough there will be enough people out there that can recognize a scam getting played on them that spamming, phishing, and scamming won't be nearly as profitable as it is now.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T10:59:00.004-05:00

I'm back home for the holidays, since this is the first Christmas where my Grandmother will be living with my Mother. She's sad about leaving her friends behind but I think that she's also happy to be living with family.

Later we'll visit Dad, and eat to bursting.

I hope that everyone's various holidays are going very well.

Via FiveThirtyEight and NPR, Happy Chinese Food as well.

The Bar of Entry

2008-12-07T21:44:00.000-05:00

So, the holy grail of the internet seems to be online communities. If you've got it, you get page views by the thousands and people will follow your every move and buy products that you recommend and basically make your life a joy worth living. Or at least that's how it seems to me from the outside.

I think that a person that doesn't live their life on the internet can maybe belong to five online communities without running into trouble. Big ones, that is, and they can replace a big one with two or three small ones without issue.

Take me. I used to be a IIDBer, a CFer, a nominal Farker, a Myspacer and I read a few webcomics (Ooh, I forgot those. They don't require much time. You can probably read ten to twenty comics regularly before it sucks up as much time as a big online community).

Now I'm a TFarker, a Facebooker, a slactivist witness, a Qweerty/TowleRoader, and I read a few webcomics and I'm on the periphery of being a TalkRatter.

Your affiliations change from time to time. IIDB rejected me. MySpace suddenly wasn't cool any more. And some of the webcomics that I used to read don't update any more.

When that happens, you're lost to the winds for a while. You can't spend more time at the places that you frequent than you already do without suffering from boredom or overload, so you drift about and check profiles and eventually find another community to join.

But even though I've got logins at dozens of places, I don't really pay much regular attention to them.

So what prevents me from becomming invested in a new online community? The Bar of Entry. Dun-dun-dun.

This imaginary object, the Bar of Entry, is set higher or lower by the conditions of the community and makes it either easier or harder for people to join and form a community at. This is probably written in some guide to forming stable online communities so that business people can make money off of them, but let me see if I can recreate it from deduction.

Design
Broad Appeal
Stimulation
Ease of Application
Consistency
Prior Community
Popularity

First, Design. Some sites are badly designed and some sites are well designed. And this isn't necesarily just measure of how visually pretty a site is but also how easy it is to use.

One of my favorites pieces of widely used community software is vBulletin. vBulletin is a great piece of software. It usually looks good, it's nearly infinitely customizable and it presents a profession and polished user interface that is easy enough to understand and take from vBulletin site to vBulletin site.

On the other hand, the typepad comment system that slacktivist currently uses blows chunks. It only shows 50 comments per page, and the typical slactivist post gets around 300 or so. Navigating between pages is a pain in the ass. It won't tell you how many pages the thread has, and it only provides forward and back buttons. If you read 100 comments the first day and then come back to read the next few hundred posts the next day, you still have to scroll through the first and second pages to get to the links to the next page. Nor does it allow you to put all of the comments on one page so you can scroll up and down to see which comments link with comments that are more than 50 responses removed.

Facebook also has some issues with the way that it operates, especially around photos. This entire post exists because BoingBoing just ate one of my posts, and I started to wonder if it was worth the trouble to try to get myself invested there.

Despite my love of vBulletin, only the community that I'm peripherally involved with uses it. In fact, I would hazzard to say that slactivist is one of my favorite communities, despite all the usage issues. So even though in this catecory it has a high bar, that didn't prevent me from joining the community.

Broad Appeal is the next notch on the Bar of Entry that I came up with. The more broadly the site appeals to people, the more people will want to join it. The number of Christians is greater than the number of atheists, so CF > IIDB. This will always be the case.

However, there are limits to Broad Appeal. Yeah, if you run a site that talks about fast cars you have broader appeal than a site that caters to Mustang owners only. (# of Fast Car owners > # of Mustang owners). Unfortunately, you'll also have a really difficult time creating an interesting community for the owners of all fast cars because people want to engage with what you're talking about.

Thus, the counter to Broad Appeal is Stimulation, by which I mean having interesting things for people to come look at and interact with.

If you try to create a site for all fast cars, it's pretty much impossible for one (or two or three) people to really do the sort of research and writing that will people coming back and getting engaged.

Stimulation also covers a few other things: How often are things posted, how well are they written, and what can I do to respond/interact with the community?

Whatever, John Scalzi's blog is usually posted multiple times a day, creating a high level of interest because every day I can visit and find something new.

Slactivist only posts one to three times a week but the quality of the articles is incredibly high.

Fark scores incredibly well in this category though, the highest of all my communities. It gets posted multiple times an hour (once a minute or so for TFark), the article headlines are diverse and funny, and not only does it provide a way for me to submit my own headlines, it has huge comment threads (and TFark has even more). Digg is another community that just hits this out of the park.

MySpace and Facebook also have lots of stuff for a person to do. MySpace has infinitely customizable pages and Facebook has the wall and games.

Ease of Application is how easy things are to join. I just need to leave a user name and email address on Making Light and Slactivist, and they don't even bother to verify them. Registration is the next step up (which will keep a surprising number of people from joining, See Bugmenot.com). After user name registration, the next step is actually forcing people to gain human verified approval (IIDB required all new users to go though Admin approval) and the final step is requiring money. TFark costs five dollars a month. Something Awful requires a one time $9.95 fee.

Consistency is easy enough to understand. Qweerty has a semi-daily post with hot guys in it. I've already mentioned that slactivist is consistently high quality. On the other hand, some days Fark will be bouncing off the walls and some days nothing that gets posted catches my eye.

This blog happens to be terrible at consistency. I mean, you never know when one of these things is going to go up. There was a six month period where nothing got posted (visibly, anyway). The only three posts that people care about are: The Hot Gymansts post, the 10 Intellectual Sci-fi Movies post, and the review of Little Brother so I'm not even consistently boring.

Prior Community is a little more difficult for an aspiring blogger to control. Some places are generally genial and nice to new people. Making Light is good at this. Slacktivist is okay at it, although people there tend to use big words like "consistency" and "dominionist" and other four syllablers.

Fark treats newcommers like tumors on toliet scum. TFarkers look down on Farkers, and join date and user number is sometimes used like a badge. Most swearing isn't censored and implied and outright insults go unedited.

Part of prior community is definitely the people that run it. The way that Fark is run shapes that community. The way that slactivist writes shapes the community there.

Finally, the last on the list is Popularity. When someone is searching for a new community to join they can only join the communities that they can find. An intensive search for their perfect community might reveal a small place with six other members but they're more likely to find a place where those six members exist among a thousand other members. If everyone lists "BoingBoing" on their list of blogs that they follow a new person is more likely to wonder what all of the fuss is about.

The weird thing about Popularity is that it's inextricably linked with the popularity of the person running it. Rosie O'Donnell blogs and probably gets hundreds of thousands of people that read her blogs even though they don't appear to be particularly engrossing or well written. But she's popular, so her blog is too.

Sometimes this creates a recursive loop. Wil Wheaton was just an actor. Then he started blogging. Now he's more famous as a blogger and writer than I think he was as just an actor. Scalzi was a blogger first, and blogging led to writing, and now people that read his books can become invested in his blogs. Now they've got slowly expanding audiences that will someday take over the earth.

So now that I've explained all of the parts of the Bar of Entry, there's still the bar itself.

If you start a blog or website looking to build a community of users, all of the notches get added together. Even if you have the best designed blog on the planet, if it's about Ukrainian Easter Eggs, gets posted twice a year, requires a registration, and the only other member is your foul mouthed Aunt Ester you probably don't have a winning combination.

On the other hand, if you're a internationally famous actor, blog every day in perfect English about your life and the behind the scenes exploits of your costars (immensely broad appeal), and have a site that is designed that makes your users want to pull their own teeth out in frustration, you'll still have thousands flock to you.

It's all a balancing act. Control the variables that you can and see where it takes you.

One final caveat that I want to repeat about all of this though: not all users are looking for a new home. No matter how interesting, easy to use, and how broad your appeal is, not everyone is going to be interested. Perez Hilton doesn't have a 100% of the market share, although I'm sure he's working on it.

He does have millions of people that check his blog daily though and I'll bet that he's mostly happy with the community of people that check him everyday.

If I had millions of people reading my blog, I think I would be.

Lex and Lia: Real Lessons

2008-12-06T22:41:00.000-05:00

Lia headed for The Strip flying low over the building toward the Stratosphere Hotel’s tower. She’d been there only once or twice since she’d run off in the night looking for Lex.

She knew that he’d probably had to move on. He’d been running. Both of them had been running. And to a certain extent she wanted to go back to running again, leave Mohan’s pack and go back to the “good old days” when it was just her and Lex.

In the books that she’d read with Annabelle, when someone did what Lex did, you swore vengeance against them. It was one of the reasons that she thought Lex was so sad.

But he’d never hurt her. In fact, he’d done everything that he could to make sure that she was okay and if she found him she’d do everything in her power to make sure that she was okay. He’d been working so hard to support them before she’d run away.

If she had too she could challenge Mohan and force him to let her bring Lex back to the pack compound. She could buy him some real clothes instead of the ratty jeans and jacket he always wore and he wouldn’t have to worry about food or money ever again.

And if anyone so much as hinted at trying to bite him she would rip out their throats with her bare human hands. It wasn’t like he wasn’t unusual for a human. Lia was sure that Lex could have contributed significantly to the pack if they would let him.

She just wanted to see him happy and not worried anymore. There had to be something that she could do to make that happen, something that she could say that would make him understand that she didn’t hate him for what he’d done but that she loved him for caring about what it meant to her.

She flew into the MGM amusement park and settled behind a trellis and next to one of the outer walls and resumed human form. No fuss, no feathers. No nudity. She was often thankful that was one of her gifts.

She didn’t have any money. Annabelle or Miss Chi-Wong always paid for everything and since she wasn’t supposed to be out by herself anyway they wouldn’t bother giving her an allowance. She probably could have tried to picked pockets or something but she really didn’t want to get caught. She’d have to call Miss Chi-Wong to come get her out of trouble and even the thought of that made her wince.

So she wandered to the exit and found a daily ride pass armband from a family that was about to leave which was good enough. She just wanted to ride the rides and remember the day that Lex had brought her here.

She went on a few roller coasters and even though she could fly now it was still surprisingly fun. Lex had always smiled on the steepest hills and now she threw up her hands and screamed with the rest of the passengers when they took a quick turn.

It was another evening so she didn’t have to wait long between rides. Even though the sun set it didn’t deter her from the roller coasters. She could see almost as well in the dark as most people could in the day.

It started to cool down but she didn’t want to leave yet. She was just hungry. She could shift into her raven form and then come back but decided to see if she could figure out some way to get food from one of the food courts.

She took a seat at one of the tables with a bored expression on her face and looked around. There a few groups of boys a few tables over and they weren’t bad looking. She pointedly made a point of not looking or talking to them.

Despite eying her for a few minutes, it wasn’t any of the groups of boys that approached her but a guy.

He was tall pale and blond and gorgeous. He was wearing a tight black shirt and jeans and looked like he was about twenty four. He was also incredibly familiar looking.

“Can I join you?”

Over the smell of grease and broiling cheese came another set of smells. The strongest one was . . . aftershave? An expensive one she would have guessed, because the guy smelled something like Mr. Mohan. It was covering something else.

The smell of carrion and rot.

The blond guy was a vampire.

She stiffened for a moment. “Aren’t you a little old to be hitting on teenagers?” she said.

He politely laughed and then sat down anyway. “Oh, I doubt you have any idea. I’m just a little curious what a werewolf is doing alone in the middle of this tent after dark.”

Well, crap. “I’m not—,” she started, but he interrupted.

“Let’s not pretend. You can probably smell me just as easily as I tell what you are. What exactly are you doing here? This area is most definitely off limits to Mohan’s activities. Whatever business you’re conducting here, you didn’t check with your pack leader or he would have told you that.” His incredibly pretty blue eyes were trying to bore into her and he was doing something to try to make her speak.

“I’m not here on business,” she said, genuinely surprised now, and looked directly into his eyes. “It’s . . . my day off. I came here to relax,” she lied.

There was a sea of old power behind those blue eyes but Mr. Mohan could pull the same trick. Lia had long ago learned to resist him and suspected that the vampire didn’t realize that could push him off so easily.

At her answer it was vampire’s turn to look surprised. “Relax?” he asked and she watched his face for some sign that he didn’t believe her.

“It’s an amusement park,” she said. “I’ve been riding the roller coasters.”

He blinked, as though he hadn’t realized that and glanced around. “Uh, well, what are you doing just sitting here then? It looked like you were waiting for someone.”

She sighed. “Actually, I don’t have any money and I was going to try to get one of those guys over there to buy me dinner.” She looked at the vampire and realized that he seemed familiar. “Which they won’t do now that they’ve seen me talking with you,” she added.

The vampire looked at the group of guys that was now studiously avoiding her.

“Oh. Look, I’m sorry for that. If you want, I can buy you something to eat.”

She hesitated wondering if he was lying to her the same way that she’d lied to him. “I’m not going to let you bite me,” she said and wondered if vampires could fly.

“Uhg. Bite you? No thanks. No offense, but you all taste like wet fur to me.”

He thought she was a wolf then. He could tell that she was a werecreature, but he couldn’t tell what kind. She wondered if feathers tasted better to him than wet fur.

A guy was approaching their table. He was wearing a security guard uniform. “Everything all right?” he asked Lia.

“Sure,” she said. “He’s my uncle.”

“I just saw her as I was passing through and thought I’d say hi,” the vampire added easily.

The security guard looked at her and then at the vampire. She was small and had dark skin and hair. He was tall, pale and blond. The security guard and the vampire’s eyes met for a moment and the security guard smiled. “Of course. Sorry to bother you.”

From the outside it was a little more impressive than it had been when he’d been focusing the same powers on her. She could do that to other lycanthropes but didn’t know if she could do it to a human. The vampire had stopped trying to coerce her after she’d told him she’d been riding the roller coasters and she supposed it would be rude now that he was trying to be nice.

He stuck out his hand. “I’m Edward.”

She reached out. “I’m Lia.”

As they shook his eyes widened. “I didn’t recognize you,” he said, “without the made up hair and the dress.”

“You were at the meeting,” Lia realized. “With Lo. You had a computer.”

Edward nodded.

“You look a lot different without a suit on,” Lia said. He looked like a clothing store model actually. Not her type at all but still very handsome.

“Thanks,” he laughed.

“No, er, that was supposed to be a compliment,” she said, and then looked back at the stalls that lined the food court. “Er, about dinner . . . ?” she prompted him.

“Yeah, sure, what do you want?”

She ordered a burger with everything on it, a giant soda and reveled in the first real fast food that she’d had in ages. Mohan’s chefs were more likely to serve her veal than a simple burger. The food was good but sometimes she missed the junk food.

She offered some of the curly fries to Edward, but he thanked her politely and sat without eating.

“You guys don’t eat a lot, do you?”

Edward shook his head. “We don’t need to eat. Well, burgers and that sort of stuff.”

“But you drink blood.”

“I’m sort surprised that you’re not grossed out by that.”

She rolled her eyes. “You should see some of the things that I’ve eaten when I’m . . . not human. It’s hard to be grossed out after your first few mice.”

He nodded understandingly. “I can understand that. You just don’t look like the kind of girl that doesn’t get grossed out by drinking blood or eating small animals.”

She looked down at her flowery jeans and shrugged. “I guess so.”

Lia ate for a while in silence until Edward asked, “You don’t get out much, do you?”

She examined him again, and then shook her head.

“The reason that you didn’t know that this was technically our territory was because you didn’t tell anyone where you were going?”

Lia nodded, and sighed as she swallowed. “I think the correct term is “run away,” she said, miming one of Annabelle’s most common phrases.

“I’d heard one or two things about that, now that I think back,” Edward told her. “Why do you run away?”

Lia looked at him and shrugged.

“Do they not feed you or something? From the way that you’re eating it looks like they haven’t given you food in years.”

“No . . . they treat me fine. I mean, I have private chefs and they have tutors and stuff. I just don’t necessarily feel comfortable there.”

“What about Mohan?”

She looked at Edward, confused.

“How do you feel about him?”

“He’s just . . . Mohan. He’s okay I guess.”

“You aren’t part of his pack, are you?”

She shrugged, not sure what he meant by that. She was part of the pack. She lived with them, after all, but she suspected that Edward meant something else.

“See, that’s an answer by itself. You don’t feel much loyalty to him. If you’d been a member of Mohan’s pack you would. You wouldn’t run away. You resisted me earlier, when you lied about coming here to relax.”

Lia thought about shifting and flying away but Edward had been friendly to her so far but she couldn’t stop herself from reflexively tensing a bit.

Edward caught her wrist but made it look like he was just laying his hand on hers. Even with time slowed for her she hadn’t seen him move. His skin was cold and she tried to lift her hand but without even appearing to tense a muscle Edward kept her wrist glued to the table.

“I don’t know why he’s allowing it, but Mohan isn’t the kind of guy to be tested forever. You may have been his pet for two years but sooner or later he’s going to get annoyed and he’s going to add you to his pack by force. You’re strong, you resisted me, but Mohan is an Alpha wereborn. He was born to lead a pack and if you throw your will up against his, you won’t be able to resist him. It doesn’t seem like you want him to do that.”

She slowly shook her head. He looked around and when she looked back she winced.

“Do you know why he’s keeping you?”

She shook her head.

“The witches, they don’t like wereravens. I thought you were just a wolf until you introduced yourself but if I was a witch I would have attacked you outright. The raven is sacred to them and they say that wereravens are a defilement.”

He gave her a look. “That’s what they say, but the real reason is that you terrify them. You have a lot to fear from Mohan, but at least he’ll keep you safe. If the witches find you they’ll kill you without hesitation and if you’ve been going around Las Vegas like this then you’ve been extremely lucky so far.”

He let go of her hand and she immediately stood. He hadn’t hurt her and he’d just told her stuff that she hadn’t known.

Carefully, she picked up the last few bites of the burger and bit into it. The entire time she kept her eyes glued to Edwards.

“For a teenager,” he said after a moment, “you do have a few surprises.”

She finished the burger.

“What do you suggest then?” she asked after a sip of her soda.

“Don’t piss off Mohan. If you keep on ticking him off, he’ll eventually crush you like a bug.”

“I don’t like being kept locked up.”

“Nobody does,” Edward said vaguely and Lia could see that there was something in his eyes when he said that. “But sometimes you have to do things that you don’t want to do to get what you want.”

“What do you think I want?”

Edward focused back on her. “I’m sure I have no idea, just as you have no idea what I want. But if you want to avoid waking up one day and wanting to do everything in your power to serve Mohan, I would learn from him. He’s a powerful guy and no matter how much you dislike him you could learn a lot from him.”

Lia sat in silence for a moment considering his words.

“Thanks for dinner,” she finally said.

“No problem,” Edward said.

He walked her to the gate. She walked a few more blocks alone before she shifted and made her way back to the compound.

Slipping back into the compound was surprisingly difficult. She’d never done it before on her own.

The clock read midnight before Annabelle entered the room and found her reading her math textbook.

“I thought I’d get a jump on tomorrow’s lessons,” Lia said.

Annabelle said nothing but before she turned and stalked out of the room her face had turned the color of a fresh salmon sushi.

Why Work for a Hotel?

2008-12-04T15:13:00.000-05:00

The last few months of not having a job has been really . . . damaging, catastrophic, miserable? One of those. Perhaps all of them.

It's given me an awful lot of time to just sit around and think though, and I've come to the problematic conclusion that I really don't seem to want to do any of the things that I'm applying for.

There really isn't an alternative here. I haven't had a divine flash of inspiration about what I do want to do but I've come to realize that I'd probably be miserable in the things that I am applying for.

This is creepy because I've been working for hotels for years, ever since summer jobs in high schools and I've usually had a fairly good time with them. I work with people well, I'm usually very organized and I tend to contribute a lot.

I know, that sounds like a line off my resume. I'll have to attribute it to the dozens and dozens of applications that I've filled out in the past few months.

I have to try to remember why I went to work for hotels in the first place and right now I'm drawing a blank. Maybe because I always sort of glamorized hotels as an industry. You cater to the rich and the famous after all, you get to meet a lot of interesting people, you get to travel.

Well, I was dead wrong about that last one. The only people that travel are the sales staff: the people that understand running a hotel least. In fact, that seems to be where all of the things that could make our profession interesting go to die a miserable and painful death. Bonuses, incentives, vacation time and the ability to speak authoritatively about the hotel's occupancy.

The only people that I hate more than sales are those sad members of the HR department: may they burn in hell. This is partially an affect of my arrival and departure experience at all of the hotels that I've worked for, so I'm sure in this dry spell this is accentuated. However, where I can at least see the services provided to a hotel by a Sales staff (however small those services might be compared to their soul deadening costs to the hotel) I can't quite see the net positive benefit to the HR departments that I've seen run.

For people that are supposed to be finding the best and the brightest workers for the hotel they do their job amazingly poorly.

Right now I'm taking a fair slew of personality inventories (I've also just been informed that I've been showing too much empathy on them; apparently the hospitality industry is looking for people that won't care if you come to them with a problem) and they've been a complete waste of time.

I'm sure half the people that fill them out do what I used to do: put in the answers that they expect that you want instead of what they really feel and now you've already set the precedent of them lying to you during the interview process and you haven't even met them yet.

I suppose it does stand to reason that most people in HR departments do so poorly because don't really understand the jobs that they're filling. Managerial or front line, they have a very limited idea of what the job entails and what the qualifications should be.

I suppose that this leads me to suspect what my main problems will be if I ever am in charge of a hotel: I'm barely going to respect my Sales staff and any HR department working under me is going to find itself doing real work.

But I'm not there yet. I'm still looking for jobs at the bottom of the barrel. The sort where I smile politely and never say anything bad about a boss that I never see or can barely stand and try to convince people that the reason that I zone out is that I find most front desk work about as challenging as watching paint dry.

So I'm still looking for a job. Still looking and trying to convince myself that it's worth it.

Totally Weird Dream

2008-12-01T11:24:00.003-05:00

I don't have a job yet and it's starting to affect me in strange ways. For example, I had this truly bizarre dream last night about looking for work.

I responded to a Craigslist ad and got an immediate response asking me if i could come to an interview right now. So I rushed out and down one of the avenues to meet the woman at her house.

She's explaining the job and it has two parts. The first part is walking her daughter to school in the morning, getting to her house at seven and then walking her four or five blocks to her school. And then the rest of it was walking down to where the mother worked, some sort of book museum with about four shelves of books (mostly children's books from what I remember of the covers).

The mother and her boss showed me around and it was a nice place. There were some tables where people could sit. It was airy and expansive, which I thought was very nice for NYC.

Then they sort of just gave me a piece of cloth, as though they wanted to see what I would do with it, and I started to dust the shelves and the desks. I remember the mother nodded as though I'd just passed a huge test. She looked relieved.

I asked when she wanted me to start and she said "Right now!" explaining that tomorrow I would need to start.

Then she asked me if I had any other questions. I pulled her to the side, not wanting to advertise my greed, and asked her about compensation. Yes, I used that word in the dream for some specific reason.

But her response was priceless. She scrunched up her face a bit and said, "Well, the Museum has an admission price of $15, and I figured that we could waive it for you."

So, walking your daughter to school and cleaning the museum and all she was prepared to give me was free admission?

In the dream, at this point, I thought to myself that I'd take the job if she would give me five bucks a day for it and immediately chastised myself for being so stupid. That was her answer though. "I'll give you $5 a day."

I didn't take the job. I just stood there, sort of expecting another offer, but maybe some realistic figure, but it never came. Instead, her boss wandered over and suggested to her that maybe she'd better make it clear that there was no pay in the next craigslist ad, and he suggested text: "Hard working Asian willing to work for nothing needed to work for . . ."

Right, that was the other thing. She'd made passing references to being Asian throughout the course of the dream, including in the original job description, except that neither she nor her daughter was Asian. And I wasn't Asian in the dream either, so I was assuming that she was just trying to fill in for someone else and until I heard the manager put that in as a condition for the next ad I hadn't realized that they were really looking only for Asians but were willing to settle for me.

So finally I said something like "I'm sorry we can't come to some arrangement," and then I woke up.

And you know what, even though in real life I'm desperate, I'm still glad that I didn't take that job in the dream.

Lex and Lia: Capture and Control

2008-11-30T21:28:00.002-05:00

Bliss showed up with four sisters in two SUVs. At six fourteen they were alone in front of the adobe building. At six fifteen there was a sixth person.

Bliss was the first one to approach the body on the blanket. It was Lex. He was naked and unconscious.

There was the raised bump of a spider bite on the side of his neck. In a few days that would be gone like it had never been, even though it had been red and raised for a long time.

Bliss rolled him over. Along the skin over his spine was a red tattoo. To Bliss it meant nothing, but she knew what to do with it.

They rolled him up in the blanket and lay him in the back of the SUV on a foam mattress that they’d just bought at Target.

Justina Bybreak sat by the boy’s side in the SUV. She’d been Maiden in her coven near San Francisco, but had given up that position after her mother died and moved home to Las Vegas. Her father had been outraged, first to find out that Bybreak’s will excluded him and that his daughter was dropping out of medical school to join his mother’s business.

Bliss smiled at the girl as the car started to move. She was in her early twenties and everything that a good witch usually wasn’t: tall, blond and stunningly beautiful.

Bliss had told her how her mother had died. And then forbid her from hurting the boy.

Justina was already stroking the side of his face with a sharp fingernail.

*-*-*-*-*

As soon as Lia penciled in the last answer to her homework she stood up and changed into some comfortable clothes.

At first it had been very nice to wear beautiful dresses all the time. They were such beautiful clothes that wearing them made her feel like a movie star and they’d only gotten nicer in the last few years. Annabelle’s selections had been nice for a girl that looked eight but it turned out that Miss Chi-Wong had a surprisingly sophisticated sense of fashion and one of the few ways that she was willing to spend time with Lia was to buy her clothes.

But the dresses were limiting. They were made to stand out and she realized after a while that they were not much more than prison uniforms.

Even the “regular” clothes that Miss Chi-Wong bought her though were very nice. The jeans that she was wearing were from a private label and up each side were embroidered flowers. Her white fuzzy blouse was one of the softest fabrics that she’d ever felt and over that she’d pulled a sweatshirt with a brilliant flower on it.

There were werewolf guards at the doors to her rooms, not to mention throughout the building. Ever since she’d been escaping Mohan had been putting a guard on the roof too although that was the easiest guard to evade.

She went to the door and put her hand up on it and concentrated.

Most of the wolves were just normal humans when they hadn’t shifted. A few had improved senses, or could shift part way between wolf and human, but most of them were just ordinary people.

Mohan wasn’t. Michael wasn’t. Lia suspected that Chi-Wong wasn’t. Neither was Lia.

She thought of bubbles and fuzz and fog and anything else that came into her head and pushed them through the door and into the guards on the other side. They wouldn’t see the images, or understand exactly what was happening, but it worked.

After thirty seconds of concentration she opened the door and slipped through the oblivious guards. She still had to move slowly and quietly while the guards daydreamed.

The elevator had a camera and so did the stairs. Mohan was serious about his security.

She had a couple of routes out of the building but the easiest by far was the kitchen window.

There was a much larger and more impressive kitchen down on the main floor of the building that could cater to large groups and meetings that Mr. Mohan sometimes held in the conference rooms on the first floor but the little kitchen up on this floor was what normally fed Lia and provided snacks and lunches for the guards.

Usually the evening guy was a jerk and Lia would have had to fuzz him out as well but today was a Sunday and the weekend guy was a thin Hispanic werewolf named Jaime. He was wearing a white apron and looked up in surprise as she came in.

She nodded to him. “Hola Jaime. ¿Como esta ustedes?” she said. Spanish wasn’t one of her lessons, but even among the servants of the werewolves Spanish seemed to dominate. She’d learned a few words out of self defense.

“Bien, Senorita,” he replied and then said something quickly and sighed.

“Yeah, afraid I need to use the window again,” she said.

She moved toward it, and he moved between her.

“No, Senorita. Senor Mohan no quiere que te vayas.” He doesn’t want you to go, he was telling her.

“Yo quiero.” I want to go.

Jaime looked at her, as though he couldn’t believe that she had desires other than what Mohan wanted. Yeah, Mr. Mohan was scary, but he wasn’t that scary.

“I’m sorry, Jaime,” she murmured and then remembered how to say it in Spanish. “Lo siento, Jaime.”

He bared his teeth for a moment, but she didn’t flinch. She tensed her muscles and things slowed down a bit, and she reached out her hand and touched his face, along his jawline. There was a spark and he was hers.

He was trying to change, and she told him not to. There was a growl in his throat but it was just a human growl.

She relaxed and time went back to the way that it was supposed to be. Jaime flinched at her hand on his face. He looked confused for a moment, then surprised and then scared.

“Lo siento, Jaime,” she said. Go over and stand by the wall for a moment, she said in her animal voice. It was easy to command something like that, it wasn’t even words or language she just had to picture it. Jaime moved back, suddenly aghast and she continued. If they ask you, I never came into the kitchen. She frowned. That was a more complicated image and she couldn’t say that in Spanish.

Well, if she had to hope that he’d understood. She shifted into the raven and fluttered the counter before she realized that she’d forgotten to open the window.

Well, there was Jaime now. She sent and image and he came over, unlatched the window and she flew out into the daylight.

Continued next week . . .

Thanksgiving and Family History

2008-11-27T21:07:00.000-05:00

For Thanksgiving I went down to spend the day at my Grandmother’s apartment in an assisted living community. Well, I suppose I should say that I came down. I’m still here and it’s the evening of Thanksgiving, but I won’t get to post this until I get home tomorrow, so I want to slip into the past tense.

She’s been in this community for something like seven or eight years and although she’s been in the “independent” section of the facility it’s getting to be too difficult for her to get around in her own apartment without some more serious care.

The problem is that my Grandmother seriously doesn’t like having people that she doesn’t know coming into her apartment every day and taking care of her like she's an infant. She wants her independence to some extent and she at least wants to know who is taking care of her.

Thus, my mother wants to take Grandma down to New Mexico to live with her. That means that this is probably the last time that she’ll have a holiday with her friends there.

Anyway, I sort of got roped into being here because I still haven’t found a job in NYC and I’m really the only person in our family who isn’t going to be either traveling or working.

I took the bus down yesterday (or I tried, but the stupid bus only got me half way before I had to call my cousin to drive me from Albany, yarg) and Grandma was surprised to see me. I think she’d forgotten that I was coming.

I didn’t sleep well last night so I slept in this morning and then we went to her “dinner” which is the midday meal that’s prepared by the staff and held in a large dining room. Grandma doesn’t eat much so most of the time she only eats that one large meal every day.

They did the traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and green beans. It was better than I remember it. I actually liked the green beans, and I usually hate green beans. I guess that’s like my Great Uncle’s retirement facility which had the only cooked spinach that I’ve ever liked: people that cook for old people know how to cook vegetables.

They also had pumpkin pie, which was okay. I’m probably going to steal Grandma’s apple cobbler from the fridge. That actually looked much better. (Added note: I had the Pecan Pie the day after this was written. It was excellent.)

If I were you, I’d probably be wondering why on earth I’m going on about the food about my Grandma’s retirement facility, and that’s a perfectly valid complaint. I’m bored out of my mind just reading it back to myself.

I’m leading up to a conversation that I just had with my Grandma. She decided that she wanted some soup (probably to trick me into eating more like she’s always trying to do). So, after a negotiation with her I made the soup and we sat around the table and ate it.

She started talking about her family, not just her kids and grandkids but her parents and grandparents. I just want to get some of this down before I forget it because it’s interesting to me.

The first thing that caught my attention when she started talking about her dad was brought up through her nightly cup of wine. She told me that it was a tradition passed down from her father, who had always had a cup of wine when he got home from work.

“He used to brew it himself,” she said.

I didn’t know that actually.

Apparently every fall he’d go down to the farmer’s market and buy a carload of grapes from the local grape farmers (there are local grape farmers in upstate New York? Apparently there used to be) and take them home. He’d pick them off the branches, clean them up, and then pack them in barrels where they were ferment all year.

Grandma reports that it used to smell horrible, and she wrinkled up her nose to underline her statement. A friend of mine fermented mead one time and I remember that smelled bad but there weren’t barrels and barrels of it.

I think it might make a bit more sense to readers at this point if I point out that my Grandmother is ninety seven years old. She didn’t say exactly how old she was when this was going on but I think that if it was going on when she was around ten that would put it in the same general region of American history as prohibition.

This vision of my Great-Grandfather as a scofflaw during prohibition was sort of discordant to me. This side of my family has always seemed a bit traditionalist and conservative and very much law abiding. The great-uncle that lived with the delicious spinach that I mentioned above is a priest. One of his brothers used to be a priest, and their sister still is a nun. No one in my Grandmother’s generation knows that I’m gay, for example.

So, I asked her what her father used to do. He worked in the turbine section of GE (GE is a big deal to my family for this and more reasons, see below), not as a laborer or an engineer but as the time clerk.

He apparently had three siblings, two sisters and a brother: Fred, Elizabeth and Ann. Fred took advantage of the GE apprentice program and became an engineer. I think it was Elizabeth that became the secretary for the head of GE’s international division. On days that her boss was out of town on business she would sometimes bring my Grandmother into the office with her and let her play with the typewriter.

Then she told me about her Grandfather, my Great-Great-Grandfather, who was a butcher. He used to buy the animals and kill them and distribute the meat in the city where he lived but the thing that she remembered most about him was the fact that when he came over to their house for Thanksgiving he would bring a bag of nickels with him and hand them out to the kids.

She looked at me when she said that. “That was a lot of money back then,” she said, just checking to make sure I understood that. I thought of the fact that I considered a scarf from a street vendor at $10 as very cheap but didn't say anything.

All of this is repeated several times, of course. Grandma’s short term memory is about three minutes, so if I’m looking for more information on something then I have to repeat various parts of the conversation.

So, here are things that I learned from various iterations of this conversation: 1. Her Grandfather was a bit unsociable; 2. He would come over to her father’s house for Thanksgiving. 3. Her Grandmother lived with one of her aunts.

You may already see where this is going, but I didn’t. So during another iteration of the conversation it came out: “She finally couldn’t deal with him anymore. She moved out.”

In all the rest of my family, there were pretty much no divorces except for my mom and dad. It always sort of weirded me out that it was my parents that split up out of dozens of couples in my family. What made them so different?

I guess in those days there wasn’t much divorce, but my great-great-grandparents were separated too. It sort of grounds you when you realize that maybe your branch of the family tree isn't quite that crazy.

Then we moved forward again. Grandma talked about how she couldn’t believe that I was living in NYC. She didn’t think that it was a very good city in which to live but she mentioned that she liked to visit for the shows.

It turns out that she used to take “excursions” from where she lived into NYC. They were like planned tours and they would have planned times to go shopping and eat dinner, and then they would go see a few plays.

“This is back when I had money. Back when I had a job.”

Again, I guess this is something that I should have known about my Grandmother but didn’t. I asked her about her job.

It turns out that she’d used to work in the GE corporate office. She started in payroll and then moved to the government contracts office on the second floor of the GE offices. That was how she met my Grandfather: she worked on the second floor and he was a factory foreman that had an office on the fourth floor.

When she married him she left her job and became a housewife.

I don’t know my extended family extremely well. I grew up thousands and thousands of miles away in New Mexico while most of them were in the Northeast. Only the daughters were outside of driving distance, my mom and my aunt, moved away. Even my great aunts and uncles lived in stretch from upstate New York to the Baltimore area.

So my family was usually just my mom, my dad, and my brother.

I don’t know exactly what to do now that I’m out here. I don’t know how to really interact with my extended family as well as a lot of the people out there that I see. The “normal” extended families are usually people that have deep long term connections to other people, but I barely have that connection with my immediate family. I only saw my cousins and my uncles and my aunts once in a blue moon. Less often, perhaps.

So this chance to connect a little bit more with my Grandmother was appreciated and I definitely learned some interesting things about my family history.

Were the World Mine

2008-11-24T22:22:00.002-05:00

So, I finally got the apartment internet hook up the other day. I'm pretty sure that I mentioned that. One of the things that I did in the glorious rush of high speed internet access was to watch all of the movie trailers on the Apple site, including the few that I'm especially looking forward too: Milk, Watchmen, Star Trek (Chris Pine is dreamy), and the next Harry Potter. I also discovered a few others that look good. Up (I mean, it's Pixar), My Name is Bruce and JCVD. There was also some crap like Yes Man (why is Jim Carrey doing that movie again?) and Valkyrie and Angels and Demons.

Among all of these big deal movies I found something that you could say that sort of uniquely appealed to me. It was Were the World Mine and although it looked a little bit campy, it also looked like it appealed to me on two levels. The first, obvious level was "cute guys" and the second level was "Why yes, the power to make people gay has been a personal fantasy of mine."

So I went to the offical website and found it to be a flash monstrosity. Not only that, it was a nonfunctional flash monstrosity. So I did the obvious thing and went to the wikipedia page about it where I found out that it was opening in NYC a week after I watched the trailer. Nifty.

Ben decided to visit that same weekend, so it seemed natural enough to drag him out to the movie.

I bought tickets online, we went out to dinner and then we went to the movie theater. It was packed. I mean, for this little indy film in it's second day of release in NYC there was a line stretching down the block. Which was very confusing. Yeah, it's NYC and all but I didn't think that the second day of release was still a big deal. It's like camping out to get an iPhone on the second day. People don't do that.

So I was standing in the line to pick up the tickets, and the guy behind me says: "After the 7:00 p.m. showing of 'Were the World Mine' the director and cast will have a Q&A."

And I turned to him, and sort of challengingly said, "What?" Because I didn't believe him because I had bought tickets to the 7:00 p.m. showing. Inexplicably cool things don't usually happen to me.

He pointed, and there it was, taped to the box office window. He hadn't even paraphrased it, he'd just read what the sign in front of me had said.

So I picked up the tickets, and hyperventilated a bit as I digested the fact that yes, something completely unplanned and cool had just happened to me, and then we went into the theater.

The line that stuck with me from the giant set of reviews (here's the NYT one) which were pasted onto the outside of the theater was from the SF Chronicle's review: "Tom Gustafson's queer-centric take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream teeters between banal conceptualizing and inspired execution."

Ben agreed with that line. If you press me I'd have to admit that I do too but I really came down on the inspired execution side in the end. It was everything that I wanted it to be. It was a little campy and the ending had some writing issues, but overall it was well acted, well written, and well produced, especially considering the ~300k budget and 24 day shooting schedule (as revealed by the Q&A).

The male lead played by Tanner Cohen was just gorgeous and it doesn't hurt that he's a decent actor. I'd love to see him again in more movies but I'm pretty sure he's also gay, which means that he'll never get a major role ever again.

Crap.

The other guy, Nathaniel David Becker, is also cute but also less overtly gay which makes me hopeful that we'll see him again.

I think the girls actually stole the show though. Zelda Williams was phenomenal as the best friend, in a Chloe from Smallville way. Judy McLane and Jill Larson as the Mom and the Mom's Boss were both excellent, especially playing off against each other. Wendy Robie had some (very) flat lines at the end of the movie but near the middle her character's bliss at the chaos is quite beautiful.

So the movie ends (happily and without death, thankfully) and the audience clapped. Then Tom Gustafson, the director, Tanner Cohen, Zelda Williams and one of the other guys (Sorry, I don't remember your name!) came down and did a quick Q&A during which I learned the above mentioned facts and for a bunch of gay guys the audience showed an amazing lack of creativity coming up with questions.

Tanner looked thinner in person and was wearing a sort of lumpy orange sweatshirt, but he was still breathlessly cute. I found him and Zelda hanging out in front of the theater after the movie and shook his hand. And asked him how old he was. 21. Too young for me but I'll still dream when I buy the movie on DVD.

One thing on his age; I figured he was actually older than that. Usually the guys that play high school guys are in their thirties. I thought that since he was such a good actor with an amazing voice, he must be older that I am. Surprise. Of course, this only serves to make me feel old.

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie thouroughly. It was a great experience and I had lots of fun. If you like fun gay musical movie romps through Shakespeare, and you can locate a showing/DVD I highly recommend this.

Okay, so that was the movie review. Today I also got on the subway and rode it all the way to the end of the line out in Queens. Which my mother probably doesn't want to hear, but it's the truth.

Once there, I walked along the beach for a bit. I got a really bizarre "You're on candid camera!" stone from a nice lady, but I don't think I did anything that wasn't unfailingly polite so I'm hoping that's the last I hear of that. I took a few pictures with my phone of the shore, and then turned around and came back home.

Sometimes I seem to blend oddly well with everyone. I passed homeless people, Russians, Jews, and (when I got back to Soho) I passed rich Asians, pampered white girls, and guys in suits.

One of my friends would probably call this the comfortable annonymity of big cities, but I can't help but imagine how much he would have stuck out like a sore thumb walking through the neighborhood of Queens that I was in. Even I would have been starring at him.

If Ben and I had held hands in that neighborhood, we probably would have been in danger.

And yet people ignored me. With my lumpy black hat, my old gray A&F jacket and jeans, I just became another in the backdrop no matter the neighborhood that I was walking through.

But Mr. Card

2008-11-18T02:02:00.001-05:00

OSC: "What is odd is that in every case they called me intolerant. They misunderstood the meaning of 'tolerance.'"

You are intolerant. You say that Mormons have a long tradition of rejecting the social customs of the surrounding culture. Great! Wonderful! Congratulations!

But now you and your church have intervened to change the law to match your beliefs even when the particular cultural issue had nothing to do with you. So much for being able to go your own way, no?

You've imposed your beliefs on your neighbors.

That is what the problem is.

We don't care what you teach. We really don't. You can teach your children that I'm a demon that drinks blood and tortures small animals and breaths black clouds of sin as long as you give us the right to get married.

Once you've interfered with the way that we interact with other gay people in the ways that we choose, that is when we start to get upset.

Lex and Lia: Deals and Politics

2008-11-17T22:13:00.000-05:00

So yeah, I'm trying to get to writing again. I know I always say that though. In order to resolve my writer's block, we're fast fowarding a bit. The gap between the last installment and this on the order of two years. I'll probably get around to explaining that break in the next installment.

Bliss left the dessicated collection of animals and insects in front of the door of the small adobe house. They weren't required, and they weren't part of her current bargain, but they couldn't hurt either. There didn't appear to be anyone home but that was deceiving; it never looked like anyone was home.

"Grandmother?" she called out. It would have been rude to try the door and Bliss didn't particually want to touch the house if she didn't have to, so she just stood there in the cool evening.

There was no response and no movement in the little home except for the swaying of the grasses that grew right up to the walls. Sometimes Spider Woman was in the mood to talk to Bliss and some days she was not.

The old spirits, the ones that were written about in legend, were always a fickle bunch. Some were touchy about the fact that they'd mostly been supplanted in the modern world but some had learned to get along.

Some were dead. In fact, most were dead.

Ideas had power, swirling around in people's brains, and when enough people all had the same ideas, they could give birth to things that were not human but alive and powerful. If the people stopped believing though, the spirits would die. Humans were the special case: they would keep living if whether you believed in them or not.

Spider Woman was amazingly resilient. She'd not only lived long enough to set her foot in with the new agers, she'd managed to keep some of her powers. In this area of the world there weren't many spirits that could say that truthfully.

So Bliss used her when she could. There were some things the spirits could do that the "mortals" could not, and vice versa. What Bliss could arrange through a few telephone calls or an internet search was often enough for surprisingly complicated bits of knowledge or powerful magics. The price for this particular assistance had been unusually difficult.

After five minutes, Bliss pulled an envelope out of her purse, went over, and stuck it in the door frame. It wouldn't get lost, she was sure of that. Spider Woman would get the envelope even if she had to chase it across a hundred miles of Nevada desert. Bliss smiled at the image.

But this resolved her debt, finally.

She turned to walk back to the car where Iron Dog was waiting but before she took more than four steps she heard the door open and turned.

Spider Woman stood there, holding the envelope. Considering the trouble that Bliss had gone through to get what was inside Spider Woman looked unmoved.

"This is it?" The spirit woman asked.

Bliss nodded.

Spider Woman slowly and carefully opened the top of the unsealed envelope and pulled out the paper inside. There was just one and she unfolded it carefully.

"You've fulfilled your end of the bargain, Bliss," she said at last, putting the paper away and holding the envelope gingerly. "And my lawyer?"

"I sent him a copy as well," Bliss said. "And the developers won't bother you again. My sisters and I have made absolutely sure of that."

"When do you want delivery? Now?"

Bliss shook her head. "We can arrange for tomorrow. No mistakes this time."

*-*-*-*-*

"Lia's run away again," said Annabelle to Miss. Chi-Wong.

Chi-Wong sighed. "Have you notified Michael?"

Annabelle nodded. "Mohan's not going to be happy."

"No, of course not. But he won't be surprised. What happened this time?"

"She'd been good all morning, I swear I'd been watching her like a hawk nearly since she'd woken up, but she seemed to be enjoying her lessons and she doesn't usually try to run when it's the middle of the day, you know that, so I went to the bathroom and left one of Michael's pack to watch her--."

"Is the guard hurt?"

"Just unconscious."

"Moon be damned . . ."

"She didn't hit him. I don't know how she managed it this time."

"She's getting to be completely uncontrollable. True, the fact that were have her is an important continuing bargaining chip with the Ladies but we can't keep. . . ." Chi-Wong paused. "I will tell Mohan. You know some of the places that she goes, join the hunt. If we can find her before the markets close, he may be willing to overlook your negligence."

Annabelle nodded and excused herself. Chi-Wong arched her fingers and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

All the different shapeshifters were linked through their shared human side. Werewolf, Weretiger, Werellama, they all eventually fit into the hierarchy. You dominated them once, they stayed dominated. If you were at the top of a pack, those under you were nearly completely loyal.

Mohan seemed oddly reluctant to break the girl though, and Chi-Wong had absolutely no idea why. That was what you did with new wolves. You put them in their place and they became quietessent.

Wereravens were rare, and the gift used to create them was rarer. In Chi-Wong's opinion whatever insane shapeshifter had thought it was a good idea to infect a child with lycanthropy, especially wereravenism, should be slowly boiled to death over the course of years by the witches. The problem was that the only person that she knew that could offer the "pure gift" of species undifferentiated lycanthropy was William Mohan.

She'd seen him use it to create Weresnakes out of rattlers. It wasn't a particuarly pleasant experience, and Chi-Wong had only been an observer. For the participants it was extremely painful and sickening, even for the giver.

Considering that the girl had shown up at Mohan's doorstep, it was hard to believe that he hadn't had something to do with her creation, but he still maintained that he hadn't. He pointed out that of all things, why would he have created a wereraven? Even two months before they'd found her their relationship with the Ladies hadn't required the sudden addition of a threat. They'd even considered killing her in her sleep since then to try to win the support of Bliss back.

If the old witch hadn't been such a caniving bitch, they might have gone through with it even.

So now they were left with what amounted to an toxic waste covered wild animal caged in the house. Lia didn't want to be kept, couldn't be easily dominated, and was constantly trying to run away. The Wolves as a group couldn't just let her go because that would permanently fracture their relationship with the Ladies. And, despite their reputation for random violence and as much as Chi-Wong hated to admit it, none of the Wolves really wanted to murder another shapeshifter, especially a child.

So why didn't Mohan want to just dominate her and be done with it? At least then he could tell her to stay put and she wouldn't have a choice in the matter. It was if he thought that her usefullness in negotiations would go out the window if she was broken but how would the ladies even know that if he didn't tell him? Chi-Wong had no idea.

Good Things

2008-11-16T22:50:00.002-05:00

The NYC Marathon

The New York City Marathon was on the second, and Elliot ran it in 4:32. I was feeling a bit under the weather, but still came out to cheer him on. I missed him at the agreed upon Elliot rally point on 1st Ave, but caught up with him in the park during and then waited around with his beautiful, intelligent and unbelievably dedicated wife after the race for him.

I'll never be able to do that but I'm so proud of Elliot. He's an amazing guy, as long as he doesn't kill himself with all of the running.

Election Night

For the election I went up to Ben's place in Boston. I don't have a TV and I didn't have internet in my apartment yet, so it seemed like the best plan.

Ben went all out, with two televisions (split for most of the night between CNN and NBC, although we did watch a lot of the live Comedy Central coverage) and a laptop streaming MSNBC. Also, since he's a genius, he knew all of the races and had been tracking all of the polling (he was helping to compile the DKos synopses of the various Senate races).

There were, over the course of the evening, about ten people that stopped by and for the most part things went swimmingly. Really, it seems like the result was about dead between Fivethirtyeight.com's predictions and Ben's, and only the passage of prop 8 in California seemed to bring a downer to the night.

At this point, eleven days later, things still seem to be going our way, what with the run-off in Minesota and Sen. Ted Stevens looking like he's lost the seat in Alaska. I can only hope that our luck holds and they throw Lieberman out of his chairmanship on his ass.

The party eventually started to wind down and finally some people went to go downstairs to smoke (yes, winning an election is just like having sex to some people).

After a bit, a few of us in the apartment got a call from the people downstairs to come down and revel in the good mood with them.

Now, I said Ben lives in Boston but really it's Cambridge. People were driving down the streets near us and honking, and people were standing out on the streets in little groups. When someone honked, they would cheer. This was late, after midnight, but I've never seen people so happy and enthusiastic after an election.

We stood out there for a while, and the feeling never went away, so eventually we got the idea to walk to Harvard Square, and by mutual aclaimmation we found ourselves doing just that.

So it's 1 a.m. an we're in Harvard Square on Massachusetts Ave and we find that there are thousands of people there. Many are holding Obama signs and wearing Obama shirts (I certainly was under my sweater). The were climbing on roofs and spilling out into the street blocking traffic along Mass Ave.

Someone even brought a life size cardboard cutout of the president-elect, and while many people were waving American flags one guy was waving a Kenyan flag (I didn't find out about the celebrations in Kenya proper until the next day).

The level of energy was absolutely intense; people were doing Obama chants such as "Yes We Can!" and "Si Se Puede!" but they also did "Yes We Did!" (someone stopped that one with shouts of "There's works just beginning!" which got a cheer) and at one point people started singing the national anthem. Off key, but we sang it with pride and honor.

After we'd been there for about forty minutes, things started to wind down and somehow the idea was spread to walk to Central Square (also on Mass Ave). So a thousand people or so flowed out into the street like a swarm of locusts and down the street, completely blocking traffic in both directions.

Cars that we passed were still honking with support, and people were still cheering back. Someone had a pair of bongo drums and marked a cadence. Oh, right, taxis and buses were also honking their support even when we were blocking the street. At one point, we saw people in a building maybe ten stories up watching us fill the street.

About half way there, the police (who had been with us all the way from Harvard Square) decided that they need to reopen the street lanes. They honked at us, corraled us, and one of the cars stopped in the middle of the group. Then, suddenly, there's cheering. The cop is hugging us and cheering with us, which was probably a good thing since it prevented any hard feelings by the marchers.

We got to Central Square about two a.m., and we decided that it was time for us to head back, but it was still just an amazing night. I would never have imagined seeing people dancing in the streets after an election if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Also, being in a place like Cambridge probably didn't hurt.

Opera At Lincoln Center

A friend of mine from San Francisco was visiting on the 5th. At first I thought we were going to miss each other, but then he called to let me know that his pseudo date had canceled on him, and he had an extra ticket to the Metropolitan Opera and would I like to attend in his place?

Yes I would.

The Opera was "Doctor Atomic" and it was about the Manhattan Project, which is an interesting topic to me because I'm on the periphery of science geekdom and I'm from the area in which the Opera was set (large chunks are set in the town of Los Alamos, which is where the ice skating rink I went to as a child was).

At first I thought the writing was crap, until my friend pointed out to me that it was adapted mostly from unclassified Manhattan Project documents, personal notes, and poetry that Oppenheimer was interested in. The music itself was beautiful though and one song (Three Person'd God, I think it was called) was especially magical.

The set design, lighting, and the various performances were quite impressive as well. It was a great night.

Movies

Also been to a few movies with Elliot and friends of his this week. Zack and Miri was cute and although I love Katie Morgan she looked . . . not great. I was also attracted to the guy that plays Jay in "Jay and Silent Bob" and I'm still really confused about that.

I don't remember anyone saying that Quantum of Solace was part two to Casino Royale's part one, but Elliot was right, it is. Without seeing Casino Royale, I would have been completely lost through large sections of QoS.

Internet

Finally on Friday I got reliable internet service in my apartment. Yay! I also badly twisted my ankle but that doesn't conform to the title of this blog entry, so I'm not going to think about that until the next time I have to stand up.

Connie Willis Musings

2008-11-12T01:27:00.000-05:00

Connie Willis is a freaking genius. I think that's three of four books that have left me crying, and the only reason that I don't think it was four for four was that the first one I read was sort of a comedy.

Bellwether was the first book that I read (I had it lying around in a stack of books that I didn't intend to read and then noticed that the author was the same as some of the ones on my "Award Winners" buy list, and it's the book that I now recommend to my scientist friends because to me, a non-scientist, it seems like the closest that I think I will ever come to understanding the life of a scientist. When B. talks about his work I flash to that book.

It was funny too, with the few sensible characters in a world of madness that's a theme of Willis'. In the strictest of senses, it wasn't so much science fiction as it was fiction involving scientists. There's the problem with that tag; it's impossible to differentiate between the genre and the latter with those words without a sentence to explain.

And then I read Doomsday Book, which left me crying for the sheer overwhelming pain expressed therein. I mean, really, it's been years since I can remember crying at the end of the novel. I think I cried at the end of The Dark Is Rising sequence and I may have cried at something that David Eddings wrote, but in recent years there aren't many books that I can point to as tearjerkers.

Doomsday Book won the Hugo, Locus and the Nebula awards and it deserved them. Indisputably, in my opinion. It was a work of art and it's one of the reasons that I think that relegating genre to the back of the bookstore is freaking criminal.

And then I read To Say Nothing Of The Dog . . . ah. I forgot To Say Nothing Of The Dog in my count in the second sentence. I didn't cry at the end of that one, but that doesn't reduce the number of Connie Willis books that I've cried at down to two. Now that I think of it, the real number is five, two that I haven't cried at and three that I have.

To Say Nothing Of The Dog is another one of those books that I saw labeled as science fiction comedy but I can't remember where I saw that. And it's not really laugh out loud ha-ha comedy like Asprin's Phule and M.Y.T.H. Inc. books or Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide or Terry Pratchett's Discworld. In a sense it's a bit comedic and I guess it could be considered to be funny, but it's more of a comedy of errors, where the character of the father is played by the space/time continuum. All sorts of little strings come together to get the lead man to come together with the lead woman and it really revolves more around the cat than the dog.

Those two books, read in succession, are what convinced me that Connie Willis was British. People write what they know and both Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog are set in England (always a good place to base time travel). They also convinced me that sometimes the books that win Hugo's or Nebula's are not only technically very well written but they're absorbing as all hell.

Just before I left, I guess this would have been in late August or early September, I went to Bubonicon, where I got to hang out with Steve Gould and Laura J. Mixon a bit. I also discovered that the Sci-Fi retailer down from Boulder (I'm sure I've got one of their cards around somewhere, but I don't remember their name) had a stack of Connie Willis books signed because she was actually from Colorado and apparently will sign just about anything that you stick in front of her. So I bought five signed books from them and my only regret is that I didn't buy more, such as signed copies of the books that I already had. I just tell myself though that maybe I'll be able to get my already purchased copies signed and maybe even personalized someday. There's a huge hardcover and I'm seriously thinking about buying it the next time I see it, regardless of its $40+ price. It's worth it. Or I bet it will be.

So then I read Passage by Willis and It seemed like one of her earlier works (although without the internet I have absolutely no idea if it's one of her earliest works or latest works, or possibly even middle of the career works. The characters didn't seem as polished and the plot seemed to struggle at time (that's the problem with comedic plots: if you don't play them just right the constant stream of misunderstandings and he said/she said and walking past each other can get old fast.

I kept thinking of Doomsday Book as I read Passage though. It had echoes of it, with the heavy themes and the constant treatment of death but I kept telling myself that it was different, that I wouldn't cry at the end.

Mrs. Willis made a liar out of me.

Doomsday Book and Passage are sad. Technically, Doomsday Book even has a bit of a happy ending but at the same time they drag you down and point to something sad and say "grok" and you're forced to do so. That's impressive in any genre.

The last one, the one that I just finished as my third book for the day (finished Mother of Storms, read a cute gay fluffy mystery, and will start Zoe's Tale by Scalzi after I finish this post) was the novella Remake, which wasn't really sad. The water in my eyes was probably more something of joy than something of sadness. It was bittersweet at the end, but still hauntingly sad. Willis knows how to write damaged characters that don't know what they want in the same vein that I want to write.

She also knows how to write characters that want things. If you write what you know, that's something that I think I'd probably have trouble with.

She also researches her books into the ground. If I went back in time to look at the locations described in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog I suspect that I would be able to recognize them without too much trouble . . . those that can be researched in the 20th and 21st centuries that is. Bellwether, Passage and Remake were full of references to things that I know must have required hundreds of hours of research with a notebook. I can't even imagine what her notes look like though because sometimes I would see an offhand comment and think to myself that one line must have required dozens of hours of research by itself. How she planned everything at that detail out ahead of time so that she could read the medical journals and the histories and watch all those old movies marking out instances of alcohol, tobacco and drug use is beyond me.

If I was half the writer or researchers that Willis is, I think I'd be in a much better position with my life.

I have to wonder if she'd be interested in a cheap assistant, perhaps someone that she might be able to mould into a good writer. Yarg. I don't understand sometimes why apprenticeships are dead. Seems like a perfectly valid way to learn a trade to me.

Brain Simulation and Hacking

2008-11-10T01:17:00.004-05:00

Happy Birthday Bro.

Spoilers for: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Accelerando by Charles Stross, The Android's Dream by John Scalzi, the Otherland quartet by Tad Williams, and Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Warning: Very Long.

I've been reading books recently in which the humans sometimes exist as simulated brains in simulated digital environments. Off the top of my head, this encompasses the Hyperion Cantos by Simmons, Accelerando by Stross, The Android's Dream by Scalzi, and the Otherland quartet by Williams.

In order of technological complexity those books are in reverse order and so the world in which Otherland is set has the most difficulty simulating the human mind, while in the AI universe of Simmons or the computronium of Stross the process is fairly easy.

There are a few problems with modeling the staggering complexity of the human mind that I haven't see addressed yet, and I'd like to consider that for a moment.

First, none of the books go through the painful phase in which a human mind has been adequately mapped but the computational power required to process even a few simulated moments takes a distributed computer network minutes to produce.

Let's consider The Android's Dream for a moment. Scalzi suggests that the only way to model a human brain is through a capture at the subatomic level, at the level where quantum uncertainty provides the unpredictable nature of human thought. Thus, the boys go in, scan themselves, and leave.

Years later, when the simulation of Brian Javna is compiled on a supercomputer the brain runs incredibly quickly. In fact, it turns into a super-program, able to rewrite, exploit, and interact with computers at a superhuman level.

Why would it run that fast though?

We're talking about a simulation of a human brain in which not only is the behavior of every electrical impulse through a brain is mapped, but the behavior of every molecule and atom in every molecule is accounted for.

To get some idea of how complicated this is, remember that the question of how proteins "fold" (i.e. how atoms fit together to create the complex organic molecules that form the building blocks of living creatures) requires huge distributed computing networks made up of thousands of machines. If you've got a PS3, you might be part of this effort through Folding@home.

To model the brain is worse. The chemicals that surround each neuron modify the electrical impulses of thought to provide memory and emotion. Which means that for every thought that occurs in your head not only do you have to account for the very complicated path that the thought travels through, but you have to know what molecules surround the path and what effect they'll have on the thought.

Neurons are connected in sequence, true, but not in direct linear or binary sequence either, which might have made it easier on the computer. If an electrical impulse has four potential paths in a human head the computer will have to attempt to figure out where it goes in binary questions (Does it travel through path one? No, so it continues on. Does it travel through path two? No, so it continues on. Does it travel through path three? No. Does it travel through path four? Yes, and now there are another four possibilities that need to be accounted for). This means that for the work that the neurons sitting in the grey goop on your head can do relatively easily, a computer has a much more complicated path to travel.

There are problems on the other side too: Assuming that the computer can accurately run the physical simulation of a human mind, how does it know what all those chemicals and impulses mean? So now the computer has to figure out what all of those slight changes mean in terms of mood, thought and memory and convert all that meaning into binary again so that the artificial human intelligence can express itself.

So I found that it strained credibility in my mind when the character in The Android's Dream woke up in a computer and found that he processed information faster than normal. In a world with binary electronic computers the electronic modeling of a human brain would require so much computer processing power that it's highly unlikely that it could be simulated as a whole without serious latency between sections.

I would have expected instead to find that the character woke up in a fog, in which part of his brain was simulated first, and then another part, and then another part, and then all melded together in stages as the computer struggles to process all that minutia. In the end, the artificial mind might think that it was alive, but each moment that passed for it would actually be several "real" moments.

Imagine what that would be like for the brain; you receive a stimulus, perhaps a bang. Instead of being able to flinch from the sound, it would require the computer program to figure out that you would want to flinch from the sound, and then figure out what your response would be . . . in sections. Instead of being able to access memories and parts of your mind all at once, your memories might lag behind your current thoughts for a moment while the computer struggled with a particularly complex chemical reaction, or vice versa.

That previous paragraph is a bit vague so let me try to lay this out even more clearly. If the sound I mentioned before were a voice instead of a bang, the computer program would have to figure out how the voice affected the ear, which in turn affected the auditory nerve, which in turn would communicate with the brain. The brain would access voice and try to interpret it by accessing memory of voice, and so the computer would have to track each of the chemicals as the memories were accessed and then back as the voice was decoded. Each of these would be processed separately, and so would your reaction to it.

Do you know what it feels like to realize that different sections of your brain are operating at different speeds? I can't imagine that the feeling is pleasant.

So, to hide the fact that your brain is running at different speeds, the computer simulation will have to slow the entire process down to the lowest common denominator. For something that's already running slowly, this is only more time passing that the computer simulated brain can't work with.

The end result is that not only do you have a mind in a fog, you have a mind running very slowly until you have nearly incomprehensibly fast computers, and elegantly written simulations to run on them. I'm not a computer guy, but I suspect that this is currently beyond the horizon in any form, even assuming that Moore's Law holds up for the next twenty years.

This leads to the next two major problems that I have with simulated humans. These came to me while I was reading Accelerando, and they're obviously related.

The first of these two questions that occurred to me was, what prevents the brain from being hacked?

You might be able to tell the brain that it is a brain floating in a jar, but it can't be self aware of that fact. Due to the fact that the computer is simulating meat for the brain to run on, it feels like meat. It doesn't feel the computer processing it's every action. So this opens the possibility of major security problems related to the way the simulation is run.

For example, if someone manages to change the simulation a little to prevent something like the dissolution of serotonin, you'll get a happier simulated brain. Another change might result in a brain with migraine headaches. Another might lead to certain kinds of memory problems.

You could also narrow the "visible" band of light so that a simulated brain could only perceive things in blue. Or yellow. Or so that it was constantly stoned, or high, or on PCP.

These could all be from slight programmer error but the scarier thought is what if they were intentionally inflicted on people? Stross addresses this slightly in Glasshouse but he doesn't go as deeply as I would have liked. What if your simulation was rewritten to make you feel good when you taste Hershey's candy simulation and bad when you taste Nestle's candy simulation? Pretty soon you're probably going to like Hershey's better than Nestle.

With even subtler rewriting you could be changed so that you (as a simulation) would desire buying products only from certain companies, or have crushes on specific people, or even desire to give your confidential data to another person. And this doesn't take into account the thousands of people that live on a planet of seven billion people and want to cause random destruction and chaos.

And that's on a subconscious level, where the simulation might be completely unaware of the changes. On the conscious level, there are even more problems. In a computer, the computer controls all of your input, all of your sensory data from the touch of a wooden door to the buzzing of a bee nearby.

A few hours of simulated pain would be a pretty effective torture method, especially since in a virtual simulation you wouldn't need to actually damage the person physically, just convince the computer to stimulate their pain nerves.

At the point where the computer can easily run a mind simulation like I mentioned before there is an even greater problem. A human mind was designed to run on a closed system without direct interface. Computers today aren't closed systems (and if Stross is writing them, they certainly aren't). The human mind has no software protections against intrusion, corruption, or even piracy (if you think that DRM is a pain in the ass, just think about what Memory Rights Management is going to be like).

The assumption that we have a simulation also assumes that the memory encoding problems have been solved, so what's to stop someone from breaking into your mind and stealing your secrets direct? They don't even need the whole brain, just whatever bit of the digital database contains chunks of memory.

Related to this little bit is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash plot, in which there is a programming language for the brain. If you've got a direct connection to a brain via a simulation, you can throw certain symbols and words and stimuli at it to hack the meat brain just as easily as you can hack the computer side. If nothing else, you could certainly run DNS attacks on a simulated brain that would serious impair it's ability to function.

The brain is not secure, and the likely probability is that an simulation complicated enough to handle simulating one is going to be full of more holes than all of the Microsoft products combined have ever had.

I can only think of one way to keep the human brain secure: keep it meatware.

Then there's the final problem. Which for me stemmed from the previous issue, and that is compatibility with the native life forms. Not that there are any right now, but that might eventually change.

On meatware, we are state of the art, but because of the complexity of simulation when it comes to brains, in a computer we'd be massively unwieldy and clunky.

In both the Accelerando and Hyperion universes, there are artificial intelligences that are not human, never were human, and don't particularly like humans. Particularly, I'm thinking of the cat (what is her name again?) in Accelerando.

I'm going to quickly sidetrack for a moment and then tie this all together and point out the Economics 2.0 zone in Accelerando is what happens when a whole bunch of sentient corporations take over the economy and everything crashes as the supply and demand architecture falters and then fails (or at least, that's the way I understand it). But no matter how much computronium there is, there will always be a lack of processing power because use will expand to fill availability. Thus, Stross has his sentient corporations attacking each other with a space for digitally simulated humans on the sidelines but the corporations are more likely to expand to fill the volume.

No matter how big the capacity of a system like that, full of actual binary beings living their self destructive little lives, there will never be enough space for a human simulation to easily exist on the edges. There will always be a race for one AI computer program to have more processing power than it's neighbors so that it can more adeptly defend and attack those same neighbors.

Further, those AIs are going to be better adapted to the environment that they exist in. They are written in binary and can interact with their environment on a much more basic level than the simulated human mind can. Instead of requiring a complicated simulation to think, they can use their binary brains to get the same usage without the intervening necessity of calculating the serotonin levels inside a human brain.

Why would an AI, no matter how simple, want to share the same space with a gigantic slow brain sim? It's apparently a dream of ours, but I can't imagine that they'd see the need to run an emulator for legacy software that can't even protect itself in a digital exchange. How likely is it that the AIs in Accelerando are going to respect a human mind when they've already taken the economy to shreds?

It's a values things and the AIs probably won't have our values.

And let's say that they do have our values to some extent and believed that humanity was worth the space, would that change anything? Wouldn't it be easier for them to keep the meat brains running than to have to put up with meat brain sims?

Again, let's look at it from the opposite perspective: say that we brought dinosaurs back from the dead. Would we allow them free access to Los Angeles? No, because it might cause untold damage and they'd eat resources (and people) uncontrollably. We'd probably do just what Crichton did in the Jurassic Park books: find a nice secluded island somewhere and visit them for special occasions.

So the question becomes, what humans want to live in a zoo for the entertainment of computer programs?

I'm sure there are lots of other problems with digitally simulating a human brain but these are the ones that I don't think the writers that have done it have addressed yet. I'd ask if anyone has any other problems, but that would assume that someone had the stamina to read twenty five hundred words to get to the end of this post.

Update: The day after I wrote this, before I even had a chance to post it online, I read the later two thirds of Mother of Storms by John Barnes in which two people become weakly god-like computer programs. Oddly, I have fewer problems with their method of ascension than I do with those in Accelerando's or The Android's Sheep even though Mother of Storms was written back in 1994. Given the assumption that the little programs running around the net are benevolent and can make significant judgment calls (which you must do to accept the ways computers are used in the book), it seems to make sense.

At the time that I wrote this, I didn't even know that Mother of Storms was going to touch on these themes. The coincidences are eerie sometimes.

A Refutation of Ender In Exile in OSC's Style

2008-10-31T00:41:00.002-04:00

First off, I don't think that I'm remotely good enough to convincingly emulate Orson Scott Card's style but this is my attempt to do so anyway. I've noticed that there are often scenes in which someone intelligent explains something to someone not so intelligent, and this is my attempt to riff off of that.

Second, I loved Orson Scott Card books . . . once upon a time. But I picked up Empire, flipped through it, and didn't like it. Didn't like it enough to tell myself that I wouldn't buy them new anymore. It's tough enough to make ends meet without second hand book stores. So when someone offered me a copy of Ender in Exile, I was quite ecstatic.

Then I read it. And most of it was good. But there were certain sections that were . . . very bad. Including some that were thinly veiled attacks on gay marriage (and adultery [by a women], and premarital sex [by a woman]). Of course, with the defeat of prop 8 by Mormons (Orson Scott Card is a Mormon) I decided to focus on the gay marriage attacks in Ender In Exile.

Considering that his books are set in the future, and so many other cultures are given a more balanced treatment in the books than OSC gives gay people in real life, I've been thinking recently, "What would Ender say to a gay couple?" Of course, Ender is a copyrighted character, so here's my attempt at a OSC scene from my perspective instead of OSC's.

Andrea went searching for Dad Derrick because he was much more likely to give her a real answer to her questions than Dad Christopher. Dad Chris sometimes avoided the answer to questions he didn't want to answer but Derrick always spoke to Andrea as an adult and had ever since she could remember. If she'd scraped her knee she called for Chris and if she wanted a serious question answered she went to Derrick.

Derrick was sitting at his desk his office, which overlooked their courtyard garden and didn't look up when I came to the door.

"Dad?" I asked after a moment and he looked up momentarily.

"Hey sport," he said before turning back to ruffling through his papers. "What is it?"

"Could I ask you a question?"

"Always. Shoot."

"Why are you and Christopher in a relationship if it isn't the optimal social arrangement?"

Dad Derrick looked up sharply and looked at Andrea, the papers forgotten. He looked genuinely shocked and suddenly Andrea regretted asking. She hadn't realized that this was going to be a big deal, but she could tell already that this was going to be a Big Issue.

"Whoa now, Andrea. Where did you hear that?"

She hesitantly pulled out the book that she'd taken from one of the office bookshelves and read over the previous week.

"Ender In Exile," he read from the title and then leaned slowly back in his chair. Andrea knew the expression on his face; he was trying to remember everything from the book and keep it from mixing up with the rest of the books that he'd read.

It was one of the expressions that defined Derrick to her because she never saw it on Erik or on people on television. She thought it was because Derrick had so many books. Not just book files, but actual bound paper books, and they covered the walls of his office and filled boxes that he kept up in the attic. He'd read so many books that Andrea sometimes thought that he must have lived for a thousand years, even though he was only in his early forties and was younger than most of her friends parents.

"Where did you come across this?" he asked Andrea. He'd lost the tone of shock and now seemed more amused than anything so Andrea relaxed a bit and realized that he'd probably just been really surprised by her question.

"You said that anything not on the top shelf was okay for me to borrow, as long as I put it back. You even recommended the first one and I just kept reading them all until I got to this one."

"I guess that was more of a rhetorical question," Derrick smilingly said. "Pull up a chair, sport. Let's talk about this."

There was an easy chair in the corner that tended to attract books like garbage attracted flies but Derrick pushed them off and offered the seat to Andrea, who climbed up and sat on her feet. Dad Chris would have been annoyed, but sometimes Andrea had seen Derrick sitting the same way and he didn't say anything about it and she saw a flicker of a smile. Maybe Chris said the same thing to Derrick sometimes.

"Tell me what the book says," Derrick suggested.

"There's a part that talks about relationships and it says . . ." Andrea twisted up her head and thought about it for a moment, " . . . monogamy is what works best for any society. That that's why half of us are men and half are women, so that it comes out even. So why are you and Chris in an relationship when it would be better for the society if you were with women instead?"

"There are actually lots of answers to that question," Derrick began. "The one that I have to tell you about because you don't have the experience to figure it out for yourself yet is that you can't choose whom you fall in love with."

"I picked out Charger when we went to the pound and I love him." Charger was her little white puppy, still only a few months old.

"But if you hadn't liked him or if he hadn't liked you we could have returned him or found him another home. You chose to bring him home but you didn't necessarily choose to love him, did you?"

That was a line of thinking that she hadn't expected. He'd replied so quickly that at first she didn't know what to say.

"I guess."

"And it's not optimal for Charger to live with us. He'd probably get more exercise with a more outdoorsy family, and I know that Chris sometimes feeds him table scraps so his diet isn't great. He also costs a lot, not just in food but time and maintaining the yard. There are other places, other families, that would run him every morning and feed him the best dog foods and maybe train him so that he could go win medals at dog shows. So should we give Charger up to another family just because it would be optimal?"

"No!" Andrea was severely dismayed. "I don't want to give him away!"

"And I don't want to break up my relationship with Chris. Hopefully, he doesn't want to break up with me, either," he said in a joking tone but Andrea saw that he had a serious look in his eyes. "That's life. It's not optimal."

"In the book though, there's a section where two people want to have a baby but they don't because the man says that it isn't right, that they have to respect monogamy. If what you want matters more than what's optimal, then why did he have to do that?"

Derrick gestured for the book and Andrea passed it over to him. "Well, first off, even though I think that the man who wrote these books was brilliant, I disagree with him on several things. The situation that you just described is one of them. Allowing those people do what they wanted, with certain limits, would have been a better solution than the one that he proposed in the book. The reason that he wrote it that way isn't hard to figure out, especially for someone as smart as you are. Do you remember back when we were talking about what I do for a living and I told you that writers put a lot of themselves into the books that they write?"

Andrea nodded.

"This author is doing that when he wrote that. Can you guess what he meant?"

Andrea thought about it for a moment. "Maybe he wanted it to be like that?"

"Correct. I've read a few of his other writings and you're correct, he did want everyone to live in relationships of one man and one woman. Back in those days they had questions about whether two men or two women should be able to get married to each other and the author wrote letters trying to stop it."

"Why would he want to do that?"

"There are still people out on different planets that are trying to do that, although not many here on Prospero. Do you know what reason they usually give?"

"Religion . . . Christianity, right?"

"Right again, sport. This author is a Mormon, which is . . .," Derrick paused considering, "well, sort of like Christianity. For now we might as well consider it to be Christianity."

Andrea shook her head, "I don't understand that at all. If they're Christians, why would they care what non-Christians do?"

"Religion is a complicated and very difficult thing to discuss. People have been debating religion for thousands and thousands of years. Sometimes people get it in their heads that they're right and that everyone else needs to go along with them. So those people go out and try to covert everyone to live in a particular way and they usually hurt a lot of people doing it."

"What if someone decides that they're right and goes out and tries to force the people converting other people that they're right?"

"That's what causes wars, sport."

"Why do they think that they're right if it always leads to bad things happening?"

"This is why religion is such a tricky thing. People are afraid of things like death, or crime, or people that are different and one of the ways that they cope with all of that fear is by creating religion."

Andrea thought about that for a moment. "Like if someone's afraid of death they'll invent heaven so that even if they die they'll be able to think they're living forever?"

Derrick laughed. "You're too smart for your own good, sport."

An unpleasant thought had occurred to Andrea though. "What if we're not right? What if the Christians are?"

Derrick shrugged, his face now carefully impassive. "That's a good questions, and it's the hardest one in the bunch to answer. Unfortunately there isn't any evidence for all of their claims than there is for our—I should say my—lack of claims. Some day you'll probably have to weigh all of the things that people claim and make a decision about what you are going to believe. But there's a big difference between us and the Christians that told other people that two men getting married was, uh, not the "optimal social arrangement" and I think it's what defines us."

"We don't try to force our views on other people."

"Got it one. So even if we're wrong we aren't forcing other people to be wrong too. These days most people agree with that, and we let people live and let live as long as they respect everyone else’s choices to do the same thing." Dad Derrick paused one more time. He was always so careful about speaking and writing things. "I just want to make one thing clear to you. Do you remember Carol and Steven? They stayed with us for a few days a few years back?"

Andrea pinched her face together, but try as she might she couldn't recall them. Chris, and Derrick to a lesser extent, had friends from all over that would sometimes come and stay in their guest house for a few days.

"Okay, what about your friend Dustin? You know his parents?"

Dustin's birthday party had only been two weeks ago and he'd had a huge party in the desert biome on the southern continent with dino rides. She couldn't have forgotten his tall and pale parents as quickly as that. She nodded.

"Dustin's family are all Christians. So are a lot of people on Prospero. After the Neopagans and the Buddhists, they're next largest religious group on the planet."

Andrea's eyes widened, but Derrick wasn't done yet.

"What I'm trying to say is that not all Christians are the sort of people that try to impose their beliefs on other people. Most of them are really nice people, and a lot of Christians are people that will fight for the rights of people everywhere to keep living their lives. Just because a few of them are wrong, that doesn't mean that all of them are. Do you understand?" he asked seriously.

Andrea nodded.

"Okay. Well. Do you have any more questions about the book?"

Andrea considered that. "No. Not right now."

"Alright, but if you have any other questions, you can always come and ask me."

She smiled, "I know dad," and went over to give him a hug.

I Need A Girlfriend

2008-10-12T03:59:00.001-04:00

I went out to a bar called Barracuda today. Not in honor of Sarah Palin, but because it was the only place on a list of five clubs that I was planning on going to that I could actually find.

Still, I'm alone in my room now, typing on my computer because one of the only two people that acknowledged my presence tonight was one of those girls that likes to hang out with gay guys.

I know what the term is. I just don't feel like using it right now.

The other person was the coat check guy, so he doesn't count.

I wish I had someone like that, who I could call and take to a gay club that is willing to go but probably won't end up leaving with the guy that I like at the end of the night. Someone who will talk and listen and laugh at my stupid jokes.

The reason that I went out is because I just feel so alone here in New York. The irony is staggering; I'm in probably the most densely populated English speaking city and I'm alone. Well, I am.

I didn't stay long because I suddenly felt that it was futile. Well, that's not quite true; it wasn't sudden. I've felt that way for a solid week now.

It does feel futile. The people that I know are . . . well, not like me. I suddenly realize how completely stupid it was to think that I might be able to recreate the happy times in my life by moving back to the same city as Elliot or to a place with gay guys. I could barely talk to gay guys in New Mexico; talking to them here in NYC is going to be nearly impossible.

Of course, with this depression comes the mindnumbingly stupid behavior: I bought real meat today and ate it. I'm putting on weight again, and I don't have a gym membership. I spent money that I don't have buying books (The Watchmen, actually. It was amazingly good. I just finished it just before I started writing this entry).

What am I going to do with myself?

I don't know how I'm going to meet people. I can't meet people through friend one because he's Jewish and gay Jewish guys don't date the shiska equivalent guys. I can't meet people through friend two because he exists in an extremely superficial and wealthy world that doesn't contain people, only objects that move and speak. I don't seem to meet people by myself because I can't connect in clubs or just in quick random moments.

So that leaves work, and I'm having trouble finding a job again. Of course. Why would the universe gift me with good luck? The economy tanks just as I start searching for employment.

I will say that I am in a now confusing long distance pseudo relationship, which is making all this even worse because now I have someone that is theoretically there for me even though I'm alone nearly all the time. And I've lost a valuable vent toward looking for a relationship or even figuring out what the hell kind of relationship this long distance thing is.

The lesson here, of course, is that if you only have one person that you feel that you can trust to talk to about relationships, make sure that you don't go and inadvertantly start a relationship with that person.

He once suggested that I would regret having sex with him. Do I regret the sex? No. I regret the relationship. At the same time, I want to grab hold of the relationship so tightly that I can't let go and close my eyes and imagine that the rest of the universe has disapeared. Douglas Adams once suggested that the entire universe can be examined through the measurement of a slice of fairy cake. If I could, I'd make that guy my slice of fairy cake.

Of course, that has three significant drawbacks. First, as my first sorta relationship taught me, these things are like snowflakes and holding them too tightly will make them melt away so quickly. Second, it's not healthy to withdraw from the world. Third, I don't know that this relationship has a long future. I try to imagine pushing it out in the future, and I just don't see it.

Perhaps the relationship would be simpler without sex, if it was a girl instead of a guy. Or perhaps I just need both at the same time, without overlap. Or I need to find it one person at the same time.

The Big Apple

2008-10-09T01:25:00.003-04:00

So, things have happened since my last update. I did in fact go to Europe. I saw Cory, I visited museums, I traveled through Ireland. It was nice.

And then I got back and didn't write about it. Sorry. My bad. I just couldn't sit and get through all of that. Perhaps I'll still manage to get enough scraped together for a future post about it. Arg.

Now I'm in New York City. Moved. In a room that I have claimed as mine, sitting on a bed that is mine, looking for a job.

It's an okay room. It's loud and small and expensive but this is New York City and I knew that it would be all of those things when I moved here.

I've realized that I don't do well without structure, but I can build structure and repetition into my life until I get a job. Grrr.

And that's about it for now. More to come, I promise, and I'll try not to wait until I have a job.

10 Best Flamewar Subjects

2008-09-23T21:36:00.006-04:00

As a long time member of Fark, I was recently considering the queue and thinking to myself "There hasn't been a good existence of God flamewar for a while." This got me to thinking, what are my favorite flamewar topics and why? Just for fun, I decided to compile a list of them, and that list grew into this list of the ten best flamewar subjects.

As is the case with most people's "10 best" lists, "best" is probably better defined as "my favorite," but since no one else bothers with that distinction, why should I? Further, I have a preference on all of these issues except for one, and I can't promise to be neutral at all times.

Also, thanks so much to xkcd's Randall Monroe for the totally appropriate comic to use.

Update: Duh. I knew I'd forgotten something. I've added it, reduced Apple vs. PC to runner up, and reorganized an issue that I think was misplaced in the order.

10. Star Trek vs. Star Wars.

A contentious battle rages between fans of Star Trek and Star Wars as to which universe could beat up the other universe. As a geek it should be obvious that they aren't easily comparable, but that doesn't stop them. Oddly, since the fan base overlaps to a wide degree, you'd think that most fans would be able to find some common ground and sit around and watch the shows that they love on an alternating basis.

Hardly. Just like sports fans, geeks have a massive set of numbers, statistics, off hand comments and other trivia with which they can wage month long vicious battles that set friend against friend. Their contests are merciless.

Unlike some of the later examples of flamewar subjects, Star Wars vs. Star Trek flamewars tend only to happen when there are deliberately provoked. Many Star Wars of Star Trek threads continue without issue and only deteriorate when deliberate comparisons are drawn with the opposing franchise.

Considering the viciousness, it's worth pointing out that the two intellectual properties were developed with wildly different intentions and themes. Star Wars is more closely related to an epic fantasy than the optimist futurism of Star Trek. Star Trek endeavors for a realistic future feel and offering commentary on real social situations and technology while Star Wars is meant to be entertaining and flashy and impressive.

That means that most Star Wars ships will win in a fight. As long as you ignore the Borg.

9. Circumcision.

If you've never been involved in a circumcision flamewar, consider yourself lucky. They are surprisingly heated ordeals in which cut men and "nice, all-American" girls argue for circumcision ("I just like the way that it looks" and "they're normal") against uncut men and "sluts" who argue against it ("It feels better" and "It's more fun"). It doesn't help matters that both sides also have well-intentioned authoritative supporters: nurses are often against the procedure and AIDS researchers are for it.

Many nurses apparently often argue that not only is it cruel and painful to the child but that it's a risky cosmetic procedure done without the informed consent of the patient. On the other hand studies in Africa have indicated that there is a reduction in the chance of HIV transmission for men that are having unprotected sex if they are circumcised.

There are second level arguments on both sides. Proponents will argue that it's a fairly safe and approved cosmetic procedure that normalizes the appearance of the penis. Those against it point out that condoms are many times more effective at preventing HIV transmission than circumcision.

Usually when circumcision threads show up they seem harmless at first. After all, compared to abortion most people wouldn't consider circumcision a big deal. However due to it's popularity in America, and the fact that men feel attached to what happens to their penises, a lot of people have developed strong feelings for or against the procedure. A few words about one person's uncut penis as opposed to what another person did to their kids and those strong feelings can erupt in a heated manner.

8. The War in Iraq (and Terrorism).

Although they have produced a lot of rhetoric and name calling, the war flamewars are surprisingly tame when it comes to a fundamental level. After all, most people seem to agree on the basics: winning, supporting the troops, and defeating the terrorists are good things while losing and getting attacked on American soil are bad. If you agree on so much, there's really only the minutia to fight over before the argument moves on to something else.

Basically, what these flamewars tend to do is drastically distort people's actual positions to produce controversy, or devolve into personal competency arguments involving politicians (which results in a Dem vs. Rep flamewar, see #2). This means that while the words thrown back and forth are heated, they don't seem to score as many hits as more vitriolic flamewars.

While the best war flamewars will be partisan, you can also get minor flamewars wherever someone suggests a specific strategy.

The major exceptions to the war flamewar as outlined above are those that erupt between those people that want to examine why the terrorists hate us, and those that think that ascribing human reasoning to terrorists is somehow material help to those terrorists. I've never understood why a minority of people believe that talking about the history of the Mideast is somehow problematic. These people can make war flamewars especially vitroilic but have been mostly shouted down recently, lowering the subject of the war one or two notches down this list.

7. Gay Marriage.

The general agreement among the largest number of people is that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage, just in granting civil unions. Since civil unions aren't "marriages" then religious people don't care if the government gives them to homosexuals and homosexuals and their allies don't feel like they're getting the short end of the stick.

The problem is that the government is deeply involved in "marriage." It exists in the tax code, in state constitutions, in inheritance law and all other sorts of crazy legal facets. It's really hard to change. Additionally, there's a minority on both sides that really want the word "marriage" to continue to be administered by the government because they think that the changes will suddenly render their relationships loveless. Or something.

Thus, the gay marriage flamewar is born. Even though there seems to be a fairly reasonable middle ground, the people on the fringe keep everyone else from getting close to some sort of agreement on the issue.

Often there's a religious undertone to gay marriage flamewars, which provides a little extra fuel for the fire, and allows for all sorts of "Leviticus 18:22" one liners to commonly appear. Sometimes someone will claim that if gay marriage is legalized their personal church will be forced to perform the services (although this idea is patently ridiculous).

Interestingly, although gay marriage can result in some very large flamewars, they typically only erupt around major announcements, like a judges ruling or a major statewide vote. There's a certain "gay marriage" critical mass required before the sparks really start to fly but once it's reached things heat up quickly.

6. Gun Control vs. Gun Ownership

I don't think there's another issue on this list, with the possible exception of the first place finisher, in which the opposing sides spend so much time ranting about things that their opponents are not saying. Each side constructs elaborate straw men that have nothing to do with their actual position on the issues that matter, and then foam at the mouth about them.

It doesn't help that the Second Amendment is out of date. Militias? Nobody today is in a militia, so what does that amendment even mean? But most gun control advocates are not advocating taking people's guns away from them (notice the key word "most") and most gun owners are in fact law abiding citizens that arm themselves for personal, family, and social protection.

Thus, you have the people that are pro-gun control and the people that are gun owners.

Never the twain shall meet in polite discourse.

You'd think that since this amendment was part of the original bill of rights, it would have become a quiet academic concern. Instead, a mention of gun control or a particularly violent killing (usually in Texas) can spawn a horrific flamewar about this subject.

5. Free vs. Regulated markets.

A laissez-faire system will result in untold wealth for everyone, says the free market enthusiast. Except that corruption, croynism and class stratification will occur, so economic systems have to be closely controlled, retorts the market regulator.

Although addicting, emotional, and interesting, this central battle of economics has never been resolved. There really has been no workable anarchist economic system feasible to give the Objectivists their try, and attempts at incredibly restrictive economic conditions have mostly failed.

A capitalistic mix seems to work well, but no two people seem to agree on exactly where the line should be drawn. The economic conservatives today suggest that the current economic problems are the result of over regulation of industry, and the economic liberals see it as the opposite. Since economics is more closely related to palmistry than a statistically rigorous science, no one knows who is correct.

It doesn't help that the issue is closely related to the existence of social programs. The libertarians find it unfair that they have to support those that have failed and the bleeding hearts find it unacceptable that we would allow people to starve or freeze due to market conditions.

Thus, the major divide in economics continues to provoke flamewars.

4. The Existence of God.

Considering that this question attacks the very fundamental nature of the reality in which people live, it isn't surprising to me that people feel so strongly about the subject that they're willing to lay out everything they can to either rally support or attack the other side.

Another sticky issue is that neither side can actually prove it's case, resulting in long frustration for both sides, who often end up lost in tiny bits of minutia or at a dead end when a believer says "Because I have faith" or an unbeliever says "Prove it."

Although there are specific instances in which the flamewar is based on a particular provocation (like a Richard Dawkins letter to the Times), this is a flamewar subject that doesn't necessarily have to be provoked. A casual mention of God, or an offhand comment by an atheist can sometimes create a flamewar where there was only a peripheral connection before.

Another problem with this kind of flamewar is that it only very rarely strays from certain fixed tropes or one liners. Keep a watch out for the "Problem of Evil," Ockham's Razor, various incarnations of Pascal's Wager, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

3. Abortion.

Considering that it is based on a small range of medical procedures, abortion is one of the most contentious of all internet topics. It has spawned entire real world organizations with members numbering in the millions beyond the numerous websites and message boards that some of the previous topics have to back them up.

Basically, the arguments boil down to a question of whether you support murder or slavery, and neither side is willing to accept "no answer" as acceptable.

One of the most interesting things about abortion flamewars is that the implications of each side have real world application. In a world that has banned abortion, you would be either locking women up for the protection of their unborn children or punishing them for getting rid of unborn children. In the current system, hundreds of thousands of what could considered to be lives are being lost. This is an important ethical question that is worth major consideration.

This is basically the "single issue voter" issue, and every election thousands if not millions of dollars are spent over the slightest steps back and forth. There are even linguistic breaks that are used to differentiate the sides and cast each other in a negative light.

Also, even though you'd think that both sides would want to keep the number of abortions down, that isn't always the case. Thus, the abortion question is sometimes related to the question of abstinence and abstinence plus sex ed, which barely missed the cut-off for this list.

Personally, considering the consequences of a person's stance on the position, I do understand why this is one of the big questions facing Americans today.

2. Democrats vs. Republicans.

If there's anything that the two party system has taught me, it is that populations are easily polarized. One of the clearest examples of this is in the virulent hatred of the opposing political parties here in the U.S.

People can't just disagree with each other, they have to stand up to the evil which is the opposing political party.

There are a few exceptions to the rule, a few bipartisan elected officials that do their job well and are widely liked on "both sides of the aisle." However, once on the national stage, they pretty much no longer exist. No matter what they do, they'll be torn down by the opposing side, who doesn't want the other guys to get a political advantage over them.

One of the biggest problems with these flamewars is that there can be no rational discussion. The sides talk past each other and since people personally identify with their parties they are personally hurt when any criticism surfaces.

Then there is the further problem that there are actually (at least) two axises of political thought in the United States, social and economic. Thus, half the time when you are talking to someone of one political party, they will only disagree with you on one axis and not the other. Socially liberal Republicans are tarred with the "right wing anti-choice anti-gay marriage" label and fiscally conservative Democrats are called "left wing 'tax and spend.'" As you can imagine, this can creates bad feelings on both sides, even though by supporting one party or the other you are implicitly endorsing both their economic and social policies.

Political flamewars recently have also seen the rise of the "concern" troll, someone that pretends to be affiliated with a party only to offer backhanded compliments and misinformation. Unlike a normal troll, concern trolls are harder to detect and can gather a substantial backlash on the way to a flamewar. While usually these types of trolls would be used to mock the opposing side, in the political arena they can actually rise to national and political prominence.

It also helps that many people strongly identified with parties are also incredibly divisive. George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Karl Rove, Ted Kennedy, and Rick Santorum are all easy ways to lead into a political flamewar. Sometimes an individual figure can kick off a Dem vs. Rep flamewar by themselves, such as the way that Sarah Palin recently has been able to do or George W. Bush managed for years by himself.

Sometimes the best Democrat vs. Republican flamewars merge with one of the previous flamewar subjects to create a super flamewar (although usually not "Star Trek vs. Star Wars"). After all, if you've got the above mentioned controversial figures to point to during a flamewar about economics, you can anger more people at once. And find a way to bring in abortion. And dis circumcision.

One of the only problems with political flamewars is that they're one of the few kinds of debates that can get over saturated and lose their focus. So much political stupidity can happen in a single day that people won't know which thread to post in. Sometimes instead of one daily political flamewar there will be a slew of smaller ones that don't get nearly as vicious and tend to peter out quickly.

1. Evolution and Creation.

Absolutely the top of the pile for utter raving insanity, the debate between evilutionists and creatards is the current major battlefield between science and religion and the only thing capable of overthrowing political parties as the best flamewar subject. Nothing seems to bother the deeply religious more than an insinuation that we might not be the result of God's plan and nothing seems to bother the scientific community more than the insinuation that their years of study and careful examination are wrong because an old book says so.

Thus, the best flamewars are born.

Considering that unlike presidential or party politics the vocal supporters of creationism are a minority in the U.S., it would be easy to assume that this flamewar doesn't get much play, but nothing seems to provoke a flamewar faster. After all, both sides believe that they have the "truth" and there doesn't seem to be a quicker way into the heated flames of online battle than that.

Interestingly, unlike the Existence of God flamewars mentioned above, the existence of actual evidence does nothing to reduce anger and force with which these arguments are put forth. In fact, I would argue that it increases it. While the question of the existence of God is something of a stalemate, the debate between creationism and evolution has become a question of "Who do you trust?"

Specifically, evolution and creation flamewars are the nexus of debate between fundamentalist Christianity and atheism, even more so than the Existence of God. While the middle of the road might argue about the existence of God, the extremists are the ones that argue creation and evolution. Added to that are the examples of Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, biologists and atheists that characterize the evolution supporters that have become famous in their own right for their outspoken opinions on this particular topic. As a farker, there are a couple of notable creationists as well. No, I'm not talking about Michael Behe or Kent Hovind but Bevets, the oft summoned indicator of a true Fark evolution/creation flamewar.

Probably the most legendary troll on Fark, it's hard to think of another internet user that is as defined by a particular subject more than Bevets and his creationism. Possibly Scalzi and bacon, but I doubt it. Almost without a subject break in years, Bevets is the tireless apologist for creation, even going so far as to host his own website with common arguments so that he can throw up links to longer rants without needing to retype them. Granted, there are sites like TalkOrigins that refute him, but Bevets does his long and exhaustive work on his own, thus earning him recognizable card game adaptations on Fark.

These debates also led to one of my favorite eponymous law: Poe's Law, which basically states that it is nearly impossible to determine the difference between a parody and a true believer. Although born in the evolution/creation debates, I've found Poe's law useful in other arenas (particularly politics).

Creation/evolution flamewars can be started over the smallest provocation. A mention of a 40 million year old fossil will sometimes provoke one, as can articles on geology, epidemiology, genetics, Mideast history or even meteorology (see vapor canopies). Then there are the subjects that can suddenly morph into creation vs. evolution debates. For example, someone arguing about the existence of god/God might use evolution or creation of proof of one of the positions. The same with the inerrancy of the bible, or carbon dating, or even a discussion of different scientific theories. If you accidentally mention that the cute kitten in the photoshop contest evolved you might have a flamewar on your hands.

Of course this is in addition to the multiple creation museum articles, advances in evolutionary biology and school board "teach the controversy" or evolution banning threads that seem to appear on a weekly basis.

Considering the nearly one hundred and fifty years that these debates have been raging, not to mention the entire religions and governments that have weighed in, this is also a historically weighty flamewar. Mentions of Darwin (both as evidence for the science supporters and as a "Darwinist" insult from the religion supporters) and shepherds that have been dead for 2000 years (mostly as an insult to Biblical literalists) abound.

Finally, I'll end on a high note and point out that it's fairly easy to Godwin a creation/evolution flamewar. After all, the Nazis were evolutionists, no?

The runner up subjects were sex education in schools, various sports team rivalries, "activist judges" (i.e. rulings that we don't like), and breastfeeding. Yup. Breastfeeding. You'd be surprised.

The Honorable Mention is:

Apple vs. (Microsoft) PC.

Starting the list off is one of the most pointless debates that I can think of, yet one that manages to devolve into a name calling match most times it appears. Any time there's a comparison of some kind between Mac computers and PCs, there's always some people that feel the need to belittle people that don't own the same sort of computer that they use.

This is partly due to the Apple marketing campaign which goes to such great lengths to establish the duality of the products and promote their brand as the hip and cool alternative. This does overlook the fact that they are a niche family of products, and even if they could compete with the wider PC market, doing so would probably drag them down to encompass some of the same problems that PCs embody.

Additionally, then there's the Microsoft angle, in which people get to hate on Microsoft. Unfortunately, in this monopoly of hatred, there isn't another company that can take on a serious mantle of opposition to the mighty "M$" more than Apple, and so Apple receives the bulk of the attention. The real rivals to most Microsoft products are unknown to the bulk of Americans, and thus invisible during the flamewars between Apple fanboys and Microsoft drones.

Thanks to the long term "We're better than they are" campaign run by Apple, these flamewars have been surprisingly persistent.

Hot Guys on the Men's Gymnastics Team

2008-08-09T21:42:00.008-04:00

So here I am sitting and watching the Men's Gymnastics Trials in the 2008 Olympics, and I can't help but to notice that they guys are phenomenally hot. All new, too, and most of them seem to be around my age. Can't wait to see them on Tuesday. I've got a huge crush on Michael Phelps, but it's nice to know that I've got some fallback events to watch for attractive male athletes.

Raj Bhavsar, the first alternate, in one of my favorites so far. I'm not used to the really built Indian guys, but I could definitely get used to them if they all looked like Raj. The arms are especially nice and I loved him on the rings, but for some reason it's the profile views that are most attractive. He's just got a really shapely head, which great on a gymnast because it's completely not necessary. I mean they all have hot bodies but Raj is cute and nice looking even beyond that. I wish there was an actor other than Kal Penn that I could compare him with because Raj is much, much cuter than Kal Penn. Here's a cute pic, and another, and a bonus older final one. (Update: How's I miss this one?)

Alexander Artemev, the other alternate is also hot stuff in a Russian looking sort of way. Apparently his horse routine was what put him below the bar, but watching him just now he was pretty impressive to my layman eye. All sorts of fun flips and spins and almost falls. The commentators were gasping. My favorite pic of him is this one. Here's another good one, and here's a profile pic that doesn't make him look like a zombie.

Kevin Tan is of Chinese descent, and the commentators had a bit of a field day pointing out that he's of Chinese descent in Beijing. Of all the hot guys on the men's gymnastics team, I think I'm least interested in Kevin. Granted, he is still incredibly hot, and he's the team captain. Here are two pictures of him that I think are good (one, two).

Joe Haggerty is actually from not that far away from me, so I'll give this guy the chops for being hot and from the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. It's hard to find pictures of him as "Joe" though, unless you expand it to Joseph. Here's a few of his best pics (one, two, three).

Jonathan Horton on the high bar was really impressive. He's the white bread short spikey hair replacement for the Hamm twins that I've been looking for. He's so adorable. I want to rub his ears for some reason, possibly because he's all of 5'1". Apparently he's the USA all around threat, which means that I should be enjoying plenty more of him. Here are the pics that I like of him (one, two, three, four)

Justin Spring is the cute blond boy. You can see some pictures of him in the articles about him at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign school newspaper here and here. I gotta love the blond spiky hair and all of the shirtless pictures that come up when you Google Image search his name don't hurt either. He's the son of an astronaut too, and here is another DailyIllini article. Definitely another of my favorites. Here are some more pretty pictures of him (one, two, three, four).

Now, I only have one issue with the team so far: Why can't anyone stick a landing? I mean, I realize that the Japanese and Chinese aren't sticking it either, but we're Americans. You're better and cuter than everyone else, and you should be sticking the landings.

Ah, okay, the Russians are coming on. More cuteness, but there's no way I'm going to try to figure out all of their names and spend hours searching them on Google.

Update: Yeah, the last alternate is David Durante, the hot guy that they occasionally flash to in the stands. He's smoking hot, as evidenced by various pictures of him. His profile link is from those in this story.

The team is doing much better now that they're in medal contention . . .

. . . and they get Bronze, I guess. Awesome.

Update 2: I guess it was Silver. And here's a bonus pic. Nice.

A Symbol of Sadness

2008-08-09T15:45:00.003-04:00

I consider myself pretty jaded. I can handle discussions about a lot of different things without flinching. Living in this world, being a user of Fark, and dealing with the discussions at IIDB have illustrated that.

Today there was a follow-up to a story on Fark that I missed the first time around. The original story was about a girl, Dani Lierow, who grew up feral in a home in Florida. She grew up alone surrounded by people.

If you missed it, the title of the story was "The girl in the window."

I cried reading that. Unbelievable. And I donated money to her new family. That's the power of those simple words in that article.

I'm sort of shocked that the mother is free. Seriously, sometimes I can't believe what the justice system is forced to do to make deals.

A Symbol of Happiness

2008-08-09T00:52:00.003-04:00

Today while I was driving on the highway I was passed by a brand new silvery sky blue Mustang convertible with two cute guys in it. The guy driving was clean cut with olive skin and dark hair and the guy in the passenger seat had long curly blond hair and his head was tilted to the side. Above them the sun was illuminating the tops of the curly clouds and making them burn in the bright light and casting rays of light everywhere.

Both looked utterly peaceful and happy.

Granted, there's a fair bent of consumerism inherent in that statement of happiness but to a certain extent I think that to be happy in our current culture requires the security that money can provide. I'm not happy about that, but I accept it as a kind of inarguable truth in this day and age.

I realize there's a gap through July. I did go to London and Ireland. I'll have to fill that in.

Also: Happy 08/08/08. The Olympic opening ceremonies were pretty impressive, eh?

Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez

2008-06-29T20:22:00.000-04:00

I'm currently reading a set of YA books aimed at gay teens (Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, Rainbow Road by Alex Sanchez). I figured they'd be candy soft books about characters that might as well be heterosexual except for an unmoving scene in which they come out to their parents. And kiss some cute guys.

Yeah, I couldn't have been more wrong about that. I've been very surprised by some of the issues that these books addressed such as unprotected sex, dating HIV positive guys, bisexuality and having alcoholic or absent father figures. Not to mention the genre classics of coming out and having a crush on your best friend.

In fact, some of the themes were more adult than some fiction written for adult gay guys. The three rainbow boys of the title have sex, drink, and occasionally fight amongst themselves. Yeah, they don't deal with any "hard" drugs but that's the only thing that I can point out that most gay guys have to deal with that the characters didn't have to deal with at some point or another.

After I'd finished them, I was wondering if I would recommend them to younger readers. I'm having this remarkably prudish "No" reaction, which I'm trying to fight down and kill. These are the kids of books that young gay guys need to read, involving interesting characters that they can both aspire to be and at the same time relate to.

Granted, there are some stereotypes at work in the books. Jason is the gay jock. Kyle is the geeky gay swimmer. Nelson is the flaming queen. Still, the book manages to turn these gay archetypes into interesting and well rounded characters. Jason is Hispanic and his father is an abusive alcoholic (his mother is in Al-Anon). Nelson's mom is the PFLAG mother but he has to deal with a distant and disinterested father and his own rash behavior. Kyle is supposed to be the geek but to me he comes across as the most normal guy, since "geek" doesn't lend itself well to gay stereotypes yet.

Kyle's also at the center of the plot, in a vague way. The books seem to pride themselves on approaching each chapter from another of the protagonists view, and this often provides valuable insight into the various personal problems all of them have, however Kyle is Nelson's best friend and eventually Jason's boyfriend. Were it not for his connection to the other two characters I suspect that Jason and Nelson's stories would have been completely separate books.

Aside from the heavy issues, I did like the variety of response that the characters faced. These books didn't portray and idyllic gay paradise where homophobia and disease don't exist but it wasn't a perfect hell either. For example, Jason the basketball player comes out to his team with the help of his coach and the guys on the team take it well. On the other hand, Kyle's swim team harasses him numerous times while the swim coach stands off to the side with a "What can I do?" smug smile on her face.

Personally, the person that I had the most problem with was Nelson. Nelson is incapable of pretending that he's not gay and I've definitely met people like him before in my life. Unfortunately, Nelson taught me that the ability to "pass" for a heterosexual is part of socialization: he comes across as nearly a sociopath, uninterested in the feelings of the people around him and unable to think about the consequences of his actions more than a few seconds out. Considering that he is the character that has unprotected sex, boozes it up, does the drugs, and intentionally tries to piss off the rednecks during their drive across country, I really felt that he got off too lightly. While Jason and Kyle have their own emotional drama to live out, Nelson manages to skate through the books without much more than a slow progression of hair color.

Despite my dislike for Nelson, I can't deny that the books were a pretty good read.

And I get to fantasize about Kyle. Mmmmmmm . . .

Another Extended Update On Me

2008-06-26T17:56:00.007-04:00

So I finally did it. Tuesday I let my boss at work know that I'm only going to be in town for a few more weeks. After that I'm going to go to London and Ireland for a couple of weeks, and after that I'm going to going to move to New York.

Wow. New York. I'm going to make it happen this time. No more neck injuries.

Yeah, I've been terribly nervous about all of this. I was nervous about quitting right up until the point where I walked into my boss's office and the first thing out of his mouth was "Are you leaving us?" Uh . . . well, yeah. I'd had a whole little speech planned, starting with the line "I just want you to know that this is by far the best job that I've ever had" but that works too.

It is the best company that I've ever worked for though. I just want to make that clear. They've treated me great here and I feel bad for leaving them. It's just that I don't want to wait around for someone above me to die of old age in order to advance. That seems to be how it's normally done here and, while I love the fact that they can keep employees for that long, I need to find something more challenging.

So yeah, I've been thinking of doing some traveling before I move. I was torn between a gay cruise or Europe, and I've opted for the ga--, no wait, I'm going to Europe. I'll be in London for the third week of July, and I'll be in Ireland after that (although I'm still working on where in Ireland I'm going to be). While in London I'm going to hook up with an online friend who is going to be attending a conference there, and hopefully I'll also see Doctorow, so that he can sign my copy of Little Brother.

Heh. It's going to be a signed first edition. Awesome.

Other than that, I figure I'll just be bumming around London and Ireland. I'll be staying near the city center in London, hopefully within walking/Tube distance of most of the interesting things to see. If anyone has any suggestions of things that I absolutely must see, let me know.

My mom actually recommended County Cork, which is apparently where my family on her side of the family is from. Perhaps I'll stop by the Blarney Stone.

Gay Pride is coming up this weekend. I did mention that Pablo broke up with me at Pride, so I'm hoping to avoid that this year. As such, I doubt that I'll be taking a date with me. I'd rather take a straight friend (incidentally, thanks so much straight friend). At least I know he won't break up with me there.

Just like usual though, as soon as I have plans to leave a place I relax to the point where I actually have some fun.

In this case, his name is Harrison. Last weekend there was a Gay Pride train ride on Saturday and a pool party on Sunday. I had a nice time on the train so I decided to go to the pool party as well.

The pool party was sort of funny. First of all, it was empty when I got there about 2:30, even though it was supposed to start at 2pm. I know that there's straight time and "gay" time ("whenever you'd have a most fabulous entrance") but the fact that there seemed to be nobody there was annoying.

Second, all of the gay guys avoided the pool. Not quite like it was acid, because they would go over and dangle their feet in, but for two hours it seemed like I was the only person willing to get in the the water. Then there were a few dark clouds and some thunder and the gay guys realized that it was now or never (or maybe they all just had a death wish) and they swarmed the pool until it was like a concrete can of sardines.

Third, I met a guy, M., on the train, and he was nice, but the more I thought about it, the less attracted to him I realized that I was. He was at the pool party, and with encouragement from sympathetic lesbians I finally nerved up and apologize for not being interested in him.

I met Harrison at the pool party. He was older, but he was older in a really cute way. Short spiky blond hair, muscles without being Schwarzenegger about it, and a pair of really cute little swim briefs. He struck up a conversation with me and I thought, hey, at the end of the day he's not going to be interested in me, but I can enjoy his attention while it lasts.

Except then it lasted for a couple of hours, even after I bashfully got out of the pool and M. arrived and I had to tell him that I wasn't interested. About a half an hour before the end of the party, I asked him if he wanted to do dinner.

He said yes.

It's odd, the last person that I can remember saying yes to dinner was B. back in college and that was a fiasco. And now I've got another thing with Harrison tonight and so I've got knots in my stomach again.

Here are the two anecdotes about Harrison that I've added to my permanent repository of stories. First, at some point he asked me to guess his age, and suggested that I'd be off by ten years. So I took a long look at him, took a guess (39ish) and then revised that up by five years.

And I was still off by more than ten years. Wow. If only I'll look so good in my fifties.

Usually people older than I am is something that I have a problem with. I've never dated or just had sex with someone more than a few years older than myself. I think the largest difference prior to this would have been A. back in Miami, who was seven years my senior. Back when I worked for the gay B&B here in Santa Fe, I got a couple of offers, but that was back when I was eighteen/nineteen, and none of them were from guys that I was attracted too.

Harrison if nothing if not physically attractive and unlike Gabe, they psycho, he has some actual personality as well. For some reason, I just don't feel uncomfortable around him.

Second little anecdote: He invited me back to his place to watch television. I acquiesced, under the impression that this was a gesture similar to inviting someone back for coffee. HD setup, 5.1 surround, all of that, but eventually I realized that he wasn't making a pass at me. He was just really interested in watching television. Uh, okay. A friend said that it was a generational difference, but really, isn't that kind invitation universally understood as a come on in the gay world.

So, here's hoping that this thing tonight goes better, and I don't mistake an invitation to watch television as a pass.

This post is already running long, so I'll make a few final comments about books and then head out. It's funny, but I haven't felt as though there has been anything to write about for days, perhaps weeks, and yet when I sit down suddenly I'm pouring what easily must be a thousand words out.

(Note: My review of the "Rainbow Boys" books was getting long, so I've split it off to here.)

I just finished Where Late the Sweet Bird Sings by Wilhelm, and I liked it. It started off a bit slow, but by the time I got to the end I understood why it needed to do that to create the emotional impact of the second and third part.

Interestingly, this is the second sci-fi book that I can clearly recall that deals with multipart humans. The first was More Than Human by Sturgeon. Where I liked Wilhelm's book I despised Sturgeons.

It has something to do with the way that the multipart humans are depicted. In Sturgeon's book, there is the powerful "head" of the group, which leads through a combination of dispassionate manipulation and a desperate need from the other parts toward him. In Wilhelm's work, the various parts are just genetically identical clones that are raised in groups. One of them seems to have a dominant personality, but they treat their fellows as extensions of themselves, while Sturgeon's characters lacked that.

True, in Where Late the Sweet Bird Sings the multipart humans have problems which eventually lead to a schism and breakup of the Miriam group and they exploit the expelled member and treat her as a non-person curiosity, but separate from her parts she regains something of the individualistic experience that her human ancestors did. I can never imagine Sturgeon's twins ever gaining the same independence.

Both instances of multipart humans consider themselves to be, well, more than human. The next stage in evolution, as it were. However, despite the fact that Wilhelm's groups exploit, enslave, and degrade humanity more than Sturgeon does, her flawed characters were also the ones that I empathized with at the end of the story. Perhaps it's just a case of better writing.

That seems to basically cover what's been going on with me recently.

Matching Donations

2008-06-20T19:36:00.003-04:00

I got an email from the Obama campaign today. I've donated before, and in light of their decision to forgo federal funding, they are looking for donations from new people.

I've been meaning to donate again since Clinton suspended her campaign, and so I decided to go through with it and donate again.

However, there was a twist in the email today. They were looking for people that had already donated to match the contributions of first time donors. So I took the money that I'd put aside for Clinton stepping down and put it up to match some first time donors.

Within four minutes, they'd already come up with three new donors to match me with.

Bam.

Now, that's fundraising power.

And, until late October, here's my political message:

I support Obama. You should too*.

*Among many reasons you should support Obama, a few notable ones are: 1) He carries nuanced and reasonable opinions on subjects such as foreign policy, the economy, equal rights, and health care. 2) He is a constitutional law scholar, and taught the subject at the University of Chicago. He graduated the top of his class from Harvard Law, and was president of the Harvard Law Review. 3) Unlike other recent Presidents, he can effectively communicate his ideas to others in English.

Joanne Rowling Gives the Comencement At Harvard

2008-06-11T19:02:00.002-04:00