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November 14th, 2009
November 13th, 2009
saycestsay
 | 10:01 pm - twitterpated
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dotar_sojat
 | 06:53 pm - The problem with books, and the invisible made visible
Books take up a lot of space, and they take a lot of time to read. Thanks to World Fantasy Convention, I've got another two square feet of books to deal with. Add this to all the books I've picked up at other cons through the years and a full-on re-organization is called for!
So I split 'em all up into books that I'm going to throw out/give away, and books that I'm going to keep. Even with that, the books I'm going to keep stack is still too big for me to put on the shelving space I have. Now, only half of those books are NEW books, the other half are books I"ve already read, but intend to keep. Funny how that works; why am I keeping them? What are the odds that I'll ever read some of this stuff again? I have a theory that the books we read over and over are usually books we read in adolesence, and these are all books I read in my 20s and 30s.
Funny thing with books that I've read, I have this desire to display them. I have no idea why that is. Why do I care if visitors see the Chanur series (and please note, most visitors will have no idea what books I've read and what books I haven't). So I split THAT group into books I want to display, and books that can go in a box and stored for display later (?!). Anyway, long story short, I now have one full shelf of books that I haven't read that I'd be intersted in reading. It should take me like three years to get through that shelf! Even worse, several books are random parts of a series... so will I break down and get the rest of the series? And these are all sf/f books, I have a bunch of history books and reference books that I need to hack through. Then there's my desire to read non-genre books to balance out the sf/f...
I look at that shelf and I feel overwhelmed. It isn't that reading is that hard, really, it's that finding TIME to do it is hard. I can read internet crap all day at work and nobody says a word. If I have a book, everybody stops and gawks and then asks what I'm reading. Crazy!
Last thing- my bookshelves in the living room are on both sides of the fireplace-- which is set in this big stone wall. As I was dealing with books I caught sight of some cobwebs on one of the stones. I got a duster and when I dusted off the stone, the air movement caused all the other cobwebs that I couldn't see to move. The entire thing is covered with them! It was like... one of those magic eye poster from the early 90s. Creepy!
Last last thing- the only thing I intend to re-read anytime soon is The Lord of the Rings (which I read in adolescence).
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brent_kellmer
 | 04:50 pm - I'll sleep when I'm dead
I was going to write a post about the upcoming trials of the 9/11 detainees in New York -- I'm strongly in favor of it, since the other option is military trials (which set a bad and very dangerous precedent and about which I have so many issues). But frankly, I'm too tired. Not necessarily physically, although it's the end of the day at the end of a week and that's certainly going to figure into it.
But it's near the end of the year, which means that it's been a very long time since I had a real vacation, and I need it. Especially after the stresses of this year. I need a nice run of days where I don't have to do anything except keep the boys alive and the dog fed. Hell, not even the latter, since one of Secundus' jobs is to do that.
But starting December 19th, I'll be off for a little more than 2 weeks, until January 4th. I'm so looking forward to it.
Current Location: at the day job
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wshaffer
 | 03:36 pm - A literal bullshit detector
Just discovered the lovely site www.fightthebull.com, which is run by some consultants dedicated to eradicating all the bull that creeps into corporate speak. They've just published a book entitled Why Business People Speak Like Idiots that I'd really like to read. But they also have this cute Mystery Matador web app, where you can put in up to 20,000 characters of text and it will analyze it for corporate bull and Flesch reading-ease score. And optionally, send an anonymous email message to the recipient of your choice.
I'll will confess to having spent a while running various recent corporate communications through the app (without sending any emails). Actually, it's confirmed what I already knew: Though somewhat plagued by people who write overly long sentences, my workplace is largely bull free. Despite a weakness for words like "enterprise" and "ecosystem".
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/juicy/cutealiens/happy_a.gif) amused
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readherring
 | 02:53 pm - Movie Marathon
I might be able to stop by Saturday night. But someone has to agree to read through my draft. Please?
EDIT: I'm not asking anyone to proof read it. Just read it and pretend to like it, so I don't feel like I've been wasting my time.
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frankwu
 | 12:22 pm - Oklahoman kids are smart after all
You may recall my post and follow-up a little while back about a poll that showed that less than 3% of Oklahoman secondary school kids would pass a citizenship test - and only 23% knew that George Washington was the first President. That poll was done by Strategic Vision (which has been accused of right-wing bias) and sponsored by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA). The numbers seemed rather not credible - statistician Nate Silver accused them of just making up numbers. Also, the follow-up post in this lj showed (in a self-reporting poll) that 90% of my lj readers got 9 or 10 correct).
Well... Oklahoma state representative Ed Cannady (rep'ing OK's 15 house district) has done what I wanted to do - recreate the poll with the same questions, using secondary school kids from his own district.
He found that they were quite a bit smarter than the Strategic Vision/OCPA poll lead us to believe. He polled all the seniors (inc. the special ed kids) in the 10 schools in his district (325 kids in all). The average score was 7.8 right out of 10, and 98% of them knew that Washington was the first President.
The lack of intellectual honesty on the part of Strategic Vision really gets me - did they just make up numbers? Seems like it. The way that Hannity and Friends just make up numbers about how many people show up for tea party demos. Or birthers just make up "facts" about the lack of documentation of Obama's birth certificate. OK, I'll stop there.
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davidlevine
 | 09:16 am - Tidbits
Word count: 3690 | Since last entry: 1502
Still plugging away on the YA fantasy. I feel my brain trying to
impose plot, but I'm trying to continue just driving where my
headlights can see.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) holyoutlaw posted
a video
of a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,
really, happy dog (ETA: fixed link), to which I commented "I have never before
heard Doppler shift on a squeeky toy." For this feat of scientific
detection I have been
named
an Improbable Research Investigator. (Thanx to gerisullivan for the tip.)
I received a fat envelope from F&SF, which I tore open
with great excitement. But it wasn't a contract... just a rejection
with some suggestions on tightening the opening. Alas. (And no,
it wasn't a subtle rewrite request.)
In his year-end
round-up of Realms of Fantasy, ecbatan calls
my "Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven" one of the best short
stories in the magazine this year.
Artisan booksmith Todd Sanders is hand-making a few bound copies
of my zeppelin story "Love in the Balance."
You
can see a picture of the work in progress here.
On Sunday November 29, I will be participating in
Sci-Fi Authorfest III
at Powell's Books in Beaverton. This multi-author booksigning event
starts at 4:00 PM and includes lilithsaintcrow,
camillealexa, barbhendee and jchendee,
devonmonk, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) brendacooper, kriswrites
and deanwesleysmith, anghara,
lmarley, and others, plus the Cloud City Garrison of the
501st Imperial Legion.
The
OryCon
31 program schedule has been posted. Gosh, that's only two
weeks away!
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frankwu
| 11:39 am - Rivalry
Now that it's November, our office thermostat is set lower - some might say, chilly, or even, perhaps, freezing.
Here in Boston I joked with a co-worker, P---, a Red Sox fan, that maybe I'll start wearing a jacket in the office - maybe a Yankees jacket. She threw a rubber ball at me.
Today, I had a brilliant idea on the way to work. I asked her if she'd be interested in the following bet:
If the Red Sox win the World Series next year, I will humiliate myself, drag myself to a store and buy myself a Red Sox baseball cap and wear it for a week. If the Yankees win, then she has to do the same - with a Yankees cap, of course.
She hemmed and hawwed - can we wait until spring training and see how they do? she asked. I said, Don't you believe in your team? Don't you think they can win? That's loser talk!
She still demured.
Then I asked R--- at work, also a fervent Sox fan. He also refused the bet.
Sox fans, where is your faith?
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jaylake
 | 02:57 am - [travel] Leaving Philadelphia
About to hop on a plane and head west to San Francisco. Don't take any wooden pickles while I'm gone.
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jaylake
 | 02:50 am - [photos] Your Friday moment of zen
Your Friday moment of zen.
Williams Lake trail at Taos Ski Valley, NM, about 11,000 feet of altitude. © 2006, 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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jaylake
 | 02:46 am - [links] Link salad flies transcontinental
Call for masks — A way of sticking it to my cancer.
Strange Horizons reviews Green [ Powell's | Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | Borders ] — Not so much with the liking of the book. No, no, not at all. In great detail, at length with the not liking.
Mercado de San Marcos: 1890s
The Speed of Online Conversation — The Web, Twitter, and you.
Rosetta takes home some pictures — Bad Astronomy with some serious wow factor.
Backward star ain't from around here — Fun with astrography. (Snurched from the Twitter feed of @jstephenyork.)
Hoekstra Helps Al Qaeda — A Republican congressman gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Waiting for the media explosion... waiting... waiting... (Just as a thought experiment, imagine if Barney Frank had done this.)
?otD: How many dances can an angelhead pin?
11/13/2009
Body movement: n/a (airport walking)
Hours slept: 6.25
This morning's weigh-in: n/a (traveling)
Currently reading: The Jade Man's Skin by Daniel Fox
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girliejones
 | 03:51 pm - Hello November
So this would be the third year in a row I've done this but yes, I left a lot of my LSS reading til November and that means that what with everything and anything else, I have the panic of needing to make my daily reading tally or it all goes haywire.
On top of that, financial stress seems to have kicked me in the arse. In much the same way that a friend of mine told me yesterday that he knew he had two deadlines on top of each other but he didn't *know know*. I might have mocked at the time. And then my own *know* turned into a *know know* when I had to look at my money yesterday and realised that I had reinvested all of TPP into TPP. Which is the point and I knew all that but I'm not sure where I thought the schedule for 2010 was going to get paid from. And like, I *knew* the money sitting in the TPP accounts was my personal money ie the printing bills I'd paid with my own credit card and that the official balance of the press was nowhere near the number in the bank account. But I hadn't really let that sink in.
Which is to say, in the end it will all work out, I'm sure, one way or another. But right now I am living on schpilkers (highly panicked, maybe in shvitzing) for all of my waking hours and am not sleeping awesomely well. I have a ton of deadlines all converging on the end of the month and I have to produce a couple of miracles.
And when I am in this state, a bunch of other things get sucked into the slip stream and pulled into the vortex. If I can't solve X, I will look to solve Y and Z, to make myself feel partially better for a moment or two. Repeat. So whilst I know I'm pretty highly stressed right now, when I hit December, there's gonna be this ridiculously huge list of things that I produced, completed and did in November.
And I'm interested to see what I do with that money situation, to be honest.
Number of stories left to read: 257
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brent_kellmer
| 11:22 pm - Slowly but surely.
1809 words tonight, mostly fairly late because we watched the new episode of Supernatural. Love that show, although I wonder where they'll go when they've averted the apocalypse. Tomorrow I'm probably going to be at the reading at the University Bookstore, so it'll be interesting getting in the wordcount. We'll have to see.
Nano:
20453 / 50000 words. 41% done!
Mr. Buckner's War:
39909 / 120000 words. 33% done!
Current Location: Casa Zoologica
Current Music: Styx -- Crystal Ball
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readherring
| 01:46 am - A crisis in faith
It's 1:45 in the morning, again.
I'm still up writing, again. I've done this every day this week, plus my normal working hours. (Which I spend about half of doing secret writing and revisions)
I'm still missing first draft material for vestigial organs and for creationist's polarizing effect on atheists, and I have the bulk of the paper to 2nd draft and proof. Then there's the small matter of press releases and posting.
It's at this point that I wonder if there's something really wrong with me. I'm not an evolutionist activist, so I'm learning a lot of this stuff cold. Embryology? Jeez. That probably won't even make it in. I'm writing over my head on a lot of this. I'm referencing books that I have only read a couple pages of. I have about 40 pages of draft, 1.5 spaced.
Sometimes, I get what I think is a great idea, and I throw myself completely at it. So far, none of these supposed 'great ideas' have ever gone anywhere. The HotSoup website died a typical sad internet death, and my "Moose suit" incident didn't really have much of an affect. I think I need an idiot check on my plans before I start them.
Bleargh. I can't give up now, though. I've already burned too much time up on it. I figure I have until Monday at the latest to finish everything and go live.
Sleepy. Bleargh.
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e_bourne
 | 10:11 pm - To the first tentpost
This evening I finished reading sequel to the first tentpost. So far the draft is about 25,000 words. Pretty comfortable, and the story is jelling faster than it was which is excellent. Fun to run across parts that I still really love. Even more fun to run across parts I don't remember. I like coming across it (both the good and bad) as if it were the first time. That will get harder and harder to do. Now it's time to move forward to the next tentpost.
I was able to get in a nice dogwalk with Kai while it was still light out. We were both happy, although I annoyed him by wanting to take pictures. He believes it should be more walking, fewer pictures! Fortunately he's mostly tolerant. Below are a few favorites.
  
  
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saycestsay
| 10:00 pm - twitterpated
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November 12th, 2009
brent_kellmer
| 08:06 pm - a quarter degree of separation...
Okay, so I was fiddling around on facebook -- I hardly ever do that because I just don't really care for the format, the layout, or, well, anything. Except that it's a really great place to find people you've misplaced. I found both of my freshman college roommates there, 22 years after I last talked to them. And my ex step sister.
But this one takes the cake. I was looking over the "friends" list of a friend in the SCA, and saw the name Robert E. Culpepper, who was a close friend in the SCA 20 years ago. No big -- I knew he was on there and had thought about friending him, then decided not to for various reasons. But then I decided to look through his "friends" list to see if any mutual friends were on it. And turns out that one of the people on his list was named Danielle Culpepper. Since I knew a Danielle Culpepper in grad school at UVa, I looked in that direction. Kind of hard to tell from the picture (it has been over 10 years), but I checked out her friends list and that convinced me. Turns out that it is the Danielle I knew. But the connection between the Robert I knew in Portland 20 years ago and the Danielle I knew on the other side of the country 10 years ago? Too freakin' weird.
Current Location: Casa Zoologica
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