I don’t know if all the details on this are right (I’m confident there’s more we aren’t being told about), but this diagram of the new presidential limo is eye-opening.
Sure, its mileage is in Hummer territory, and it won’t be winning any races — but this thing could eat Hummers for breakfast and keep on rolling.
And the bottles of blood are a nice touch, if more than a little creepy.
Probably my oddest thought of the morning, brought on by the (for me) early hour and the kind of research I’ve done these past few years: I find it interesting that while there were about five padded wooden seats for the key participants of the ceremony, everybody else up there was on plastic folding chairs of a type you might find anywhere. It’s a marked contrast with the physical splendor once considered de rigeur for, say, coronations. There’s no sense that the rest of the First Family are now too special for plastic folding chairs, and no particular glitz for the President himself.
In general, I know there was a lot of pomp and celebration leading up to and following the event, but fundamentally speaking, the inauguration itself is remarkably simple (in its performance as well as its furniture). As I said to kniedzw, the oath felt almost like an anticlimax: the handover of power had slipped by a couple of minutes previously, when the clock struck noon. The quartet finished playing, Obama stood up, and a couple of sentences later it’s done. As rituals go, that’s not much.
Rick Warren: I’m still not happy with that. But I am happy with Joseph Lowery (a civil rights activist whose take on gay marriage apparently boils down to “what in God’s name are you doing wasting your time on the private behavior of loving adults when there are starving children who need your help?”), and also with Gene Robinson, a gay bishop whose invocation on Sunday struck me as very poignant:
Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president. …
Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. …
That’s a radical sort of prayer — by which I mean it makes me think, not of Christianity, but of Christ, and the pretty radical message he preached, which has been sanded down and made more comfortable over the centuries. Anyway, yes: Warren is something to be angry and disappointed about. But he shouldn’t be allowed to eclipse all the other clerical choices; their voices deserve to be heard, too.
Can anybody tell me what happened to Cheney? I caught some comment about an accident, that’s put him temporarily in a wheelchair.
And finally, the speech. If I were given it to critique, I could find things I would have done a little differently, but overall it was beautiful in both form and content. I love the rhetorical devices that elevate Obama’s words to a kind of poetry, and I love the fact that the hope he preaches isn’t an empty thing of “let’s cross our fingers and hope things get better,” but a call to arms, to roll up our sleeves and make it reality. He managed to criticize past action while maintaining a positive tone, which is a pretty deft trick, and one that I think will serve him well.
The only dark note: I breathed a sigh of relief once it was over, that everything went off safely. I’m going to spend the next four (or eight) years perpetually afraid for that man’s life, and the lives of those around him — sad, but also true. Pray to any divine power you think might be listening, and also to the good men and women of the Secret Service, that this historic change doesn’t end in tragedy.
. . . we give you the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.
Ye gods is that man a good speaker.
I hauled my sorry self out of bed way before my usual hour just to watch the inauguration live. That’s how much I love our new President. (Heck, if I’d still been living in Indiana, I would have strongly considered driving to D.C. for the day — though hearing the weather report this morning made me kind of glad it was out of the question.) I have a couple of thoughts about the inauguration ceremony, but as I also have a dentist appointment this morning, for which I should get out the door, I’ll save them until later.
But yeah. Happy day.
This Christmas, kniedzw and I were the happy recipients of a new slow cooker. I expect it will be particularly useful on karate nights, when I come home at 9:15 ravenously hungry and wanting food NOW NOW NOW — but only if I know what to put in it before I leave.
So I turn to you, O Internets, for slow-cooker recipes. Please note the following constraints:
Suggestions? This is a pretty small cooker — I think it’s maybe five or five and a half quarts — so we’re looking more for two-person-sized recipes with maybe some leftovers, not things that can feed a whole family.
This month on SF Novelists, I really really wish I could go back to writing short stories that don’t require a metric ton of research.
I don’t know why I’m accumulating weblinks like dust bunnies lately, but I really, really am. so have some more.
***
I go to all the trouble of figuring out how the Nebula rules work, and then they go changing them on me. But I applaud the move — and it doesn’t invalidate my previous effort, since I believe 2008 works are still operating under the old rules. Anyway, the argument in favor of rolling eligibility has always been to avoid disadvantaging works published late in the year; the argument against it has always been that 1) it’s utterly byzantine to figure out and 2) it makes the Nebulas hit too late to be relevant. (As in, the majority of the works in the running for the 2009 award were published in 2007.) Me, I’m in favor of the change. The Oscars make it work; so can we.
***
The science of fiction — namely, what effect reading fiction has on our minds. I’ve heard these ideas before, but this is a good presentation of them, especially since the scientists acknowledge at the end that they should go on to look at tv and movies and games and so on.
***
Jesus Christ that cat is huge.
***
Cat Valente’s advice to single male programmer types, re: housekeeping. So very, very true, even without the focus on getting laid.
***
Interesting thoughts on core animal emotions, and how they might apply to the 2008 American presidential election and the proselytizing efforts of atheists.
***
Now to deal with e-mail.
There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.
***
The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.
Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.
Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.
This is for ninja_turbo especially, but also anybody who’s ever wondered about a certain lack in Battlestar Galactica.
It’s come to my attention that there are people on my flist who have never seen or even heard of The Sandbaggers. I must do what I can to remedy this.
The show ran for three seasons on the BBC around 1978-1980. This being the BBC, that means there are only twenty episodes, all told. Almost every one is brilliant; the few that aren’t, were not written by the usual guy, and even then they don’t suck.
This is a spy show, but as the main character points out in the first ep, “if you want James Bond, go to your library. If you want to run an intelligence service, sit at your desk and think, and then think again.” 90% of most eps covers the planning, the piecing together of information, and most especially the politicking necessary to make the missions happen (or to stop them from going through). The fieldwork, when it happens, usually looks a bit cheap, partly because it isn’t the slick flashiness Bond has conditioned you to expect, and partly because it’s the BBC in the late seventies, and the production wasn’t exactly rolling in cash.
“Sandbaggers” is a nickname for a three-man special section in the Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6. The main character, Neil Burnside, is the Director of Operations for SIS, but the show focuses particularly on the deployment of the Sandbaggers for particularly delicate or difficult missions. In practice, this means the plots often involve Burnside ricocheting back and forth between the offices of C (the head of SIS), the deputy chief, and the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, as he tries to get clearance for or obstruct various operations. Also, thanks to a “special relationship” of information-sharing between SIS and the CIA, he’s usually wheeling and dealing with the head of their London station. Burnside, being a character somewhat of a type with Francis Crawford of Lymond and Dr. Gregory House, is very very good at what he does, but not remotely afraid to be a manipulative bastard in pursuit of that end.
I mentioned that a few of the eps are less good. This is because much of the show’s awesomeness derives from its scripts, written by a guy named Ian Mackintosh, about whom there is much mysteriousness. It’s widely speculated, even by people who worked on the show, that Mackintosh was ex-naval intelligence himself. The scripts certainly came close enough to realism that one of them was censored under the Official Secrets Act; that’s why there are only six episodes in the second season.
And why didn’t he write all of the third season? Because he disappeared. Without a trace. He was flying in Alaska with a friend who was (I believe) an ex-RAF pilot, and they radioed in a call for help just before flying into the one zone that wasn’t covered by US or Soviet radar. Nothing was ever seen of them again. It’s possible they crashed into the ocean and the wreckage all sank, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder; some of the people involved in the show honestly thought Mackintosh had defected to the USSR. They found no sign of him after the Iron Curtain fell, though, so it remains a complete mystery to this day.
So that’s why you get only twenty episodes. They hired people to fill out the remainder of the third season, but understood that nobody was up to Mackintosh’s standard, and decided to stop there.
You can get the show on DVD these days. The image and sound quality are bad enough that the disc puts up a disclaimer/apology while it’s loading, but the scripts and the acting are fantastic, full of twisty plot and authorial ruthlessness.
. . . and now I want to go watch more, instead of doing the work I should do. Siiiiiiigh.
Re-watching some season two Sandbaggers tonight, I figured out Yet Another Reason why drama more often floats my boat than comedy does.
(The first set of reasons, btw, involved me figuring out which kinds of humour I do and do not find funny — the latter category mapping with unfortunate closeness to the kinds of humour generally seen in modern American comedies.)
I really like watching characters do the thing they do well. I like competence. Whether it’s Burnside planning a mission or House diagnosing an illness or whatever, I can be happy just watching the clockwork go. Some of my favorite X-Files episodes were the ones where Mulder — who, after all, came out of the Behavioral Science Unit — dusted off his profiling skills to figure out what the bad guy was doing. Massive character drama is good, too, of course, but competence can be fun to watch.
And TV is a particularly good venue for it, since the episodic structure allows for repeated demonstrations of competence, instead of just the one big sequence a movie might have. But this, as I said, gives me another reason I don’t like sitcoms: they’re more likely to focus on the characters’ incompetence. I can find that fun, too, but only as a flavoring, not a main dish.
Should read about Mesoamerica tonight. Wanna watch more Sandbaggers. Whine whine whine.
There’s something appallingly Orwellian about the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the abuses it is used to cover. But if you’ve ever wondered how our intelligence agencies can get useful information out of detainees without torturing them, here’s how.
Critics of J.K. Rowling may be tempted to joke that the Harry Potter books are torture, but the real point is down in that last block quote. All it takes to “break” some people is kindness. And the intelligence you get in return is more reliable, not less — while also creating allies instead of enemies, bettering your national image, and generally behaving like a moral human being.
***
As long as I’m talking politics, I might as well also link to this set of asinine arguments against early voting. Seriously, most of this boils down to: 1) it’s better to be seen voting by your fellow citizens, 2) you might make an impulsive decision based on personal preference, 3) omg what if in the last week it turns out the guy you voted for kicks puppies but you’ve already cast your vote, 4) early-voting polls might influence people who vote later, and 5) if you can’t take some time on Election Day to go vote, screw you.
Cause, y’know, all those people working three jobs to make ends meet ought to be able to spare a couple of hours to stand in line.
The closest he comes to a legitimate argument is when he talks about the possibilities of voter fraud and non-secret ballots. But voter fraud is far from the imminent danger threatening to devour our sacred democracy that some make it out to be, and there are ways of handling those problems. Oregon votes 100% by mail-in ballot, and I haven’t noticed that state collapsing in a wave of corruption. Early voting, whether by mail or at polling places, increases voter turnout; I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing.
I keep throwing out every opening I write for this thing because what the story really wants to do is open with the protagonist waking up from a dream.
But unfortunately for me and the story, that is a cardinal sin I don’t think I’m allowed to commit. It doesn’t matter if I produce the most brilliantly effective waking-up-from-a-dream opening that’s been seen these last ten years; too many editors will roll their eyes and chuck the manuscript without reading onward. And then readers, if I make it past an editor. Starting with a dream or the protagonist waking up is an unforgiveable cliche.
Dammit.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. I have managed to give myself enough of a mental hernia trying to leap a particular hurdle that I can’t even write this LJ post without stopping, starting, revising, deleting paragraphs, and generally replicating the exact problem I’m having with the aforementioned hurdle.
It’s like when you start paying attention to how you speak — whether you swear a lot or speak in sentence fragments or use “like” six times a second — and next thing you know, you can barely open your mouth for self-consciousness over what’s going to come out.
I am thinking too much about how first-person narration works, which is why I’ve managed to hamstring even my LJ-posting capabilities, let alone fiction. The usual remedy, which is to stop over-thinking it and just do it already, does not work in this case, because while the first-person narration I have is perfectly serviceable, I’m trying to kick it up another notch, and find this character’s distinctive voice. This is rendered difficult by the fact that the story in question is the Sekrit Revision Projekt, which has been around for a very long time. Convincing my brain the sentences need to go differently is like punching fog.
I’ve spent half this afternoon digging out every short story and novel in my library that uses first-person narration, in the hopes that beating my head against them will produce a breakthrough. So far, it’s produced nothing more than bruised brain-meats. It doesn’t help that the voice issue is tied up in how the story begins; I’ve more or less fixed the plot problems, but I still need a better beginning, and part of the bettering needs to be on the level of voice. But this isn’t the kind of first-person story where the narrator is self-consciously addressing the reader (or another character in the story), nor do I want it to be the kind of the tale where the beginning is framed in terms of hindsight — “When so-and-so first showed up, I didn’t know he’d be trouble,” or “The day my life changed forever, I was too busy playing with my cat to notice,” etc. It feels like a cheap and easy way to get the story in motion, and then you drop the hindsight effect after the first page or so. Lots of authors do that. I don’t want to. But I’m floundering around trying to figure out what I do want to do.
I recognize that, once I figure that out, and the voice, I will have dramatically improved this story, and probably my writing as a whole. This does not make flinging myself at the hurdle any more fun.
And we’ve reached a point where my brain is literally trying to stick squirrels into the opening paragraphs, as if they will somehow improve anything. Yes, details like squirrels are something this story needs, but they aren’t the key to the problem, O Subconscious. The squirrels can wait.
<beats head some more>
I’m on a cleaning-up roll around here, which means, among other things, closing down some browser tabs.
Fans of Jane Austen will either die laughing, or maybe just die from aneurysms.
If you review books on your site, Diana Pharaoh Francis has teamed up with the folks at Grasping for the Wind to put together a book reviewers database. Head over there for details; the gist is, they’re trying to collate sf/f/h review sites, the better to connect reviewers with publishers and authors, and vice versa.
Interesting thoughts from Boston.com on how cities affect our brains. I’m sure the data’s being presented in a light designed to support the conclusions, but I still think there’s interesting info there, about stimulation and the effect of greenery on our mental states.
Sunset on Mars. I looked at it, thought “meh,” then realized I was judging it against sunset photos, with all their colorful glory. This isn’t about colorful glory; it’s about SUNSET on MARS. omgawesome. I never knew that Martian sunsets were blue.
Also, Flycon. Still in the planning stages, but the idea is that it’ll be an online convention, with panel discussions and so on. An interesting experiment, and I’m planning to participate.
I think that’s it for now.
Whoever it was on my flist that mentioned enjoying the first episode of Jekyll: THANK YOU.
Okay, yeah, I wrote a novel called Doppelganger; I’m predisposed to like stories in this vein. But still. The British mini-series Jekyll is kind of awesome.
Some of it is standard-issue awesome, if that makes sense: good bits of dialogue, nicely twisty plot, and so on. But there’s also special-order awesome, like the lesbian PI couple, and the general sense that the female characters carry roughly half of the weight of the show, instead of being a couple of tokens running around for variety. I didn’t like Claire at first, and she fell down again a little bit toward the end, but she had a nice stretch in the middle there where she went from plot-fodder wife to an active agent in the plot. And that was very pleasing.
(The other thing that was awesome? I didn’t have to leave my house to make the magic moving pictures come to me. Netflix’s streaming option, via XBox Live, is da bomb.)
So, for those not aware, this is essentially a sequel to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a modern-day guy named Tom Jackman who’s got more than just your average case of split personality. He’s recently estranged from his wife and children (owing to his fear that his other side might, well, kill and eat them), and he’s being chased around by an evil organization that wants to do god knows what kind of experimentation on him, but there are enough wrenches thrown into that run-of-the-mill setup to keep it quite interesting. If I have one substantive complaint, it’s that I would have liked more than six episodes; I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better off as a mini-series than an ongoing thing, but another two or four episodes would have allowed for more exploration of the very interesting side characters. In particular, the way the opening scene plays made me expect Miss Reimer to have more central of a role, and I was mildly disappointed that she stayed pretty resolutely secondary.
James Nesbitt pulls off the major requirement of a role like this, which is to play a convincing difference between the two personalities. He’s helped along by minor prosthetics — altering his hairline, ears, chin, and eye color, since Hyde is not supposed to look exactly like Jackman — but the important thing is the behavior. David Boreanaz never did it well enough for my taste; Angelus, for me, mostly existed in the dialogue written for him, which Angel would never have spoken. Hyde’s got the dialogue, but he’s also got the change in pitch and tone and especially body language. Hyde moves differently than Jackman does. (He also goes through a pretty wide range of accents, for various reasons.) So props to him.
If you’ve seen this, please flag any spoilers in your comments, since I imagine a lot of people haven’t come across it yet.
I have a box on my desk now, a box whose lid is sculpted into the shape of a pile of pens, and it has a Hemingway quote on the side that I disagree with, and I have put pens into it. It’s taking the place of the plastic Staples desk organizer my pens used to live in. Only that isn’t true; the organizer holds several other things (like rulers and pads of paper and my mini-stapler) that don’t fit into the Pen Box, not to mention more pens than the Pen Box can actually fit. So the plastic thing isn’t going away; it’s just moving onto the shelves behind me, where I don’t see it when I’m sitting at my computer, and in the meantime my Favored Pens get to live in the Pen Box on the desk, which makes me feel much more elegant and writerly because it’s not made of plastic.
This has no bearing on anything I actually do, but it feeds the ego and the self-image. As if I have upgraded my Writer Equipment, and by doing so, somehow upgraded a tiny piece of myself.
I figure, as long as I don’t forget how irrelevant this actually is — i.e. don’t fall into the consumerism trap — I’ll enjoy the illusion.
I wasn’t going to do this because my odds of ending up on the Hugo list are vanishingly small, but what the heck. If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugos, here’s what I’ve published in 2008 that you might consider:
Novel
Midnight Never Come
Short stories
“Lost Soul” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #7, January 2008
“Kiss of Life” — Beneath the Surface, ed. Tim Deal, 2008
“The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe” — Paradox #12, April 2008
“Beggar’s Blessing” — Shroud Magazine #2, 2008
“A Mask of Flesh” — Clockwork Phoenix, ed. Mike Allen, July 2008
“Kingspeaker” — Beneath Ceaseless Skies #3, November 2008
“A Heretic by Degrees” — Intergalactic Medicine Show #10, November 2008
Relevant links for all of the above can be found here.
Today is sucking a little bit, because I’ve stopped taking medication. It’s a little masochistic, but a confluence of things over the last two months or so has had me downing a wide array of over-the-counter drugs, and I’m not real happy with that. So, time to detox. I’m moderately stuffed up and headachy and so on, but it’s subsided to a level I can live with, in trade for not pummeling my system with chemicals.
(Please note that I would not be doing this if I had in fact been diagnosed with strep; I would be taking my mold pills like a good little girl, because I am all about killing bacterial infections D-E-D, and in a manner which does not promote antibiotic resistance. But this appears to be a viral infection, so if I can live without clockwork doses of Advil, I will. I’m not feverish, just a bit achy.)
So. Lots of liquids is the order of the day.
I’m rather annoyed to have more or less lost my week to this business. I haven’t been completely unproductive, but the balance has swung much further toward that end of the spectrum than I’d like. Fortunately, my copy-edit for Ashes isn’t slated to arrive until early February, so I’ll have a chance to finish the things I wanted to do in January.
Oh! Speaking of which! I don’t think I’m on the website yet, but I will be at VeriCon at the end of the month. If you’re in the Boston area, come by Harvard for the fun.
Okay, so the truth is I just stole these wholesale from toft_froggy. But I know I’ve got people on my flist who think thinky thoughts about fanfic, and I suspect these links will provoke much thinky thoughtness for them.
What Started It All: thingswithwings posting about Merlin fandom and the ways in which fandom migrations occur. (Can I just say I love the phrase “fandom migrations”? The mental images are great.)
In Which the Comments Blew Up: various people pick apart reasons for participating in a fandom and what it means to say it’s “just for fun/pleasure.” (Okay, I didn’t read the whole thread, because there’s a bit where it explodes and I didn’t feel like following it. But I read the stuff I didn’t have to hit “expand” for.)
A Typological (Not Typical) Response: miriam_heddy sorts out patterns in the comments to the previous post — so you don’t have to! (Haven’t read the comments here, though. I only have so much time in my life.)
My take? I think there is a degree of social responsibility in choosing one’s fandom, because if giant flocks of ficcers descend upon a show, then it’s a form of positive feedback to the people who write and produce that show. And if they can attract massive fan interest despite being racist and sexist and what-have-you, then I do think it encourages more writing in that vein. (Or at the very least, it doesn’t encourage them to improve.) So I sympathize with thingswithwings‘s reaction, in the vein of, dude, what if we poured all this love and creative effort into stuff that doesn’t have those flaws? And I do not — sorry, folks — sympathize much with the “but life is hard and I watch this stuff for brainless fun” response, because if your brainless fun involves consuming intellectual poison (“women with power are eeeevil!,” frex), then yes, I’m going to judge you for that. Things can be fun and good. What a novel idea!
Huh. I must be getting over the Respiratory Bug of Suck Unidentified Viral Infection, if I have the energy to engage with this.
Edited to add: An excellent comment by cryptoxin, which very tidily (though with heavy use of academispeak) sums up the aspect I latched onto in the original post. Rather than making tempests in teacups about whether thingswithwings is just upset that everybody’s leaving her fandom for a new one, I wish more people would engage with this part of the question.
For gollumgollum and all you others in the health-care field: an article on unlaundered scrubs and the transmission of bacteria. What I liked? Seeing Monroe Hospital in Bloomington held up as an example of how to prevent this problem.
For, well, anybody with a weird sense of humour and/or an appreciation for Edward Gorey: The Recently Deflowered Girl. (Some pages are funnier than others.)
For anybody pissed off at M. Night Shyamalan’s casting of lily-white actors for the live-action Avatar movie: addresses to complain at. The usefulness of complaining is, of course, very uncertain; but at least you can try.
For completing the schizophrenia of this link post: Change.org‘s ideas competition. Again, the usefulness is uncertain, but this is more than just a random web poll, and there are some very interesting ideas there. Also some that really don’t strike me as major priorities (do we really need to be worrying about dog breed-specific laws when there’s the Patriot Act going on?), and a bit of redundancy (spot how many candidate ideas have to do with the environment or marijuana!), but I got pointed at the competition because of the “End corporate personhood” idea, which is one of those random things that gets me all frothy at the mouth. So vote if you want to — you need to make a profile, but that’s quickly done — and while you’re there, if you want to click on the thingy for ending corporate personhood, know that it’ll put a smile on my face.
