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Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

Do you like superheroes? (Or supervillains?)

Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge are doing a pretty sweet contest for their upcoming book Shades of Gray (sequel to Black and White, their first superhero/urban fantasy collaboration). Due to legal restrictions, the contest is open to everybody, but the general idea is to get people to pre-order Shades of Gray, so as to help ensure it will actually show up on bookstore shelves. (There’s been a problem with the situation there, but I don’t know if the details are mine to share.) Ergo, if you like the idea of superhero fiction in non-comics form, check out that link, enter the contest, and spread the word!

more linky

Because, having cleaned out my browser, I don’t want it getting cluttered again so soon:

Miss D.C. body-slams groper

So, it’s worth mentioning that responding physically to someone groping you is not necessarily a good idea; it can escalate a situation that might have otherwise stayed minor, to the detriment of the woman trying to protect herself. But what I love about this is a) the hilarious contrast of a beauty queen slamming somebody into a wall, and b) more importantly, the way that hilarious contrast has helped make this incident news: Miss D.C., Jen Corey, now has a chance to talk about the truly unacceptable way women are often treated while engaged in such provocative activities as walking down a public street. And she isn’t letting that chance go to waste. To which I say, well-done, ma’am. The more we talk about this, the better.

If you missed it over the weekend . . . .

I posted a new excerpt from A Star Shall Fall (beginning of the whole is here).

And while I’m tidying up my browser, I might as well make this a linkdump post and add in two other things:

Cat Valente on the power of the suit — which I note mostly because, as I was saying to a friend recently, I have essentially no fashion registers between “jeans and t-shirt” and “formal wear.” I’ve sort of acquired a degree of business casual, left over from the year when I was teaching my own (non-archaeology-related*) classes, which you can see in action at ICFA and other warm-weather cons, but most of the time I default to a higher degree of slobbiness. But I really enjoy dressing up, i.e. actual fancy wear. It’s just the middle registers I don’t have much use for.

The Pleasures of Imagination — what struck me in this was a bit near the end, where the author said,

I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don’t care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet’s friends are coping with his death because these friends don’t exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction.

And I immediately thought, “hello, fanfiction.” Because the aftermath of trauma is one of several fertile areas out of which derivative works can sprout.

This has been your not-at-all-regularly-scheduled schizophrenic link post.

*My theory was that when you’re assistant-teaching intro to archaeology, you’ll actually get more cred by showing up in jeans and a flannel shirt than a skirt and heels.

Jim Hines Explains It All

Many years ago, I remember hearing an incredibly vague story about some fanfic writer who sued a professional author for writing a book they claimed was too similar to a pre-existing fanfic.

I suspect that was the product of this story going through a game of Telephone, with details being dropped at every turn. Jim Hines, Hero of the Revolution, has dug through the dustbin of the Internets to try and ascertain the actual facts of an incident in the early 90’s, involving Marion Zimmer Bradley and the fanfic writer Jean Lamb. Why? Because when arguments come up concerning fanfic, sooner or later somebody ends up trotting out this particular tale, often in moderately warped form (though rarely as warped as the version I heard). So it’s worth taking a step back and asking, what actually happened there?

We’ll never know for sure — particularly since, as Opusculus points out in one of the posts Jim links to, the incident almost certainly involved one of MZB’s ghostwriters, and none of the likely candidates has given a detailed account of the events. (Neither has Lamb, possibly — as suggested somewhere in the comment threads — on advise of counsel.) But if you’re interested in the boundary between fanfic and profic, and what kinds of legal issues can arise when something wanders across that boundary, definitely read Jim’s post, and follow the links if you have the time. At the very least, the story is not quite what folklore has made it out to be, and so the lessons to be taken away from it are not necessarily what you think.

Or at least what I thought, since I was operating from a very warped version of the facts. So I owe thanks to Jim for the breakdown.

In which the Cat preaches it, again

Cat Valente on Lost:

But here’s the thing, guys. If you don’t want to get tarred with the SF brush, you don’t get to play with our toys, either. That means you do not get any of the following exciting action figures: monsters, immortal beings, time travel, alternate universes, glowcaves, Egyptian mythology, electromagnetic magic, insta-healing, psychic powers, Dark Lords, Lords of Light, magical touched by an angel fatecakes, teleportation, mystical islands, or bodily possession. Get your sticky hands off them–you’ll only break them. Make a sitcom and shut up, if you want to howl about not being SF. Make a gritty procedural. Make Thirty-Something, I don’t know. But don’t make an SF show and then prance around telling everyone it’s SUPER REALISTIC while trying to conceal your painful giant quantum rabbit erection. You can’t trot out all those shiny SF baubles and then refuse to develop them or treat them seriously.

And while we’re on the topic of TV and not respecting stuff? I’m at a point where I would like to ban all shows from touching the topic of sf/f community, including but not limited to: comic book fans, LARPers, Renfest folk, players of video games, and anything else of a remotely geeky stripe. Just leave them alone, TV people. You don’t understand those groups, and what’s worse, you don’t want to understand them; you just want to toss them in because you’ve decided to do an episode about people who are totally detached from reality and can’t keep their non-fantasy lives in balance with anything else. And you’ve decided we are those people. Kindly piss off, leave the geeks out of your police procedural or whatever it is you’re making, and stick with things you actually have respect for.

It’s not what Cat was ranting about, but it was on my mind, so I decided to kill two birds with one ineffectual blog post. After all, that’s what the internets are for.

two charitable causes, again

Because my first Onyx Court history offer went in less than two hours, I’m doing a second one, this time without the “Buy It Now” price: go here to bid on your own piece of historical faerie fiction. (Now with bonus “Special Richard III Disclaimer.”) The auction ends on May 23rd, so get your bids in soon!

Also, the Brenda Novak auction for diabetes research is still ongoing, and there are still a pair of signed Onyx Court novels up for sale.

The Gimpy Feet Guide to Ungimping

(Yeah, I know, I’m posty today. Trying to clear out some links that have been sitting around for a while, that require more discussion than can profitably be done in a linkdump post.)

Someone a while back asked what I was doing about the problem of collapsing arches in my feet. Since most of my foot/ankle problems are interrelated (surprise!), I figured it was worth doing one collated post on all my physical therapy — with bonus link about barefoot running.

This site shows pictures of most of the PT. I’m doing all four exercises in the “resistance band” group on that page, plus two others: with cotton balls between my toes, I’m squeezing the toes together, and I’m also doing the one where you put your foot on a towel and gradually scrunch the fabric up with your toes. Three sets of 15, each day. So far I’ve graduated up two resistance bands; when I can do four sets of 15 with the next (and strongest) band, I’ll probably call it quits with that stuff.

I’m also doing three other exercises, more newly-added to my repertoire. First, I’m standing on one foot. No, really. Aside from the atrophy caused by the surgical recovery, I also had a pre-existing weakness in my tibialis posterior, which is a muscle that runs down the inside of your ankle and splays across the sole of your foot. It’s one of the muscles closely involved in arch support (another being the tibialis anterior, on the outside of the joint), and it plays a big role in balancing. When I try to stand on one foot for any real length of time, I can feel it crapping out on me, causing my ankle to roll inward, with predictable consequences for my balance. So this exercise is remarkably tiring, at least for one tiny part of my leg. The other two are lunges (of the athletic, not the fencing, sort) and one-foot squats, which I can’t really do worth a damn. I’m supposed to stand on one foot and squat down as low as I can (including lowering my back and sticking my butt out; this isn’t a plié), while keeping my heel on the ground. Between the weakness of that one muscle and my possibly structural inability to dorsiflex very far, this turns out to be a carnival of wobbling on my part.

So if you have arch problems, you want to do the inversion and eversion exercises, the ones where you’re moving your foot from side to side against resistance. And it turns out that helps a lot for balance, too: in karate last night, I discovered that when I do one of the rapid 180-degree turns many of the kata include, I’m now landing in zenkutsu-dachi on the far side with MUCH less instability than I used to. I never thought to connect that with the arch issues, but it seems to be related.

Also — on the topic of arch problems — you might want to read up on barefoot running. This is something I only recently encountered, and I’m not a runner myself, so I don’t have much first-hand knowledge on the subject. But there’s a chapter in the book Born to Run that makes a convincing argument for how our highly-engineered running shoes have actually contributed to foot problems, rather than reducing them. And the reasons seem like common sense: the shoe, by stiffening and cushioning the foot, radically changes the mechanics of how we run. I had a deeply suspicious reaction when my primary care doctor told me the solution to my arch problems was putting more support in my shoes; wouldn’t that just further weaken my feet? (You can imagine what my PT said when I asked her.) There’s at least some evidence that running barefoot, or in minimal shoes, with a forefoot or midfoot strike, will actually strengthen your arches by — here’s a wacky idea — using them as evolution intended.

I’m not likely to take up running any time soon, but for those of you who do it, you might want to investigate some of the minimal-shoe options out there.

And now, having dealt with some of the crap cluttering up my browser, I’m off to be productive on a different front. Namely, folding laundry.

a pair of links to ponder

This post is a summary of a lecture given by Dr. Robert Lustig, talking about fructose and the role it may be playing in the general weight gain the U.S. has seen over the last thirty years.

This post is a counter-argument to Lustig.

I don’t know for sure what to make of any of it, except that I do feel Lustig’s being a bit alarmist by calling fructose a “poison” and agitating for its regulation. I’m not a biochemist, so round about the part where tongodeon‘s post turns into wodges of acronyms and other specialized terms (i.e. the metabolisys grafs), I lose track of the argument. But I can comprehend the beginning and the end, and they told me two useful things.

First, I thought I was all virtuous because I’d almost completely eliminated soda from my diet, replacing it with fruit juice. Why? Well, I’d heard that high fructose corn syrup was bad. Whether Lustig is right or not about the problems of fructose (not just HFCS), it does seem to be true that getting my fructose from juice doesn’t really make as a big of a difference as I’d assumed. I’m still chugging the stuff in large quantities, and I trust Lustig is at least right about how my body metabolizes it. What the effect of that might be, seems to be the point under debate. Anyway, I’m going to experiment for a while with cutting back on fruit juice, too, and see what that does.

Second, the “exercise does not work by burning calories” paragraph was exactly what I needed to read, because it clarifies for me some things I’ve never understood. The math of burning calories never worked out in my head (because it doesn’t, really), so I appreciated seeing a brief catalogue of the other things exercise does, that can have an effect on weight. (Aside from all the non-weight-related benefits, of course, like strength and endurance and agility and so on.) In other words, now I know what “it raises your metabolism” actually means.

Anyway, if you happen to be a biochemist on the side, I’d be interested to hear what you think of Lustig’s arguments. Is fructose (whether consumed as HFCS or sucrose) that important? How about the connection with fiber? Or is this, as the second post argues, just the new “low fat” argument, another attempt to demonize one specific part of our diet while losing sight of the big picture?

I’ll believe it when I see it, but . . . .

Courtesy of moonandserpent: Elfquest movie inches closer to actual existence.

I’ve always assumed the thing would never happen, but if it did . . . folks, this is one of the deep foundational stories in my head, one of the things that’s been with me for years and years and years. A movie would either be awesome or a travesty. I’m willing to risk the latter for the chance of the former.

And now I need to persuade myself that the things I have to get done today take priority over curling up with Elfquest.

reasons for leaving Facebook, longer version

Here’s the visual version, showing the recent expansion of information not only to your friends, but to your networks, to all of Facebook, and to the entire Internet.

The good news is, Facebook won’t be doing much more to undermine your privacy — because they’ve already decided to show just about everything to just about everybody.

The graphic is a representation of the information from this EFF article. Wired has more generalized discussion of the issues with Facebook, and Business Insider gives 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. If you decide to do that, though, read this, because Facebook uses just about every trick short of outright lying to prevent you from actually deleting your account.

I’ve never given Facebook much private information; the furthest I went was to list my schools and graduation years, my marital status, and a few interests, none of which are particular secrets. But Facebook, unlike (say) LJ, allows for — sorry, let’s update our terms, is actively taking steps to facilitate — organized mining of that data. This bothers me on three fronts.

First, I can control what data I post about myself, but I can’t control what data my friends post about me. And while this is true of the Internet in general, on Facebook, any photo tagged with my name is automatically and unambiguously connected to me, in a way that I cannot avoid. Also, changes have made it such that I’m not just sharing that info with friends, and with Facebook-the-company, but with everybody who develops an application for them. Do I trust all of those people?

Second, this is a cynical violation of the principles on which Facebook was founded. After years of saying your information would be private, visible only to friends (thus encouraging you to submit a lot of it — after all, isn’t the point of the service to share news with your friends?), now the founder is claiming that our society’s privacy standards have changed and he’s just keeping up with the times. We all totally want to live our lives in public on the Internet, right?

Third — most offensively — this is opt-out, not opt-in. Facebook did not ask me, “would you like to share these pieces of information by connecting them to these public pages?” It said, “You’re now going to share all of this! Or you can pick individually.” And then I had to manually deselect every single item, because I didn’t get a “no, thanks” option. Given the way Facebook has implemented changes, I have no certainty at all that I’ve successfully kept myself out of that loop, because they bury the “stay private” options as deeply as they can — when they even provide them. Sometimes the only way to stay clear is to completely delete information about yourself: you can no longer have private “likes.” You either have them, and they’re auto-linked to public pages, or you leave them blank. So much for sharing private info with friends. To use the service now is to use it for all the Internet to see.

Which is faintly annoying when it’s just a matter of me listing, oh, music as a hobby. But what if you’ve listed “gay marriage rights”? Or “abortion rights”? Or something else politically sensitive? Now your activism is visible to your boss (who maybe voted Yes on 8), and to people who maybe like harassing activists like you.

There are more details in the articles I’ve linked, but those are enough for me. The value I get from Facebook is marginal: yeah, I’ve connected to old friends from high school, etc, but we’ve done nothing more than connect; I haven’t struck up conversations with them. The signal-to-noise ratio of my news feed is so abysmal I don’t even bother reading it most of the time. I hate the layout of the service, and as for the applications, they’re time-wasters I really, really don’t need.

And I don’t feel like continuing to patronize a service that behaves this badly, even if the actual damage to me is likewise marginal.

all hail the unsung laborers

What a mother’s work is worth.

I’m sure there are a hundred points on which to quibble with the methodology here, but I want to applaud the core idea, which is to look at how much the labor of a mother (stay-at-home or working mom) is worth. The notion that laundry, house-cleaning, cooking, chauffeuring, psychological counseling, and all the rest of it somehow only count as work when you’re not doing them for your own family is nonsense. So all hail the mothers (and the fathers, too, but today is not their day) who keep the domestic economy functioning.

two charitable causes, Onyx Court on offer

First, I tried this for the help_haiti auction and it was a lot of fun, so I’m doing it again: Onyx Court historical fiction, up for auction. Pick your person or event from English history, and I’ll tell you what the fae had to do with it. The cause this time around is ; full details here, but the short form is that Deb Mensinger is lined up for a liver transplant that will cure her of porphyria, but her donor (her brother) has no insurance and lives on the other side of the country. So the auction is to help defray costs.

Minimum bid on my offer is $5, “buy it now” is $50, and bidding ends Sunday, May 23rd.

Second, I’m once again participating in the Brenda Novak auction to benefit diabetes research. My contribution is a signed pair of the first two Onyx Court novels. Bidding currently stands at $7, with the increment set at $5.

Both auctions have a LOT of other material on offer, so browse through and see if there’s anything that catches your eye!

UPDATE: Er, so the first auction is already gone, via “buy it now.” I will contemplate possibilities for other offers.

BCS anthology

One of the victims of me falling behind on e-mail has been this announcement: Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has released an anthology of the magazine!

The Best of BCS, Year One features such authors as Marie Brennan, Richard Parks, and 2009 Campbell Award finalists Tony Pi and Aliette de Bodard. It includes “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips, named to Locus’s 2009 Recommended Reading List, and “Father’s Kill” by Christopher Green, winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story of 2009.

(My contribution is “Driftwood,” for those who are fans.)

If you’ve been meaning to sample the magazine, this is a good way to do it: a $2.99 ebook available in five different formats. Proceeds get funneled back into keeping the magazine going — and since BCS is that semi-rarity, a magazine that pays its authors more than a token amount, I’m all in favor of that! Table of contents and other details here.

Hey, brother mine! Follow this link. :-)

I’m in another Mind Meld over at SF Signal, this time with Wil Wheaton! (And others.) The topic this time around is the iPad — what we think of it, whether we own one, whether we’re ever likely to. Attitudes generally seem positive, but if your mileage varies, feel free to say so in the SF Signal comments.

(You could say it here, too, but I suspect the livelier discussion will be over there. Me, I’m likely to just shrug. This isn’t a topic I’m deeply invested in.)

two links of a political nature

I’m hardly the only person to post this one, but it deserves as wide a readership as it can get: Imagine If the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?

One of many examples, flipping the colors on Tea Party activity to expose the racism and white privilege that runs throughout the movement. This isn’t just about the hideously offensive signs some protesters have proudly waved; take those away, and race would still be a major element, however much they like to deny it.

And, on the class-warfare front: Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I can’t say for sure how strong the logic is; I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also social reasons, linking CEOs to shareholders such that the latter don’t mind paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to their friends. But at the very least, it offers an argument for why there isn’t enough competition to drive CEO pay down.

cleaning out Firefox

March for Babies — The link is to the fundraising page for the family of a friend, but I link to it because of a different friend, who has endured one of the most difficult pregnancies I’ve ever heard of, and will soon be giving birth to a pair of preemies. So supporting maternal and infant health is something I’m a bit keen on right now.

On a lighter note: Why the Library of Congress is Archiving Tweets — I find this deeply nifty, because they’re right: the value of an individual tweet is fairly low. But taken in the aggregate, they form a corpus of high historical value, for certain kinds of research. And Twitter and the LoC seem to be taking a reasonably sane approach to what they’re archiving and how, and how access to it will be managed.

On a note of high hilarity: Marella Sands on the language of sex in vampire fiction — specifically, comparing old-school Polidori and Stoker approaches to the Anita Blake series today.

Another Sirens update — Registration costs go up after April 30th, so if you’re on the fence about going, try to decide quickly!

That’s four links, and everybody says five things make a post, so my fifth thing shall be, uh, me apologizing for only having four. (I actually do have a fifth, but it deserves actual discussion, so I’m saving it for later.)

video games as art

Link from jaylake: Roger Ebert on why video games can never be art.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Ebert, but in this instance I think he fails signally to construct a rigorous argument for his point, even as he’s taking apart Santiago for the same failure.

I could go through his article responding line by line, but that would produce an incredibly long and rambling post, so I’ll try to just hit the central points. First off, he dings Santiago for “lacking a convincing definition of art.” Given that no one has yet managed to come up with a truly convincing definition, that’s a bit unfair. And indeed, he immediately follows that criticism by asking, “But is Plato’s any better?” Okay, so he recognizes the contentious nature of definitions in the first place — but then the rest of the paragraph is spent on his own definition, which at the end, boils down to taste. Art is the amazing stuff. Everything else is . . . something else.

He clearly means “art” as a category of quality, rather than anything structurally defined. Which is an approach I fundamentally disagree with. To pick the simplest way of pointing out the flaw of that argument: Ebert says video games aren’t art (and won’t be) because none of the examples he’s seen impress him. But I guarantee you there are movies that do impress him which would bore me stiff, while there are video games I consider artful. The message I take away from his argument is that my opinion doesn’t matter; only his does, and people who agree with him. And that’s why quality as the delimiter of “what’s art?” is a bad way to go.

More ways in which he’s wrong . . . .