In t' spirit o' t' holiday, I think I'll be double postin' today.
*sigh* me Pakistani IMer seems t' have thought I was a lass (or gay, it could go either way.) He eventually asked me if I had any beautys, and when I said "No, I'm straight." He quit chattin'. Oh well. (I'd assume he thought I was a lass, except that me MSN account broadcasts me first name t' t' world. t be entirely possible that me name doesn't actually occur in hus country and thus he has no gender referents for it, but were I him, I would have used a search engine t' figure that one out.)
Oh aye.
Arrr.
*sigh* my Pakistani IMer seems to have thought I was a girl (or gay, it could go either way.) He eventually asked me if I had any boyfriends, and when I said "No, I'm straight." He quit chatting. Oh well. (I'd assume he thought I was a girl, except that my MSN account broadcasts my first name to the world. It is entirely possible that my name doesn't actually occur in hus country and thus he has no gender referents for it, but were I him, I would have used a search engine to figure that one out.)
Oh yes.
Arrr.
So today I have:
Input 10 more Coke Rewards Codes
Read some Oh my Goddess.
Watched Geeks In Love, Ultimate Show Down of Ultimate Destiny, some bizzare anime girl on a loop spinning a leek to the tune of some eastern european singer scatting in a language I don't recognize, the Japanese end of the world asteroid impact video, a 1965 Chevy commercial with the casts of Bonnanza, Bewitched, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a cheesy 1984 D&D commercial, and a new Wierd Al Video.
Plotted something for a D&D adventure some time in the near future.
Made fried rice (was okay, not my best effort)
Avoided writing a response to every article in a 32 page booklet about evolution published by the Jehova's Witnesses and chocked full of either willful deception of idiotic misunderstandings.
Not been Pope Inconsederate Nazi the first.
Written a disjointed "essay" about Belldandy (sort of) and posted it in a mostly public forum.
I haven't felt this geekishly fulfilled in a long time.
Especially when you add that to rewatching Love Hina and Visions of Escaflowne in the last two weeks, DMing an adventure last Friday, rereading Love Hina in the last couple of weeks, playing a few rounds of nethack, and relearning the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. Oh and hanging out in a game store.
The Geek is back. Long Live the Geek.
What are we going to do tomorrow night?
Try
To
Take
Over
The
World
I thought that I had talked about this here in the past, but a quick search of the pdf of my journal that I created a couple of months ago via www.ljbook.com doesn't turn anything up, and I remember it as having been at least a year ago.
You see, the thing is, I really like Oh! My Goddess.
More embarassingly, I like Belldandy.
Let me digress for a moment.
A couple of years ago, I read a book about anime that included almost as an aside, an interesting thesis. It was something like "Successful (or popular) media confirms society's norms." It isn't that all characters always fit into the rolls that the society that the media was intended for's norms, but the ones who do will tend to be happy, and even the characters who don't conform to the expected will really be contented only when they are filling their socially expected roles. For example, Love Hina. Ketaro plays several traditional Japanes Male roles through out the series and as soon as he finds the first one (Hard working mostly dutiful student) his life starts improving. Naru on the other hand is an agressive girl who out performs everyone. Throughout the series most of the times that she is actually happy are when she is helping Ketaro, being domestic, or generally not being herself. By the end of the series she has become a wellspring of calm and beauty who has faith in her man and isn't even upset by him being late for their wedding. Shinobu really changes very little throughout the series, and is the second closest character to the traditional Japanese woman anyway. Su, well, she's sort of the Pheobe role in the series. Mutsumi Is very much a traditional Japanese woman who is happy throughout the whole series (and has a lot of the positive traits of Belldandy that if she didn't have some strong negatives at least implied, I wouldn't be able to stand her.) Kitsune well she's half of the cautionary tale of the series. She and Haruka both differ from the cultural expectations and are both unhappy. (Haruka becomes a fairly traditional wife and becomes happy) Motoko... Motroko is a tomboy warrior who strives to fill her sister's shoes. Her sister also gave up her accomplishments to get married and a big part of what Motoko learns throughout the series is that that is okay. By the end, she is decorating a wedding cake, and while she is still a warrior, she is also a romance novelist who writes wierd samurai romance novels. As she embraces more of the traditional Japanese feminity, she becomes more grounded and happiert too.
Ooh then there's Friends. Pheobe is the only character in the whole series over how many identical seasons the show ran that didn't fulfil society's expectations, and while she wasn't unhappy in her role, she was constantly the odd woman out. The rest of the cast? Wealthy, pretty, white, boring. Exactly what you are supposed to strive to be in America.
(I am hamstrung here by the smallish amount of TV I watch.)
Tool Time. Tim Allen's character is an absolute geek. He revels in it. Almost every bad thing that happens in the show is due directly to his geekhood.
Vision of Escaflowne.
Van: Warrior. As he becomes a better Samurai, he becomes happier.
Hitomi: Dares to want things for herself. Every freaking time that she tries to get something she wants, she gets to watch people die in fires. The only times that her precognition doesn't cause her pain are when she is using it to aid the male characters, and even then, only if she is helping them for them and not for what she wants. (Seriously, she once tries to use her power to get a guy, and she causes the death of a king, the injury of his son in law, and the firey death of a bunch of random towns people. Her grandmother on the other hand, was very happy but only ever did things when called by the Male character who was obsessed with her. (Other characters. these two encapsulate the series though)
Back to Belldandy.
You see, she is absolutely the image of the suportive subsume-yourself-to-the-needs-of-others ideal that is one of the acceptable roles for a Japanese female (not limited to Japan, but particularly egregious there.) Her older sister (one of two female characters in the series who have sensual sides at all) is continuously unhappy. She is brash and bossy and dominant, and a half-demon to match. The younger sister shows signs of turning into Belldandy as she gets older. The Male Lead is actually fairly similar to Belldandy after he gets over the inexperienced letch bit that all harem manga have their characters go through apparently.
Someday I want to read something like Love Hina or Oh! My Goddess where the two love interest characters partner up/get married whatever early on. From the midpoint of Love Hina, Ketaro and Naru could have been having regular sex (or at least been boyfriend/girlfriend) without seriously changing the story at all. From the point that Naru decided that after all she did like Keichi and that she prefered him to the unobtainable Seta, they acted mostly as a partnership/couple (with a couple moments of stupidoubity.) As things stand, that period gets written off by the words "Four Years Later."
Actually on second thought, in Oh! My Goddess, they do start acting as partners fairly quickly. (I'll have to reread the early issues to see where that happens.)
Hurm... it may be that I've found the answer.
If that happened around book10 to 15, that means it happened at about the same number of pages as it did in Love Hina and is thus much too slow.
In Oh! My Goddess, Belldandy really does care about everyone. And while Keichi isn't as petranaturally good a person as she is, he does too. (He takes on a very culturally feminine role in this series. Which since Skuld and Urd and really everyone but Belldandy and the geek girl and the rich girl whose names escape me at the moment are quite culturally masculine in the series, lends a sense of ballance. (His sister could go either way but she eventually dissapears from the series.)) (<-- Still don't see why I'm not supposed to nest parenthetical bits in other parenthetical bits)
She's willing to give up a lot for pretty much anyone, and everything for Keichi and her loved ones. But this isn't unilateral. Urd, Skuld and Keichi all demonstrate their willingness to give up their most important aspects for her as well. While she expresses this as a strong conformation to societal norms, it is a recriprocal trade.
(There is an awesome issue where Keichi is being quietly despondant while trying his best to cheer up someone who is having troubles that they can't do anything about. She confronts him about this, and he tells her that he's recently come to realize that his relationship with Belldandy has the potential to hurt her a lot. See, he is mortal. She isn't. He's realized that because his wish bound them together and they fell in love, his mortality has the potential to be a huge blow for her. Well, it is more indirect in the comic.)
In O!MG Belldandy's happyness isn't because of her conformation to societal norms. It is because she is a happy person. Two seperate issues.
So, I was looking at the PHB today. I had never thought through the implications of the weapons size chart. For a medium creature, a small creature's 2 handed weapon becomes a 1 handed weapon, and a tiny creature's 2 handed weapon becomes a light weapon.
2d6 medium becomes 1d10 small or 1d8 tiny.
Critical Ranges and multipliers stay the same.
For 100 gp, a human ranger can dual wield a small and a tiny greatsword, do 1d10 and 1d8 damage and get 2X criticals on a 19-20 and have a light weapon in the off hand. All without having to take exotic weapon proficiency bastard sword.
08:00. Yet another hour I was not meant to see.
So you can be ambulatory. Which means you have to have a mode of ambulation. This implies the ability to ambulate.
I had forgotten how much I liked Love Hina. The epilogue is quite neat, and I sort of wish that there were a couple of books set in that setting with the main characters from the original being the background characters in the new one. Have them leading their lives, sort of like what the original X-men do in the new xmen groups' comics. They are there, sometimes they are very there, but the new people are very much central. Have a couple of cross over characters (Shinobu, Sarah, Su) but make the story about Emi and some other new residents. (The older characters could be handled like Haruka and Seta. You see bits of their lives and actions, some times they take center stage, but if the viewpoint characters go somewhere else, we quit following what is happening in their lives.)
yane no ue de sora o aogu, hizashi wa uraraka
miageru sora, karadajuu genki ga minagitteku
I liked the fan translated version of the manga better than the official ones I bought. (Comes mostly from them leaving a big chunk of the common words untranslated in the fan translation. There are points where you know that's not what they are saying in the tokyopop edition.)
Okay
Astroturf : bad
viral marketing : ?
When a company hires someone to go create a new identity on a forum, establish themselves as respected forum members, and then plug the product? That's bad.
On the other hand? When they create a massive distributed online/offline puzzle/mystery that ties in with an upcomming product? That can be hella cool (I'm looing at you I love bees)
In the middle ground? We have electronics companys hiring attactive well dressed people to wander around high traffic areas using their products. That seems more honest than the forum people, but less honest than is desirable. On the other hand, I'd rather see how a piece of equipment works in the field instead of seeing a commercial for it.
The sound and image quality is much better on the WMV than on the quicktime one:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/08/30/keith-olbermann-delivers-one-hell-of-a-commentary-on-rumsfeld/
I wish we had more Olbermanns countering the mostly unquestioned by the mainstream media ex cathedra dictums from the office of the president and his supporters.
Just read two mythosey stories. First one was pretty good. Neither had the pointless purple prose that mars most mythosey stuff. Second one is a little too quick with the motivation dumps. The main character draws conclusions from evidence yet to come, which I would have accepted from the first one since it was written after most of the events in question, but since the second one is a series of as events occured emails, is unexcusable.
They both have the rushed compulsion problem common to the genre.
First (and better of the two)
http://www.holyshiite.com/caver/index.html
Second (lots of nice journaly stuff. Should have used several different journal systems though. 2 LJ, maybe a blogger or myspace, instead of all lj)
http://www.dionaea-house.com/
Today I saw heteronormativity and white guys inhabit the earth fantasy described as vanillia cupcake syndrome. Meaning boring, dull, and not worth eating.
Thing is, I don't know that that's an apt name. I'm not sure I've ever had a vanillia cupcake. I've had white and yellow cupcakes, but I don't think they had any more vanillia than a chocolate cupcake has, I think they were just yellow and white cupcakes. Boring, dull, and not worth eating. On the other hand, it seems that you should be able to make a cupcake that tastes of vanillia the way a chocholate cupcake tastes of chocholate. Then a vanillia cupcake could be a sublime experience. That's a secret covered up by some silly cultural assumptions around these parts. We use vanillia to mean plain, dull, normal, and boring. I suspect the folks that think that way have only ever had vanillia flavored things. Theobromine rush aside, real vanillia is so much better than chocolate (Well, I'm a guy. Chocolate doesn't latch on to the pleasure centers of my brain the way it does for women. I suppose that I'd be unable to convince me if it triggered the same parts of my brain that get lit up during an orgasim too.) The flavor is a more complex thing than chocolate's, it lends itself to considered enjoyment. (Quick, run to the store. I'll be here when you get back. Buy a thing of mid-quality vanillia Icecream. Breyers will do. The one with the vanillia flecks. When you get back, eat some. Don't just eat it, but taste it, pay attention to the things it does in your mouth. See?) If you can make vanillia cupcakes lie that, then the metaphor doesn't hold.
So, I use mentadent toothpaste. Usually one of the dark blue ones. This time though, "Replenishing White" was massively on sale, so I bought it. The colored toothpaste is pale green. Nastiest toothpaste I've ever had. It is in the same category (though not quite idenal with) drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth, even to the point of having a similar lingering aftertaste. Blech.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14497678/
So, scumfuck political appointee Steven Galson has lost a round to science. He is the asswipe who decided on his own to ignore the reccomendations of the FDA scientists who actually do their jobs in favor of the keep women barefoot and powerless agenda of his political masters. Well, the Democrats forced his masters' hands by tying up the nomination of another scumfuck political appointee until he reversed his decision. RU 486 will now be avaliable to woman over the age of 18 over the counter. He did manage to spike the process (and ignore the science in favor of politics) by insisting that 16 year olds shouldn't have access. (Er? So they send a friend in to buy it, or use a fake ID. Most pharmacists are decent people, they aren't going to check IDs that closely. Of course there are a fair number of asshole pharmacists out there who will use the fact that it is behind the counter to withold it from women, undermining the whole point of making it avaliable. If you can't do you job...)
Stolen (without asking questions yet) from
I want everyone who reads this to ask me three questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends (including me) to ask you anything.
I'll answer them.
No promises about the truth of the answers.
*EDIT* So I am an idiot. Not only did Istress and strain to find 18 movies to fill my 16 movie quota, I then posted my key instead of the quiz. *headdesk*
A. Pick 16 of your favorite movies.
B. Then pick one of your favorite quotes from each movie.
C. Post the quotes in your journal.
D. Have those on your friends list try to guess what the movie is without Googling, you cheating fuckers.
E. Strike out the quote once it has been correctly identified and place the guesser’s username directly after the quote (whenever I get to it, since I'm doing this while I'm uploading a huge frickin' file).
In my case I picked 16 movies that I could remember the names of. I can't think of 16 favorites. I don't watch that many movies.
yanked from
1 "Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?"
2 "Freedom? We have it! And fame? Nah. It's an empty purse. Count it, go broke. Eat it, go hungry. Seek it, go mad!"
3 "If you're looking for a partner, then stop flying solo."
4 "Our domain is the shadow. Stray from it reluctantly. For when you do, you must strike hard and fade away . . . without a trace."
5 "An intelligent guard... didn't see that one coming."
6. "God, I miss Communism! The Red Threat? People were scared, the agency had respect, and I got laid every night."
7. "Greatness. It comes in many forms, sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice - that's the loneliest form."
8. "There's a time when a man needs to fight and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny's lost, the ship has sailed and that only a fool will continue. The truth is I've always been a fool."
9. "Hey, c'mon. We're superheroes. What could happen?"
10. "He's right on top of us. I wonder if he is using the same wind we are using."
11. "They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession."
12. "That's a pretty big risk for a Science Officer. It's, uh, not exactly out of the manual, is it?"
13. "Archaeology is the search for fact... not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall."
14. "I'll kill you with my teacup."
15. "I'd like to wish you the best in your future career, but I doubt you'll live long enough to have one."
16. "Oh, what a romantic notion. Do you honestly believe that I could've amass the wealth that I have if I worried about honor? Ooh, no, no, no, no, no, tisk, tisk, tisk. So, pretty boy, if you don't want Hugo over here to come rearrange your features for you, I suggest you just give it up."
17. "I am not going to sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I'm going to take a stand. I'm going to defend it. Right or wrong, I'm going to defend it."
18. "Then, if you'll excuse me, but I'm in the middle of 15 things, all of them annoying. Thank you for coming by."
I checked my email today and when I realized that I was excited about emptying the spam folder, I realized something. I need to write more emails.
Specifically I need to write more emails to people who reply to email. (The majority of my email writing in the last year has been to two people. Neither of them reply quickly or even reliably to email.)
So, I picked up several books from the library the other day. Two and four of the Vampire Earth series (3 was out so I put a hold on it. The other person reading the series ahead of me is slow. I can read books 3 and 4 in a couple of days. If I waited for three and he or she grabbed 4, I'd have to wait 2 weeks for the last book.)
I also grabbed His Majesty's Dragon and the new Stackpole novel. I've been waiting for it, though I did forget about it until I saw it on the shelf.
Choice of the Cat was in part much better than Way of the Wolf. More tightly written, I didn't have to work as hard to suspend my annoyance with the psychic mutant space vampires this time.
His Majesty's Dragon? Well, early this year I read 1602, Identity Crisis, and Kingdom Come. In that order. This was absolutely the wrong thing to do. Kingdom Come was wonderful, one of the best books to come out of DC. Had I read it alone, or even first, it wouldn't suffer from an acute case of nicebut (as in "That was nice, but it was no Dune.") Sadly as I was reading it, I couldn't help but compare it unfavoriably to Identity Crisis and even more so to 1602.
Choice of the Cat could have fallen into the same category had I been unlucky enough to read it after His Majesty's Dragon.
About HMD... Novik and Webber appear to share the same source material. There is a scene that is essentially the same except for setting where the problem Lieutennant sees the error of his ways, shapes up and asks for forgiveness. I suspect that this is straight from Hornblower, but I can't bring the exact scene to mind at the moment. This isn't a criticism. Both Webber and Novik have their main characters do something that Hornblower didn't do, at least as far into the series as I have currently delved. They grow and change and shed the bits of their prickely persona that make them less good at their jobs. I think hornblower does too, but only after he marries his second wife and I've not gotten to the bit where he meets her.
from <lj user="guipago">
Go here: Random Quotations. Refresh the page until you find five quotations that you like, and post them to your journal.
Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win.
Robert Heinlein (1907 - 1988)
Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
Jack Paar
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944), "The Wisdom of the Sands"
A ship in harbor is safe--- but that is not what ships are for.
John A. Shedd
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Man and Superman (1903), Maxims for Revolutionists
Runners Up:
There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.
Alice Thomas Ellis
A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood.
Mark Ardis
Work is not always required... there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
George McDonald
Wow.
I just let my hotmail account lapse. 30 days without logging on apparently does it, and msn messenger via gaim apparently doesn't count.
Fortunately, back when I got my gmail account, I used mr postman and eudora (and possibly "pop goes the gmail" to transfer my hotmail to my gmail account. I haven't done so again, but most of the important stuff is there.
So, the west wing was, I think, not intended to be watched in large chunks. I started last night and watched till lateish. Didn't watch them in order, but that's mostly because I'm not really as smart as I used to think I was and I failed to notice that going from the first to the second disk brought me up a lot in episode numbers and I convinced myself that the things I hadn't seen in the intro clips had gotten cut from the series completely. Instead, I had not noticed that both sides of the DVDs were playable. The series works skipping 4 of each 8 episodes, but it works even better skipping none.
And Wow.
Bartlet has a speech early in the show where he talks about the armor provided in Rome by the words "civis Romanus" and I can't disagree with him completely even though where he wanted to go with it was wrong. But. The next part where Leo replies to him and says that as the president of the sole superpower left on the planet he can conquer the world, but if he does, Leo will "raise up an army against you, and I will win." is one of my favorite bits from the show. (There's actually several others that beat that, including when he tells his daughter exactly why her being kidnapped is a bigger fear of both the Secret Service and the Joint Chiefs than him being killed.)
I just finished reading E.E. Knight's Dragon Champion. A great deal of fun. I'm looking forward to the next book in the series while hoping he can hold it together. (Assuming that it picks up shortly after this book, which given the potential logitivity of the protagonist, is not a completely safe assumption, there's a danger that he'll spin it out of control as the scope expands. Probably not, but I've seen other good authors fall into that trap before.)
I know that this doesn't effect as many people as the decline and fall of E3, but it still sucks. Guardians of Order is closing their doors.
Mark MacKinnon was very up front about it and said that their financial problems were a combination of the down turn in the RPG market, the recent drop in the American Dollar vs the Canadian Dollar (He is in Canadia but makes most of his sales in the states so his company, which was already having problems was hit hard by the decrease in value of his product where it sells the most,) and his own lack of buisness accumen.
Mark's company made damned good games, with a system that I would frequently use when I wanted to run a new setting without spending months working up all of the mechanics.
He had made a deal with Phage Press to print a new edition of Amber Diceless, which had me all giddy.
And George R.R. Martin had a contract with them to make the A Game of Thrones RPG. A lot of material is almost ready or even printed now, and Mark is trying to make sure that it gets to the stores even though that means handing them to other companies.
To make things worse, the news was broken earlier than MacKinnon had hoped for when there was a miscommunication between him and Martin. (He was trying to get as many of his obligations fulfilled as possible before going public and Martin though that he was making an announcement about it in their conversation.)
I hope that Mark and his staff and family come through this okay. I'm going to miss his work.
So I've not been online as much as usual for the last two weeks. My little brother was home and we usually split the computer time 20/80 during the day. Add to that my uncle Mackie (he changes names occasionally, but this one has stuck for quite a while) and his boyfriend Jim stopping by after a highschool reunion and I didn't actually check any webcomics yesterday. When I got to Penny Arcade, I saw the thing about E3 cutting way back. Well duh. I thought it would take a couple of years but when they did the idiotic move of cutting back booth babes at a trade show, I figured that was the first knell of mediocratcy and decline for the event. Didn't expect it to happen quite that fast. Oh well. I was never really all that hyped about it anyway. Give me Origins, World Con, GenCon Indy, or ComicCon any day over the gated community that was E3.
*EDIT*
E3 isn't exactly dead and it is still a gated community, but now it is much smaller and well, it is sort of like gating Gary Indiana. (Without the stench.)
There is something wrong with people. This is by far not the first time I've heard of folks calling 911 over stupid buisness crap. I swear, somewhere in gradeschool or middle school we should have a lesson unit on who you call to report various types of problems.
Okay, I am the first to admit that I really have a hard time making aesthetic determinations about guys, but why the hell would a bunch of people be sending Neil Gaiman an article about how ugly guys are doing better these day... oh. He's mentioned in the article.
*EDIT*
Yeah, I've been spending too much time over at Gender Racial Issues" where none may exist.
*/EDIT*
So, I finished Way of the Wolf 2 before starting In Fury Born.
This is the third time I've checked it out from the library. THe previous two times I just couldn't get past the cover blurb.
This is a science fictionish book. (Well Science Fantasy at least)
It is about alien psychic invader vampires.
Yeah.
Alien Invaders and Vampires. Who can subsist on the "auras" of humans.
But I can get past that point.
I can accept alien invaders and ignore the vampire bits.
Oh they also have uber minions that are more the traditional blood drinking vampires. Also alien, but probably engineered to eat humans.
The brute minions though...
The big strong stupid alien rapist unable to plan for the future brute minions...
Were there any black face shows on the silent screen?
These guys, Glugs or something similar, well it is is pretty easy to draw a fairly strong case that they are stand-ins for the darker side of white America's view of blacks.
This is probably entirely unintentional. In fact, I am not sure that it would be possible to create a big strong stupid servitor race that you couldn't draw the same parallels to.
So, since they are mostly in the background, I can get past that.
Ignoring the above, these are pretty good books. I was going to say pulpish, but if I ignore the above bits they lose some of the pulp aesthetic.
I'm going to give at least the next book a chance. I'll have to see after that. If the vampires get all angsty and stand-in-for-sex-and-deathy then that'll be the end of it for me.
I think I ought to be reading more David Webber.
He makes me want to write.
His newest book? In Fury Born?
Well, it lifts the drop sequence for the drop troops from Starship Troopers, but then so does everyone else who uses drop troops.
Also, it uses all of his favorite military philosophy catch phrases.
You know what the character will do because you can ask "If Honor was a marine, what would she do?"
(It even has, almost verbatium, the scene in either the first or second Honor book near the end where her sponsor almost comes to hate her because of how she reports her casualties with no feeling, seeming to read them off, not coldly but like a grocery list, but then he realizes how much pain she is in and that hiding it is her method of coping.)
There is an in memorandum thread for Jim Baen over at websnark. Very touching. I do wish that Jim weren't dead and that the thread after the article was after some other Snark. The first one needs no explanation. The second one? Well, there are all sorts of discussions hiding in this thread that I'd love to have, but I don't want to be part of moving it away from a discussion of Baen and his life and the good he has done.
(There is a huge Heinlein Discussion in there that won't be had because of that.)
I also wanted to reply to this:
"So too are Baen Books’ titles. David Weber’s books are more about political and social what-ifs than space battles, but work just as well as “space battle” type stories."
Which is a small part of someone's very long "I'll miss Jim Baen" post.
Problem is, at least if he/she is discussing the Honor Harrington books... well, no. They are all about the space battles.
That isn't to say that there isn't a lot of impressive world building, but the question that inspired the setting isn't "what if there was a high tech monarchy on the edge of human space" it is "What do I need to do to justify putting Horratio Hornblower in a space ship?"
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Nice. I'm downloading it right now. I want a generic tool like this though. the .lit format only lets you select one page at a time. Gak. At least with a properly prepared PDF I can select the whole document.
There was a car on fire in front of my house.
Well, between my house and the next one down the street.
I saw it roll past smoking, but I live out in the country, a big cloud of white smoke/dust following a car isn't really noteworthy, even though we have blacktop roads here.
Then someone was running toward my house and I went to get the door and saw a burning car through the window.
About that time the first firefighters showed up in their private vehicles. ONe pulled out a fire extinguisher and gave it a go. The fire didn't even notice. On the otherhand, in the intrem the smoke had turned grey and the plastic bits had started to drip.
Then the engine showed up and they hosed it into submission. (The hood, which had warped shut gave them a moment of trouble, but it is all taken care of now.)
Nobody was hurt, the car on the other hand looks like a writeoff.
What the hell do you do to a new or newish car to make it catch on fire?
My dogs are in their cage so they don't get too excited about all of the strangers walking back and forth out there.
From http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html
A frikken men. (Note that Peter Brians is an English Professor and this is attached to a massive page of proper English usage.)
AND that I fully intend to start using the phrase "Apples and Organs."
Oh and an interesting note about Lion's Share? Frequently a lion will actually get her kill taken away from her by groups of scavengers.
Non-Errors
(Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.)
Split infinitives
For the hyper-critical, “to boldly go where no man has gone before” should be “to go boldly. . . .” It is good to be aware that inserting one or more words between “to” and a verb is not strictly speaking an error, and is often more expressive and graceful than moving the intervening words elsewhere; but so many people are offended by split infinitives that it is better to avoid them except when the alternatives sound strained and awkward.
Ending a sentence with a preposition
A fine example of an artificial “rule” which ignores standard usage. The famous witticism usually attributed to Winston Churchill makes the point well: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” see The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Jack Lynch has some sensible comments on this issue. If you think you know the original version of this saying, click here.
Beginning a sentence with a conjunction
It offends those who wish to confine English usage in a logical straitjacket that writers often begin sentences with “and” or “but.” True, one should be aware that many such sentences would be improved by becoming clauses in compound sentences; but there are many effective and traditional uses for beginning sentences thus. One example is the reply to a previous assertion in a dialogue: “But, my dear Watson, the criminal obviously wore expensive boots or he would not have taken such pains to scrape them clean.” Make it a rule to consider whether your conjunction would repose more naturally within the previous sentence or would lose in useful emphasis by being demoted from its position at the head of a new sentence.
Using “between” for only two, “among” for more
The “-tween” in “between” is clearly linked to the number two; but, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “In all senses, between has, from its earliest appearance, been extended to more than two.” We’re talking about Anglo-Saxon here—early. Pedants have labored to enforce “among” when there are three or more objects under discussion, but largely in vain. Even the pickiest speaker does not naturally say, “A treaty has been negotiated among England, France, and Germany.”
Over vs. more than.
Some people claim that “over” cannot be used to signify “more than,” as in “Over a thousand baton-twirlers marched in the parade.” “Over,” they insist, always refers to something physically higher: say, the blimp hovering over the parade route. This absurd distinction ignores the role metaphor plays in language. If I write 1 on the blackboard and 10 beside it, 10 is still the “higher” number. “Over” has been used in the sense of “more than” for over a thousand years.
Gender vs. sex
Feminists eager to remove references to sexuality from discussions of females and males not involving mating or reproduction revived an older meaning of “gender,” which had come to refer in modern times chiefly to language, as a synonym for “sex” in phrases such as “Our goal is to achieve gender equality.” Americans, always nervous about sex, eagerly embraced this usage, which is now standard. In some scholarly fields, “sex” is now used to label biologically determined aspects of maleness and femaleness (reproduction, etc.) while “gender” refers to their socially determined aspects (behavior, attitudes, etc.); but in ordinary speech this distinction is not always maintained. It is disingenuous to pretend that people who use “gender” in the new senses are making an error, just as it is disingenuous to maintain that “Ms.” means “manuscript” (that’s “MS”). Nevertheless, I must admit I was startled to discover that the tag on my new trousers describes not only their size and color, but their “gender.”
Using “who” for people, “that” for animals and inanimate objects
In fact there are many instances in which the most conservative usage is to refer to a person using “that”: “All the politicians that were at the party later denied even knowing the host” is actually somewhat more traditional than the more popular “politicians who.” An aversion to “that” referring to human beings as somehow diminishing their humanity may be praiseworthily sensitive, but it cannot claim the authority of tradition. In some sentences, “that” is clearly preferable to “who”: “She is the only person I know of that prefers whipped cream on her granola.” In the following example, to exchange “that” for “who” would be absurd: “Who was it that said, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle’?”*
*Commonly attributed to Gloria Steinem, but she attributes it to Irina Dunn.
“Since” cannot mean “because.”
“Since” need not always refer to time. Since the 14th century, when it was often spelled “syn,” it has also meant “seeing that” or “because.”
Hopefully
This word has meant “it is to be hoped” for a very long time, and those who insist it can only mean “in a hopeful fashion” display more hopefulness than realism.
Momentarily
“The plane will be landing momentarily” says the flight attendant, and the grumpy grammarian in seat 36B thinks to himself, “So we’re going to touch down for just a moment?” Everyone else thinks, “Just a moment now before we land.” Back in the 1920s when this use of “momentarily” was first spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, one might have been accused of misusing the word; but by now it’s listed without comment as one of the standard definitions in most dictionaries.
Lend vs. loan
“Loan me your hat” was just as correct everywhere as “lend me your ears” until the British made “lend” the preferred verb, relegating “loan” to the thing being lent. However, as in so many cases, Americans kept the older pattern, which in its turn has influenced modern British usage so that those insisting that “loan” can only be a noun are in the minority.
Regime vs. regimen
Some people insist that “regime” should be used only in reference to governments, and that people who say they are following a dietary regime should instead use “regimen”; but “regime” has been a synonym of “regimen” for over a century, and is widely accepted in that sense.
Near miss
It is futile to protest that “near miss” should be “near collision.” This expression is a condensed version of something like “a miss that came very near to being a collision” and is similar to “narrow escape.” Everyone knows what is meant by it and almost everyone uses it. It should be noted that the expression can also be used in the sense of almost succeeding in striking a desired target: “His Cointreau soufflé was a near miss.”
“None” singular vs. plural
Some people insist that since “none” is derived from “no one” it should always be singular: “none of us is having dessert.” However, in standard usage, the word is most often treated as a plural. “None of us are having dessert” will do just fine.
Scan vs. skim
Those who insist that “scan” can never be a synonym of “skim” have lost the battle. It is true that the word originally meant “to scrutinize,” but it has now evolved into one of those unfortunate words with two opposite meanings: to examine closely (now rare) and to glance at quickly (much more common). It would be difficult to say which of these two meanings is more prominent in the computer-related usage, to “scan a document.”
Off of
For most Americans, the natural thing to say is “Climb down off of [pronounced ” offa” ] that horse, Tex, with your hands in the air"; but many U.K. authorities urge that the “of” should be omitted as redundant. Where British English reigns you may want to omit the “of” as superfluous, but common usage in the U.S. has rendered “off of” so standard as to generally pass unnoticed, though some American authorities also discourage it in formal writing. However, “off of” meaning “from” in phrases like “borrow five dollars off of Clarice” is definitely nonstandard.
“Gotten” vs. “got.”
In England, the old past participle “gotten” dropped out of use except in such stock phrases as “ill-gotten” and “gotten up,” but in the U.S. it is still considered interchangeable with “got” as the past participle of “get.”
Till vs. ’til.
Since it looks like an abbreviation for “until,” some people argue that this word should always be spelled “’til” (though not all insist on the apostrophe). However, “till” has regularly occurred as a spelling of this word for over 800 years and it’s actually older than “until.” It is perfectly good English.
Teenage vs. teenaged.
Some people object that the word should be “teenaged,” but unlike the still nonstandard “ice tea” and “stain glass,” “teenage” is almost universally accepted now.
Don’t use “reference” to mean “cite.”
Nouns are often turned into verbs in English, and “reference” in the sense “to provide references or citations” has become so widespread that it’s generally acceptable, though some teachers and editors still object.
Feeling bad
“I feel bad” is standard English, as in “This t-shirt smells bad” (not “badly”). “I feel badly” is an incorrect hyper-correction by people who think they know better than the masses. People who are happy can correctly say they feel good, but if they say they feel well, we know they mean to say they’re healthy.
Unquote vs. endquote
Some people get upset at the common pattern by which speakers frame a quotation by saying “quote . . . unquote,” insisting that the latter word should logically be “endquote”; but illogical as it may be, “unquote” has been used in this way for about a century, and “endquote” is nonstandard.
Persuade vs. convince
Some people like to distinguish between these two words by insisting that you persuade people until you have convinced them; but “persuade” as a synonym for “convince” goes back at least to the 16th century. It can mean both to attempt to convince and to succeed. It is no longer common to say things like “I am persuaded that you are an illiterate fool,” but even this usage is not in itself wrong.
Normalcy vs. normality
The word “normalcy” had been around for more than half a century when President Warren G. Harding was assailed in the newspapers for having used it in a 1921 speech. Some folks are still upset; but in the U.S. “normalcy” is a perfectly normal—if uncommon—synonym for “normality.”
You shouldn’t pronounce the “e” in “not my forte.”
Some people insist that it’s an error to pronounce the word “forte” in the expression “not my forte” as if French-derived “forte” were the same as the Italian musical term for “loud”: “for-tay.” But the original French expression is pas mon fort, which not only has no “e” on the end to pronounce—it has a silent “t” as well. It’s too bad that when we imported this phrase we mangled it so badly, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. If you go around saying what sounds like ”that’s not my fort,” people won’t understand what you mean.
However, those who use the phrase to mean “not to my taste” (“Wagnerian opera is not my forte”) are definitely mistaken. Your forte is what you’re good at, not just stuff you like.
“Preventive” is the adjective, “preventative” the noun.
I must say I like the sound of this distinction, but in fact the two are interchangeable as both nouns and adjective, though many prefer “preventive” as being shorter and simpler. “Preventative” used as an adjective dates back to the 17th century, as does “preventive” as a noun.
People should say a book is titled such-and-such rather than entitled.
No less a writer than Chaucer is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as having used “entitled” in this sense, the very first meaning of the word listed by the OED. It may be a touch pretentious, but it’s not wrong.
People are healthy; vegetables are healthful.
Logic and tradition are on the side of those who make this distinction, but I’m afraid phrases like “part of a healthy breakfast” have become so widespread that they are rarely perceived as erroneous except by the hyper-correct. On a related though slightly different subject, it is interesting to note that in English adjectives connected to sensations in the perceiver of an object or event are often transferred to the object or event itself. In the 19th century it was not uncommon to refer, for instance, to a “grateful shower of rain,” and we still say “a gloomy landscape,” “a cheerful sight” and “a happy coincidence.”
Dinner is done; people are finished.
I pronounce this an antiquated distinction rarely observed in modern speech. Nobody really supposes the speaker is saying he or she has been roasted to a turn. In older usage people said, “I have done” to indicate they had completed an action. “I am done” is not really so very different.
Crops are raised; children are reared.
Old-fashioned writers insist that you raise crops and rear children; but in modern American English children are usually “raised.”
“You’ve got mail” should be “you have mail.”
The “have” contracted in phrases like this is merely an auxiliary verb indicating the present perfect tense, not an expression of possession. It is not a redundancy. Compare: “You’ve sent the mail."
It’s “cut the muster,” not “cut the mustard.”
This etymology seems plausible at first. Its proponents often trace it to the American Civil War. We do have the analogous expression “to pass muster,” which probably first suggested this alternative; but although the origins of “cut the mustard” are somewhat obscure, the latter is definitely the form used in all sorts of writing throughout the twentieth century. Common sense would suggest that a person cutting a muster is not someone being selected as fit, but someone eliminating the unfit. See the alt.usage.english faq explanation of this term.
It’s “carrot on a stick,” not “carrot or stick.”
Authoritative dictionaries agree, the original expression refers to offering to reward a stubborn mule or donkey with a carrot or threatening to beat it with a stick and not to a carrot being dangled from a stick. Further discussion. This and other popular etymologies fit under the heading aptly called by the English “too clever by half."
“Spitting image” should be “spit and image.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earlier form was "spitten image,” which may indeed have evolved from “spit and image.” It’s a crude figure of speech: someone else is enough like you to have been spat out by you, made of the very stuff of your body. In the early 20th century the spelling and pronunciation gradually shifted to the less logical “spitting image,” which is now standard. It’s too late to go back. There is no historical basis for the claim sometimes made that the original expression was “spirit and image.”
“Lion’s share” means all of something, not the larger part of something.
Even though the original meaning of this phrase reflected the idea that the lion can take whatever he wants—typically all of the slaughtered game, leaving nothing for anyone else—in modern usage the meaning has shifted to “the largest share.” This makes great sense if you consider the way hyenas and vultures swarm over the leftovers from a typical lion’s kill.
“Connoisseur” should be spelled “connaisseur.”
When we borrowed this word from the French in the 18th century, it was spelled “connoisseur.” Is it our fault the French later decided to shift the spelling of many OI words to the more phonetically accurate AI? Of those Francophone purists who insist we should follow their example I say, let ’em eat bifteck.
from _eurekalert
A University of Illinois at Chicago study published in the July/August issue of the journal Child Development reveals a link between smoking during pregnancy and very early child behavior problems.
Well DUH
And this goes both for mothers who smoke and mothers who spend time around smokers. Of course smoking hurts fetuses. It hurts toddlers and children and adults too. Even if they aren't the ones smoking.
On the other hand, this is cool, about as cool as the article about electronic eyes that I might not actually have copied to my journal a while ago:
For the first time, a team led by Brown University researchers is publishing detailed clinical trial results that show a tiny new brain sensor allowed a quadriplegic to open a prosthetic hand, control a robotic limb and move a computer cursor -- using thoughts alone. The work, featured on the cover of Nature, offers important insights into the human brain and how to tap its power to improve the lives of people with spinal cord injury and other severe motor impairments.
My copies of Civil War 1 and 2 just came in!
I don't remember if I posted this or just talked about it with a bunch of people, but I finially finished The Moor's Last Sigh. The last third of the book would have been decend had it not been laden with all of the baggage of the first 2/3. It really wanted to be a novella instead of a novel.
Every time that the Boy Scouts of America (or groups associated with them) hit the news, I am reminded of how glad I am I left the organization. Honestly? If you want to be thought of as a decent organization/person, it is time to cut your ties with them. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/15015759.htm
I have told parts of this story before. There's new bits here.
Okay, the internet is a really small place.
I've mentioned nodal points before, unusual conincidences that have sent feelers into my future.
My example of this is usually Jenn and Scott.
I'm a Heinlein fan. I got mom to buy For Us the Living for me when it came out.
Either Fark.Com or slashdot carried a story I read about this book. It mentioned that on Electrolite (The blog of Patric and Theresa Nielsen Hayden) there was a big discussion of the book by some of the current luminaries of SF and some of the backbone people of NASA.
I read the whole conversation, but never posted.
This was where I first ran across Scott (go buy his book now, I'll be here when you get back and it is probably better than whatever you were going to read next anyway) Lynch.
I've got another friend who was half of why I joined Live Journal and who I was having a bit of an arguement with at the time (I think we both read too much and too little in the other's position, and I'd like to say the whole thing was entirely past at this late date) (whose webcomic you should go read. Go ahead, I'll be here when you get back.) and well, she made a public post about the topic of the arguement (not our arguement, but her own crusade for this particular matter) that quoted an essay by someone else (who I think wasn't entirely right) and was perhaps the least little bit hyperbolic about how the essay matched with her postion (which it actually didn't have a one to one match with, but it was close) and which inspired a huge lj arguement with various people some of which were rather quite nasty about the whole thing, way beyond what I (who was, you'll recall, still having my own headted disagreement with her, though at the time it had really petered off into occasional snarls and glares) thought was reasonable or necessary. I sort of maybe asked the people who were ragging her for citing an article in support of her thesis that wasn't just a restatement of her thesis what their majors in college were. And I might have mentioned that I was interested in going back and getting another degree but not wanting one where things like citing articles was an issue. I may have mentioned wanting a degree that I could finish without substantial effort. But I'm sure I was tactful about it (and no fair looking for the arguement that's cheating.) Well, that's where I met Jenn. Who was working at night job at a hotel, something that gave her lots of computer time during my main computer time times (I was in Oregon she was in the Midwest, the time difference was in favor of me actually catching her in her down times) so we ended up spending a lot of time talking via some IM client or another.
Jenn is engaged to Scott.
I ended up talking to Scott (via live journal) a fair amount.
In Scott's journal I came to interact with Elizabeth (Who also has most of a score of novels written and more to come, a total of 15 written, a few not actually on the shelves yet. Go buy this one, let me borrow it when you are done. I'm broke.)
Elizabeth is writing all sorts of things, and knows more about Dead English Writer People than I knew there was to know. She also writes about Spaceships and 50 year old women warriors with cybernetics that need updating and secrets that need hiding and about quirky networkded AIs who could probably pass the Turing Test with whatever it is that an AI would do to make it harder to accomplish a task done.) 15 books. That is a daunting figure. It is backed up by a ready grasp of science (which isn't daunting to me) and literary theory and history (Daunting! We'll see that one pop up again) and Automechanics (my worst subject on the ASVAB) (Some day I'd love to debate third wave feminism and particularly feminist epistemology with her. I bet she'd tie me in ribbons, but it would be all sorts of fun, if I had 3 months to bone up on the subject.) She is also writing things with Sarah.
Sarah has a PhD. in English stuff that I sort of faked my way through in Primary School and talked my advisor into letting me skip in College. This makes talking about the nuts and bolts of writing with her a daunting process. She writes books alone too. Go. Buy. Return. I'll be here.
Sarah talks about the nooks and crannies and the neat thiongs and the silly things about this wonderous glorious supergenre called Fantasy and Science Fiction. She claims that science makes her a little nervous, so she makes occasional mistakes in the discussion. "It is also the case that I, personally, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with hard sf--in the broad sense of science fiction which grounds itself in the hard sciences--due in part to my even more uneasy relationship with the hard sciences themselves. Personal unease and uncertainty lead (as ever) to overgeneralizations, and if I didn't want to unpack what I meant, I shouldn't have gotten in the ring."
Well I mentioned Nancy Kress, who writes Hard SF where the science takes a background and the people are fully realized.
Patrick Neilsen Hayden replies to my comment and talks about how people often miss that she is writing Hard SF
It turns out that he may well have planted the Kress==Hard SF meme in my head in, you know it, the Electrolite Thread that started this whole chain of events.
Oh, and the next post in that thread? It is about Cory Doctrow who is a major poster on a shared news/civil liberties blog called boingboing. Mr. Doctrow's writing is 1/3 at fault for why my eyes hurt right now. I spent three days ending 2 days ago staring at a screen reading the first 3 and some change years of that blog on a monitor attached to a messed up video card that makes long reading as bad as on the old monitors back in 93. The boing boing link of this chain doesn'g go anywhere yet. http://www.boingboing.net
I was rereading a section of http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004356.html#004356 when I ran across this:
"For that matter, many new areas of study go through a phase of being seen as an all-curing tool; remember when AI was going to change the world? Or biotech? Or e-business?"
Know what?
We are currently in a world full of ai. It isn't the talking self aware AI that many people think of when they talk about AI, but it is AI none the less, and it is/has transformed the world. I suspect that from the view point of history, the last thirty years and maybe the next ten will be seen as a huge shift in the world and one that occured much faster than the industrial revolution.
Biotech? Biotech is just beginning to be felt, but it has already made itself known. We grow a fair number of our drugs in vats already. Ice Minus is quietly used on crops across the world in conjunction with weather satelites (another application of AI) to make various frost sensitive crops more viable. BGH and HGH have had their own impacts. There is a race going on right now between the microbiologists and the chemists to be the first one out the gates with the next metal concentration technology (currently the microbiologists are winning. But then they were able to find what they needed in nature, often at the very sites that needed them.) Superfund sites and oil spills are currently being cleaned up in part by the products of biotech. The EU's (and the green/environmental movement's) complete and unresonable rejection of GM crops is going to turn around and bite them in their collective asses as the years go on. By their reasoning, we ought to pull peanuts off the market because a bunch of folks are deathly allergic to them. (If they were pro-GM they'd be in a position to kill the negativeest aspects of the tech, mainly the kill switch genes, though at least the EU has been particularly stupid about IP issues to date, and the herbicide resistance genes. Instead they are seen as the enemies by the people doing the work with the biggest potential to make the world green again.) New Biotech crops are doing neat things like cutting the cycle time (and thus acerage) needed by the timber industry to grow various types of wood and adding needed vitamins to staple crops in regions where malnutrition is still the biggest problem facing the population.
E-commerce? Who knows where that will go. It won't fizzle, but it may not be a real revolution on its own. (When crossed with AI though...)
I was rereading a section of http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004356.html#004356 when I ran across this:
"For that matter, many new areas of study go through a phase of being seen as an all-curing tool; remember when AI was going to change the world? Or biotech? Or e-business?"
Know what?
We are currently in a world full of ai. It isn't the talking self aware AI that many people think of when they talk about AI, but it is AI none the less, and it is/has transformed the world. I suspect that from the view point of history, the last thirty years and maybe the next ten will be seen as a huge shift in the world and one that occured much faster than the industrial revolution.
Biotech? Biotech is just beginning to be felt, but it has already made itself known. We grow a fair number of our drugs in vats already. Ice Minus is quietly used on crops across the world in conjunction with weather satelites (another application of AI) to make various frost sensitive crops more viable. BGH and HGH have had their own impacts. There is a race going on right now between the microbiologists and the chemists to be the first one out the gates with the next metal concentration technology (currently the microbiologists are winning. But then they were able to find what they needed in nature, often at the very sites that needed them.) Superfund sites and oil spills are currently being cleaned up in part by the products of biotech. The EU's (and the green/environmental movement's) complete and unresonable rejection of GM crops is going to turn around and bite them in their collective asses as the years go on. By their reasoning, we ought to pull peanuts off the market because a bunch of folks are deathly allergic to them. (If they were pro-GM they'd be in a position to kill the negativeest aspects of the tech, mainly the kill switch genes, though at least the EU has been particularly stupid about IP issues to date, and the herbicide resistance genes. Instead they are seen as the enemies by the people doing the work with the biggest potential to make the world green again.) New Biotech crops are doing neat things like cutting the cycle time (and thus acerage) needed by the timber industry to grow various types of wood and adding needed vitamins to staple crops in regions where malnutrition is still the biggest problem facing the population.
E-commerce? Who knows where that will go. It won't fizzle, but it may not be a real revolution on its own. (When crossed with AI though...)
Acquired from <lj user=Guipago>
I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about.
Ask away. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.
Hee hee, I just thought of a neat add on to the Abunai game!
I call it Ping
Now instead of throwing something and warning the target, you throw something that bounces at the target and then yell ping when it hits (like a submarine.) Wish I'd thought of this when Rube and I were rooming together.
I'm thinking about pulling ut of Nanowrimo this year. With the Pigfucker in office other things seem more important. Also all of the stories I am hyped about continuing are not eligible for Nanowrimo since I've already written sizeable chunks of them. I will keep posting things in the private part of my journal though.
So folks, on Tuesday 50% of the eligible adults voted, and half of them voted for Bush.
Next time you are in a crowd, look at the guy in front of you, look at the lady to your left, look at the guy on the right. Now look at yourself. Are you a pigfucker? If not then the odds are good that the other three are.
I will not be gracious about this thing.
I will not accept.
I will not work with this regime any more than the republicans worked with Bill Clinton.
If they can be obstructionists and cheaters, well, so can I.
We will not step aside for your demolition of the constitution.
We will not step aside for the establishment of a Evangelical Protestant Theocracy.
We will not accept the disenfranchisement of minorities and traditionally liberal voters through litigation or through intimidation.
We will not allow you to gain crontroll over our bodies, minds, and souls.
We will not allow you to fight a war in our name wothout justification, bolstered by lies, and maintained through silence.
We do not accept that this nation has the right to stand alone against the world when the world is advising moderation and restraint.
Mr. Bush you are not a uniter, you weren't a uniter 4 years ago, you, your party, and your puppeteers have gone out of your way to be a divider for the last 4 years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I dedicate these comming years to make sure that your type of vileness is not inflicted upon the American people again for as long as I shall live.
So with the country in the hands of madmen and pigfuckers who have already shown a vested interest in repealing the constitution, I'm gonna start using PGP for my emails. this is not a today or tomorrow thing, more of a in the next few weeks sort of thing. I'll let you know when it starts and we can exchange public keys, preferably by snail mail.
So, november one, first day of nanowrimo. Get to pop out 2000 words a day for 25 of the next 30 days. It's what I ought to have been doing for the last 600 days, so I guess his is just a warm-up.
I'm hoping that next time I have money the drug store still has the Hershey's Symphony minis.
Not much else. I'll be posting my progress on this thing in the private lounge hopefully daily.
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