Level 0: Mickey Spillane. Your circumstances are very simple. You may actually be too healthy for your own good.

Level 1:

Level 2:

Level 3:

Level 4:

Level 5: Gene Wolfe, William Faulkner. Your situation is very complex. Important truths are hidden in multi-level allusions, and very little (if anything) is as it seems.

What should go in the intervening slots?

Like so many others, I am a fanatic on one side or the other of this question.

The Wreck of the Old 97.
ObOffTopic:
I wonder how modern day casemodders and pimp-my-ride types would build steam engines, were they in use today?

I cannot type without putting two spaces after a period. I just hate the way it looks with only one. I even do it when I KNOW html is going to take out the extra.

See my comments elsewhere about learning to type on a manual typewriter. In a fixed-pitch font, no less. I am scarred for life.

When preparing a manuscript for submission, I just have to globally replace dot space space with dot space. I cannot type that way ab initio*, and I probably won't ever learn.

*abi nitio?

Level 2: Hunter Thompson. You may or may not be healthy, but you're not feeling any pain.

It's pretty cool.

So you're not going to like it when I do my binding of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, then. When I can find a clothbound* copy of Hamlet, I'm going to take it apart and use it as binding materials.

-----
* gotta be clothbound. I need to unravel the cloth for thread to sew the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgg0GIfbszg

And let's not forget the relevant Arcimboldo still life.

There's no word nitio in Latin; I presume you meant niteo, which means "I shine, I sparkle", with a secondary meaning of "I am charming."

You also missed a comma.

So, rephrased,

abi, niteo?†

To which, Xopher, the answer is nites* You are shiny.

-----
* because there is no Latin word that means "yes", you restate the verb to agree with the question.
† we are entirely ignoring the Latin requirement for question words or suffixes, because it's not entertaining to add them in.

*fix ending if needed; trying for "that shines" or something.

Which leads to Nightmouse, and they can make mice fluoresce. I'm thinking a very nerdy brandname for a very nerdy pet.

In other news, last night I saw a movie that I can say objectively was a great movie that I didn't like one bit. Very interesting experience.

My company announced to me a couple of weeks ago that, Surprise!, I get to look for a new job, as they no longer want my group around. So anyway, I get some severance as condolences for the lay-off, but I haven't looked for a job in almost 8 years. Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

Level 2: Jane Austen. Although there are some complications, by sticking with a reliable formula, everything will turn out as it should.

Level 3: Tolstoy, Henry James: You will eventually understand what's happening, because your ailment is fairly straightforward. Still, it will not end well for you.

Level 4: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco: You can't possibly understand what's happening to you, but it's meaningless and will have no perceptible effect, so don't worry about it.

I love them both without limit, they are remarkable people for their ages, but they are still people of their age, and I am a woman of my age and would prefer a bit more private time and a lot less cooking.

And for the next month, starting tonight, both of them will be home.

I've always been glad I learned to touch-type back then; it kept me in beer money in college typing other people's term papers. Then I was ahead of most other recruits when in Navy Radioman school I didn't have to learn my way around the TTY keyboard.

Oh, and Xopher, I double-space after periods and colons too.

Give them specific cooking assignments. Don't have a backup meal.

Disagree. If I* meet you outside of a tech environment, and I'm interested in you, how do we exchange data? A one page advertisement for you that tells me what you do and how to get a hold of you is going to be way more useful than...pretty much anything I can fit into long term memory.

If I'm interviewing you, and I decide I want to hire you, but I have to convince the rest of the commitee, then having that sheet of paper I can photocopy and pass out at our next meeting is great. If you didn't bring that sheet of paper with you to your interview, then you have to count on me remembering to find it on the company's (buggy) HR webapp.

Arguably, if you can fit the essentials of what you know how to do, and where you did it, onto a single sheet of paper, that's awesome, because nobody is ever going to want to read more than that.

I'm thinking the question isn't "are resumes still useful" but "what are resumes actually used for?" As far as I can tell, all of the scenarios mentioned above, plus the data in them is useful for sorting out who not to call back. That step may or may not be taken over by crappy HR webapps.

*I = hypothetical hiring person

And speaking of houses, let me pass on a piece of hard-earned life wisdom on the same scale as never create with a bulldozer a problem you will later have to solve with a shovel: If you are of the Christmas/Yule/Solstice tree persuasion, DO NOT SIGN THE MORTGAGE PAPERS ON ANY PERMANENT DWELLING UNLESS YOU KNOW PRECISELY WHERE A CHRISTMAS TREE WILL FIT.

Fourteen years here and we've yet to find a place that doesn't entail terrible inconvenience.

& @22:
Less sure about the Io than the nitet, which is correct.

But I'm not up on my Latin exclamations.

Diatryma @23
Nitemus means "we are shiny", in both the visual and Firefly senses. Spanish is a good extrapolation here.

(Also, it separates the people who are really clueless about work history and resumes from those who have some competence. I saw one once where the misspellings and inverted dates alone would have killed any possible interview, if the history of frequent job changes hadn't done it first.)

Privacy is a tricky thing; we've yet to negotiate a common definition.

Level 4.5: Umberto Eco, David Foster Wallace. The diagnosis is written in English, but you need to read it three times and consult two encyclopedias before you can begin to tease out the meaning.

The first Christmas in the house, we put the Christmas tree in the big picture window in the music room. It was disappointing, not least because even then, the front of the house was for kids, and the back was for adults. The next year, we had to figure out a way to get a tree into the great room, which has a two-story ceiling and a perfect place for a tree, right next to the stairs going up to the second-story kitchen lofty thing.

Do you know how big a tree will fit in two stories?

Do you know how interesting it can be to get a fifteen- to twenty-foot tree into an interestingly-shaped house?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

When I saw your question I assumed that the distinction was between one-page resumes and longer resumes, but I see others are making a different assumption.

I would say that yes, you need a resume, but it doesn't have to be a single page. Mine isn't. Of course, I've been employed for 14-22 years, depending on how you count it. If you have only been employed for a few years you can probably fit everything onto one page. If not, I would at least make sure that the most important information is on the first page - for example, don't lead off with your education, since unless you just got a degree that's not critical.

A fluorescent hamster, now that would be a great mascot for this neighborhood.

Private industry usually has more flexibility, and the one pager is usually more appropriate.

Résumés are like other things, where it's not size that matters, but demonstrable skills. ::grin::

Good luck!

Two pages is on the cusp. Better a two-page resume in readable format than a one pager in eight-point.

First, you have to get to the hiring manager. There's someone else, either a headhunting company or an internal recruitment staff, who's doing first-run triage on resumes. They generally don't really understand what the team is looking for, so more often than not this comes down to comparing the resume against some keywords the hiring manager has suggested. So for this, you need a resume, and you need to have guessed some of the right buzzwords.

Next, you have to look interesting enough to the hiring manager for it to be worth a technical person's time to talk to you. The resume's all this decision is based on too, so it still matters: obvious lying and a complete lack of communication skills are bad here, but other than that as far as I can tell it largely comes down to luck.

And finally, you talk to people. From here out, the resume is primarily just a starting point for conversations, and doesn't matter much. Do be careful that if you claim to be an expert on a subject that you can back that claim up, though.

Good luck! Where are you located?

When I get the resumes, I go through with a highlighter and mark off anything that matches up to what I'm looking for, and I also look for a pattern showing width/depth of knowledge, since different positions call for different things. For example, a help desk person needs a broad base of shallow knowledge; a db architect needs in-depth expertise on one thing. I also look to get an overall sense of the person's level so I can figure out if they're in our salary range.

So, from a manager's perspective, I think the best resumes are the ones that show a pattern of activity and experience, and are liberally peppered with specific accomplishments and technologies. If it's 3 pages long, no problem, since I'm just skimming anyway. Whereas if it's 1 page long and doesn't happen to list the one odd thing that will catch my eye, you could miss an opportunity.

Level 4: Thomas Pynchon - even when you know you what you have, you have no idea where it came from.

Level 4.01: J.D. Salinger - whatever you got has been hanging around for 50 years.

Level 1.02: Michael Chrichton - even if you think you have it, you don't have it, particularly if you think you have a fever.

Highly recommend reading the whole article.

Also relatively young & techie, I've hunted jobs twice in the last 12 months. (Contract expired followed by dot-bomb collapse.) I found the following to be effective:

1. Post your resume on Computerjobs.com, Monster, and careerbuilder. MS-Word format is standard for recruiters, but some of the job sites want you to jump through a few site-specific hoops. Throw in as many buzzwords as you feel comfortable asserting competence in. Recruiters will begin phoning about 5m after you post.

2. For each of the above web sites, do an a.m. scan of the new postings. If something looks particularly choice: 1) send an email with attached resume 2) follow-up 1h later with a phone call.

3. Resumes should be as long as you need to communicate your skill set. My last one ran well over a page and no one blinked.

4. Based on my experience on the hiring side of the desk, the following translation table applies. You may wish to fluff your resume accordingly:

claim="1 year experience" --> actual="I've heard of it"
claim="2 year experience" --> actual="6 months. knows the basics."
claim="5 years experience" --> actual="either actually competent or a gifted bullshitter"
claim="competent" --> actual="very good indeed but still modest"
claim="expert" -->actual="incompetent AND arrogant"
claim="less than 1y" -->actual="hasn't sent out resumes in a while"

Oracle is still pretty happening. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding something. Happy hunting.

For getting the resume down to one page, I suggest using the heading "Relevant Experience," which indicates that you have plenty of other experience, too, but you've been thoughtful enough to highlight just the bits your reader will care about.

-----
* yes, blowing my own horn on this, but it's relevant.

The "Relevant Experience" paragraph makes a lot of sense.

Manny @13: I still feel queasy hitting books with hammers, rounding and backing. It's getting better, but I think it will be a few more years before the horror has completely left.

If you find rounding and backing feels like beating up books, have you tried Jim Brockman's technique of concave rigid spines?

I'm not a geocacher, but thanks for the recommendation. Sounds like a good wee walk for a dark winter's evening.

But I note they used a pre-made headband. Should have sewn it by hand.

Eventually, I would like to take up the church newsletter again, which would also mean downloading OpenOffice because my new computer has nothing more complex than WordPad. I pride myself on creating elegant, readable pages. And I go into FROTHING RAGE when I download one of those cute little "fill-in-the-middle" frames or word bubbles or what have you and I can't actually PUT ANYTHING IN THE BLANK PART IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PICTURE. What good are they?

nerdycellist @ #24, I've had that experience. With Osama, for example.

Amen, sister. This is our fourth Christmas here, and I'm still not happy. We're of the "put the tree in or near the front window" persuasion, and we've got a doozy of a window, a huge bay. Unfortunately this is also the obvious/OneTrue place for the couch. So for three years we moved the couch, with a resultant furniture arrangement that turned out to discourage guests from even entering the living room. (It damn near discourages me!) My husband, swearing that he will never move the couch again (it has a queen-size bed inside and is more than just quite heavy) insisted last year that after Christmas the couch stay where it had been temporarily placed. The tree looks good, but that couch has been bugging me for a whole freaking year. And will continue to do so. (My personal theory is that the tree would look great in the equally-large upstairs bay window in the bedroom, where it wouldn't discourage anything bu maybe the cat, but carrying the tree up the stairs would be, umm, difficult in several senses of the word. Alas.)

Trying to use OO after spending more time than is technically healthy for me dinking around with Excel 2003 is infuriatingly not quite right.

What that means (for me, slightly incoherently, since it's been a long week):

(1) There should be something that tells me what sort of job you want to have ("UNIX administrator" is useless - do you want to build genome sequencing clusters, or would you prefer a highly predictable 9-5 job, where you're responsible for specific, well understood things).

(2) There should be something that tells me what you can do for me, vis-a-vis your previous work experience and skills. ("Normalized a database of ten billion entries, reducing end-of-month reporting time from 3 days to 3 hours" (spurious example, but hopefully clear enough) "Negotiated a 15% reduction in support contract costs", yada, yada).

(3) I don't have to work at figuring out what's on the page. That means no fancy fonts, no smushingeverythingtogether, so it's unreadable, no murky acronyms, IYKWIM.

It's (hopefully) obvious, but having your name and the page number on each page of your resume makes it obvious if a page has gotten lost, as well.

Unlike somebody further up the page, I'd never recommend padding your resume - the reason I suggest the "what you can do for me" section is that it highlights what you can do, which is completely separate from the years you've been doing it.

[0] Tech industry, everything from no experience through to senior level experts

It's possible that the artist used just the boards (aka covers), and the textblock/book itself* lives on in a less attractive but more durable library binding, although it's hard to tell whether that's the case** here or not.

I'm not sure whether or not that would mollify your roommate. I'm always a little ambivalent about these sorts of things, myself.

* -- I'm not entirely comfortable with calling this "the book itself". It's *most* of the book, but its original binding served as something more than just a container for its information, unlike this.

** -- unintentional bookbinding pun

I'm stuck with this house; even if we wanted to swap it out (it's a double wide; we're real farmers, in that way) it would involve digging up and storing out of the way some giant irreplaceble landscape plants, and I'm not up to the job. I have yet to win the argument for a teeny tiny tree, and somehow no-one wants to talk about getting a fake one and hanging it from the dining-room ceiling.

Where did all these fellow bookbinders come from? Cool! How long have you been binding? What kind of binding do you do?

I'll have been binding six years come January; I'm self-taught and bind mostly in leather. I do fine binding and some designer binding, mostly traditional structures. But really, I just do what interests me.

dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy
what worlds were dreamt in that forbidding place
with pleasures of the bloodless hunt and chase

it took such little things to bring true joy
as all unthinking we created grace
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

yet far too swiftly each discards the boy
too much to do though different in each case
and far too fast deep lines will groove the face
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

Having gone through Silicon Valley searches, I think the single most important thing is to have a really good cover letter. And cover letter system.

Your CL connects the dots between their reqs and your skills. It also lets gatekeepers know-- or at least leave them unable to vote against you-- that you are qualified, even if they don't understand the details (and they often don't). By gatekeeper I mean the HR or recruiter who'll send resumes on to the actual hiring manager.

I made sure that even 10 seconds of reading- or even glancing- on their part would let them know that I met their main reqs.

For example, If they needed 4 years of experience in XYZ, my resume might have those 4 years at 2 different companies in 2 different industries / languages / etc, so the reader couldn't automatically see it. The cover letter, in contrast, could have "4 years..." as the 1st bullet point. The resume is proof of your qualifications, but the CL is your claim.

More later, and I'll email an example.

Lila 65: 'Eia'!!!! That's the word I was looking for. Thanks!

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

My advice, in a direction somewhat orthogonal to the general flavor of advice you're getting, would be that now is a good time to diversify. For your next job, hunt a job which uses some of your existing skills - so they'll hire you - but builds on them in a new different direction. If you've got experience with Crystal Reports and Office VBA automation, for example, hunt for a job where you're using that in a .Net programming context, and then leverage it into doing VB.Net and C# or J# programming. (MS .Net programmers will be in demand for quite a while, I think.) Or get a job which uses your Oracle reporting skills and find a way to take on DBA responsibilities and pick up DBA skills in that job. Etc. In the short term it's easier to get hired by having lots of years in one thing. However when the industry suddenly changes course, as it does from time to time, and nobody is using X/Y/Z any more, that can turn deadly to your career. Better to keep adding new skill areas from time to time.

I agree with the general flavor of the advice up thread, especially from Mary Dell and Katharine - use a couple pages if it takes that to comfortably fit in all your buzzwords, but be ready to summarize it in a less-than-one-page cover letter.

Advanced play: Classify the jobs you are going after into discrete niches, and have a custom version of the resume for each niche, emphasizing different skillsets as primary. You may even wish to tweak your resume a little for each job you're applying to.

And IMNSHO never ever pad your months/years of experience - that's just the kind of thing that will throw you right out the door of a job you might otherwise have had. One of the absolute worst things that can happen during the hiring process is if the interviewer suddenly finds a reason to suspect your moral character - they are likely to drop you like a hot potato and go for someone less qualified but who they think is more trustworthy. I have had to drop candidates like that myself, when our reference checks cast serious doubts on claims they'd made.

P.S. Kathryn, not Katharine. Excuse me! It was right there above my post, too!

(Flashing red lights, bells...)

Fat lot of good managing a mid-sized IBM S/34 and its data entry personnel for nine years has done me.

abi @72: I started taking occasional classes about 4 years ago, but am only now trying to put together some of the larger tools so I can do things at home. I just bought myself some gold and hand tools. Still getting the hang of warming them on the kitchen stove...

Pictures of some of my books.

I've heard of the concave spines but never done one. About the instructions you linked: What does he mean about "the...top board may be cusioned"? And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well? I guess if it filled the square at the top of the foredge it would also help support the book block.

Thanks everyone for the various binding links!

Be careful. Not sure of the laws where you are but we had a high profile case of that ended with a jail sentence.

Last time this happened, I had a new job before the severance ran out.

Unfortunately I'm just a power user, not a programmer. But that may not be a bad thing.

yay!

Hmm... any idea how transferable your S/34 skills would be to the AS/400 ? I know the AS/400's theoretically the successor to the S/34, but that doesn't tell me much about how related the skillsets are.

There are still recruiters? I thought all of them moved over to be real estate salesmen.

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

How about this sort of grouse? ;)

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

I understand - the largest concentration of organizations doing the type of work that I do/enjoy/like are assuredly not where I live, nor where I'd want to live. The advent of telecommuting as a viable option certainly hasn't hurt anything, however.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

Ahhh! I'd have said "Manager, Data Processing" - but that's far too much time spent dealing with organizations that make ASN.1 seem flexible and unconscious of hierarchy.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

Neat! Any chance you'd comment about how to do[0] freelance research?

[0] Get paid for...

If you'd like a few recommendations of IT recruiting firms we'd work with again, contact me via e-mail.

It can be quickly, easily, and cheaply updated to fix mistakes, add new materials, enhance searching.

And about that enhanced searching -- you can have as many entry points to an item as you and your catalogers have the time, energy, and storage for. And storage is waaaaay cheaper than more card catalog cabinets and drawers. Not to mention the cost of the cards themselves.

I can acess the online catalog remotely to determine if the library has the item I need, which branch it's in, and whether it's on the shelf before I leave home.

Terminals take up lots less space than bulky catalogs and can be anywhere in the library.

No looooong waits for filing to get done.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

MKK--former cataloger

It kind of goes with the hollow back/case construction and the false raised bands, I think.

First you have to find clients, which means network with people who know people who might find your services useful. This is unquestionably the hardest part of the process. The second-hardest is getting paid on a timely basis, particularly if you work for startups. In the biotech/pharma business the startups are the ones who need this kind of service, but they're also the ones who have terrible cash flow.

It's an up-and-down business.

xeger, #87: Not. See above; IBM made some major OS changes from the S/36 to the S/38, and the AS/400 is successor to the latter. The system architecture and command language are completely different.

abi@33: my first reaction was it should be nitent, since the number is unclear; but I don't think I ever learned what Latin does in that case....

Xopher: agree on "ecce" (involves a 2nd party), but I thought "Eia" was noisier than "Ooo". (But not really sure, since I'm recalling it used in medieval Italian).

The NZ SPCA has a Christmas CD single designed for dogs - recorded at frequencies audible to dogs but not humans.

Thanks also to Debbie @ 19 for the video on marbling--I just wish I could have examples of the finished products!

Like Xopher, I'm a period-space-space typer. The "single space after the period" development irks the bejeebus out of me: there's not enough white space to nicely delineate the beginning of a new sentence.

JESR @ 71--As long as you have a sturdy but decorative hook screwed into the ceiling's equivalent of a stud (a joist? I dunno...), and a hook-and-four-straight-wires version of a hanger for plants in plastic pots, you can hang a small live tree from the ceiling. My mom and I did so for many years, as a means of thwarting the lummox dog (who nearly knocked down the tree to see out the corner window behind it) and the climb-the-trunk, bat-off-the-ornaments cats.

It worked well, not only in those capacities but to enable the stringing of lights and tinsel garland--just spin the tree one direction, then the other! (Slowly, of course.)

Might be in some web archive or other.

That only leaves the range 20khz-22khz usable for doggie music. A full frequency doubling is required for an octave; I'm not sure how to figure out how much of an octive that gives, but it can't be much, maybe not even a full note.

So...am I missing something fundamental here, or are doggies not going to be getting much out of these CDs either?

[1] and that simplification may be where I go off the rails
[2] I used to be able to hear when a computer monitor was powered on but not getting a signal; I no longer can. Do new ones not make sound or is that another sign I'm getting old?

As a fellow heterodynaholic, I send my sympathy (and, of course, sinister laughter).

It may very well be addable to the list of 'things which people interested in Making Light are often also interested in.'

Yangzhou has a block printing museum which I'm going to be taking some students to see -- maybe next weekend, or in any event whenever I've got this kitten in good enough shape to rehome.

Google (and dog whistles) suggest dogs can hear up to around 44 kHz, so above CD (and normal stereo amplifier) frequencies. Maybe dogs can just pay attention to noises above 14 kHz, which we mostly hear mostly as timbre anyway.

Pretty much all CRTs do whine in my experience, but it's much less common for the newer LCDs to do so. (The LCD itself is silent, but they usually have a florescent backlight that isn't.) Also, nowadays CRTs are often driven at higher resolution, which raises the frequency of the whine and makes it harder to hear, I think.

Also, older LCD monitors could behave "interestingly" with an out-of-range or absent/floating signal, but modern ones (mostly) detect that early and put the display into low-power mode or substitute an internally generated signal.

The last DP job I had was at a major Waikiki hotel. I left it in 1993, when they were still running two S/36s, one for front-office and one for back.

Not even that, really, since you only get all the way up to Nyquist if you have infinitely steep filters, which we don't. (That's why DVD-A, running at 96kHz or 192kHz, sounds better* than CD--not because people can hear frequencies up to 96k, but because the designers can use better-sounding filters.)

My guess is that the CDs have tones in the upper half-octave at a fairly low level, which is going to be hard for humans to hear (maybe impossible in a noisy environment, or if the humans went to too many punk shows in their youth the way I did), but easy for the dogs.

I sure hope they come with warnings not to play them too loud...

*In principle. Implementation counts.

Since I work in the library catalog search software world, I don't see the demise of the card catalog as being entirely sad. I think there are insanely neat things you can do with an online catalog.

But I am also nostalgic for the physical presence of the card catalog. When I was at UC Berkeley, I took a Library Science course because I wanted to get a stack pass*. One day the instructor mentioned that there were still a few handwritten cards in the drawers, and I decided to find one. I spent several hours looking up books that I thought might be obscure enough that they had not been replaced since the advent of the typewriter. And I found one.

I still recall everything that was in my field of vision when I saw it (for a mid-19th century translation of the Argonautica). I even remember the color of shirt I was wearing (olive green).

Much as I love online catalogs, that experience is irreplaceable.

-----
* If anyone doesn't understand the appeal of spending time in the stacks, I cannot possibly explain it. It's like jazz; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.

You do some lovely work. I'm almost embarrassed to link to my sites. I think it's obvious how much you've benefitted by real instruction, no matter how much fun I've had figuring things out from books.

What does he mean about "the...top board may be cushioned"?

It means chamfered, in this context. A lot of fine bindings will take the right angles off of the edges of the boards to increase the appearance of delicacy.

And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well?

I'd never heard of just putting one on the fore edge. I'm fairly sure he meant all around.

You can see some of his, and his son Stuart's work in the [British] Society of Bookbinders gallery pages. (Actually, those pages are have lots beautiful bindings, organized by binder. The Events > Bookbinding Competition pages are also full of amazing work*).

My question on concave spine books has always been what the fore edge of the text block looks like. I don't like the thought of a convex text block.

-----
* mutter mutter frames no deeplinking mutter mutter

I meant to link to this page about types of Chinese bookbinding found in the Dunhuang caves on one of Abi's earlier bookbinding threads, but I don't think I ever did.

Eia, nitet!*

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

In Western bookbinding, which is derivative of the horizontal scroll format, there has never been a tradition of top-binding until the advent of the stenographer's notebook.

In Japanese bookbinding, certain book types (account books**, primarily) appear to have been bound across a short edge, but even there, they appear to have been used with the spine perpendicular to the reader/writer. This book has one photo of a receipt book (hantori cho) that looks like it was used like a steno notebook, but the text isn't clear either way.

-----
* singular in reference to the link, or to the webpage, or to the collection of items
** which were traditionally bound by professional ledger binders, rather than bookbinders.

Oh, I understand that very well! In grad school at Undue Perversity P.U., I spent many an hour exploring. It was there I found Merrill Moore's "Clinical Sonnets"*, a number of pages of which I photocopied. But I am equally happy for the advance of electronic cataloguing and online used-book-selling, which led me to Alibris, where I can find said book.

*illustrated by Edward Gorey, no less!

The making of the GoshWowOhBoyOhBoy Bible, otherwise known as St. John's Bible. This is the first completely hand-lettered on vellum, gold-leaf illuminated Bible to have been made in over 500 years. 24 1/2" x 15 3/4", 9 years, New Standard Revised Version, over a million dollars, commissioned by Benedictine monks in Minnesota, and utterly gorgeous. I recommend getting the book--the website doesn't have nearly enough images from it, especially of the calligraphy.

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, who's spent his adult life rescuing Yiddish books. Jewish history is sadder, funnier, and weirder than I knew.

And an employment question....I know a CPA who would like to work for a company which is law-abiding and honest. I don't know how much of this is conscientiousness and how much is irrational pickyness, but I've brought up the possibility of looking for a company with the desired traits, and gotten told that it just isn't feasible--you pretty much have to take the jobs that are available. Are things really that much a matter of luck?

Every year Fortune published their list of the 100
best companies to work for. That would be a start.

I've fixed them.

Inspired by the incident of Mitt Romney's favourite novel, the New York Times suggests two sf books to each Presidential hopeful: one that reflects the way he (or she) wants to be seen, and one that seems appropriate from a more objective viewpoint.

I particularly like the latter suggestion for Giuliani: “The War of the Worlds,” by H. G. Wells: During a cataclysmically destructive event, an observant bystander happens to be in the right place at the right time and thereafter never stops talking about it.

The synergy between the two books suggested for McCain is also nice.

But we've had two in short order. I'll save it for a little while, develop it further.

No freaking way would I ever pay $115,000 for a bible, nor $695 or $595 ("genuine" vs. "bonded" leather for the reduced size editions). That's ludicrously expensive. I suppose a wealthy performance artist could make a run at the Turner Prize by doing something unspeakable to a copy of the $115,000 "heritage" edition; that would be newsworthy.

Thanks for the information*. That's pretty much what I thought, about the western tradition, & it does does make sense that if you started making codices by folding up horizontal scrolls, you'd end up with vertical spines by default. Which I suppose raises the question of whether anyone ever used vertical scrolls much. I guess the Chinese had horizontal scrolls because that was how the bamboo-slat books went... perhaps if they'd developed a script written in rows rather than columns, they'd have used horizontal slats, vertical scrolls and top-bound codices.

In Japanese bookbinding, certain book types (account books, primarily) appear to have been bound across a short edge, but even there, they appear to have been used with the spine perpendicular to the reader/writer. This book has one photo of a receipt book (hantori cho) that looks like it was used like a steno notebook, but the text isn't clear either way.

Very interesting. I remember finding something about Japanese bookbinding on the web once... ah, here it is: Japanese Bookbinding (link goes to the page which includes the ledgers). Certainly the characters on the covers are oriented with the spine at the top, but there isn't any information about the orientation inside. They look to me as if they might be hung up by that tassel, which would be a reason for the cover to orient that way even if the pages didn't.

Interestingly, I have a modern perfect-bound Japanese children's kanji workbook arranged on the same kind of pattern: bound across the shorter edge, cover art oriented with the spine at the top, internal text oriented with the pages turning left to right. I hadn't thought of it in terms of historical continuity until today.

* And for the term "top-bound". It's difficult to talk about this kind of thing concisely and unambiguously when one lacks technical vocabulary.

Any of you New Yorkers see the Santacon last Saturday? Or if you're bored tonight and live in one of these cities, you should see if you can get involved at the last minute: Atlanta, Baltimore, Bangkok, Calgary, Detroit, Dallas (obviously), Helsinki, Indianapolis, London, Nashville, New Orleans, Ottawa, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, or Wilmington.

Although UFOs likely have been spotted since biblical times, the first major reports started on June 24, 1947 when Pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine disk shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington. (from http://www.ufosnw.com/history.htm).

My husband from Texas via LA, was sure he was seeing a fleet of flying saucers the first time he saw The Mountain the day before a low pressure front roll in; he still jokes that if there are flying saucers they use lensatic fleets at Mt. Rainier as camoflague. Visitors from the midwest often refuse to "read" the Cascade volcanoes as mountains, prefering to see them as misshapen storm clouds; seeing lensatic clouds as flying saucers is just another way that mental sets determine perception.

(Indulge me my pedantry; my brain is made of old oatmeal, these days).

*Which made it on to the net labeled Mt. St. Helens. Believe me in this: it is The Mountain. It looks no more like St. Helens than Grand Coulee Dam looks like the Space Needle.

According to the author (Kojiro Ikegami), the tassels at the top had a specific purpose.

Completed ledgers were often strung together and tied with a long cord so that in case of fire -- a common occurrence in crowded Japanese towns -- they could be flung into a nearby well and later retrieved without damage to either paper or ink.

GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States, Should tell reporters he’s read “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card: A gifted child from a privileged family defeats a race of inhuman warriors without ever having to leave the comfort of his war-simulator machine.

bwhahhahawhaahwhbwaw!

Mount Shasta, in far Northern California, is known for its lenticular clouds.

But of course those aren't clouds, they are the ships of the Lemurian people-- the earlier race of Mankind who once lived in lost Atlantis-- as they travel from power-point to power-point (the intersection of power-lines) across the earth. The great city within hollow Shasta can also be reached via the wormhole inside the uncountable depths of nearby Castle Lake, a lake also known as the control lake for the UC Davis scientists studying Lake Tahoe, an unbelieving group who claim Castle is only 400 feet deep and 10,000 years old, a mere product of the last ice age.

I've been told.

Kathryn #134: Isn't Mount Shasta one of the places that allow access to the Earth's hollow interior, and the paradise therein?

And you have access to these necromancy-like feats without having to sell your soul to Santa. As for Earth's hollow interior, and the paradise therein, you've never seen the movie At The Earth's Core, obviously. It reveals the little-known truth that Earth's interior is not a paradise, but a hell ruled by cheesy rubbery pterodactyls.

I see what you did there!

One of my favorite memories is taking the Coast Starlight north from the Bay Area on a day when a freight line worker had "accidentally" locked it on a siding and gone home for the night, making it run eight hours late. Instead of going through Dunsmuir in the dead of night we passed through the Shasta area in broad daylight. I'd seen Shasta from I-5 before, but never that close up. The tracks run through a lava field which I want to examine close up some day.

IIRC, stepping on the butterfly in the past swung the results of an election in the present, so that the more belligerent, unstable candidate became President.

I had been wondering how many stories you could put together that would have an election as a major plot point. The Eighty Minute Hour by Brian Aldiss for one. There had been a short story I recall (but cannot recall author or title) where a pair of scientists shift themselves into a parallel universe where 'the Judge' wins the election against a militant fascist, only to find that in this universe the Judge is a militant fascist (I don't think I would be able to find this in the box library in the attic; I'm pretty sure I sold the book I read the story in years ago).

http://drawger.com/show.php?show_id=27&image_id=926

One of the reasons I love San Francisco is the history of Santacons. The third year was when 40 Santas flew to Portland to join the festivities there. 40 on one flight.

Tim Walters #108:
I bought a copy for a 'Secret Santa' present and yes, it comes with a warning to not play at excessive volumes.

Local TV & radio have been testing it on canines of various sorts & some anecdotal evidence suggests that dogs can hear and respond to it. For all I know, it's a whole CD's worth of actual silence, but it's for a good cause.

ethan, #126: Sometimes technology gives strange epiphanies. One of mine was back in 1998, looking at the pictures from Mars online. I thought I was accustomed to my computer being a "window on the world" -- but to have it suddenly be a window onto another world was just plain awe-inspiring.

Greg, #133: Perhaps more importantly... at a critical juncture in his training, he CHEATS. I strongly suspect that the choice of Ender's Game for Bush was made with the assumption that the people who have read the book would also make that connection.

xkcd on the modern world. I know how that feels, in spite of Dubya.

Overall, very good. Will Smith does an excellent job playing The Last Man On Earth; the dog actor is splendid as well. Manhattan is very credibly deserted and grown over.

Caveat: A wrenching story . . . traumatic at times.

Missing: The whole notion that the lead character is viewed as a fearsome anti-vampire by the sickly night-dwelling survivors.

Did you want instructions? I'd have to look them up, and while Joy of Cooking probably has useful ones, my pro baking textbook, which I KNOW does, is at work right now.

A lot of fine bindings will take the right angles off of the edges of the boards to increase the appearance of delicacy.

Ok, thanks for explaining. I've done that before; I just thought it was to reduce the strain on the leather.

The first I'd heard of a Yapp edge was in a class Dominic Riley taught this year in Seattle. We did a limp vellum binding, where we just folded the cover over the fore edge.

My question on concave spine books has always been what the fore edge of the text block looks like.

I've not found any pictures. One could trim them flat after backing, but that might also look a little strange. Especially if you didn't take it into account in the imposition. (I did this once by mistake. It doesn't look strange on the self given how most contemporary books are flat, but it does look slightly off as you flip through.) I don't see you you could ever get a concave fore edge with a concave spine. Maybe clamp it really hard and go at it with a chisel?

Thanks for the SOB links. Amazing stuff!

Me too. And about that fluorescent cat- it isn't just a fluorescent cat- it's a fluorescent cloned cat. As soon as I saw it, I knew it had to become one of my precious user icons (one only gets 15, so it can be a big decision).

We've been looking at haze in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter planet 63 light years away. 21st century moments, yay.

The seven volumes seem to cost about $40 each at amazon, but that's still $420 for the set, which is pretty steep.

As far as I can tell, the St. John's Bible is of more interest as art than as religion, though one of the purposes of it is to encourage contemplative reading, and I think it would work for that.

If you just want a good solid dose of "Ooooh, Shiny!", Illuminating the Word is officially $40, but I found a $20 copy online.

I keep waiting for the regular PanAm flight to the moon.

As for UK politics, the Labour Party came up with the slogan "Not flash, just Gordon" after Brown took office; it is a damn shame that the Lib Dems didn't respond by describing their then-leader, Menzies Campbell, as "Not merciless, just Ming".

I think Mr Langford pointed out that Osama bin Laden might have been inspired by the Foundation series: a genius sets up a dedicated order on a remote planet in order to rule the galaxy after the inevitable collapse of the decadent Empire, and communicates with them by regular posthumous video recordings... (also al-Qaeda means "the base". Or "the Foundation"?)

Rob Rusick@143: First Lensman, by Doc Smith. "Franchise", by Isaac Asimov. Probably Double Star, and if memory serves me right Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad.

The government has a $intensifier LOT of rules for handling job apps. I just had to be on the team to score a stack of applications and to do the interviews, so I am happy to turn my pain into good for someone.

For the US govermnent, a one-page resume would not meet the minimum requirements. If you look at the position announcement, it describes the position, lists some education/experience requirements, and then lists "KSAs", knowledge/skill/ability requirements. A lot of applicants seem not to grasp that these are the heart of it. You have to address--in specific detail--how you meet each and every one of these KSA requirements.

Each KSA point is scored separately, so if something you wrote in #2 is also applicable in your response for KSA #4--repeat it.

It is also very important to explain much mojo of each KSA you have. (NB: "Mojo" is not a government term.) How independently did you act when you did things related to the KSA? How wide was the scope of your action? How broad was the effect? Did you make recommendations or decisions? Did you develop new things or figure out how to apply old things? All these go into the grade you get for how well you meet the KSA.

Another tip: the graders are not allowed to infer. If you say you did A and C, the graders are not allowed to assume you passed through B en route. If it's not in your package explicitly, it doesn't exist.

Also, it's useful to know that http://www.usajobs.gov/ is a database of all federal job postings, in all parts of the country. You can even set up agents to mail you new postings that meet your criteria and apply on line through the site. It fails to suck.

Books I've read in which the LDS church figures prominently are Under the Banner of Heaven and a book by Martha Beck called Leaving the Saints. (She writes well but boy, does she have issues. Talk about an untrustworthy narrator...)

Comments and suggestions gladly considered.

Oh, I didn't mention this - but all four are hardbacks.

JESR, #145, from my college dining hall (Seattle Pacific), we could look one way and see the sound and the other way and see Rainier.

And usajobs.com is way better than even a lot of the corporate, expensive Web job-hunting sites.

Getting more expensive quickly. Job hunting will be my full-time job starting Monday (I have severance, sufficient until mid-March but no insurance once the new year starts. I have my meds refilled until then too).

I have mixed feelings about the possibility.

Very rocketpunk, that image.

By the way, the prices I refer to in my #127 ($115000, $695 and $595) were for various editions available directly from the publisher's website, and not Amazon prices.

I took "Vocational Typewriting" classes in high school, during the 70s, double-spaces after full-stops, etc, and all. All of the workbooks we had to use (with titles like "Practical Secretarial Typewriting"), from the good people at McGraw-Hill, were bound across the top. I've never come across that kind of binding in books anywhere since.

The curious thing about these books was that you read down the first page, flipped it upwards, and the next page was printed on its back, upside-down, so that you could read a two-page spread from top to bottom. It was a useful way to arrange pages when you had to copy, say, a long legal document, etc.

Oops on the price--no doubt a combination of arithmetic error and pessimism about the cost.

#177 ::: Earl Cooley III:

Why give the publisher prices rather than what a lot of people are likely to pay?

I was describing an Asimov story to someone recently, and that is probably the one! In brief: computers are used to find the most representative voter in the country, who is then asked a series of questions. Based on his answers, the outcome of the election is calculated; the ultimate winner remains unknown even to the 'voter', until the results are announced.

<joke>I suppose the bad news would be that the computers were built by Diebold.</joke>

I read the novel more than 30 years ago, but I seem to remember that the story didn't live up to its premise's promise, with the Voter winding up hiding somewhere near Pluto. And there might have been aliens waiting once he got there.

Nancy@182: I don't recall an election in The Probability Broach; one of points of that book is that they don't have elections. IIRC, the "Congress" involves anyone willing to show up with tags indicating the number of people willing to delegate to the critter at that moment. (There may be some foofaraw about how the chair is elected, but that's still in-camera.)

After various title-cards, the opening shot is of a statue of Alexander III. There's a brief scene of a running crowd, and then the imagery is of men climing the statue, using ladders and ropes, and preparing to topple it.

Sound familiar?

So, way back when the Republican invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam, they seem to have pretty deliberately emulated Soviet propaganda. True, Eisenstein's imagery is so powerful that it has been influencing revolutionaries ever since the film was released. It's one of those essential narrative memes.

And isn't spooky to see that communist propaganda and to recall it being recreated by the US Army.

You're right--it's a campaign with voting, but not an election.

John Dalmas' "The General's President" may have included an election; I can't remember for sure if the title character came to power via the normal route or not.

The election is off-camera, but one of the early Vorkosigan books has repeated mentions of an election on Beta colony where nobody will admit to having voted for the winner; I've never been sure whether to interpret that to mean that the winner's popularity has decreased significantly since the election, or that the election was rigged, or simply that Our Heroes move in minority-opinion circles.

I took it to mean the first or the last of the three (possibly both at once), but that was before this crowd was in office.

I couldn't resist making my own comment, where one of the writers I touted was Jo Walton with her latest two books (from Tor). Has anyone else ignored the lousy heading and checked out that discussion?

To ridicule the ludicrously high prices for a bible that represents money that would be better spent on the EFF or ramen noodle soup. I understand that it would be useless to attempt to affect your enthusiasm for the project, though.

There was a short period of time after a lottery drawing where an assassination attempt was allowed; the new ruler could evade or kill the assassin. Some critic pointed out an interesting inversion in the story: the ruler was determined by random chance, and a convention was held to select his assassin.

I would think a system like that would create figurehead rulers, with the actual power residing in the institutions. But you probably can't use logic on a book like this*. I wonder if this had been one of the books PKD did on a speed-fueled writing binge.

* Again, IIRC, the elected assassin turned to be an android capable of space-flight; this is why the new ruler had been hiding out on Pluto. Oddly enough, I don't think there were any aliens in this story.

One of Neal Stephenson's pseudonymous collaborations involves a presidential campaign in a near-future US. Ah, here we go, "Interface" originally published as by "Stephen Bury".

Which reminds me of Bruce Sterling's similar* Distraction. I don't recall if an election actually takes place in the course of the novel, but the protagonist is a campaign manager or similar.

* I've not read Interface, but I've seen them compared.

Sci-Fi for People Who Don't Think They Like Sci-Fi.

I, for one, am in danger of turning into one of those people. Every now and then I pick up something and try to read it, and it turns out not to be as fun as it looks at first.

So the question is, where should I look in order to find stuff that is worthwhile so I don't start expecting things not to be worthwhile and quit?

Level 7, Robert Anton Wilson and Thomas Pynchon:
You know that something is majorly wrong but you don't know what it is because you don't know that you know what you know, and it's all a cover-up anyway.

Hm. I looked at the recommendations in the user comments. "Ender's Game" came up numerous, numerous times. And so did "Left Hand of Darkness". Maybe I'm not actually a sci-fi person, either.

ROT13'ing the spoilers.

Ender's Game:

Gur jubyr gvzr V jnf ernqvat "Raqre'f Tnzr", V pbhyq abg trg cnfg n fvk lrne byq orvat orggre ng fgengrtvmvat aniny onggyrf guna fbzrbar jub'f npghnyyl orra va gur anil sbe gjragl lrnef be fb. Gur jubyr guvat pnzr bss nf n tvnag Tnel Fgh sbe zr. Ohg vg jba nyy fbegf bs njneqf naq nccneragyl rirelbar ryfr ybirq vg.

Left Hand of Darkness:

Yrsg Unaq bs Qnexarff qvqa'g qb vg sbe zr rvgure. Gur frpbaq gvzr gur YUbQ zragvbarq gung Trayl qvqa'g npprcg fbzr cneg bs Rfgenina, (naq tvira gung Trayl nyjnlf eryngrq gb Rfgenina nf vs Rfgenina jnf n znyr, engure guna naqebtlabhf), V thrffrq gur ovt gjvfg jnf tbvat gb or gung gurl unir frk. Gura gur raqvat jurer Rfgenina raqf hc trggvat xvyyrq sbe ab erny checbfr frrzrq n qhzo jnl gb xvyy bss fbzrbar fb erfbheprshy. V pbhyqa'g oryvrir Rfgenina jbhyq qb fbzrguvat fb cbvagyrff.

Actually, I haven't read anything lately, from any genre, that I was particularly enthralled with.

A commenter on Andy Wheeler's blog* brought up this WashPost blog post Great Sci Fi for People Who Think They Don't Like Sci Fi because the WP writer lists only fairly old books. I skimmed down the long list of comments and noticed that there are very few books by female authors listed until you get to Faren Miller's post at the bottom.

*Andy was complaining that Itzkoff's piece on SF books for presidents doesn't actually require Itzkoff to have read SF recently.

As the NYTimes article shows, and G.Greenwald highlights, this has never really been about 9/11 or foreign surveillance: those were just the retroactive excuses.

Please call your congresscritter / write speeches for Dodd's fillibuster / consider donating to the EFF*.

-------
* It's a member-supported non-profit which gets results as if they were much larger than they are**. They've been fighting AT&T for nearly 2 years, and I suppose AT&T finally recognized it could only win by buying a win in Congress. Bleh.

** Yes, I'm biased- I know the people at the EFF. They're very effective and efficient, but they're limited by how much money they get in donations (and they don't have nearly as many members as some people might think).

From Housewife to Heretic by Sonia Johnson

And one of my favorite* memories came after a blizzard shut down I-5 and slowed the Coast Starlight so that it didn't arrive in Dunsmuir until 6am.

The stretch from Dunsmuir to Lake Shasta had places with over 3 feet of snow**. That against a brilliant blue sky made for near-numinous beauty.

* although the waiting on the empty platform*** from 3am (the original "we've been delayed but we'll get there") until 6am ("this time we really mean it") got too cold. Other people who arrived at the station at the much more realistic 5am let me stay in their car and regain sensation in my feet.

** 3 feet from the blizzard, more from before.

*** Now they have a heated waiting room. Not then.

(* I did get a hit on shiny, but it wasn't related.)

I guess they get to hear the latest teenage gossip as it happens.

Children's pop-up books are the only examples I can think of.

Two books I actually did find worthwhile recently were Spaceman Blues by Brian Slattery and Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. In the past year the only other science fiction books that made an impression on me were the last couple of Company books from Kage Baker, Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale (part of an obscure but amazingly good small press series that began as a Doctor Who spinoff) and Blindsight by Peter Watts, which I enjoyed despite an aversion to depressing books. (I'm chronically depressed, and dystopias or otherwise grim stories make me feel worse--so they have to be really, really good before I'll read more than a couple of chapters.)

(Oh, and Charles Stross's Halting State was fun, too, if not quite up to the standard of Accelerando.)

Looks like he said to himself after reading Null-A, "I can do this", and proceeded to do so.

I'm curious: Have any Wiccans/pagans read the book? A big thread of the book involved something like Wicca as a very common religion, at least in the US, but I have no idea how close the book is to any reality, since I know very little about Wicca.

Forget the two-hours of sleep. Forget the 0530 bus to the Nünberg airport to get a flight which left at 1100.

Forget the gal at duty free who didn't know enough to let me buy the schnapps I wanted to pick up.

Forget the fact that I hate the Frankfurt airport.

Forget that I couldn't upgrade and had 12 hours from FRA to SFO in an inside inside seat (though, to be fair, my seatmates were very nice and as such horrors go, this one wasn't too bad).

Forget that my bag was opened, by those mysterious, "supplemental" screenings people behind the scenes..

Forget all that; and accept that customs in SFO was as pleasant as customs ever gets.

Forget even that I lost a mitten from my jacket; and that it had the kinderegg I'd been hoarding since it arrived in my boot on St. Nicholas morning.

No, some bastard stole my assorted marzipans. Took it from my duty-free bag in the overhead bin.

But, I'm home. Saw some people at the party Maia hied me away to from the airport. Played come carols at meeting yesterday, did some more socialising last night (the calendar she sent me is booked, until Friday). I am, I hope, slept out and past jat-lag.

It's good to be home.

Apologies for tooting my own employer's horn, but the February 2008 Locus will have the usual Best Of lists and reviewers' comments on SF, Fantasy etc. from this year. Though at present, we're all still arguing over what will go on the list, the final version should include a lot of good stuff, and the comments will mention other personal faves.

I don't get to see much SF myself, but Jo Walton's last two do qualify as fine books. I also liked Slattery's Spaceman Blues, which Wesley mentioned above, and hope it will make one of the eventual lists.

From my own reviewerly perspective, fantasy of many kinds is where things are really "happening" at present. Not to knock SF, though, for it certainly hasn't lost its relevance as we've moved into another century.... (Etc., etc., and I'll cut the blather now!)

[0] Unknown to me...

Self-Determination. It's the American Way.

My daytime trip past Shasta was in mid-May, and very different from yours; wish we could swap memory-files so that we could know both extremes, but I get hung up describing the jackrabbit I saw at dawn that day, flying along even with the train beneath a broad rainbow at the last flat before entering the foothills.

Indeed, that's the only thing I don't understand about Lieberman.

I would also find the little thing dingalinging in my ear or buzzing in my pocket all the time incredibly annoying. I would have had to confess to my mother that I had gotten sick of the stupid thing and flung it out of the bus.

One of the scans of endpapers hit me right in the nostalgia plexus: this one from a 1954 Tom Swift, Jr. book. I remember that image!

I loved that illustration, too, in my day. But the Endpapers to End Endpapers were created by Alex Schomburg for Winston.

(Interestingly the Tom Swift illo seems to have been contributed by Jackson Publick, one of the creators of The Venture Brothers. TVB is a vicious and frequently-tasteless parody of Jonny Quest but it is also frequently hilarious.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119766934184930123.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_page_one

-hee.

I'm trying to get away from that kind of thinking. A week at my family's house, fighting with their computer, will do a lot to put me back in my own head, rather than the communal one.

They can also say "OK, well they have two kinds of chocolate icecream here. One is called Double Fudge Chocolate, and the other is called Chocolate Chocolate. Which kind do you want?" A feature, I might add, that I have personally found useful.

They can also call home and say "Daddy, I'm on a dark road in the country and I have a flat. I'm scared."

There are more.

[posted from 202.45.119.133]

They can also call home...

In short, they can avoid every TV and movie plot line that can only take place without the existence of cellphones.

EvilDude: "Hey, kid, your dad's been in an accident and your mom asked me to pick you up. Hop on in."
Kid: "OK, but let me call my mom first."

Those are days of the past, now.

Current lead story on the front page of msnbc.com: late-night TV shows are coming back on the air, without writers.

Currently missing entirely from the front pages of either site: Turkey's attacking the PKK in Iraq. Chris Dodd's filibustering in the Senate.

After my annual appraisal‡ this afternoon, my boss dashed off (on his cycle) to catch the ferry south across the Ij to his home. I was packing up my bike more slowly when he came back. The ferries weren't running in our area. Two boats had collided, three people had gone into the water, and the river was closed for the search & rescue*.

The ferries were running further east, so he was headed that way. I joined him, not because I live east of the office (I'm to the north), but because it just sounded like fun to cycle hell for leather through the darkened streets of Amsterdam Noord.

So I rode with him, and it was as wild and as crazy† as I expected. We pulled up, laughing and breathless, just as the ferry arrived to take him south. I then turned and rode back the way with the flood of cyclists coming off the boat, many of them going back toward where he and I had come from.

There was a great feeling of unity in that group of cyclists, and very good manners. It was as crowded as the Tour De France just after the starting line, but slower and more generous. The group split and resplit as different people headed off in different directions.

I found myself, after a time, in a group of four riding in a line. We were up on an old dyke, built up on either side now, but still the only high ground in the area. The bike path was a little apart from the road, but there weren't any cars anyway, just the four of us, all but silent in the frozen night air. I was second from back.

And then the woman behind me began to sing.

I only caught snatches of it, though her voice was clear and lovely in that chilly air. It was in Dutch, and so incomprehensible to me, but it sounded old - maybe 16th century.

And then she finished the song, and fell silent, and I found myself thinking about the people in the river back behind us. And it seemed like a scene from a story, the four strangers travelling together in the dark and the cold, and the singing, and the stopping, as though the death in the river had reached out and taken one of us as well.

I glanced back, and she was fine, riding under the streetlamps. Our little group split up shortly afterward. Eventually I was alone in the darkness, far from any houses or lighting, with just my bike lights to show the way.

And I started to sing**, and didn't stop until I came into the lights of my village.

-----
‡ which went very well, and included the handing over of the permanent contract.
* air temperature freezing, water warmer, and the fire dept reckon up to 3 hours' survivability. It's been 4 hours now, and I only know of two who got out of the river.
† but, I hasten to add, not dangerous
** Greensleeves

She's too modest, as most great people tend to.

What an incredible thing to have for a memory. (Not the death part, of course, but the sense of community, and the singing, and the riding in the dark.)

So it's nice to see his book getting advtg on a literary blog.

I read his first book, "Swimming Across the Hudson", which was pretty good. It was clearly a first novel, since, knowing the family, I can see a lot of similarities between Henkin's family and the family described in the novel.

Earl, #212: That one's in my TBR stack, so I wouldn't mind a brief (spoiler-free) opinion about it when you're done. It won't bother me a bit if it turns into a romance; I enjoy well-done genre crossovers. A fair number of the books on my Desert Island list are SF/mystery or SF/romance.

Xopher, #235: Or a real-life example: "I wiped out on my bike, and I'm bleeding. I'm at the corner of 34th and $STREET. Can Dad come and get me?" (Fortunately, no real harm done, though she needed 3 stitches in her chin. And a nice gentleman on a motorcycle, who'd seen it happen, stopped and stayed with her until my partner arrived.)

Another subthread starts up on boating, hypothermia, and/or drowning, with many tragic tales and copious references to Jim's Annual Hypothermia Lecture.

Others of us, the ones who started out talking about singing, might branch off into discussing our favorite walking tunes and chants, or into the fertile/futile topic of Why "Greensleeves" Is Better Than "What Child Is This," and/or other abominations of great songs made into crappy Christmas carols.

It would approach the thousand-post singularity in no time. I encourage you to promote it.

(Also I had to reeducate a friend on the concept of an arranged rendezvous at the age of 30 when he moved to a town with very patchy coverage at the bottom of the hill (where the pubs are))

It demonstrated to me the clear superiority of the Dutch style of bike to the American styles... The Dutch bikes, you sit completely upright and can look around and chat easily; in America, both mountain and road bikes involve you crouching over the handles to various degrees. The Dutch way is far more comfortable for me (Ahh! The American leaning on the wrists being jolted by the road thing! It hurts and stings!), and better suited to the 2 miles on flat steets to and from work: I'm more visible and I can see better around me.

I wish there was someplace that sold cheap Dutch-style bikes in America.

Ask and ye shall find. :

http://www.dutchbikes.us/

Dutch Bicycles in US

Ok. I got my first two-wheeler when we lived in New London, CT at the Navy's Underwater Sound Lab (on the Groton River, across from the Sub Base) in 1956 or 1957. I learned to ride it on the grinder (massive parking-lot sized gravel-coated macadam piece of land) outside the front door of our quarters.

I think the Sound Lab has been closed.

For some reason nobody ever mentions that you're not supposed to lean on the wrists - the majority of your weight should be supported by those nice firm abs and back muscles, and your wrists/hands should be unloaded, lest they become damaged.

There are a few American specialty manufacturers making bikes on that Dutch model you speak of, which is also the model of the old English three-speeds -- Broadway Bikes in Cambridge, MA is one of them (http://broadwaybicycleschool.com/mastermodel.html). Rivendell Bicycles in Walnut Creek, CA may be another one (http://www.rivbike.com/) -- their descriptions don't pay explicit homage, but they have the right attitude. You will pay handsomely for the privilege of owning a bike like that, however, since at least here in the US they aren't mass-produced bikes. (You may be able to find them used, though, since they seemingly last forever -- partly due, I suspect, to the internally-geared hub and solid steel construction.)

Then again, if you're like me, that $3000 bike doesn't look nearly so expensive when I figure that the bike will last me the rest of my life. Myself, I'm still lusting after the Tout Terrain Silkroad -- http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/tout-terrain.asp.

Maybe they thought it was almond-flavored C4.

There's a reason for the handlebars, of course. It's because the crouched riding position offers less wind resistance, which is important as average speeds get up to around 40 kph. If you're a fit, whippet-like road racer, fine. If you're not, and you're only trying to get some exercise and burn calories rather than fossil fuels, too bad, loser.

I couldn't stay on the bike.

Just a handful of layoffs this time . . . five out of maybe 200 in the office.

Tomorrow I put out tins of Christmas fudge to help everyone get over survivor's guilt.

perhaps a Recumbent Bike?

Not cheap though. But I always thought it would be neat to own one.

I had reorganized my utensil drawer (why I was keeping those flimsy but very sharp knives I'm not sure, but I threw them out) when I realized: last night I had the whole counter covered with chocolate-covered parchment paper, which I balled up and shoved in the trash*, greatly expediting my cleanup.

Fortunately, I had put a new bag in the kitchen garbage. I pulled out the ball of parchment paper and started unrolling it, hardly daring to hope...and there it was. It was covered with chocolate, so it blended in. OM GANESHA.

But I didn't get ANY chocolates made tonight. And I'm much too tired to begin—plus it was my exhaustion that nearly let to my sabotaging my entire operation last night. So I'm going to bed.

But here's a picture of what I was working on last night. Those are fresh-ginger buttercreams in bittersweet chocolate, and yes that's real gold dust. The ginger is very strong, and to me it tastes exactly how gold looks, so I think it really works.

*Yes, that means I threw away a fair amount of chocolate. After several evenings of working chocolate, you feel like you never want to see it again at the end of a work session. I'm happy to report that this bizarre sensation fades by morning.

When I first rode bikes they were all made with upright handlebars except those used by professional racers. I did a bike tour through New England, six weeks, from Springfield MA to Canada and back when I was sixteen, riding a 3-speed Raleigh with upright handlebars. I loved that bike, and except for one nasty spill in the Green Mountains which required some patching (me, knees; bike, brakes) the trip went gloriously well.

"Comfort" bikes, eh....?

Xopher, #276: Sorry, but I'm not going to get a MySpace account just to look at pictures of chocolate, no matter how pretty. This is not the first time I've encountered that particular roadblock; apparently MySpace won't let you look at anything without logging in first.

Shouldn't that be OM GANACHE?

I have released Kevin Riggle's message from captivity. All quoted numbers from 270 till now are suspect*.

-----
* Arrest on sight.

un-believe-a-bull.

This means I do not take it into Amsterdam proper, where it would get stolen in a heartbeat. Even in the areas I do take it, I use a Dutch ring lock and a thick cable lock.

I've made it seem less desirable by fitting it with a set of large, practical, and entirely unsporty panniers. They're another feature of Dutch cycling - about 40 Euro for a good set, which will take my laptop and bag for work, or - in combination with a backpack - a whole shopping cart full of groceries. I've even brought a (mini) crate of beer home in them once.

I love my bike. I call it Vera.

I'll be less shy next time.

You shouldn't just bind books, abi, you should be writing them. Your story @251 is wonderful.

Level 10 - Phillip K. Dick:
God hates you and smites you; as you lie dying you find yourself the object of worship of a cult of androids who will carry the battle to Heaven. You still die.

There are others. Alan Moore is much more subtle than you are giving him credit for.

You will love your bicycle! You will give your bicycle a girl's name! Because it is the only thing you are going to get your leg over from now on! This machine is your wife - and you will be faithful!

(I also love my bike. I have just spent far too much money on a Steve-Austin-scale refit after the axle broke in Trafalgar Square. I call it The Beast.)

Without wanting to get into another round of Greg London vs. Alan Moore fans, I'll note that this is one of the potential problems with reading things into the early hours of the morning; you miss things. Amongst other things Watchmen is a critique of superheroes. Irvqg, orvat n fhcreureb, gevrf gb fnir gur jbeyq hfvat ivbyrapr; gur qvssrerapr vf ur hfrf vg ba n ynetre fpnyr. Gur zbeny ceboyrz bs hfvat ivbyrapr gb fbyir ceboyrzf vf vyyhfgengrq ol gur zntavsvpngvba sebz orngvat hc ivyynvaf gb qrfgeblvat cneg bs Arj Lbex; vf gur jbeyq ernyyl orggre sbe vg?

Ba n gnatrag, jr xabj ubj gur-jbeyq-havgvat-nsgre-na-nggnpx-ba-Arj-Lbex jbexrq bhg va erny yvsr, juvpu znxrf zr jbaqre jung Yvaqrezna gubhtug ur pbhyq qb orggre va Urebrf.

(Next time I name an alien city it will be Arj Lbex)

Greg @ #276, my husband rides a recumbent and is very pleased with it. He mainly rides shortish, leisurely rides around the outskirts of town (30 miles or so), but he did a double century on it a couple of years back. He has back problems, but finds the recumbent very comfortable.

subtle, shmudtle. I got all the clues. They're irrelevant.

There is an idea in writing called "show me, don't tell me." When judging the war-porn-ness of a story, I base it off of what the author shows me on screen from beginning of story to end. Not what the author tells me happens off screen, or hints will happen after. If Moore wanted to get scored for the fact that the plan wouldn't work out in the end, then he ended his story too early. He should have shown that part. He should have figured out a way to have another chapter showing the world five or ten years after his version of the story ended. Given that the series of 12 comic books spans across 20 or 30 years, no reason he couldn't have pushed the timeline out to show us 10 years after chapter 12. He didn't. So he doesn't get credit for it.

And that doesn't even get into his absolute infatuation with torture via Rorschach. Rorschach repeatedly tortures people and gets the information that tells him where the proverbial ticking bomb is. Torture works in Moore's world. It worked transformational miracles on Evey in "V for Vendetta", and it works like "24" in "The Watchmen". I thought "V" showed an infatuation with torture. But "Watchmen" goes way beyond "V".

More than one person can search the same general area -- no waiting until the guy doing a bibliography of books about George Washington finishes with that drawer.

I'm not really arguing against your point, more like making a tangentally related gripe--My local library has four computers that have card catalogs on them. They also all have internet access. If you want to use the card catalog, you have to sign up on the waiting list and wait for your turn in the queue, and you only get fifteen minutes, because there's always someone who wants to get online. Aargh.

#276, Greg London -
I have a vague fear of recumbent bikes, ever since my uncle severely broke his leg on a home-built one*. I don't even know the details of the accident (it was quite some time ago) but he's the only person I know who broke a leg** on a bicycle and also the only person I know who had a recumbent. It makes the anecdotal evidence against them pretty strong. Can anyone comment on whether they really are any more dangerous?

*Yes, the "home-built" part might have been a major contributing factor. I don't know.

**He's actually the only person I know of who broke a bone of any kind, but I'm betting I could ask around and find many fractured wrists among my more adventurous friends, so we'll limit it to "the only person I know who broke a leg."

Alternatively, one might argue that the civilian deaths don't count, and that drops the score to +385, which is still pretty high. But I think they count.

Either way, it's up there.

Nancy #182: In the _Rainbow Cadenza_ there's an election, and this leads to people important to the plot moving around a bit. And I loved the way they'd shifted around rules regarding sexual orientation (a straight guy seen cavorting with a man was assumed to be having a good time, but a gay man seen cavorting with a woman was a scandal).

I'd missed that last. I obviously need to reread the book.

I'm curious: Have any Wiccans/pagans read the book? A big thread of the book involved something like Wicca as a very common religion, at least in the US, but I have no idea how close the book is to any reality, since I know very little about Wicca.

I'm a fairly non-observant neo-pagan, so I can answer that.

The book is very far from reality. Everything in the neo-pagan/Wiccan range involves few people, little money, and practically no political influence.

There's been one political win lately-- it's now possible to get pentacles on graves in National Cemeteries.

As for Rainbow Cadenza, I was unhappy with the portrayal of Wicca in it, and I finally figured out that Wicca in the novel was completely aligned with the very creepy government.

I've been in some hairy bike-wrecks (two of which involved cars) and on a recumbent, one of them would probably have been fatal, even with a helmet and body armor.

And now what I actually wanted to ask! I think I broke my home computer monitor. It's a big CRT, and while I was plugging something into the back of the computer, it made noises like it was turning on, turning off, switching back and forth, then turned off. And now it won't turn on again. I think static may have had something to do with it. Is this a completely broken thing, or is there something I can do to check?

AUGGGHHHHHHH!!!!
* runs into the night pursued by counter-tenors *

Madeline, the other keyword is 'Cruiser', e.g.:

Raleigh Bikes
They are very comfortable to ride, especially with the new gell seats!

Unfortunately, not so cheap; I managed to get a second-hand one for myself, though. You might try EBay or Craigslist.

May marzipan thieves be consigned to the fieriest pits of Eblis. But, however bad it was, even a bad trip home is still a trip home. Welcome back.

abi,

Please, when you write a story like the one about bicycling in Amsterdam, post it so we can enjoy it to the maximum, by embellishing it with threads and subthreads, relevant and not. It's the best way to honor storytelling.

ink cannery girl & heresiarch

At some point we may need to discuss a 12-step program. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy Agatha's adventures as much as possible.

All,

I've been a dim ghost of my usual online presence lately, but I'll be coming back, now that we've got our younger son safely married off. I'll post some pictures and reminiscences on my blog (click my username above) later, probably tonight.

I've never seen anyone wearing a helmet over a high ponytail. I have long hair, and I french braid it. Fits under my helmet fine (although I had to search around for a helmet that would fit my weirdly big head).

Maybe you could find one of those helmets with multiple vent holes, and fit the ponytail through the hole?

Also, anybody got a reaction to the Bali talks apart from "Thats what I expected, we're doomed now"?

I do have to take exception, though, to the assertion that only that which is explicitly shown on the page (or onscreen) matters in a story. What isn't explicit can matter just as much as what's shown (or told*); sometimes it's more so. And I don't think the implicit things need to have definite answers, either - indeed, one of the things I find worthwhile in Watchmen is that is IS ambiguous in many ways, which makes its resolution all the more troubling (and being troubling is very much its point).

Have you read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics? While some of his overall theory is somewhat contestible, one of the more brilliant observations in it is that the magic of comics (in particular, but it applies to other media as well) happens in the gutters - that it's what the reader brings to the action between panels that makes comics work, because otherwise it's just disconnected images with no through-line at all. To take an example from the work under discussion, one of the most powerful and terrifying bits of Watchmen is where Rorschach figures out what happened to the little girl - which we're not told in so many words, or shown explicitly, but we see the flashes of images as Rorschach puts it together and are allowed to experience that moment of horror along with him. It doesn't work unless the reader is engaged in solving the puzzle on their own from the clues given (and, like the best horror, it relies on the reader's complicity for its impact, because you're going to come up with something much more awful in your head than anything that could possibly be drawn on the page). When Rorschach's narration points out that it's not God that ohgpuref puvyqera naq srrqf gurz gb gur qbtf, it's us - that resonates on a meta-level, because it's we the readers who have imagined it for ourselves without having to be "shown."

I wonder if it's a variation of engaging with story on that level, where it's expected that the reader will fill in narrative and thematic gaps, that's the source of disconnect in many of these thrashes with people who like things that you find distasteful or problematic and who are seeing things that to you obviously aren't there. For good or ill, that level of story can't be codified or rated on a scale - but it makes all the difference in the way many, many of us react to narrative that can't be accounted for solely by tallying the body count or the depictions of unpleasant behavior by the protagonists.

*"Show, don't tell" is, IMNSHO, one of the more dangerous bits of advice ever elevated to artistic gospel - not because it's wrong, but because adherence to it as a Rule creates just as much flawed and awkward work as the alternative. Sometimes you need to just tell something and get on with it. And sometimes you need to neither show nor tell, but leave the important parts in the lacunae between what's being told and shown and let the picture emerge for the reader in that negative space.

So did I, and I only saw the movie. Thank you, Greg. We are a lonely minority, but proud. I've never been able to figure out why my otherwise sensible, totally anti-torture friends approved of V.

It's a funny thing, I've never before been quite so annoyed at a petty theft. Perhaps it broke some sense of the compact I feel for my fellow travellers.

Regardless, I am more glad to be home that I am angered by the loss of my sweetmeats.

"I thought "V" showed an infatuation with torture."

I thought rather that it showed an infatuation with revenge, tempered with an awareness that revenge is limited, and problematic. Torture happened once or twice, but frequently it was of the happened through karma kind, if that makes any sense.

Thanks. I wonder if Shulman was trying to carry off the same kind of transformation of Wicca that happened to Christianity, when it went from a small ridiculed or persecuted or ignored cult to a powerful religion aligned with the state. You get very different kinds of people interested in those two different kinds of religions, different doctrines that seem interesting or important, etc.

(Actually it was having a logging truck making a left turn at about half that speed, close enough to leave bits of bark in my hair, that really did it).

It seems reasonable to me that Shulman was reversing the status of paganism and Christianity-- I was annoyed that there were no pagans who were opposed to the larger society. There are always Christians who aren't happy with the compromises Christianity has made with power.

Well, Rirl'f genafsbezngvba sebz n sevtugrarq, natel puvyq vagb n shyyl pbzcrgrag jbzna jnf pneevrq bhg ol gbegher, qbar ol I. Vs lbh gbbx I nf fbzr xvaq bs zbeny nhgubevgl, gur vzcyvpngvbaf jrer frevbhfyl anfgl, evtug? Nabgure jnl gb ernq guvf vf gung I xabjf bayl bar jnl gb sbetr Rirl vagb uvf fhpprffbe--gur bar hfrq ba uvz. Ohg ubarfgyl, V qvqa'g pbzr njnl jvgu gung frafr.

In Watchmen, one thing about Ebefpunpu'f hfr bs gbegher vf gung vg bppnfvbanyyl frrzrq gb lvryq vasbezngvba, ohg ur jnf pyrneyl orngvat nafjref bhg bs qbmraf bs crbcyr va trareny gb trg bar nafjre--vg'f abg yvxr vg whfg zntvpnyyl jbexrq.

Watchmen didn't seem like war porn to me; there were lots of morally ambiguous enemies and heroes, gur nccnerag tbbq thl jnf thvygl bs n ybat fgevat bs crefbany zheqref bs crbcyr ur xarj, phyzvangvat va n ubeevoyr znff zheqre. V fher qvqa'g jnyx njnl sebz gur raqvat guvaxvat Irvqg jnf nal xvaq bs pyrne tbbq thl. Vg jnf cbffvoyr ur'q fnirq gur jbeyq, ohg jr qvqa'g svaq bhg.

Fair enough. There were certainly mainstream characters that were sympathetic. ISTM that the big breaking point was whether the mainstream character was a Marnie; for example, I think her uncle and mother were not, and were repulsed by what they did. (But maybe I'm projecting what I wanted to think about the sympathetic characters.)

And this pseudo-disemvowelling of potential spoiler stuff is beggining to annoy me.

JESR- that might be right, it would explain the dangers of manipulation, i.e. the powerful change the odds so that people think "Oh well, he's going to lose anyway" or something like that. I have yet to read "Shockwave rider".

And nothing to do with bikes, and passed on without comment, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/. Apologies if it's been mentioned already.

If you don't want to do it by hand, rot13.com is a nice simple page with a textbox and a button.

[wants]

However, recent discussions have made me wonder-- although I hesitate to project onto Greg, and apologize for the presumption-- whether like me, he doesn't really grok the technique of unreliable narration. Oh sure, I know that it exists in the abstract, and I can be pointed toward its (supposed?) clues and subtext, but I almost never even *see* the unreliability factor on my own, and tend to distrust/dislike the technique because to me it feels like "cheating". The author has abused my naive faith in the straightforward presentation of the story-- if I can't trust a significant aspect of the overall narrative POV, why should I believe *any* of the plot that's conveyed through it?-- and is trying to have things both ways, rather like people who fire off an insult and then instantly deny it with "Oh, I was just joking; you can't possibly have thought I *meant* that?"

I also got put off by the onset of winter, but now that I just got my sweaters and heavy coats out of storage, I might take another shot at it. (Yes, it's been warm enough here that I'd managed without gloves or toques so far!)

Recumbents look cool, but they simply don't fit into a traffic stream increasingly dominated by SUVs and trucks.

Helmets: Looking at my helmet, it could handle a low ponytail, but not a high one, as there's a fastener in the way. On the other hand, I remember there were several different models. I'd suggest swinging by a bike shop or two and trying on every distinct model you can find.

Watchmen: Greg, I can certainly appreciate your finding Watchmen disturbing -- so did I -- but it was meant to be dystopian!

Abi's tale: come on folks, she scatters poetry and insight all over (heck, she zaps spam in verse), gets adopted as a moderator, and now you're giving her grief for not being prominent enough with her work?

Be grateful for gifts, and Abi's brought a lot of gifts to this blog! (And yes, it's a very sweet story, thank you Abi for sharing it.) One of the things I love best about this blog is that you can be reading along in some "ordinary" thread, and suddenly you find treasure....

Debbie 280: For that pun you will be cast into the Outer Dark-Chocolate-ness, where there will be wailing and ganacheing of teeth.

Greg 283: Fear is the motivator.

I must fear. Fear is the Motivator. Fear is the little death that lets you know you're alive. I will cower in my fear. I will allow it to possess and control me. I will turn the mind's eye inward and take no action. And when it is done I will be nothing; only It will remain.

The Litany in Favor of Fear. Don't say it out loud.

Dan 309: *"Show, don't tell" is, IMNSHO, one of the more dangerous bits of advice ever elevated to artistic gospel - not because it's wrong, but because adherence to it as a Rule creates just as much flawed and awkward work as the alternative. Sometimes you need to just tell something and get on with it. And sometimes you need to neither show nor tell, but leave the important parts in the lacunae between what's being told and shown and let the picture emerge for the reader in that negative space.

Hear, hear! I recently had a friend pick up a story of mine, read a page and a half, then put it down, saying "I don't have time to read a story that breaks rules from beginning writing classes." (He's young and rude. I make allowances.)

My "mistake"? The sentence 'She cried a little, and he comforted her as best he could.' I was supposed to go into details about him comforting her, relate that part of the conversation. My friend's writing teacher told him "show, don't tell," and he thought it applied there. I glossed over it on purpose because the story is in limited 3rd, and the character was focused on his own goals for the conversation, and is the kind of person who does the comforting thing on autopilot.

But none of that matters, you see. You have to show everything at all times, so that your reader has to wade through acres of description and page after page of unimportant dialogue to get to the meat of the story you want to tell. Barf.

Julia 324: No recipe exists. I dusted the mold, used a standard shell-molding technique, filled them with ginger buttercream (half a stick of butter, cup of powdered sugar, cream together, splash of cream, beat, add freshly-squeezed ginger root juice to taste), capped them. That's it.

Julie 325: Wow, I really disagree—if that's even the right word for something that's so clearly a matter of taste and preference. I LOVE unreliable narrators. I love Amelia Peabody ("'Why are you doing that?' I calmly inquired. 'Well, there's no need to scream,' he quite unreasonably replied.") and the limited 3rd in Dhalgren, whose main POV character is stark raving bonkers.

One of my favorite books has a 1st who partway in says "OK, I never did X and Y, and I don't have a dog. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite and take out all the lies. I'm not going to tell any more," and by then you know how much he WISHES he had a dog (the scenes with the dog are just as vivid as anything else in the book), and what he wants people to think of him, and that he's going to TRY to tell the truth. It's a profound insight into the character.

I guess I like figuring things out. I like stories where the writer doesn't tell you what the characters can all assume knowledge of, so you have to figure out that they're using the word 'book' in a very different way than you're used to (or even the words 'he' and 'she', as in Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand, though in that case he does tell you eventually), or that the main POV character isn't quite aware that Jerusalem is an actual place on Earth, as opposed to in Heaven.

I love to read stories like that, and I TRY to write them. Thanks, though, because now I'm aware that some people just. hate. that, and remember not to be too dense with it.

And then there's the stories where the narrator is not who or what they think they are! I encountered that most recently in Brust's Cowboy Feng's..., and while I generally love Brust, I didn't think he managed the Reveal too well there. By comparison, Alistair Reynolds pulled it off perfectly in Chasm City,

This is where that awful deconstructionist jargon about "reading protocols" seems to actually apply. I think the people who simply don't get or can't stand reading books with unreliable narrators, books and films where all the important events take place "off-screen", etc. and the people who love them - as you and I clearly do - are going through a completely different reading process.

In Watchmen not only does much of the most important action take place offscreen, in between panels, and so on, but arguably the most important single event of the book is not the climax, but what one can "see" will take place just after the last panel of the book, and what one may infer will slowly but inevitably follow from that.

Not hard-and-fast, if only because a clever reversal can be done that is both unexpected and not just the author smacking down the reader. While Watchmen isn't an unreliable-narrator story as such (except in the sense that Rorschach gets some time in the caption panels, but that part's conspiratorial - it's clear from the start that this guy is a paranoid nutcase), it ends with a plot turn that subverts the expectations of the mainstream superhero-comics-reading audience. For my money, I didn't feel punished by that development, but I could understand to an extent why a reader might feel more or less cheated by it. I happen to like deconstructive, subversive, uncomfortable stories (as well as the other kind, I should add), but it's certainly not everyone's thing, nor should it be - which is why I don't take offense that Greg didn't like Watchmen, I just reject that there's a measurable, objective set of criteria that you can use to "score" a narrative on how much it fits some arbitrary and objectionable category. (I don't especially care for Mary Sue quizzes, either, for much the same reason.)

ethan: Only the best puppets for my horde of minions! Bwahahahaha!

And I think you're right about process. I can't think of a way to characterize their reading process that doesn't sound derogatory (this is NOT because I think theirs is "wrong" but because I so strongly prefer mine) or to characterize mine without sounding like I'm elevating it.

I have to say, Watchmen, much as it may have lots of brain-working narrative (a big plus in my book), sounds like it might be too depressing a read for me.

I can now agree wholeheartedly with Albatross's comments about Watchmen.

Clifton- I managed to read Triton on the 2nd attempt. I was feeling in a funny mood at the time, I can't explain it exactly, and I think I could see how at times I could be like the central character.

By the way, is Delaney going to finish "The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities"?

Xopher: I haven't read the story you refer to, but I can completely imagine that author pulling off what you describe. I should clarify that even a surprise twist can be conspiratorial; it just has to assume that the audience is going to in some way appreciate the revelation, rather than treat their gullibility as something to be taken advantage of. I don't know if I'm making much sense with that distinction, but (to use a sort of naughty illustration) it's the difference between "Surprise! Morning sex!" and "Surprise! I took naked pictures of you while you were drunk!"

Uzzz, V qba'g erpnyy gnxvat I nf n zbeny nhgubevgl, naq V guvax gung jnf engure gur cbvag bs gur fgbel. Ubjrire V qb guvax gung ur znl unir bayl xabja gung zrgubq bs "sbetvat". Gung gur qrgrpgvir oybxr znantrq gb qb vg ba uvf jba, jvgu n srj qehtf sbe uryc, znxrf gur fgbel zber pbzcyrk. I jnf znavchyngvat crbcyr nyy gur jnl guebhtu gur fgbel, juvpu qbrfa'g dhvgr nppbeq jvgu zhpu nanepuvfg gurbel...

(minor LibraryThing update: all my shelved books are now indexed. Of course, that just makes it depressingly obvious how many books are left in boxes, stacks, piles, heaps, closets, drawers, cubbyholes, and miscellaneous forgotten-about storage areas.)

kevin@270: not all that new; the last bike I bought (21 years ago) was a "city" bike, with the child/old-standard level wide handlebars and a frame that crossbred mountain and racer styles.

albatross/Nancy: what I got from Cadenza was that their "Wicca" had been specifically created/supported to supplant Xianity, which would not have tolerated government-run brothels. It's a Swift-style satire on other beliefs, possibly arguing that no religion can survive being Established but not a commentary on most present forms of paganism.

That's Roy Batty (Rutger Hower) at/near the end of Bladerunner. My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies.

Babel-17. (And my copy is in one of the magic boxes, too.)

Bladerunner was quoting something else?

I understand that Rutger Hauer created that line himself, and Ridley Scott liked it enough to use it.

I didn't google it; I remember it from the movie, which is why I was surprised!

interviewer: And Remedios the Beautiful? What gave you the idea of sending her to heaven?

GGM: I'd originally planned that she would disappear while in the house embroidering with Rebecca and Amaranta. But this almost cinematographic trick didn't seem viable. I was still going to have Remedios around. Then I thought of making her ascend to heaven, body and soul. The fact behind it? A woman whose grand-daughter had run away from home in the early hours of the morning, and who tried to hide the fact by putting the word around that she had gone up to heaven.

For me, that last part was definitely an "Oh, that's just LYING" moment as per Diatryma, esp. considering the book's entire reputation of "magical realism"-- if there's no real magic in there after all, then what's the point?

...riding a 3-speed Raleigh with upright handlebars. I loved that bike,

I had one of those, in the early '70s; gave it up when I moved to California in early '75. Loved loved loved that bike; I've owned others since, but never been as happy with them.

With the wrecked knee, I'm in There Shall Be No More Riding of Bicycles land, alas. I'm on a relatively flat part of Bainbridge, too, it would be an easy ride to the library, bank, post office, grocery stores - and bead store.

ObPreviousThreadReChristmasKitsch:

My rubber ducky nativity and angels arrived. One set is on the edge of my bathtub, the others are going to be given to the friend who inflicted their image on me.

It didn't take as long as I expected it would, but I've only done ~1300 books so far. I have another ~1000 or ~1500 left to unbox or otherwise find and do.

I have three different bar code readers, too -- a CueCat, a Handspring Visor card, and an older-model Intelliscanner. And if I find any of them before I finish unboxing books, I might try using them, but I'm actually enjoying the hands-on typing, refreshing my memory of some books I'd forgotten about.

Interesting - I think you're the first person I've known to hold that rationale about clearing recumbents in a wreck, other than me.

I didn't see _Rainbow Cadenza_ as a comment on modern paganism. However, it's a ritual system I like, and I don't enjoy seeing something I like turned into something subtly nasty.

#269 xeger: I imagine one would get nice abs from sitting solely on stools, and yet, office chairs have backs. I'm not in the business of getting abs, I'm in the business of getting from place to place.

Dave Luckett, Lizzy L: Preach it, my fellows! I don't have a bad neck, but I don't want one either, and avoiding craning it while jolting along on the crummy roads here sounds like a good first step.

#276 Greg London: I see a reasonable number of recumbent bikes around the Bay Area, but that's because I have good eyes. As others have said, lorblessme if I'd trust my life to commuting in one of those... Hard enough to see and be seen when you're at eye level.

#322 Alan Braggins: Wow, now that's a useful darn link. I'll repost it in case people missed it first pass: http://clevercycles.com/?p=193 He has little stick-figure sketches and discussions of the riding positions of various types of bikes: apparently cruiser/comfort bikes still aren't quite Dutch bikes. Anyway, thanks! I have enough friends in Portland that I might pop up on Southwest to look at/maybe even buy a bike from this shop as part of a weekend...

The trouble, though, is that bikes are transitory organisms where I live. They will get stolen, it's only a matter of when. Bike for life, alas, no.

As for Tannhauser Gate, I just saw a reference to a song with that in Blade-Runner-based lyrics. But cannot find the link again, like water from a dried stream.

I can deal with logically extrapolating from existing material to figure out what happens offscreen. I have trouble with unreliable narration (esp. via outright "factual" falsification rather than omissions or subjective value judgements)-- which for me overlaps a bit with a slightly different technique which perhaps should be called "ironic narration", wherein a main viewpoint character has a clearly, consistently defined mindset, which the author is in fact lampooning in expectation that readers will recognize that character's utter folly. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is one of the more obvious examples; since I was fairly young the first time I read it (6? 8?), I honestly don't remember whether I took the surface argument seriously.

Hopefully I'm a bit better at that sort of thing now, but I still have trouble with more subtle applications-- e.g., in Richard Adams' The Girl on a Swing, the narrator thinks of his wife as an avatar of a Gravesian pagan goddess who is ultimately brought to grief by discordance with the prevailing Christian virtues, and I've always accepted the book on that level, but recently an alternate reading was suggested to me wherein Adams is "really" saying that the narrator created his wife's tragedy by maintaining such an unrealistic, idealized view of her. Again, on an intellectual level, I can see the validity of the latter interpretation, but it makes me think that in that case, Adams has played me *and* his narrator as fools.

Don't mind me; I'll be in the corner under the dunce hat.

As somebody who sits on the floor to work, I can vouch that the lack of a chair back doesn't appear to have anything to do with getting nice abs ;) My point however, painfully learned on my part, is simply that it's worth finding out the 'correct' way to do things, if one's at all prone to injury due to bad technique, or to repetitive stress type injuries.

Bloody Postmodernism.

It's this sort of thing that turns Beowulf into an angst-ridden git who bonks creatures he should be killing.

Still, great dragon.

Didn't that used to be called fanfiction :)

I have trouble with unreliable narration (esp. via outright "factual" falsification rather than omissions or subjective value judgements)-- which for me overlaps a bit with a slightly different technique which perhaps should be called "ironic narration", wherein a main viewpoint character has a clearly, consistently defined mindset, which the author is in fact lampooning in expectation that readers will recognize that character's utter folly.

Would Browning's _My Last Duchess_ be an example of that? I can remember people in one of my lit classes uterly failing to be ouraged by it, when I wanted to hit the narrator, which was not pleasant at all. Getting mad at fictional characters is the most futile of exercises. They never change. They don't even listen to reason. Except in fanfiction ...

HARD CUT (actually, commercial-break) to Our Heroes in the pub afterwards. "And did I mention that they hit the ground with a most satisfying THUD?"

Now obviously, this was done for cost-saving as well as narrative reasons. But did the writer actually have to show us that there was a fight in between those scenes? Of course not! We're perfectly capable of filling in the gap -- and in some ways it's a courtesy to the audience to grant them that ability.

Graphic novels partake of some of the conventions of TV and movies as well as those of text. I don't think it's a bad thing for them to leave similar contextual gaps for the reader to fill in.

Julie, Diatryma, Xopher, et al: I'm not sure I've ever read a story with what you're describing as "unreliable narration"; OTOH, it's definitely possible that I have, and what I got from it instead was, "WTF? That doesn't make narrative sense!" From the various descriptions, I suspect that if I figured it out it would feel like cheating, and if I didn't it would feel like really poor writing.

Oh, and that Amelia Peabody quote? Yikes, that's my mother... with all the relevant emotional baggage from someone who rewrites reality with that sort of facility. The whole "I AM NOT RAISING MY VOICE!!!" thing.

Vian, #367: Re fictional characters not listening to you... this is one of the reasons that I don't like reading stories with irritating protagonists*. I don't mind an unsympathetic protagonist that's well-written**, but if the reader is expected to identify with the hero at all, said hero had better not be someone I keep wanting to smack upside the head!

* Or an irritating major secondary character. I gave up on an otherwise-enjoyable mystery series when I found myself repeatedly indulging in self-insertion fantasy for the specific purpose of having my Mary Sue POV character break up with the romantic interest.

** My canonical example of this is John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century. The protagonist is a vicious, amoral thug***, but we're not being asked to identify with him, only to accept him as a narrator, and his internal motivations are all understandable and yet never presented as admirable. The difference is subtle, but important.

*** Sort of a cross between Karl Rove and one of the out-of-control Blackwater mercenaries, with a taste for torture.

No doubt, all of you folks will be able to read between the lines, read between the frames, and read between the stories.

But does no one here think that downplaying the costs of a war, downplaying the deaths, downplaying the wounded, downplaying the monetary costs, downplaying the schedule, downplaying the messiness generally associated with war, while simultaneously upplaying and demonizing the enemy, does no one think that such an approach by the government has no effect on maintaining support and sympathies among the general populace longer than would have happened if the facts were laid out bare, on the screen, in ink and paper, and so on?

The "war pr0n" score is little more than a measure of how far removed the "tale" of war being told by the public mouthpieces is from the actual war on the ground.

In the case of fiction, replace the White House with the Author, replace the Newscaster with the Narrator, and replace the Public with the Audience/Reader/Viewer.

The war pr0n score is an indicator of how far the author is subverting the truth to maintain sympathy for his characters and his story. It doesn't matter if the narrator is unreliable, the author picked the narrator just like the White House picks the Press Secretary. It doesn't matter whether it is a dystopia or utopia. And it's not a matter of enforcing "show, don't tell" as some iron clad writer's advice.

It's an indicator of how the author chooses the narrator to relay the facts of war and violence to the reader, versus how much the author chooses to conceal the uglier facts from the reader to maintain their sympathies for a little more.

So, it doesn't matter if Rorschach is an unreliable narrator, what matters is Rorschach is giving us a Fox News story version of how useful torture is. He eventually gets useful information. We are seldom shown completely innocent people being tortured. We are never shown false information throwing him off the trail. The author choose to show us that torture works and that's an unrealistic representation of violence.

It also isn't simply a matter of body count. If you show nameless black hats getting killed, you get 3 points per dead body. That can add up pretty quick. However, if you show us the cost of that battle by also showing us nameless white hats getting killed and churned into cannon fodder, then you subtract 3 points from your war pr0n score per dead, nameless whitehat.

So, if you show us the good guys going in, guns blazing, wiping out the bad guys, and none of the good guys get hurt, you're going to rack up a high war pr0n score for minimizing the cost of war.

If you show a number of good guys getting killed, show us on screen like you so eagerly showed us the black hats getting killed, then you show us the true cost of the war, you let the reporters show pictures of our dead and wounded, and you may not get a high war pr0n score.

Is the Narrator a Fox News style newscaster? Or is he someone with a slightly more realistic outlook on the costs of war?

Yes, of course, none of you are fooled. You see the pictures and you read between the frames and you think how terrible war really is. But that's you watching Fox News announce a US invasion and you shake your head in despair. You know what the cost is and you fill in the information missing from the Fox News newscast.

What the war pr0n score is, is an objective look at what's comming off the network, not how you or someone else managed to fill in the blanks. It is an objective measure of what is being put on the channel, and that score can give you a sense of whether you're watching Fox News or whether you're watching PBS.

It is a measure of the narrative coming out of the channel, not a measure of how you, the highly well informed, were able to fill in the missing informaiton.

And based on this score, "Watchmen" is broadcast on a Fox News style channel.

so it occurred to me, when someone asked upthread if you "hold with" (i was gonna say "believe in," in the religious sense, but there's the inevitable baptism joke) unreliable narrators...

do you hold with moral ambiguity in literature? or do you think it's bullshit & betrays (or could even lead to) muddled morality in real life?

Every week they'd have a guest band on - and every week they'd perform _Stairway to Heaven_, very often "in the style of ___".

Pure joy for cover version fiends (like me). The CD is on Amazon (but what's this strange new American cover?) at http://www.amazon.com/Stairways-Heaven-Various-Artists/dp/B000005J65

or you can just go and have a listen to much of it at the world's finest music blog: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/05/stairways_to_he.html

Should it be forbidden to try to show a view into the mind of a psychopath, because someone might take it as an example to be followed? If so, what is the extent of forbidden narrative?

> Should it be forbidden to try to show a view into the mind of a psychopath, because someone might take it as an example to be followed?

I don't think so, but it certainly disturbed me when I saw _Clockwork Orange_ at the movies, and the mentally unbalanced guy in the seat behind me was very very visibly excited and happy during the scenes where Alex and his droogs went head kicking. Lots of jumping up and down and punching fists into palms and happy little cries of "get him!"

Not making a political point either way here - just sharing the creepiness..

miriam@372: if you "hold with" unreliable narrators

They don't affect the score. The author chooses the narrator, the way the white house chooses the press secretary, or the way the prime minister in V chooses the "Voice of England".

do you hold with moral ambiguity in literature?

morality doesn't enter into it.

I don't think torture works. If you write a story where torture works, you win ten points for war pr0n. You get 10 points every time torture produces useful information from a guilty party. You subtract 10 points everytime your characters unknowingly torture an innocent victim or everytime torture produces bad information that is difficult for the characters to determine if it's accurate or not.

If you show torture, but you bring in innocent people as often as guilty people, if you torture them all equally, if it produces piles of useless information and false positives, then your overal score will be around zero.

Torture is still morally wrong, but if you portray it accurately in your story, then you don't get any war pr0n points. So, it's got nothing to do with the morality of the act. It's got to do with the accuracy, or lack thereof, of how the act is reported to the reader by the author.

You could even write a story that shows the characters riding the cusp of whether torture is right or wrong or that they don't care or whatever moral ambiguity you want to put into it. That isn't what triggers the war pr0n points. It's whether or not you portray torture accurately or not, the innocent tortured with the guilty, the false positives it generates, etc. Show that, and you can do whatever you want with it in a story, and you won't accumulate war pr0n points.

allright, never mind. serves me right anyway.

i promise, & everyone can hold me to this, never to try to engage with you again when you have a website to push.

I get that Rorschach is supposed to be unhinged. It doesn't affect the score. What affects the score is that the character uses torture and keeps getting useful information.

If good intel is a needle in a haystack, then torture is a hay-producing process, not a needle producing process. Torturing 20 people should produce 20 claims that are difficult for the characters to weed out and wastes far more of their time than is worth.

Your character could be as nutty as a fruitcake, or as sane as they come, it's not the torture that gets you the points or that some crazy guy is doing the torture, it's that the torture consistenly yeilds useful information rather than swamping them with fodder.

If they showed Rorschach torturing an innocent person and getting a false positive that leads them on a wild goose chase, then subtract 10 points from the war pr0n score.

Also--did you not notice that Rorschach is on a wild goose chase for the entire length of the book?

I guess I'm not sure I understand why you score things. What's your goal?

*Not to mention that any "war porn" scoring system where Watchmen and 300 can get the same score is broken from the get-go.

Did I not answer your question? Morality has nothing to do with it. Torture is morally wrong. But you don't get points for showing torture, you get points for showing torture in an unrealistic manner.

i promise, & everyone can hold me to this, never to try to engage with you again when you have a website to push.

Yeah, cause the only reason I'd post a ten thousand word post on my own website would have nothing to do with... the grief I'd get for posting a ten thousand word post here. Or the fact that I can't edit something I post here if I screw up my math or something.

I answered your question and didn't even mention my website because it had nothing to do with your question. I mentioned it to ethan because I had already wrote up an explanation of the specific thing he'd asked about.

(But I will say, without contradicting the above, that, yes, the ability to make sense of the lacunae in story, including figuring out unreliable narrators, is indeed a not-dissimilar skillset to being able to spot propaganda. Both require asking what it is that you're not being shown.)

Greg, at the risk of dragging all this out longer than is warranted, two things:

1) The trouble with the War Pr0n rating is that you've developed an instrument for detecting the presence of a certain thing, except that the whole process by which it's measured rests on a number of circular, begging-the-question assumptions that certain things mean what the scale says they do. I do admire the thought and effort that you've put into it, and the principles it wants to uphold, but neither effort nor principle is proof against the possibility that the work is flawed. Consider that it may be detecting things that are correlative but not causative to the issues that it is concerned with, and that the way it's calibrated may be giving you false positives.

2) Please please please drop the sarcasm. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I entered into this discussion in good faith. I hope I've made it clear that I have no intention of browbeating you into agreeing with me, and I would like it very much if you could extend the same courtesy. If the subject matter is something that you can't engage with people who disagree with you on it without anger and dismissal, perhaps it's time to withdraw from the debate.

Greg, you say in your summary of Watchmen that the main characters agree that what happens at the end was necessary. Which is entirely untrue--they agree that now that it has already happened and they can't do anything about it, revealing the truth behind it would only make it even worse. Those are two very different things.

rot13

gur pvivyvnaf va Arj Lbex ner xvyyrq gb sbby gur jbeyq vagb guvaxvat Rnegu vf haqre nggnpx sebz fbzr nyvra sbez sebz nabgure qvzrafvba. Gur vqrn gung guvf nyvra nggnpx jvyy pnhfr gur ovpxrevat vagreangvbany eryngvbaf gb fgbc gurve fdhnooyvat naq svaq crnpr. Va gung erfcrpg, vg qbrfa'g znggre gb Irvqg, Qe. Znaunggna, Avgr Bjy, be Ynhevr, jurer gurfr pviyvnaf ner. Gurl ner n zrnaf gb na raq, gurl ner cncre gnetrgf gung arrq gb or xvyyrq gb ernpu gurve hygvzngr tbny bs srne vaqhprq jbeyq crnpr. Gurl pbhyq cebqhpr gur fnzr srne unq Irvqg ynhapurq uvf nggnpx ng Zbfpbj be Ybaqba be Orwvat be jurerire. fb, gurl jbhyq pbhag gur fnzr.

Also--did you not notice that Rorschach is on a wild goose chase for the entire length of the book?

Avgr Bjy naq Ynhevr ohfg Ebefpunpu bhg bs wnvy. Avgr Bjy naq Ebefpunpu tb gb n one, Ebefpunpu gbegherf n thl naq trgf fbzr vasbezngvba nobhg gur nffnffva gung jnf uverq gb xvyy Irvqg. Avgr Bjy gbegherf n thl naq trgf vasbezngvba gbb. Guvf gura vzzrqvngryl (jvguva n pbhcyr ubhef) unf gurz svther bhg gung gurl arrq gb pbasebag Irvqg ng uvf nagnegvp onfr.

I guess I'm not sure I understand why you score things. What's your goal?

It's a study in how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force, anything from "they will greet us as liberators" to Rambo going back to Vietnam and settling old scores. And I happen to have a bit of a pet peeve for people who misdescribe violence, so I wanted to come up with some objective measuring system.

But the numbers don't mean anything unless I have bunch of different works scored to compare them too. The first movie I did was "V" and it came out at +112. And I had no idea how high that was. So then I did "300" and it got over 600 points. so a scale is forming so you can see where a work lands in the numbering system.

I figure if I can score a whole bunch of movies and they land at relatively understandable places on the scale, then that would prove the scoring system.

*Not to mention that any "war porn" scoring system where Watchmen and 300 can get the same score is broken from the get-go.

One thing that came up for me is that the scoring system was made for movies, so I'm not sure how to score certain things for comic books. If you see a persian paper target get stabbed and killed in "300", that was 3 points. But comic books can't have motion, so you don't see the stabbing or shooting or whatever. you see moments before or after, usually.

you can subtract 300 points if you'd like, and give "Watchmen" a score of +368.

The 300 points come from gur arj lbex pvivyvnaf xvyyrq ol Irvqg'f gryrcbegrq zbafgre. Gurer ner sbhe be svir cntrf nsgre gur nggnpx gung fubj abguvat ohg qrnq obqvrf. Gurl dhnyvsl nf cncre gnetrgf, ohg V unira'g svtherq bhg ubj gb pbhag gurz va n pbzvp obbx, fvapr vs lbh tb nyy gur jnl vagb gur onpxtebhaq, lbh onfvpnyyl frr fgvpx svtherf. V'z abg ragveryl fher ubj gb qrny jvgu gurz, fb srry serr gb vtaber gurz sbe abj naq hfr n fpber bs +368.

If I can figure out how to deal with that scene, I'll readjust the score.

I had to check a couple of times, but I couldn't find the word "necessary", including alternate spellings. Was that something I posted here and rot13'ed it?

If I'd said they thought it neccessary, that would have been a typo I'd need to fix. So I was asking.

All I know about The Watchmen, not having read comics since childhood, is from assorted references to it around the internet & blogosphere.

Dan@309: you feel that they're being disingenuous, or just wrong?

Hm, I'm not sure why this is landing as if I must either be calling everyone a liar or stupid, (or that I'm just pushing a website). I know I never said anything like that. But if that's how this is occurring for people, then the conversation is already lost.

usually at this point, I'll attempt to explain further, but I've yet to see that actually work. Once it's done, it seems to be un-done-able.

So, I'm done. Anyone who wanted to continue the conversation with me, I'm perfectly happy to continue on email.

Goodnight Gracie.

1. Lbh qrsvar "cncre gnetrgf" yvxr fb: "anzryrff, urnegyrff, rzbgvbayrff urapuzra, jubz gur cebgntbavfg pna xvyy jvgu fhofgnagvnyyl yrff rzbgvbany onpxynfu guna vs gurl jrer shyyl syrfurq bhg punenpgref." Lbh qrfpevor gur crbcyr jr frr xvyyrq ol gur gryrcbegngvba nggnpx nf cncre gnetrgf, rira gubhtu gur pebjq vapyhqrf: gur gjb Oreavrf (gur arjfiraqbe naq gur pbzvp-ernqvat xvq), gur yrfovna pbhcyr jr'q frra nethvat rneyvre, naq gur cevfba cflpuvngevfg naq uvf jvsr. Gurfr ner uneqyl "anzryrff, urnegyrff, rzbgvbayrff" abaragvgvrf.

2. Lbh artyrpg gung jura Ebefpunpu hfrf gbegher gb svaq gur zvffvat tvey (juvpu ur qrfpevorf va Puncgre 16), ur gbegherf 14 crbcyr jub xarj abguvat, svefg. V qba'g xabj vs guvf znxrf vg orggre be jbefr sebz lbhe fgnaqcbvag -- vg'f na nqzvffvba gung gbegher hfhnyyl qbrfa'g jbex, ohg gur snpg gung ur uvgf cnlqveg jvgu gur 15gu ivpgvz pbhyq or frra nf whfgvslvat gur 14gu bguref.

3. Lbh pbafvfgragyl zvffcryy "Zbybpu".

4. Va Puncgre 6, jura Ebefpunpu erpbhagf univat orra orngra nf n puvyq, lbh qrfpevor guvf nf n "cbvagyrff qrzbafgengvba bs rivy". Vg'f cerggl boivbhf gb zr gung guvf jnf sne sebz cbvagyrff -- gung gur bevtva bs Ebefpunpu'f vanovyvgl gb srry ybir vf fubja va guvf fprar. (Gur pbaprcgf bs frk naq zrepl ner yvaxrq va Jngpuzra, naq Ebefpunpu vf hasnzvyvne jvgu obgu. Ba zl uneq qevir V'ir tbg gur ortvaavatf bs n ybatre rffnl ba guvf gbcvp.)

5. Lbh'er jebat nobhg Fnyyl Whcvgre jnagvat gb or encrq. Erernq gung frdhrapr (Puncgre 9, cntr 7). Fnyyl zbpxf gur abgvba gung fur jnf encrq nf fbzr xvaq bs Cragubhfr yrggref-pbyhza snagnfl. Fur fyrcg jvgu Rqqvr orpnhfr ur jnf tragyr gbjneqf ure. Erzrzore jung V fnvq nobhg frk naq zrepl?

6. Fbzrubj, lbh pbhag gur fprar jurer n tnat bs Xabg-Gbcf xvyyf gur ryqre Avgr Bjy ntnvafg Zbber, rira gubhtu vg'f na nethzrag ntnvafg ivtvynagvfz.

7. Lbh zvfhaqrefgnaq Qe znaunggna. Ur qbrfa'g unir tbq-yvxr vagryyvtrapr -- vs ur qvq, ur'q nyernql xabj ubj gb vfbyngr n tyhvab. Ur qbrfa'g unir tbq-yvxr jvfqbz -- vs ur qvq, ur'q haqrefgnaq uhzna orvatf orggre, naq jbhyq unir xabja gung gur zhygvcyr-obqvrf frk gevpx jbhyqa'g cyrnfr Ynhevr. Ur'f rira yrff pncnoyr guna Irvqg vf bs yrnqvat gur jbeyq gb n ynfgvat crnpr. Gb gur rkgrag gung Qe Znaunggna flzobyvmrf Tbq va gur fgbel, ur flzobyvmrf n qvfgnag, Qrvfgvp Tbq, abg n hgbcvna npgvivfg zrffvnavp Tbq.

8. Lbh zvff gur ragver cbvag bs gur fgbel! Va Puncgre 11, jr frr n svtug oernx bhg nzbat fbzr crbcyr ba n ALP fgerrg pbeare, naq jr frr beqvanel Arj Lbexref nebhaq gurz fgnegvat gb vagreirar -- znlor gb wbva va gur svtug, znlor gb oernx vg hc. Naq gura gurl'er nyy xvyyrq ol Irvqg'f fhcre-cyna! Gur Tbeqvna Xabg gung Nyrknaqre phg guebhtu -- gung'f fbpvrgl, uhzna phygher va nyy vg'f gnatyrq, shpxrq-hc tybel.

> Steve #374, This is what the original Australian CD of Stairways to Heaven looked like. It uses imagery from the introduction to "The Money or the Gun" Australian ABC show it was excerpted from, as you mentioned.

Oh yes - I'm Australian and I watched it on TV when it first happened. I was just a bit startled to see the "wrong" CD cover.

> It's possible Andrew Denton has made sure that it hasn't been reissued, especially the video version, since he was seen being young & silly.

Nah - I don't think Andrew Denton feels shame. Not about silly music anyway. Last time I saw him on TV he was pretending to be Steve Irwin, wrestling a wild armchair into submission.

I'm in the middle of reading a good example right now: Ken MacLeod's "Learning the World". There are two main groups of characters, human and alien, who know very little about each other, but who make large assumptions based on their own experience. Individuals in each group have very different backgrounds and agendas, and all of them filter their perceptions through both the agendas and the assumptions. Because we see some actions through more than one viewpoint, we get some parallax that a single viewpoint wouldn't give. Because the narratives are each told from limited knowledge, seeing that the narratives don't jibe tells us that the actual situation is different; and frrvat gung nyy gur aneengvirf fgvyy bayl tvir hf n cnegvny ivrj bs jung'f tbvat ba gryyf hf gung fbzrbar, creuncf nabgure punenpgre jub vfa'g CBI, ohg vf fubja va gur onpxtebhaq, vf npghnyyl znavchyngvat riragf.

Dan, miriam just accused Greg of being out to promote a website in what looked to me like an attempt to delegitimise Greg's status as a party to a dialogue. Seems a bit much to me to expect people to get that thrown at them and just ignore it.

As to the specific Watchman discussion, I have no opinion on it, except to note that if you've read Tom Brightwind, or How the Fairy Bridge was Built at Thoresby (and I know at least two people apart from me reading this have, because I can read acknowledgements as well as the next man/woman/Fairy Prince) Greg London and David Montefiore have a great deal in common. I forget the exact quote, but it's something like, `having been much improved by argument himself, he thought that he could argue people into a better nature.'

(Note: Greg, this is a compliment. If you take offense, I pre-emptively withdraw and apologise.)

Oh, and as mentioned, "I've seen things … lost, like tears in rain." is one of the all-time classic SF quotes, from Ray Batty in Blade Runner. If I'm not already crying, that bit does it. There are numerous MP3s of it across the internet, along with other BR quotes — I got a phone call today to tell me that my new Blade Runner DVD release is at the shop ready to pick up, so there may be a rash of new ones from a possibly better soundtrack. If I ever hear it as a ringtone, I'll have to destroy the phone/drop it into deep water so I won't beat the owner to death with it. With losses over the years, and things that are memories only for me in the world now, it's become more, rather than less, stronger over time.

The first unreliable narrator I remember spotting was John Carter, who was so obviously lying when he said he wasn't proud to be the greatest swordsman on two worlds. He was always yakking about it, and always telling me that it was just a simple fact that no-one who had seen him fight would doubt, but even an eight-year-old could tell he loved bragging about it.

*blink* Where the fleep did that come from??

greg was talking about objective tests, & i'd just found one: if there is a subject to which greg has not devoted a website, i can speak to him sensibly about it, & he will answer straight questions with honest answers.* if greg has devoted a website to or near a subject (the evil of alan moore, copyright terms), i cannot speak with him sensibly or get answers that don't lead directly back to his theory.

& this argument i certainly shouldn't have gotten back into. last time i asked him (yes, paraphrasing) if he would take my impression of the way he was conducting his argument at face value, he said no, because i'd admitted to being an alan moore fan, & so would say anything to disparage someone who dares criticize moore.

so now when something relating to moore has come up again i should, & no i really do**, know that all my opinions & arguments are meaningless.

*not that i don't get into arguments with him still; there were some in, off the top of my head, slash-fic & the sky is evil threads, & in the latter i think he even conceded a point to me, though he didn't say so explicitly.

**no, i really do. i'm not being ironic. i regret everything. i could be totally wrong that answering your question is better than leaving any vaguely related argument the f alone, because i can't get away from people's convictions that i'm pissy & motivated by malice.

I certainly don't think you come across that way, but then I thought "Oh-oh!" as soon as Greg
wheeled his hobby-horse out back at #283.

This is all probably terribly irrational; an anesthesiologist said I had more chance of dying in a car wreck driving to the hospital than under anesthesia. This might be more reassuring if I wasn't planning to walk over.

And while it's really a silly idea to back out at the last minute after months of prep and fighting the health plan to get them to actually approve and cover this and going through the ups and downs of their approved/not approved/approved game, I can't help wondering if I am just being kind of wimpy. Is relief of discomfort and pain worth elective surgery? Am I just being a wimp? I mean, I live with pain all the time - what's a little more? Maybe it's not enough pain to justify this? Am I doing this for stupid reasons? Is it worth the chance of dying? Was this all a really BAD decision? And is it too late to change my mind? Gaaah!

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled argument. Talk to y'all later, or not, as the case may be.

I'm trying to pick apart why these "war pr0n" discussions always turn toxic, in the hopes of reducing that effect in future.

I understand your point about the glorification of violence, and the desensitizing effect that it can have on us. To a certain extent, I agree with that point. But you seem to be contending that this robs a work of all of its validity, and that's where you lose me (and, I expect, a lot of us).

Have you tried scoring the Iliad? It's full of death and violence; it celebrates killing people. Yet I, personally, would not be the same person had I never read (and wept at) the description of Hector's body being dragged around the city walls of Troy. But that episode comes wrapped in a poem that glorifies war. Am I supposed to treat it as war pr0n?

Have you ever scored a work you really like? Have you ever liked something that scored high, or been strongly moved and changed by one that did? If so, what was it?

When you only score works you don't like - and that is all we have seen you do here - you seem to be attempting to give your own personal taste some kind of absolute validity. You conflate aesthetics and morality when you start a discussion with how you hated the Watchmen, and then go on to explain its war pr0n score. It reads as a bullying tactic, in effect calling everyone who disagrees with you a bad person.

This effect is magnified because you invented the scoring system yourself, and you are its only advocate. Thus, it seems even more like an invented stick to beat people with. Worse: it's a moral code where you are the arbiter of what is good and bad. That pushes people's religion and evangelism buttons, and this crowd pushes back.

If you want people to accept war pr0n as a valid concept, a valid way of evaluating a work, you need to divorce it from your aesthetic views and find a way to get broader acceptance for it.

Otherwise, if these discussions continue, and continue in the vein they have so far, I'm going to have to consider some form of moderator intervention. This is going nowhere, and getting there faster every time.

What I always do on the eve of momentous and scary things - moving countries comes to mind - is trust my past self. At a time when I was able to be calm and rational, I made a decision, after weighing all the risks and considering the costs and benefits. So when it's time to take the plunge, and my emotions kick in, I know that I've already done the thinking.

Trust yourself.

You made the decision to have this surgery for good reasons. You fought for it because you believed that it was worth doing. It's not wimpy, because long term pain is not good for you; the cumulative effects are greater than the degree of pain at any given moment.

Drop us a line when it's done; we look forward to hearing from you.

It's been a while since I've read Unquenchable Fire, but I remember it as a lot of fun, especially the bit where the doctors using conventional magical methods carefully explain the dangers of using anything else. And we get a heroine who is cranky about it all instead of plucky.

#377 ::: Greg London

Another problem with the way torture is commonly portrayed is there are no consequences except the gathering of information. You don't see the longterm effects on the victim, who is usually only in the story for the torture scene, or any emotional consequences for the torturer.

And I was revolted by the bit in the New Sun books where Severian says he abolished the Order of Truth and Penitence because it caused good people to do bad things. Maybe this is just the way Severian would see it, but if he realized torture was a bad thing, is it implausible for him to make the leap to realizes it was bad for particular people?

I was very disappointed in Watchmen--I'd been going along, emotionally involved and impressed with the intelligence shown in the details, and then we get to The Big Event, and it's a cliche. Isn't Veidt supposed to be smarter than that? On the other hand, I haven't been able to figure out a better Big Event.

IIRC, Sturgeon wrote a story about a similar Big Event, and it worked as badly as a reasonable person would expect.

#357, Xeger - Interesting - I think you're the first person I've known to hold that rationale about clearing recumbents in a wreck, other than me.

My vague memory of my uncle's accident leads me to think this is a reasonable fear. I think he lost control going down a hill and didn't fall well, with no one else involved. I'm not positive, though.

I hadn't even considered ajay and David Harmon's perspective about traffic, which is a truly excellent point. But that's partially because I simply can't imagine myself riding in traffic. A handful of people do it in this area[1], but I'm not confident I won't get into an accident in my bright red car that protects my precious limbs, even on my tiny five-mile commute[2]. If I ever switch to biking it, I'll be on the sidewalk, laws or no laws[3].

[1] I see perhaps one bicyclist in traffic every two or three weeks.

[2] There have been two nearly-head-on collisions at an intersection I pass every day in the last month. I probably wouldn't take the same route if I were biking in traffic, but yikes.

[3] There aren't enough of either pedestrians or bicyclists in this area for the police to bother enforcing that law, anyway.

I think this is because we are capable of rational thought and have (at least most of us) the capacity to question our actions, which is a thing that helps keep us honest, even though it's not much help at times like these. I don't believe you make serious decisions lightly, and trusting the choices that led you to this point is safe. Have faith in your own wisdom.

Best wishes for a good outcome, and a recovery that does not screw up your holidays.

None of these solutions is ideal for everybody, all of them work for somebody.

Anyway, it my be perception to me only, but it seems that there's been a lot of it going on in the SF community in recent years. The good news is that everyone I can think of who went through of it, came out of it as reasonably as one can expect when one's hide is getting cut into and flesh removal occurs.

My wife expressed some similar sentiments over the summer before having carpal tunnel release surgery (in her case, part of what was freaking her out was that the last time she went under the knife was a back operation, with all the attendant awfulness that entails, and her rational mind couldn't convince the other part that this was not the same thing); it turned out to be very much worth the trouble and worry, and I expect your procedure will too. Don't give in to the grim Puritan nonsense that tells you it's better to grit your teeth and suck it up. It's not. You didn't make a bad decision, and it isn't silly in the least.

That said, what you're going through is a natural reaction to having made momentous decisions - it's the instinctive "ohshitohshitohshit" that kicks in the last few steps before the leap. As abi said, trust the self that made the decision and that it was weighed and rational and with your best interests in mind. Like depression, you can't talk it away, but you can ride it through if you're able to keep a little distance from it and understand that it's an event, not an argument.

Best wishes to you, and let us all know how it goes.

Have you ever scored a work you really like?

I just started doing this a little while ago. I only have three things scored so far. V for Vendetta, 300, Watchmen.

I liked 300. I have to roll my eyes here and there knowing a bit about where it diverges from history.

I was thinking of doing Kill Bill next. I liked KB and it didn't make my eyes roll. It'll probably be through the roof for a war pr0n score. I'm fine with that.

Have you ever liked something that scored high, or been strongly moved and changed by one that did? If so, what was it?

Have I ever been strongly moved or improved by a story?

That's actually a really interesting question.

Star Wars. But I was just a tyke and very impressionable. Did it move me? Yeah, I was a Lawful Good farmboy who suddenly wanted to grow up and fight the Evil Empire. Slight problem with target acquisition somewhere along the line, though. Didn't have my own Obi Wan Kenobi whispering in my ear.

A story that improved me was "2001, a space odyssey". Read it in high school. It got me to realize that there is more to the world than I might be able to see or know or ever know. No idea what it's war pr0n score would be. I don't recall any misrepresentations of violence.

A story that moved me as an adult was "The Old Man and the Sea". probably score a zero on war pr0n, the little violence I remember it showing is realistic. Actually I think a number of Hemmingway's stories show war in a fairly accurate light. Women are raped and scarred long after it happened. Innocent people are killed. Plans don't go accordingly. sometimes the choices are limited to the lesser of two evils. He shows that kind of stuff.

But I don't recall any of his stories as showing violence as being superior to social structures, to diplomacy, to society. I don't recall any of his stories being unrealistic in showing violence for what it is and what it isn't. Maybe he glorified it a bit and maybe he'd get some point, but I doubt any of his stories would be over a hundred points. And he had issues with representing female charcters honestly, but that's a different scorecard.

Unreliable narrators-- okay, Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and The Queen of Attolia. The first one made me angry, the second one made me feel like part of the book. In the first, the unreliability was in character with the first-person narrator, but at least twice, I thought I had it figured out and changed my mind when I considered what I had read. The ha-ha-GOTCHA moment annoyed me because it felt like the book had lied to me, not just the narrator. I'll reread it to see where the information came in, but I'm not sure I won't still be annoyed. In Queen, it's third-person, so the sneakiness is not due to narrator. Again, I'd have to reread it to see if all the information was there, but I felt like the story was treating me as an equal instead of a dupe.
It's the difference between, say, The Sixth Sense, where you can watch it a second time and appreciate it, and The Village, where the movie goes to increasing lengths to amaze you with its trickery.

This may only work with trickster stories, though. Unreliable narrators who are wrong or working from bad data are usually fine by me. Narrators that say one thing over and over and over while the story says another are great if they're done well.

Am I strange in breaking up opinions as things the author says, things the character says, and things the story says?

In the vein of the strange, while the surgeon was working he looked over the curtain and asked if she wanted her appendix out, "while I'm in the neighborhood" and so it was done.

Best wishes.

But I'm fine, my surgery was a Very Good Thing, and you will be and yours will be. Bright blessings!

Would the buttercream recipe work if, instead of covering in chocolate and molding, you hand-rolled them and covered in a powder such as cocoa or confectioners with lots of ground ginger?

I ask because while my chocolate truffles last week were deemed excellent, they are a bit too strongly chocolatey to go with the high-end champagne that's the focus of the party I'm making desserts for on Friday. And yet I really don't want to lose the idea of green-tea infused *some*thing (I'd used white chocolate for this) rolled in ginger, or (conceptual idea) Earl Grey-infused something with lemon. Nor am I confident of my dipping abilities, not being desirous of investing in a tempering gadget.

The bed is nicely made with clean black sheets, the better to absorb any stray blood. Twenty-four novels have been piled neatly on one side of the bed. (That wouldn't be enough if I was going to do nothing but read, but it's probably generous for this - I bet I don't get more than 15 of them read in ~two weeks of housebound time.) Dance research paperwork (mazurka!) likewise in bed. Laptop in bed. Fridge stocked. Laundry done. Christmas tree raised. Really Good Painkillers acquired along with alarming medical supplies (gauze sponges, surgical tape, Q-tips...what exactly I'm going to do with the latter I am sort of afraid to ask.)

I'm running late enough that I shall take a cab.

A fire broke out this morning in the Old EOB next to the White House where a lot of the staff have offices, including Cheney's ceremonial offices. Remember, only destroy documents and media using equipment specifically designed for that purpose -- old fireplaces simply can't handle it.

Of course there is the question of just what kind of ceremonies were going on in Cheney's offices.

One of my favorite books has a 1st who partway in says "OK, I never did X and Y, and I don't have a dog. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite and take out all the lies.

What book? Want!

There is a definite problem in being graphic about violence, in that even when it is supposed to be made repugnant through one's sympathy for the victim or antipathy for the aggressor, those emotions are not obligatory, and the violence can be "appreciated" for its own sake. There are, for example, connoisseurs (as it were) of particular kinds of scenes in movies. It's an abuse to do so, of course. At the same time when we are being shown "repugnant" violence at length, and being asked to continue watching, there is a decided mxed message. I have never read Maus, and I'm never going to, just as I will never see Saving Private Ryan. There's no way to get rid of the way in which the (for me) truly repugnant beyond toleration can be reconciled with the fact of it being an entertainment. I have the same discomfort with Watchmen, but it is within limits of toleration, and a substantial chunk can be pushed off into the superhero fantasy land. The more it insists on being read as "real", the more pr0no graphic it gets.

I think powdered ginger should be considered an entirely different spice—or rather fresh ginger isn't so much a spice as a vegetable. I learned the shell-molding technique because the amount of fresh ginger juice required to make the buttercream flavorful enough for my (admittedly intense) tastes rendered the buttercream too runny to dip, even frozen. Shell molding also gives a much thinner layer of chocolate around the filling, so that's a plus too.

I THINK I might be able to do it without a tempering machine, but I haven't tried.

Now, if you want to try a thicker buttercream flavored with dry powdered ginger, go ahead. I haven't ever done that, so I don't know how it will turn out. Please note two things: the ginger will gain flavor as it rehydrates, and as it does, the buttercream will thicken.

If I were going to try this, I would make the buttercream about frosting texture, mix in enough ginger powder so that it tastes strongly but not overwhelmingly of ginger, then cover it (plastic wrap directly on the surface) and let it sit undisturbed at room temperature for several hours, perhaps overnight (buttercream has too much sugar in it to spoil quickly).

Then I'd take out chunks of it, or mix in additional powdered sugar if it were still too thin, and roll them in shaved bittersweet chocolate.

But it's your invention. You can't do the above with my runny buttercream, though I suppose you could thicken it back up with more sugar.

I would never use dried ginger to roll something in, but then I don't really like dried ginger very much.

Todd, the dog thing isn't a big spoiler.

Greg,

I'm trying to pick apart why these "war pr0n" discussions always turn toxic, in the hopes of reducing that effect in future.

I think any discussion in which something that one person regards as art or literature, is labeled "pornography" by another person, is toxic at its heart.

There are typically 2 paths for the discussion to take:

1. (No it isn't!) (Yes it is!) (Nuh-uh!) (Yuh-huh!)

2. (I like pornography.) (Then you must approve of the behaviors depicted therein.) (No I don't!) (Yes you do!) (Nuh-uh!) (Yuh-huh!)

In this case, Greg's focus is on violence instead of (primarily) sex, but "WarPr0n" appears to be a classic morals-in-literature campaign. I suppose it's possible to discuss one of those without it immediately degrading into zealotry and namecalling, but I have yet to see it.

Tamper with the tempering machine and risk its temper, you fool!

Why do people have anything against war prawns? Afraid they'll lobster grenade from inside the aquarium?

Thanks. I wasn't sure what the physics were for this, so it's good to get a summary. I might experiment on a very small scale, if I can squeeze a bit of time this afternoon, and then do it for real tomorrow if the results are satisfactory. The tea infusion is with the cream, so it doesn't increase the general runniness, as long as there's cream anyway. If you see what I mean.

Thereby leaving their enemies doubly shell-shocked.

So, yer saying yer going to clam up, then?

Serge #442: I'd be careful not to fall into an écrevisse...

Know what I mean, chum?

vian @367: Unfortunately, Browning's "My Last Duchess" is another one of those works which I first encountered sufficiently long ago (and probably youngish, maybe in the 12-14 range) that I don't clearly recall my initial interpretation of it. But offhand, I *think* I was able to at least separate out the "facts" of the situation from the narrator's subjective explanation of how/why they'd happened. Then again, I could be retconning my memory :b

Offboard, someone[*] has suggested that Greg's war pr0n scale is currently very similar in implementation to CAPalert's movie scoring system, in terms of registering the presence of certain factors without mitigating them for context. To me, this seems like a very interesting angle from which to approach the discussion in relatively abstract terms, as long as the mere mention of CAPalert doesn't instantly raise hackles...?

[*: I'm not naming the source in case (s)he doesn't want to be publically identified, esp. since (s)he has so far refrained from personally posting the comparison. I don't want to sound too weaselly about that disclaimer because my gut instinct is to agree with the comparison; basically I'm just noting that I can't claim credit for that potential insight and haven't yet made any attempt to rigorously work out the parallels.]

Also, the eminent Victorian I'm citing might have found your first translation a bit too blunt.

Susan, #405: Talk to your anesthesiologist; let him/her know about your concerns, even if they seem silly to you. When I had shoulder surgery 5 years ago, I made sure the anesthesiologist knew that I have a deep horror about breathing something that isn't air, and that I wanted to be OUT before the mask went on. They're used to hearing things much sillier than anything you've said.

Be prepared to have the first thing you eat come back up, even if you wait some hours before trying food; that's apparently a common side effect of general anesthesia, and has happened to me twice.

Xopher, #421: There's a comment I'd like to make in response to what you said here, but I'm a little afraid that it might freak you out. If you'd like to hear it anyhow, say so.

I was thinking of doing Kill Bill next. I liked KB and it didn't make my eyes roll. It'll probably be through the roof for a war pr0n score. I'm fine with that.

This surprises me, considering how much you use a high score to cast aspersions on works you don't like.

The thing is, Greg's scales aren't really about graphic violence, but about "how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force" (Greg's comment 384). As far as I can tell from the scaling, vividly depicted violence with realistic consequences and implications is OK, while a passing reference to torture working (for instance) is not.

I haven't dug in enough to do the numbers, but I suspect that a lot of the Old Testament would come out as war pr0n in this scale. Exodus, for instance, probably scores quite high.

How about something flowery, like "so long as life and honour last?" Honour is not, of course, a real translation for culpam, but it's one way of putting the sentiment.

Maus might surprise you; it's been a while since I read it, but IIRC substantially less than half of it is about what actually goes on at Auschwitz. A great deal of it is looking at his father in the present day and his style of life, at the author's prickly relationship with his father, at his own grappling with his mother's suicide, and at his trying to figure out for himself how much of his father's cranky and irrational behavior (hoarding matches, constant kvetching) is due to his time in Auschwitz and how much of it's "just the way he is". (Come to think of it, the narrative doesn't even get to Auschwitz until the second volume, 'And now my troubles began.')

But your original comment read to me as "cheap-shot ad hominem attack and flounce out the door," which didn't seem like you.

yeah, i can see that. i think a lot of times i'm not terribly clear, & it's a mixture of wanting to use interesting/evocative/impressionistic language & the fact that, as an intuitive thinker, i assume people know what i'm talking about (or what i'm thinking) far more than they do.

thanks for saying it wasn't like me.

Maus might surprise you; it's been a while since I read it, but IIRC substantially less than half of it is about what actually goes on at Auschwitz.

true, but different people have different triggers. my paternal grandparents are both survivors (my grandpa of hitler, my grandma of stalin, when they divided poland). my grandma devours modern jewish literaure, a huge percentage of which relates to the holocaust. my grandpa won't read holocaust books, because, as he says, he already went through it once.*

*he really enjoyed schindler's list, though, partly because he had been put in a factory. & he participated in spielberg's memory project after the movie.

Such a christian site is obviously a stick to beat the godless (or those who don't have quite the same religious orientation as the website owner), and Greg's site feels just the same. The scoring is arbitrary and uncalibrated, there's a sense that a movie has to be completely devoid of the scored violence to be approved of, there's no recognition of context, and sometimes a seemingly wilful ignorance of what might make a fiction worth experiencing to a normal human being. I feel I'm being beaten for liking such-and-such a story, or rather, being beaten for liking the violence in the story when it isn't the violence or even the resluts of it that I'm enjoying.