Here's my review.

And here is a story I didn't want to put on my semi-professional-ish blog.

In the spring of 2007, the library where I was working banned MySpace. There had been some gang activity, some graffiti and thefts, related to the fact that MySpace brought into the library some people who would not otherwise voluntarily visit a library. So maybe if we banned MySpace the Undesirables would stop showing up. Never mind that libraries are supposed to be about free speech.

This worked okay at some of the branch libraries, which had security officers. At my branch, though, we didn't have a security officer - and we also had, more than any other branch, the teens who didn't have computers at home. So they weren't just going to shrug and accept the loss of their social network. It took them about 20 seconds to find proxy servers, and more proxy servers. And it fell on me to kick them off.

Eventually I realized that I was on the side of the bad guys. And I wasn't just on the bad side - I was also on the losing side. It's not like you can ever block all the proxy servers there are. But I wasn't high enough on the totem pole to fight, I was barely experienced enough in my career to trust my own judgement, and when we had violent incidents or gang graffiti, I got scared. I started thinking, "If word gets around that this is the library where you can get on MySpace, it'll just get worse."

Eventually I had enough and I quit, and I now work at a library where people surf on MySpace to their hearts' content.

Since then, I never stopped to think about my complicity with a bad system, and what I might have done differently, until I read Little Brother.

It are on the way to reconstruction.

You have no chance of loss. Make your time.

Things that struck me: I have rarely had the experience of enjoying a novel and recognizing it as propaganda at the same time. I'm curious whether this novel could be enjoyed by someone with more authoritarian politics. (It might be possible. For an example in the reverse direction, there's a scene in Xenocide where Valentine is trying to convince the mayor to impose curfews and martial law in order to prevent a riot, and I sympathized with her viewpoint completely.)

Little Brother does a really good job explaining why people who have "nothing" to hide still value their privacy. It also did a nice job showing the kind of mindset that is necessary to protect one's privacy.

The conventions of the children's book allow the author to directly give advice to the reader; I remember C.S. Lewis instructing me on how to clean a sword and whisper effectively. It is neat seeing this sort of interaction being used to give directions on hacking and activism. I think of the voice of this novel as the "corrupting older cousin".

Oh wait, here it is.

Also: just had a holy-crap moment when Firefox told me it couldn't find you. !! But this time it really was my local network, apparently (unlike the last time.) Having the server up on ssh at the time was very reassuring, of course...

I had a gradually diminishing case of the shakes for about a day and a half after the "did we just lose two months or seven years of Making Light?" scare was resolved. That's why I was so tired by Sunday afternoon: I could barely sleep on Saturday night.

Abi and I are continuing to catalogue material. There's a lot of it.

I'm still very tired, but it's good to be home. Besides, I got three pounds of mammoth-tooth slices in the mail today, and who wouldn't be cheered up by that?

The mammoth?

One of the first tools I turned to when it wouldn't load was something I found through a Sidelight or Particle: Down for everyone, or just me?

I'm very, very glad that it's back. I missed all of you.

I can sympathize -- it's perfectly reasonable to walk away from a job that's putting you in an untenable and/or dangerous position.

It might well have been possible to do something else -- if you'd been more experienced, better connected, etc. but in any case, such "The Boss Is Wrong" situations are always pretty hazardous (jobwise). You basically can't deal with the nastier ones at all, unless you're already ready to quit if you don't get satisfaction. That kind of undercuts your motivation to fix "their" problem!

Sheer poetry, sir, beautiful.

Making Light, et. al.

Welcome back and welcome home. 'Tis good our subjectively-long cyber-national nightmare is over.

And re: Little Brother, I teach English at a high school. I haven't been able to read it yet, but I bought a copy for me, a copy for my classroom free-read bookcase, and purchased and donated a copy to the school's library as well.

The things they need to learn ...

As for myspace, we've got a rather flimsy ban on it - if we notice the kids in the children's room on it we'll ask them to get off, since by myspace's terms of service, if they're old enough to be on it, they should be using the computers in the adult department (the dividing age is 14). Mind you, we're rather lax about getting them off and myspace is the only site we limit in that way.

We're just about to start a renovation which will give us computers in the YA room, and I am very much looking forward to not having that policy to deal with. Thankfully other than that, our library's policy is hands off unless what's on the screen bothers other patrons and no filters on the computers.

I have my comments from Google, I think. How can I get them to someone to work their magic, or do I need to?

I finished Little Brother over the weekend as well. No review, except to say that I enjoyed it and have a niece who might appreciate it.

I did have this little dialogue with my girlfriend on Sunday as we were walking through the park on one of the first sunny days in quite some time:

Me: I just finished the new Doctorow book. I really enjoyed it. Would you like to borrow it.

long pause
K: Oh, you mean Cory Doctorow. You had me confused because you don't read literary fiction, and I hadn't heard of any new E.L. Doctorow books.

Me: I don't read literary fiction? Have you ever looked at my bookshelves?

K: (clearly sensing that she almost started a fight) Oh. Sorry. I didn't mean it that way - I just meant that you read other things too. Thinking of which, I should make plans for us to have dinner with H... & C... since C said in his Livejournal that he liked some of the same SF authors as you do.

Me (mollified): Yeah, I'd like that.

When I decided to look for abi's comment behind it, I saw mine, and then the ticky-box which said, "match case"

Does anyone have any idea what sort of beastie this is? I've, sort of, narrowed it down from what morphology is visible, but that's a rough guess (and it turns out I was deceived, and it's not a marine beastie)

It was used as a gimmick in an episode of one of the Law & Order shows last week. Robin Williams guest-starred as a charismatic anti-authoritarian creep who staged a freeze-in to cover a kidnapping. (Sort of.)

It looks like a "red spider", which isn't a spider but a mite. "they were so tiny they looked like freckles..." sounds about right. When we're in North Wales in warm weather, huge numbers can usually be seen random-walking over white walls and window-sills (and other surfaces, but they show up best on white). As described here (scroll down for photo).

It looks like some sort of mite. Yon beastie looks similar to this:

http://www.pbase.com/holopain/image/44496628

but is obviously not the same thing.

It's somewhere between I hope this can't happen here, and I don't think it's likely that it would happen here, both much less strong conditions than I really care for. It feeds that little kernel of paranoia in my head that keeps planning for those excrement vs. air moving implement scenarios.

I have some quibbles, and I was really tempted to skim the tech exposition sections, but then again, I know a lot of that already, at least the bits that are grounded in reality.

The real problem that i have is just that dividing line between what's real and what's plausible, and what's not. Lots of SF has that nice clear dividing line of what the author has changed from our world. This doesn't. Not that that's really a problem with the book, mind you...

Also - the resulting PDF from that tex-file will have hyperlinks activated to all the referenced websites.

Now to read the book too - the bits and pieces I read while marking the text up were Very Interesting, but I haven't gotten around to acquiring an easily readable copy yet.

If yes, do you have one or two proverbial "what I know know about the process of upgrading I wish I knew at the start" ideas? Because I'm at the start, and I'm not quite sure where to start, from here. i.e. Where do you learn what's the first thing you should learn?

(and if you can point to actual people who know Drupal et. al, email me)

---------
(1) knowing that the Fluorosphere has deep and varied experience which never ceases to amaze me.

(2) site now has articles, a daily newsletter, and a forum. The new version would add video (which can be useful), a small blog, and a wiki.

You can try popping over to What's That Bug and hunt through archives to see if it has come up there before. They remind of the freshly hatched spiders from under our deck last year.

Rashomonified? Ok, I got nothin....

Hopefully not in a Google cache. Tried MSN? ;-)

JESR @36-- eaten by voles? Sounds like a fate to be wished on someone particularly awful.

I'd also say mite too. Doesn't have the legs and segments to be an amphipod, from what I can squint at that picture--the cephalothorax looks too smooth.

It's a moneyspider! I loved those little guys, when I lived in England. They're supposed to bring good fortune if you're sensible enough to not smash them.

As for what it *actually* is...can't help you, I'm afraid.

Some preliminary thoughts: since it was first mentioned I've been mulling over the fact that if I ever read YA fiction, I have to pretend that it's not talking about me, it's not for me, and it's not meant for me - it's written for an audience of one: That Kid Over There. If I apply any personal relevance to it whatsoever, I loathe it with the kind of hatred adults reserve for semicolons and people who run red lights.

The comments in the earlier thread, plus the cover copy and blurb quotes, didn't help the impression that this would be yet another of Those Books for the same audience of one: That Kid Over There. To be honest, my opinion of it sunk with every glowing review.

Turns out I was right. One paragraph in and the 'realistic teenage voice' that 'real kids will love!' made me want to punch Marcus in the face. Two paragraphs in and I settled for sneering 'you ignorant little snot, you think you're so clever' at the screen. I have never met one of us (even the ones who fell into the same ooh-I'm-so-cool egotrap Marcus firmly occupies) so idiotic that they would exercise the ability to make themselves quite so insufferable so quickly without getting a handle on who they were talking to first. Even in print. Seeing what so many of you think is an awesome teenage voice is so swell I can just feel my rude, arrogant, pretentious little heart bursting for joy.

(Three paragraphs in and I am scoffing. 'sucking chest wound of a human being'? A jailer? Really, Marcus? Your school has three vice-principals when most high schools in the USA now operate with only a principal and maybe a secretary because they can't afford one vice principal, and you're crying foul? Christ on a stick, Marcus, you're an idiot. Think. Use that much-vaunted brain of yours.)

Four paragraphs in and I'd say not to give this to any one of us with any kind of bullshit meter, because this pings mine big time. The title alone>pings it and combined with the first paragraph it's hilarious enough I'd almost file it under comedy if the coverage weren't so earnest. ('w1n5t0n', really?)

Yes, important things to say about the State of the American Nation, yes, I know, important things about security and authorities and scary people with tasers, yes, we know. That's my point here, and every one of us I know will agree with me.

The point here for me is that we live with not being taken seriously, with having our movements tracked and recorded by our parents and friends and schools every class and everywhere we go, we live with being told to shut up because we're not old enough or not wise enough to know what the Adults Are Thinking, we live with being told that we're not allowed to do this or that because it Might Hurt Us even though we know the risks are dammably low, we live with being under constant suspicion and being told to move on if we're doing nothing more than walking down the street, if we're laughing we're accused of plotting arson, if we're on a computer we must be doing something illegal, if we're doing nothing we're useless and if we try to do something we're not old or wise enough and we'll inevitably screw it up anyway so why bother teaching us, and so on. Every teenager I know can reel off a list of scary or creepy crap that's happened or been said to them because they were teenagers without even thinking about it.

The point is, welcome to our world. Welcome. Isn't it great? And here we have an adult writing as a teenager describing an adult world of ARGs and sucking chest wounds masquerading as people, and it just doesn't ring true. He's describing adult surveillance of the adult kind with adult outrage at being treated like a child, like a teenager, without acknowledging the fact that we already live with this crap, we get it from our parents and we get it from our schools and we get it from the cops and random passerby and we get it from each other and he is part of the problem.

The stuff Marcus is so arrogant about circumventing, the hey-look-at-me school of hacking, isn't the stuff we consider newsworthy or worth writing about, because it's what we live with. It's natural to us that we're suspicious of adults, that they aren't to be trusted without a lot of evidence saying we can. We don't go into detail about our roleplaying games in open forums or in public because doing that makes adults think we're doing something creepy and illegal. We don't think about the photo IDs or the cameras because they're always there anyway. We don't like it, sure, but they're there, and why screw with it and make it worse when we don't need to? People always watch us no matter how many or how few cameras there are, and we can't do anything about that. Those aren't anywhere near the list of priorities.

It just doesn't ring true, and it hasn't rung true in any discussion of it, in any review, even the cover copy itself, because it's not how it works for us. Marcus, in his tales of hacked laptops and screwing with gait recognition cams and all that, acts with the impunity of an adult, of the adult writing him. That is why Marcus is not believable, and I'm a few screens in and I already know this.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Being able to do something even if you shouldn't do it is an adult freedom, not a teenage one. The way Marcus goes about things in the climate he's living in (which isn't far off from a good proportion of US high schools, and even in my school which was pretty good about it otherwise the teachers took electronic rollcall every class and the school would SMS the parents' mobiles if a student was ever marked absent, plus a whole host of other security measures which didn't warrant even that much of our attention) isn't true to how we think, to the pressures we are actually under, to the rules we are forced to operate by.

All I can see happening is that this book is misunderstood by adults and loved by adults and all that conservative fearmongering backlash I've seen some comments here ask for will end up hurting us and pretty much only us. Hell, Little Brother will hurt us no matter what, whether it's banned or whether it's accepted in schools or whatever else might happen. The best result I think can I think of, in my opinion, would be for it to quietly flop.

Little Brother undermines itself by the fact of being what it is. It's a characteristic feature of YA fiction and it's particularly pernicious and offensive masquerading as something helpful and useful and oh-wow-it-lights-up cool. Given the subject, I don't see much way around that.

Yes, I can see the appeal of why it would seem to be such an awesome idea at root, and I can see why it would be so easy to think that Little Brother is its own answer to any and all objections at a distance. I personally care less about the awesome idea and more about the consequences of its execution, since I and the teenagers I know will be the ones dealing with them. We're still suffering from rules and suspicions left over from the effects of The Anarchist's Cookbook and that was published in the seventies, ffs.

No doubt I'll have more to say once I finish it. Who knows? My opinion might improve.

(*) Not my best, Ronit, but, hey, it's very early here.

DavidS @ 14: I was thinking about leaving copies around, too. Maybe BookCrossing?

Lindra @ 51: Maybe at 23 I'm effectively eons away from 17, but Marcus's voice didn't bother me. I heard the same criticisms about Rob Thurman's Nightlife, though, and although there were instances where I thought the voice was a little overdone, it didn't annoy me as much as it apparently annoyed some other readers. So I think your opinion is completely valid, but also that others, possibly even other teenagers, might not agree. I mean, I was a teen when I started watching Buffy, and though I recognized that the way they spoke wasn't the way I spoke, it didn't repel me.

I'm still trying to parse the rest of your comment, though. Is your main criticism (as far as believability goes) that a real teenager would never be able to get away with challenging "the system" the way Marcus does, would recognize that he wouldn't be able to and would never try? I'm open to discussion/debate over the book (if that's agreeable to our hosts, of course), but I want to make sure I understand your argument.

Lindra @ 51: I hear what you're saying about making things worse, though I don't agree with it. (I say this as someone who spent several hours in jail, illegally and without being charged, when I was seventeen for possessing a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.) Your point about roll call occurred to me, too, but I could also imagine a system arrogant enough to skip that safeguard.

The infodumping is a bit heavy at times (which, as a technical person, I maybe find more obtrusive than someone to whom it's new, and maybe not). I think a reader otherwise taken with the narrative will apply Roger Penrose's suggestion to the reader's of The Emperor's New Mind to those bothered by the equations: Skip over it and keep going.

There's a point in your argument, though, which pains me to read:

Being able to do something even if you shouldn't do it is an adult freedom, not a teenage one.

Been a teenager (he said, from memories of the seventies) was precisely about taking those freedoms from those unwilling (often with good motivations, sometimes not) to allow them. That conflict is part of the process of maturation, and that you write so well and yet hold that retrograde belief yourself suggests to me that you are (forgive me) still a child, whatever your age.

As to having the freedom to do what's right even in the face of society's opposition -- no. Nobody has that freedom to do what they want, without society's opposition. Teens feel it more keenly, being more social animals to start with, but there's a reason nobody does jack about stopping the war, for instance, even though 70% of Americans think it was a bad idea. The vast majority of us find it impossible to thwart peer pressure.

In fact, I'd say the prime reason people are kicking up such a fuss about this book is a sense of, "Finally somebody's saying something about this crap." Cory's good at thwarting peer pressure (largely by selecting his peers wisely, which is the best any of us can do.) This book could be the literary equivalent of crayon on toilet paper and people would still recommend it to every teen they know.

I'll agree with your sentiment of Marcus' voice. It doesn't ring true to me, either -- but then, it does sound exactly like other YA fiction I've read. (I'm thinking Diane Duane and that Max Ride thing, and other stuff my daughter, now 13, has greatly enjoyed.) And so it's a good bet that most teens won't find it too off-putting. And if those teens find in it a tale of somebody who bucks the system, and that gets slipped under the radar, that's good for all of us. The more people who realize there's fascism a-brew, but that it's not inevitable, the better.

Cory Doctorow has this effect, I've noted. You either love him or hate him; most people seem to have a visceral reaction one way or the other. It's weird.

Ack! I was nervous and previewing a zillion times with too many different thoughts going on and apparently wrote all the sense out of it. Sorry about that.

Yeah, I stated the language thing a bit strongly. No doubt there are others my age who wouldn't (and didn't) find his voice irritating; I just haven't heard from them yet, but the possibility is there. I wasn't much affected by Buffy's language either, but I think my objection is more that Marcus' language strikes me as pompous and overconfident. It's so very 'I am awesome so I will namedrop everything awesome so you will understand how awesome it is and how awesome I am for knowing how awesome it is', especially in the beginning, and it was a struggle to read through it.

I'm sort of circling around my main point, here - bear with me, please?

I think Marcus' characterisation is inconsistent with that of a real teenager, and with Doctorow's goal, on several fronts. Marcus is very plainly a vehicle, and while some ideological vehicles can be good reads, I think the way he's set up undermines what he's trying to advocate.

It's a question of relevance. This is a book people want teenagers to read, to get them thinking critically about security and that, but Marcus is never in a position where he is learning any of this. He knows too much and his voice never (for me) stops being cocky to the point its offputting.

He gives advice on how to start learning and gives out springboards to start from on various topics but we don't see him learning anything himself other than getting a few 'oops, I overlooked that' moments (which aren't even internally consistent). He's a static character who is meant to be relevant to teenagers who might not even have a first clue about how to start with that kind of I HAS RIGHTS security beliefs/activism, and Marcus reads as someone who is already very, very indoctrinated into that school of thinking. To be honest, I don't think it reads as cool. It's not appealing. He sounds a little like a fanatic, all 'yeah yeah yeah this is how it is' while not bothering to spell out what it means to think that way. Blah blah Bill of Righs blah blah you can skip school blah blah blah... but what does it mean? Why should I think this way? It's served up as answering its own question and it doesn't at all.

I'm still noodling a little, sorry. I think it's written with characterisation and an ideology that are equally certain and sure and their sureness ends up working against each other. Both the message and the character are written to tell us that this is the better way of things as a matter of course, that we should of course care (and Marcus' interactions with his father are explictly written to show that his father is wrong) and while adults who are familiar with that school of thinking and Boing Boing, etc. are going to love it for falling smack in the middle of what they already know to be true, teenagers who are way too familiar with the powerlessness that comes with being a teenager are going to look at this and think 'no way can I do any of that'. It's a lot to take in when it's so directly at odds with a lot of what we're being told.

And the ones that are smart enough to understand it and not smart enough to understand that trying these things out can and will backfire without due caution are going to cause problems for for the rest, while the ones who already agree with it probably know all of it already and don't need it.

I get that the message is important. I agree that it is important. But as recruitment, it doesn't work. As an ideological manual, it doesn't work.

I don't know. On the one hand, there are places where it's probably not going to get much worse, if at all. On the other hand, I can see well-meaning parents and teachers making a situation worse where they teach it or talk about it, but there's nowhere for the teens in question to test things out and they come up hard against rules and regulations. Some teachers will make that allowance and some won't. I suppose I'll have to trust that there are those who do. I still worry, though.

Michael Roberts @ 55:

That was really arrogant of me to say, wasn't it? I'm sorry about that; I should have clarified to say that the problems of lack of civil liberties are everyone's problem, not just mine, no matter how it feels to me at the time of posting.

You're right about peer pressure.

I agree with the 'someone's finally saying something about it' sentiment, yes. My concern is more 'was Little Brother the wisest and the most useful way to say it'? which is comparative nitpicking, really.

He's a very visceral writer. It's difficult to take an objective standpoint, moreso than with other writers where one can at least scrub off some of the personal bits and think about it at a distance, but Doctorow scribbles his convictions right onto the page and that much belief, on topics which concern a hell of a lot of people and polarise people any way they're presented, packs an emotional wallop. That's my theory, in any case.

Is it sealed? Is it safe?

(Good temptation. Nice temptation. Good boy. Now behave.)

Actually I agree with much of what you said, even though I liked the book.

And now I'll move over to the new thread before I say more.

And my impression is that a realistic picture of serious crime isn't interesting and exotic, so much as depressing and dismal crap like a gang member killing some bystanders during a shootout over who gets to sell crack on a particular street corner, or some lady's drunken abusive boyfriend finally managing to kill her instead of just beating the hell out of her. But it's not all that much fun to watch obvious lowlifes get paraded around, or to watch clever prosecutors outthink high-school dropout crackheads and trick them into admitting guilt or something.

[1] Was Larry King always basically the TV version of _The National Enquirer_?

Lindra #58: Can you think of examples of this kind of book that worked better for you? From your comments, you seem to find most or all YA stuff pretty annoying.

I rather liked Madeline L'Engle's books, including both the YA stuff and the adult stuff. I read most of them as an adult, though, so I'm not sure I'm reacting the way you would. (But I also wasn't looking for Improving Books for Young People, just books I'd enjoy reading.) House Like a Lotus is probably a bit outside the range you'd call YA (it deals with some moderately heavy stuff), but its protagonist is a smart moderately outcast 16 year old girl and it seemed to me to hold together pretty well. I also liked a lot of Heinlein's stuff which was supposedly written for juveniles, but which was actually often him slipping stuff past the prudes[2].

[1] Actually, I think she said she was 17-18, so not a kid, but "these young adults today" just doesn't have the same ring....

[2] IMO, he was a much better writer when narrowly constrained by juvenile book rules than when he could insert gratuitous sex scenes, open marriages, incest, etc., into his books.

Why does San Francisco's Castro Theater always show stuff I'd love to see when I'm not visiting? It is a personal affront that, instead of showing The Black Hole and Moonraker the week of July 14, it will do so on May 17. And Tron and Brainstorm will be shown on July 4.

Bummer.

I haven't read Little Brother yet, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that, possibly, Marcus might develop a bit over the course of the book. He might be being deliberately set up as overconfident so as to make his inevitable takedown that much more painful, and the lessons learned all the more relevant.

(Also, I must say you clearly have excellent taste in friends, if you think that there are limits to teenage overconfidence and lack of self-awareness. Especially in the privacy of one's own head.)

"...teenagers who are way too familiar with the powerlessness that comes with being a teenager are going to look at this and think 'no way can I do any of that'."

Like how BtVS totally flopped because all the people watching it were like, "What, a cheerleader who fights evil and is superstrong? No way I can do any of that." Superpower fantasies are popular among the powerless precisely because they get to indulge in something outside of their daily experience.

@Michael Weholt and Michael Roberts #65-66: Me too, though I'm "only" 32 yet.

Moving over to the Spoiled thread so as not to mess it up for those who haven't finished it yet. (Lucky people they are! I want to read it for the first time again!)

later,
-cajun

Whoops! Sorry, I don't mean to imply that you will be the "Token Young Adult" whom I think "will speak for all YA's". I'm still not all that good at getting my brain to not automatically assign individual people to groups and consider them to be The Representative for their group. I'm recognizing that it happens, though, so hopefully I can learn to nip such things quickly so I can *think* before writing such things...

I still look forward to your commentary when you finish the book though.

Later,
-cajun

Scott Westerfield's Midnighters trilogy. (Or his Uglies series -- I haven't gotten to reading it yet, but plenty others here have.)

Neil Gaiman's Coraline.

James Clemens' Shadowfall and .

John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos series.

Terry Pratchett's Tiffany

Any of Heinlein's "juvies"

Almost anything by Doris Piserchia.

For me, he falls into that category of "scifi authors with grand ideas, but lacking in story/chops". I mean, it's a general failing of the genre, and I know that when I pick up a genre book, but for some reason I find it especially irritating in contemporary authors. Maybe someone will remix "Little Brother" in essay form with the story bits taken out - I'd probably read it then.

I don't go looking for Improving Books For Young People either, but it's a popular sub-genre in YA fiction, along with What I Wish I Had Known At Your Age, and they frequently cross over. Neither are subgenres I'd recommend.

There is some good YA out there, though (she says). Off the top of my head, although most of the authors are Australian:

John Marsden's Tomorrow series; Laurie Anderson, Speak in particular; I've always been a fan of Judy Blume and would recommend most of her work; Lois Lowry's Anastasia series; Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest (yes, I know, but I loved it at fifteen); Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl; Ruth Park's Playing Beatie Bow, my copy of which I have adored to dogeared bits; Elizabeth Honey's 45 + 47 Stella Street and the sequel Fiddleback; Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn, which I hated when I was twelve and loved when I was sixteen, and others; Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, the first (Sabriel) in particular; Andy Griffiths, particularly his Just! series (hilarious when I was ten, still hilarious when I was sixteen), Morris Gleitzman; Paul Jennings; Robin Klein, particularly The Listmaker although her others are good too; Cynthia Voight for Dicey's Song.

My first Heinlein was Sail Beyond The Sunset, and I've never read his juveniles - I seem to tend toward his later work.

heresiarch @ 70:

Yeah, those were my preliminary comments. I'm somewhere between halfway and two-thirds through and quite liking it, actually, even if I disagree on a lot of points. Your limb appears to be the correct one from what I'm reading.

(My friends frequently don't take the wise route. But they at least get a sense of how just how much trouble they're in if they do and start plotting out how to get out of it the moment they decide not to be polite for whichever reason. Their reasons aren't always sensible either. But there's at least a few seconds of thought somewhere in there.)

Superpower fantasies are popular among the powerless precisely because they get to indulge in something outside of their daily experience

Which is true, yes. However, Little Brother has aspects of being a superpower fantasy combined with urban realism. That's problematic when the driving point behind the superpower fantasy in question is 'this could be you'!

There's no way to learn how to be one girl in all the world with the power to stop evil, but there are ways to learn how to do all or a lot of the things Marcus does, which is my point exactly (or one of them, I have too many points): Little Brother is trying to combine a character who has many of the characteristics of a superhero with the idea that you can be a superhero too!, which defeats the idea of a superhero.

Who's going? Four of us, at least. Will there be another ML gathering?

Susan -- how about the dance panel getting together for lunch Saturday?

This is where I put my shameface on and admit I haven't read any of those. (Yet. I'm taking down a list of the books mentioned and will get them from the local library.) Do you mind if I read them in the next few days and get back to you? Hopefully this thread will be active then, if you're still interested.

My favourite voices of any young character I've read so far are a tossup between Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park, Hating Alison Ashley by Robin Klein, and 45 + 47 Stella Street by Elizabeth Honey. All are Australian authors and I recommend them to the skies.

I don't know when your day was exactly, but it was certainly true in my day and I strongly suspect it's still true in this day.

As part of my graduate fellowship, I taught the equivalent of "Freshman English" for a few years and by far the most difficult part of it was getting many of my students to believe that the effusive praise their high school English teachers had heaped on them for being able to throw around Big Words was pretty horrifically misplaced.

Every once in a while you'd get a student who was either naturally gifted at expressing him-or-herself in a concise, straightforward manner, or who had a teacher who actually could teach writing to the idea instead of the teacher. What a delight that was.

Most if not all of them?
I wouldn't say that.

I'm chairing the panel for Susan and Tracie (and a third who I'm sure we'll introduce to the joys of Making Light if she's not already here). Who else will we see?

I thought To Sail Beyond the Sunset was very good in its non-SF descriptions the main character's life, the whole historical fiction of being a smart and practical freethinker living in that time and place. I liked it less and less as it incorporated more and more SF-ish elements, and didn't care for the ending at all. I kept thinking he must have started this as something like a memoir of his own upbringing and life, but mangled a bit to fit his previous stories/future history and his own weird worldview. The sense of living in small town Missouri or Kansas City in that time, being so different in your beliefs and worldview than the official, socially acceptable beliefs and worldview, that felt very real to me somehow.

Little Brother is trying to combine a character who has many of the characteristics of a superhero with the idea that you can be a superhero too!, which defeats the idea of a superhero.

Aah. Yeah. Yeah, I see what you're getting at here.

But you don't have to be a Hacker Superhero to achieve something, given that teens are more likely to face the travails that Marcus goes up against in the opening pages (microwaving RFIDs, etc.) than what Marcus goes up against in the rest of the book.

As I related upthread, all it took to bring me down was a series of proxy servers. It took about 20 seconds to get through the block and could've been done by a trained monkey.

It doesn't take a superhero.

Tracie & Sisuile, I just emailed about doing dinner Friday night for the dance panel. I'm coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday morning. All Saturday meals also available, but would rather do the dance panel thing the night before if it works for peoples' schedules. I'll have a car, so we can go off-campus.

ISTM that the net is wonderful for learning how to write[1] in a readable, effective way, because you have good reasons to write a lot of text, and you get feedback and see the effects of what you wrote. And you can also watch how other people write, and how it works out for them. I think I learned much more about effective writing from a couple years chatting on Relay and irc and arguing politics and space policy and crypto on BITNET lists and Usenet than I did in any number of classes in high school and college.

"Everything I ever needed to know about writing I learned on Usenet. And ISTM U ppl should STFU, coz the lurkers are supportin' me in email."

[1] I'm just going to ignore the fact that in this company, I'm nowhere in the top 100 people to ask about how to learn to write effectively....

Brief orienting notes regarding my samples:

Scott Westerfield is the current Hot Name in YA SF, though Midnighters is more horror/fantasy than science fiction. I was struck by the vulnerability of the protagonists, and that sometimes they do learn the hard way.

Neil Gaiman's Coraline struck me as smart and brave, without being reckless or superhuman.

James Clemens' Shadowfall and Hinterland -- fantasy with some young protagonists, but they've been summarily thrown in the deep end along with the grown-ups.

John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos series -- Possibly unfair, as the protagonists are manifestly not meant to be ordinary teenagers.

Terry Pratchett: Arguably the greatest living satirist of our time. The "Tiffany" books are a branch of his "Discworld" series, the branch starting with The Wee Free Men. The protagonist is smart and brave, but she's also frequently in over her head!

Heinlein's "juvies": His "can-do" teens became a stereotype, but they have their moments. Podkayne Of Mars breaks from his pattern in some significant ways.

Doris Piserchia: Long out of print, but I've been collecting her juveniles for a while. Her usual setup was an adolescent girl, abandoned or otherwise "wild", with some kind of world-hopping power, and/or an animal companion (sometimes one provides the other), careering through the multiverse like a misguided missile.

I think, despite much fretty fretty punditry to the contrary, you are quite right.

Obviously there are a number of bad habits people can pick up (trollishness, e.g.), but I think if you're starting out with a relatively clear thinking mind wanting to express itself in good faith, there are plenty of Learning By Doing opportunities on the web and/or intertubes. Hell, I've certainly become a better writer from the experience. At least in my estimation, which may or may not count for much.

Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge -- tough, smart girl avec goose named Saracen.

(Yes, they're all good books in themselves, although the quality varies from excellent to worthwhile reading.)

It felt that way to me, too. There was quite a bit of small detail in there that sounded like they'd been taken from memory, or that he'd done some fairly close research. It's one of the strongest character backgrounds I've ever read out of Heinlein, and though I haven't read the juveniles I'd venture a guess those don't come close either. Mangled is about right, as well - it started off so well, good beginning, excellent character intimacy, and somewhere two-thirds in, it dropped into confused weirdness. It was almost as though he realised all of a sudden that it was too true to life and he had to push it away from reality somehow, and what better way to do that than introduce SF? Thing is, I liked Maureen. I really, really liked her. And then he went and wrote things and made it less about Maureen and more about Weirdness. I threw a full spoiled-child fit when I finished it the first time, stomping and all. It was so disappointing.

Emily H @ 84:

It doesn't take a superhero.
I think this is the crux of it: is that the impression people come away with? I'm leaning toward yes, while your stance suggests no.

David Harmon @ 87:

Ah, the wonders of libraries and the librarians who let us borrow their precious books when we ask nicely. Wee Free Men! I've always planned on getting around to reading that, but I end up rereading the City Guard branches instead and planning to become Vimes when I am a grownup.

Out of that lsit Doris Piserchia sounds the most intriguing. I'm curious about her rarity - would she be available at a fairly small library, or would she require the untold magics of interstate loan?

I think part of the problem (and I know it's one for me) is that those of us who are bibliophiles and reasonably quick run for the adult sections of the library/bookstore as soon as we can. Thus, we get away from the "improving" YA literature as fast as possible except for in English class. Then when we get something like Little Brother, which is (SF) Literature with a Point from which We as Young Adults are Supposed to Draw Parallels by A Wise and Knowing Adult, it jars us. I got enough of that in English class, thank you, and still have a negative viceral reaction to that sort of Literature.

Little Brother seems to be a book to read because it has a point, not for the pleasure of reading it because the story is engaging, engrossing, and worth the joy. Thatis why I still read so much YA. I like Diane Duane's books because they're stories first and something that expands perspective second - In many ways, those were the first "urban fantasy" I had read and managed to make me think seriously about religion at a point when I needed to. If the book had had a point that it beat me over the head with, I wouldn't have liked them nearly as much, I think. However, I started reading them in 6th grade, and now my re-reads are tinged with the memory of all the other times I read them.

My current "buy if I see it" list has a lot of authors who flip back and forth across the YA/Adult boundary: Robin McKinley, Madeline L'Engle*, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Ursula LeGuin, Diane Wynne Jones, etc. I will say that there are several YA authors that I can't read anymore for exactly the reasons you describe above - I'm technically an adult these days and I hate getting preached at. Though I think growth is something that these authors were striving for even through the preaching - the lessons that many of us learned by reading YA fantasy this generation have great value. The world is bigger than you think. Girls can be heroes, too. Heroism isn't just about beating people up, it's mostly about using your brain. Courage is a priceless comodity and is not the absence of fear. Magic is all very well, but it's what you do with or with out it that matters. Ask for help, stupid. Learn to trust. Love to learn. And something many of those authors pushed with all their hearts - a girl is not insignificant, she can have just as much an effect as any boy. She can be a hero, she can be a queen, a Rider, a Herald, a mercenary, a mage, a Knight, a scientist, a doctor, a vetrinarian, a teacher, a mother, a brain. It's the fruit of the fight - girls who read these books don't accept "Because you're a GIRL!!" as a valid reason that we can't be or do something. But the way many of these authors pushed that point home was by just having it be so. It wasn't a big deal in the books, why should it be so in the real world. However, you can see in some earlier books/older authors that the fight is still their central point. I don't read those anymore. I can't.

That may be what Doctorow is doing, that a new generation who has a new fight on their hands and the fight is the point, but you're right. It's preachy enough that I don't see my friends in many of the charecters. They're not real teens to me and so the point makes me cringe, as it becomes Another Piece of Literature I Should Read and Improve Myself Upon.

*I still am working on the goal I set at 10 - own everything of hers I can. Still working on the non-fiction.

And more goodies are coming soon, from people like Diana Wynne Jones.

Second, I bet you read every bit as well as you write, or even better, and so I doubt there's any YA fiction that really works for you. I remember reading YA fiction after reading The Lord of the Rings in junior high, and rolling my eyes a lot. Tenth graders who read at the 10¹² grade level are not the target market for this book; tenth graders who read at tenth grade level are.

Third, FINISH THE BOOK. I found Marcus much more likeable by the end.

Fourth, there might be a bit of the "brick wall on stage" effect going on here. You know that one? If you build a brick wall with real bricks and mortar on stage, it will look fake from the 10th row. To make it look real, you have to put up a muslin frame and paint bricks onto it. If you transcribe teenage speech (anyone's, actually) exactly as it's spoken, it looks stupid and makes THEM look stupid, because written English is quite different from spoken English, to the point where some linguists have called it a separate dialect. Just a thought.

Fifth, Marcus is in California, and nobody I know talks like him (I live in New Jersey).

Sixth, Cory did get a couple of things wrong. There are a couple places where I could detect some Canadianisms creeping in.

Exactly. Yes, that was my problem with it, and my reaction was, as you said, way too visceral. In retrospect I posted too early while I was still experiencing that twinge of 'ugh, not again!'.

I ran for the adult section as fast as I could, too, but the thing is, I still read YA and I do in fact like YA as a whole at times despite how much I slam the genre. It's that so much of what's recommended are, well, the sorts of books taught in English classes With Important Points, and I've learnt to avoid them, but then you get something like Little Brother recommended all over the place and it is jarring, yes, because there's all this other awesome YA out there and there's this and in some ways it's almost orthogonal to what I've come to expect of quality YA fiction.

I often fall into the (bad) habit of barely thinking of quality YA as YA because the subgenres of Good Story and Good Characters are to some authors so separate from the subgenres of Listen Up, Kid and Moral Lesson that it's tedious and really very obvious, and the kind of YA that is brought up in discussions tends to fall into the latter two. Except in places where it doesn't, and then it does for one book or another, and -- I don't know about you -- I react with a kind of mild horror. ML is recommending what? etc.

The lessons are important, of course they are, and they need to be said. It's that the delivery methods are different as a spray can and a hammer, and once I've learnt that I hate being hit in the head with a hammer, or that the spray can stories are awesome for all the background graffiti that's taken as perfectly normal and pretties up the landscape to boot, I can't stand the hammer stories anymore because of the unsettling sense that they should be painting the wall, not putting holes in it, to stretch the simile too far.

This thread gives me the impression I really, really, really should read more Madeline L'Engle. Anywhere specific I should start?

Yes, that simile was stretched to the point where it snapped and recoiled and put out its own eye, and may have injured other innocent similes who were just walking by at the time. My metaphor has now suffered a similar (npi) fate.

I can think of a bunch of good SF with young characters playing major roles without being superheroes, exactly. And yes, not needing to beat anyone up or get into a shootout or whatever. ISTM that a critical lesson of fiction at all ages/levels is that you're not some helpless pawn under the control of the bigger and richer and more powerful people. Even if you can't beat anyone up or buy anyone off, you've got a mind and eyes and hands and courage and beliefs, and you can take meaningful action. And you can take responsibility for making things better, or for making your own world better.

Gaiman and Pratchet had a wonderfully funny book called Good Omens, in which three of the important characters in the book were pretty young, and were not immobilized by this fact. Though one of them was kind of superheroey, in a Revelations sort of sense. (I'm not sure this book would be nearly as funny if you weren't raised with some minimal cultural familiarity with Protestant Christian millenialist ideas.)

Vinge's The Peace War has a main character who's about 15, and isn't a superhero, though he's way, way off on the far right end of the intelligence distribution, and has certainly had an interesting life. A bunch of his books feature pretty normal but bright kids maturing as the story progresses--A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep both have bits of this.

L Neil Smith's Pallas follows a non-superhuman guy from about age 15 to the point where he's a grandfather, but a lot of the core action that sets his life's path happens when he's very young.

Shulman's The Rainbow Cadenza> also follows a young, very talented but not at all superhuman woman as she matures and resolves her big plot/life difficulties.

All these characters solve their problems by thinking much more than by fighting, though there are small bits of fighting in each one. One thing that strikes me is that I don't think any of them are marketed as YA, partly because there are occasional sexual references. (By contrast, it seems like Card's Ender's Game is marketed as a YA title, which is sort of amazing, given how amazingly dark and horrible the story really is.)

(Prompted by finding someone on my LJ flist who also got an ARC of Little Brother from the Making Light offer. I didn't know she was a lurker, too.)

... the subgenres of Good Story and Good Characters are to some authors so separate from the subgenres of Listen Up, Kid and Moral Lesson ...

[laughing too hard to continue reading] Oh, well said!

First - I give ML and its commenters, including you, partial credit. Three (four?) years of lurking gave me a significant starting point.

Second - there is YA fiction that works for me, but it has to be YA fiction that sounds like me or my friends, or at least credits us with thought processes. Which is probably more of a tough call than it sounds ('of course they all think like I do!' ego-centrism, etc.).

Third - I'm glad to hear he was more likeable by the end, so I will try. I'm tempted to ask if I really truly have to, but he is already growing on me a little, so I won't.

Fourth, Fifth, Sixth - you could be right about the brick wall, but probably not in the way you mean, exactly. Marcus speaks in complete sentences, and so do I and my friends and the people I know. He just doesn't speak in the sentence I'm accustomed to, sentences with commas and digressions and true tangents meandering back toward the original topic. The dialect is very different from mine, yes, because I'm not in the US or ever have been, but I'm used to that from other novels. There's a kind of authenticity to it, but it's the same fake-authentic they describe of the San Fran baths. I don't know, precisely. Hm. I'll have to think about this.

I'd start with House Like a Lotus or Certain Women, just because those are my favorite of her books. The YA/juvenile books are quite good, but they're definitely written for younger readers, so a lot of what an adult worldview wants to see is a bit out of focus. Of those, Arm of the Starfish has a somewhat oddball SFish premise, but is a good read. Meet the Austins and A Ring of Endless Light are, IMO, very good. I didn't care much for her (I think) last novel, Troubling a Star--it just didn't seem to be as intricate and subtle and well put together as her earlier work. I really liked The Small Rain, which I think was her first novel. She wrote a sequel much, much later, which was good, but IMO not as good as the first book. The sequel was called A Severed Wasp.

One sideline that's interesting to me is that she's openly Christian, and that plays an important part in many of the stories, but it's hard to explain how far her writing is from what I think of as Christian polemical writing.

And there are plenty of people around who read at an effectively infinite grade level. I was paying Lindra a compliment.

Lindra, if you haven't read Le Guin's YA stuff - Earthsea & Gifts - you should give her a try. Also Charles De Lint, who writes mostly non-YA fantasy*, has some reasonably authentic-seeming teenage characters. At least, I get the idea that he remembers what it's like to be young.

*we never did collectively settle on a better term than "adult," I think

The voles want the daylilies and the cattle want everything; I'm working outside in the drizzle today, when I get my loins properly girded, to reinforce the fence so that they can't get to the raspberries. This assumes they don't find some other place soft enough to push a post over and get on my side of the fence to slaughter daylilies, raspberries, roses and all while I'm in Montana and the house-sitter huddles inside afraid of the bovine menace.

Her Christian non-fiction is just as well written and clear as her fiction, and just as far from the fundamentalist didactic right. It informs, coaxes, explains and is generally a lot of fun.

Lindra @ 108

You're certainly doing better than I did when I started here. ;)

Re: different phrasing - there are subtle differences in teenage phrasing within the States as well. I know my friends never used some of that phrasing so it jars me as well. The fact that we all took German and/or Latin which wove their way into our grammar and speech patterns has nothing to do with it, certainly. *grins* What is something that is glaringly different for you?

So, what are you going to study at university?

I've been looking for books that make American History interesting. By "Interesting", I mean books that don't cover history like my various high school text books, all dates and battle diagrams, Good Guys and Bad Guys, and Righteous God-Like White Dudes doing what was best for the country with the occasional mention of a lady or Noble African- or Native- American. I like to read about why people did things, and in what historical and social context they were done. Amazon randomly recommended "A Voyage Long & Strange" and it looked fun, but then I read this review:

"While our public schools continue their relentless rewriting of history to fit the agenda of special interest groups (such as the criminal protection lobby's removal of firearms from image of Washington crossing the Delaware), it's good to come across a book based on open-minded research."

So I guess my first question is:

Really? Some lobby removed firearms from that painting of Washington crossing the Delaware*? Did they attack the painting with Wite-Out, or have the guns digitally replaced by walkie-talkies in textbooks? Somehow I find this hard to believe - like maybe it was an O'Reilly talking point and not an actual true fact. More Truthy than Truthful. But I have been wrong before - does anyone here know about a movement that succesfully removed firearms from either that painting or representations of the same.

And my next question:

If my instinct is right and no such thing was done to any painting, going by the bias of the reviewer, can I possibly enjoy a book that he enjoyed?

* and as far as I'm concerned, the less that painting gets reproduced at all the better; it's like Revolutionary War Thomas Kincaid.

[1] This is a remarkably low bar.

I had a heck of a time getting violets established. Although they're quite common around here, slugs ate mine again and again. It was only after my neighbor gave me some extras from her garden which were already pretty large, that the slugs left them alone. Interestingly, they also don't go after the new ones that have seeded out.

Indeed, you might need to delve into the dark labyrinth of a used-book store! Barbara Gordon and I listed a bunch of her books here and here (respectively) last time Piserchia came up in discussion, and the dates ranged from 1974 to 1982.

When I'm interacting with fire-breathing dragons I always take my own advice and draw the line at dinosaur sodomy. The fire goes places, you know.

Sisuile @ 110:

The whole dialect is odd to me. The things that come to mind are more cultural. Like the name thing, for one. So many brand names, so many place names, as though he had a grid of every street in his head. I found it odd how the places were so specific when I'm used to things like 'I'm going to M.'s or 'Down up the river on the docks' or 'Couple blocks up thataway'. Not much in the way of specific geography at all. Also ethnicities -- here it's a heavy South Asian concentration, and I wondered where all the Asian names were in his circle of friends. I always wonder where they are, but it was especially striking this time. About the only character directly recognisable to me from my own experience was Van because she reminded me of my sister, and that only up to a point.

As for university, I've taken the year, possibly next year, for the treatment of my medical conditions to finish and to think on what I want to do. I know I would like to write professionally (romance novels, most likely) since I can't hold down A Real Job(tm) but I'm not good enough yet. I'm good, but not to the point where I'd be willing to have it in print with a name on it. There's also a measure in place here where we have a seven-year cap on our government university subsidies, which means that going into university before I know what I want to do is a really bad idea.

I had ambitions toward mathematics or information architecture or medical research specialising in why in hells a quarter of deaf people have 'cause unknown' marked on their records, but life happened.

I'm told it's never easy to reconcile delusions of grandeur with reality, but I'm finding it difficult. I want to change the world through the amber orbs of flame-haired beauties who kick arse! *laughs* Not really, but something like that.

Yourself? Got any university plans?

Oooh, secondhand bookstore! I never need an excuse to visit those. Thank you for digging up the links - her books sound truly fantastic. Don't get me wrong, they were interesting before and I have a bookpile, but jumping through interdimensional rings is a concept which has its own level on the scale of things demanding immediate attention. It's brilliant.

And if the general nautical stuff appeals, just start reading Patrick O'Brien. There's something about his work which appeals to a lot of SF fans: his alien world just happens to be historical. And having the gallant hero spending half his time dodging debtors' prison, rather than the French, gives a book a different feel.

Remember, in this place sloths are debauched as a matter of course.

How is Australia on independant entrepeneurs? I know here in the States the gov. makes our tax lives interesting and insurance is a killer. And don't let this crowd hear you say that writing is not a Real Job. ;) But medical issues can be overcome if you own your own business and can get decent insurance, if it turns out that writing isn't the business for you. (I started university as a creative writing major. I left that once I figured out I was going to have to read Modern Upstanding Literature. Ugh). I will say that if you're going to be a writer or any type of small business person, take all the business classes that you can. Seriously. And think about a history track - there seem to be a lot of medievalists who end up writing fantasy for some reason. *grins* /end history pimpage But don't limit your options because of medical - there are some really surprising jobs out there that can accomidate weird schedules, issues, etc. If you want to continue this discussion off-ML, I can be reached most of the time at (one word) falling leaf arts @ gmail dot com or at the linked URL.

I finished university last year and am probably about to head back (gods willing and the creek don't rise) for higher degrees. Historical consulting isn't a Real Job either, but it requires three letters after my name.

I'm having a bit of trouble with Patrick O'Brien, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I've started the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series about three times and I can't quite get into it. I have been going through the Sharpe books like popcorn though, so maybe my tastes are just a little low-brow.

I'm having a bit of trouble with Patrick O'Brien, and I can't quite put my finger on it. I've started the first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series about three times and I can't quite get into it. I have been going through the Sharpe books like popcorn though, so maybe my tastes are just a little low-brow.

But do the garden gnomes believe in the Oxford comma?

The Speckled Monster isn't about American history per se, but it is something that effected our history - the finding of the vaccine against smallpox in England. A really, really cool book. I read it in high school after hearing the author on NPR.

Nah, no worries, you weren't patronising. I'm pretty rigid about being patronised and that wasn't it. I'll email you about the rest when I wake up.

Which three letters?

O'Brian -- he used that spelling to distance himself from his brother Flann.

As I remember, I found the stories OK (speaking as a long-time Hornblower fan) but not terribly special until book three, HMS Surprise -- which had me fully hooked for the rest of the sequence.

Can any native (or anyone who just goes there frequently) of London say how important a part the Tube Map plays in your direction-finding? I've spent a total of about three weeks there, and it turned out to be very important to me.

That said, I found Cory's/Marcus's navigational usages to be just what I, who lived in the Bay Area for 7-8 years and went up to The City at least once a month, still keep in my head. Part of it, of course, is that Marcus sees his city from a walker's perspective; I find I'm a lot more likely to keep track of streets as compared to landmarks when I'm walking or diving, and use/notice landmarks more when I'm a passenger.

The usual advice in such cases is to stop reading #1 when you hit a wall (no, *not* the book!) and give #2 a try instead.

I could do that here in Austin, but it would no longer be profitable/useful with anyone except my husband. (Although on Sunday I steered him to a Mexican restaurant by saying, "it's where XYZ used to be, back in the 70s.")

I had some horrible moments last weekend, when we decided to see for ourselves all the building going on west of campus. We kept going by new stuff and holes in the ground for which all I could come up with was, "I have no idea what used to be there." Or in what archaeological age it might have disappeared.

hmm. i, like i imagine everyone here, "read above my grade level" in high school too, but i also liked ya all through high school & still do (although the ya i've read recently has been because it's by favourite authors: the pratchett tiffany books & sherman alexie's "diary of a part-time indian"). & for the record, high school was ten-is years ago for me. now i'm trying to think how my tastes/attitudes converged & differed from lindra's.

"authentic teen contemporary voice," or "talking like my friends & i talk" was never something i looked for. maybe it's less egotism, or maybe it's more: as a teen misanthrope, the last thing i wanted to do when i cracked open a book was spend more time with kids just like the kids at school. i do remember thinking judy blume captured speech really well, but it wasn't slang & idiom, it was where she put her ellipses. you could really hear the cadence.

(as a counterexample, one of the few really contemporary (at the time) series i read was "animorphs", which i pretty much hated because the characters *did* read like typical teens... not very smart, not very imaginative, & whose only references were pop culture of that exact year.)

maybe that's why i liked ya of a generation or so before mine: it was historical, & thus an escape. & i don't think i considered it at the time, but i felt the authors i liked best were writing for themselves, just like real literature, & not to impart a lesson. that might not really have been true, their characters were appealing enough that i just wanted to go hang out with them, rather than measuring them to see whether they reflected me or not. authors i'm thinking of like s.e. hinton, lois (as you mentioned) lowry, diana wynne jones, paula danziger....

when i read ya now, i still don't think "what would it be like as a teenager reading this?" cause when i get into a book, i can't be thinking outside it like that. "part-time indian" was just a sherman alexie book, "summerland" was just a michael chabon book, etc.

but the tiffany series... i feel pratchett dumbed it down from his discworld books, which was unnecessary of course, because the whole reason discworld got so popular was teens started reading it. so he did his usual discworld thing but added heavy-handed moralizing & repeated himself a lot to make sure you know where he's going with this. this sense has wrenched me out of all the tiffany books at least once. (i just keep picking them up because his characters & world & writing (mostly) are just so gosh-darn fun.)

lindra,

So many brand names, so many place names, as though he had a grid of every street in his head. I found it odd how the places were so specific when I'm used to things like 'I'm going to M.'s or 'Down up the river on the docks' or 'Couple blocks up thataway'.

well, the brand names apparently is a real trend in american ya right now. i don't remember it from my youth, but we are given to believe that today's teenagers are such good little consumers that they demand upscale brands plastered all over their literature.

& it just might be jealousy, but it seems to me that americans are more inclined to call things by their corporate, focus-group approved proper names than british people. (i can still remember in college, hearing a peer refer to "valentine's week" with a straight face. ugh!)

Also ethnicities -- here it's a heavy South Asian concentration, and I wondered where all the Asian names were in his circle of friends.

that's funny. cause the book is set in the bay area, right? so there wouldn't be a lot of south asians necessarily, but there should be a lot of east asians (chinese, japanese, korean). i haven't read the book, but i am accustomed to movies & tv shows set in san francisco, that i just can't believe because everyone is white.

When it isn't deeply squicky -- in which case I just stop watching -- I find L&O fascinating, in a horrible sort of way.

With the sensational "Ripped from the Headline" crap about implanted RFID chips, pharmaceuticals gone awry, reproductive technology, and sinister web sites, it looks more and more like a spin off of Max Headroom ("Twenty minutes into the future!")

This was my experience as well and, IIRC, is the Common Wisdom among O'Brian fans.

It was there, just not a big thing. Marcus doesn't seem to use ethnic origin for much except occasional physical description. (It didn't bother me at all.)
I had the impression that he lived in the city; his father went down the peninsula, and later he did, to talk to the Silicon Valley people.

Ph.D. For, Lo! I am a useless academic in a uterly obscure field! *grins*

Even if you really can't be bothered to finish Master and Commander, I'd recommend trying HMS Surprise from the library, by which O'Brian is up to speed, and the story has a good hook into the series.

It makes me realize how much we all live in different worlds, and how that causes different things to resonate. The world of 'people you know' suffers from a lot of sample bias; it took me a long time to realize how utterly atypical my own teen experience was, and it definitely influenced how I react to books. Take my experience with one of the most popular tropes in YA SF and Fantasy: people feeling inconvenienced by their special abilities. Characters stand around and say "Oh angst! I have powers, oh woe is me, I just want to be normal." I've never really grasped that, not for an instant. And I know that it must be something that a lot of kids think and worry about, because it shows up all the time in YA literature. But no one I knew at the time felt that way, so the books all read false to me. Years later, I've just now made friends with a few people who hid their intelligence during high school to avoid being beaten up or ostracized. It was a revelation that let me understand a huge swath of literature.

Those 'hide your light under a bushel' characters read as strange even now, though less improbable. Whereas the cocky, know-everything guys who think their cool tricks, arcane knowledge, personal contacts, and 'leet hax' can fix everything are a dime a dozen in my world. True, I game online... and before I started gaming online I would have found that type as alien and weird-sounding as you seem to. Now I know a half-dozen 16-18 year olds who actively script and hack and circumvent and think they are god's gift to leet. It's all about drawing your samples from different cultures.

Take Judy Blume, mentioned above. To me, all the characters in Judy Blume books were... not people I could relate too. I read a lot of them, because they were there and I'd basically read whatever was put in front of me at that point, and because they were always on the summer reading lists. But I didn't like them. I think an issue was that a lot of the kids Blume wrote wanted to be normal, or to be popular, or to fit in somewhere in the common community of their school. This must have resonated with a lot of people - otherwise would those books be so beloved and so enduring? But I was coping with a different struggle, and needed a book that told me it was ok to realize you'd never be a part of the group, and that it was ok to stop trying to work in their world.

I did find those heroes in YA then, and I still read YA now. My favorite YA character of all time seems all-but-forgotten nowadays, which is sad. Richard Peck's Blossom Culp (The Ghost Belonged to Me, Ghosts I Have Been, etc) was just the right kind of clever, cynical outsider for me. Her books are partly about the realities of occult spiritualism and partially about class conflict in the 1910s, and both her background and her abilities make her an outsider. She feels this exclusion keenly, but it doesn't rule her actions. A close second would be Patricia Wrede's unstoppable Cimorene (Dealing with Dragons, etc), the very first 'girl who rescues herself, and everybody else' I encountered in a fantasy universe.

I think the Superhero question is also ultimately one of personal taste. For me, having the hero start out competent neatly solves one of my primary problems with current juvenile fiction: the impossible climb. It's present in all varieties of juvenile fiction, but it's most prominent in anime and manga: some newb learns about some trade/school/job/power that others have. And lo, he has *talent*. But he must learn... and through the course of the series he will go from being a newb to being the best in the world, surpassing people who have been in the 'biz' for much much longer than he has. This has always struck me wrong, and a story has to do a lot to overcome that premise. I'd much rather watch something like Slayers, Cowboy Beebop, Full Metal Panic or even, to some extent Ranma: where the characters start out with a strong skillset and use it to good effect, and their superiority isn't due to an inexplicable and inevitable rise from nothing, but rather the honing and improving of already established skills. I guess it's just not my mythic form. One person's favorite thing is another's turn-off.

I love the message: "You could do this, but it is going to be an awful lot of work, or require sacrifice of some kind. However, you could." I like the concession that the skills required to perform certain actions actually do take substantial investment of time and tedium, so it's more convenient to join the story after the protagonist already has them. But I can also understand how that statement could be discouraging - I just never looked at it that way before.

It gives me a lot to think about, both as a reader and a writer. I prefer a story where an already accomplished person must surmount a few barriers to become an exceptional one, making sacrifices along the way. Or a story where an already accomplished person learns that they do not know everything, and are out of their depth, and must adapt or ally with others quickly to survive and succeed. I suppose I didn't understand why they kept making stories where we start from scratch, or from very little, and work the entire way up.

I'm trying to keep a list of likely literary pitfalls in my head, and now I have a new one: how can I avoid the 'hammer to the head moral' phenomenon? I think there may be good ways to steer away, but no perfect ways. Perhaps no matter what you say, if you say it strongly enough some people will find it too blunt. I normally adore LeGuin, but I could not finish Always Coming Home, and I think it may be that 'surplus of point' reaction. And not to pick too much on Judy Blume, but I remember getting the same feeling when reading Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Strangely I didn't have that reaction at all while reading Narnia, while many others did. I'll have to wait to finish Little Brother to weigh in on that one, but so far it doesn't strike me that way.

Flann's sequence of novels set in the Napoleonic wars is today sadly neglected:

The Third Midshipman: A murder thriller, a hilarious satire about an archetypal frigate's crew, a surrealistic vision of eternity, and a tender, brief, erotic story of the love between a man and his bow chaser.

The Hard Tack: While Captain ffoales is engaged in mysterious humanitarian work on behalf of women, onto his ship come two boys, growing up in the odour of rum and boiled puddings.

The Malta Archive: St. Augustine, Jonathan Swift and scientist Doctor De Selby compete for the favours of a lady, distill flawless whiskey in a week flat, and plan the downfall of the Corsican dictator all in the span of a single dog watch.

The Tar's Lament: Wildly funny, with a deep sense of dark evil, this tale of the lower-deck's revenge on their social and military superiors is a hard little gem of black humour.

Our first inclination would have been to say you have Predatory Running Mites, but we just received a very thorough explanation. Here is some information just supplied to us by a real expert named Barry M. OConnor: "All of the mites in the photos you call by this name are species in the family Erythraeidae, genus Balaustium. I think you have these confused with species in the family Anystidae, genus Anystis. Both of these mites are relatively large (for mites!), red in color, and commonly occur in aggregations. Anystis are the very fast moving, predatory mites. Their body is almost circular in outline. They run in what appears to be a random fashion until they encounter small arthropod prey. These are harmless to people. Balaustium, on the other hand, are more elongate as seen in your photos, with a distinct gap between the 2nd and 3rd legs. Species of Erythraeidae have piercing mouthparts and are also predatory on small arthropods or eggs in their post-larval stages, but Balaustium are unusual in being pollen feeders. They can be found in large numbers in flowers, but are most often seen by people on flat surfaces where pollen falls. These mites have been reported to bite people, causing some irritation, although why they do this is uncertain since they're not parasitic."

The OP says that fits the behavior and circumstance of them being found.

As to why I was thinking the specific amphipod I mentioned this picture is the reason.

albatross: I read the L'Engle as a juvenile/YA. They worked for me, though truth be told some of that was on a religious level; though I didn't completely notice it. Being a Roman Catholic some of her tropes were the sort of thinking I was doing.

A Wrinkle in Time (which I re-read last August) still works. A Wind in the Door", not so much. I am hesitant to go back to "A Swiftly Tilting Planet".

re writing on the net: I know that I am better for it. Not the least of which is because... on the net I write. Feedback is nice, and it helps, but working is working. I know that I was trepidatious about diving into ML (hard as that may be for those who recall to believe; and yes Lindra, some of this is directed at you; I was 30ish when I started writing here), because the caliber of those in whose company I was writing is high.

I stil boggle at the quality of the writing, and am thrilled when I see a great piece of writing; which everyone usually manages to do sometime.

Now, if only I could fix my crappy typing.

nerdycellist: The phrase "criminal protection lobby" is the giveaway that the agenda is almost certainly driving the story. I'd guess the book sucks too.

What, specifically are you looking for? Survey books? Detailed coverage of a small chunk of time? Illustrative books of an era using a single person event? There's a lot of good stuff out there, but absent some idea of what you want, I'm not comfortable making a recommendation, though from the follow-up comments I have some things I can actually commend.

The Sharpe books are easy reading (though they have some howlers, and the latter portion falls apart for having a persistent villian; doesn't kill them, but it moves them down to more brain-candy.

Cornwell also wrote three books in the US civil War, and one on the Revolution (that one feels as though it ought to have at least one more; but so far, no).

For a good look at flying in WW2, Piece of Cake is really good (pre-war to Adler Tag).

Damn it, I wish I had my library someplace other than boxes.

"Wellington's Rifles" and "The Man who Broke Napoleon's Codes" (IIRC that latter title) both by the same author, are excellent. "Tommy" by Richard Holmes (and I'd love to get ahold of "Redcoat" by him). Anything by Lynne Macdonald on WW1. She went and did a lot of oral history, and then wrote (and wrote and wrote); but the best is probably her book on the Somme.

I liked the side by side biography of Custer and Crazy Horse by Steven Ambrose, but "The Men of Company K" is a better book on being in the American Line than Band of Brothers, but "Pegasus Bridge" is really good; being more focused than Band of Brothers.

The book which is tickling my mind is one any O'Brian fan should be possessed of, about Lord Cochrane (on who Aubrey was modelled). I think it's "Lord Cochrane, Seaman, Radical, Liberator: A Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald" by Christopher Lloyd, 1947.

If it's the book I recall, the description of the raid on the mutineers of the Surprise is worth it.

If you've ever read "84 Charing Cross Road" you might want to look at, "Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War" by Leo Marks.

I’m between the two of you age-wise, and I’ve got a YA in the house (though she doesn’t read, to the despair of many). It’s not the l33t speak that’s bothered me in the small portion of Little Brother that I’ve had a chance to read, it’s the Attitude. At that age, I can tell you that I was the only person allowed to always be right. *grins* Though in my group of friends, it’s wasn’t a striving to be ‘normal’, but to be accepted in our own rights. The gamers and the geeks are the only people who would do that with a brainy girl who read fantasy and watched anime. It was the first time I fit in anywhere. I hate that feeling of living on the outside looking in, without any companionship – that may be where the trope of striving for ‘normalcy’ comes in. ‘Hide your light’ characters set my teeth on edge as well, because that ‘normalcy’ becomes the goal and the Man v. Self conflict in the movie/show/book. *rolls eyes* My opinion of those characters always was something on the order of, “If appreciate the gifts you were given, you don’t deserve them.” Though I will say that sometimes gifts are troublesome things, and I wish that mine or others wouldn’t be so demanding or determinedly inconvenient.*

Unfortunately, this is the world we’ve got, and many kids like their boundaries to define the confusing nature of it. These boundaries also define ‘normal’ and the perimeters outside of which people are ‘strange’. If you’re normal, you’re part of a group – people, especially teens, are social creatures and generally want to feel that they’ve got a community around them. My solution, and probably the solution of many people in these parts, was to join/create a community of weirdos, geeks, and other highly intelligent people who weren’t precisely normal. (see: Making Light, population of. *grins*) Listening to many of the people who sing the praises of ML, a common thread is feeling like they’ve found a community where they belong. In this group many feel mostly ‘normal’, or within the very loose boundaries set by the hosts, since we’re among other mostly like-minded people.

My favorite types of YA fiction are those that re-define “normal” to include a lot more, of people with special gifts or hard-won skills fighting for acceptance and community. I’m with you that the Judy Blume books aren’t up my alley, but things like Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series are exactly what I’m talking about. Probably a perspective thing; I am a really social creature who keeps fighting for that group IRL. While I like the “person with skills gets better” or “person with skills learns something new” a lot, they usually don’t resonate with me so much as the loaner or the outsider fighting for acceptance of who they are rather than changing to fit the mold. I see this with Cimorene (who is one of my favorite characters *ever*) and her endless knights as well.

*It is my experience that when Art, or Music, or Words or the other muse-driven gifts demand time, they’re usually at the worst possible moment, yes?

(1) Drupal is the Linux of content management systems. It's very flexible, but it has a steep learning curve. I was learning Drupal as I went along, and I spent a lot of time feeling frustrated before I got the hang of things. (You'll probably have an easier time of it than I did; the site I've been migrating is rather complicated.)

(2) The official handbooks do a decent job of covering the basics.

(3) Modules are your friends. They let you add all kinds of useful functionality to your site, including some really basic stuff like generating lists of content. There are a lot of modules out there, but it's worth spending some time finding out what's available and which ones are commonly used. You will definitely want to check out CCK and Views. There are also modules out there for doing newsletters and forums. (I suspect you'll want to use something other than Drupal for the wiki portion of your site.)

(4) If you get stuck on something, ask for help on the Drupal forums.

(5) If you find yourself moving beyond the basics, I highly recommend reading Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate. Westgate's company, Lullabot, also has a website that contains a wealth of information for Drupal developers.

Feel free to email me if you have more questions. As I said, I'm not an expert, but I've been through what you're about to go through.

I don't do fiction on TV. (It gives me that fingernails-on-blackboard feeling.)

For the most part, I am looking for "Detailed coverage of a small chunk of time" and "Illustrative books of an era using a single person event...". I will definitely check out "Between Silk & Cyanide".

I really enjoyed the HBO John Adams series, based on the McCollough bio, so I might pick up more of his books.

As for my original amazon rec, I looked at it last time I was at a bookstore and the backflap copy made it look interesting. Plus it wasn't from Regnery press. But considering Amazon's been recommending "Jesus wants you to be rich" type books based on my purchase of "John Donne: A Reformed Soul", maybe I'll wait until someone else says something nice about it before I try it. I remember the last time I bought a book based on random recommendation and it did not end well. At the point where Thomas Cahill posited that Immigration and non-English speaking were going to be the downfall of the US is about when I threw "How the Irish Saved Civilization" against the wall.

If my Bay-Area friends of east-Asian ethnicity are a statistically-relevant sample, they might explain the name issue; most of them don't have Asian first names.

true. i didn't know if the book was the kind to mention people's last names or not.

And I don't know about Serge, but I didn't see it on TV; I saw it live on Broadway.

But when people are self-organizing, it requires a management skill that is much closer to facilitation. When you see the really good ones–a Linus Torvalds on the Linux project, or a Teresa Nielsen Hayden managing the comments on Boing Boing

(just in case anyone doesn't follow every sidelighted link)

Ms. Teresa, over here, Ms. INDUSTRY STANDARD!

YES!

Me, I was OK with Cahill, until he went off on the Spartans, though I don't recall the passage you mention about the downfall of the US.

The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands is my favorite. As you might expect, it's about the California Gold Rush, but he also touches on how the strike affected the national attitude and the Civil War, and other things that your high school history classes never got into.

The Devil In the White City by Erik Larson is also good, about the Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who stalked it. That one was popular enough that you can find copies at used book stores without undue difficulty.

The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, is fascinating because it's about Dutch Manhattan— based on documents that have only been translated in the last couple of decades. It also includes the true terms of the "sale" of the island— the local tribes weren't nearly so gullible as they've always been thought, since it seems to have been a lease rather than a sale, and part of the terms included on-demand hospitality.

You'll notice a trend with all of these books. They're all about a particular time and place, rather than being an overview. The more particular a subject is, the better the research tends to be... at least, if the researcher is any good at all. I remember one book that promised to be interesting and ended up being a "Who cares?" book. Except that it did give me the phrase "larboard foretopmast studding sail boom" to drop into a game.

Lindra: Damn, girl. Your writing has power. Keep doing it.

On To Sail Beyond the Sunset: I read it all the way through once. Since then I have been reading my personal version, which is to skip all of the non-historical chapters. It actually is quite readable in that format. (I skip Waterloo in Les Miserables for much the same reason.)

What a goddam waste war is--that's one small aspect of Between Silk and Cyanide--and what a goddam waste, period--that's Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Is Breaking the Code good as a play? I've neither seen it nor read it.

Serge @ 152: I saw the title on a poster at the university where I got my math degree and got it, but then, I'd angrily read Alan Turing: The Enigma not too much earlier.

Much anger from me today. I blame Cory Doctorow.

Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States hasn't been mentioned yet. Now it has. (When I got him to sign my copy, I took the issue of Analog where it was quoted to show him.)

Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States hasn't been mentioned yet. Now it has. (When I got him to sign my copy, I took the issue of Analog where it was quoted to show him.)

Thanks- that's a helpful summary.

For today I'm working on the jargon, so that I can use the nouns and verbs correctly. i.e. to not be posting the equivalent of "experienced processor-editor wanted to oversee a high-serif paper to move courier from footnotes to layout. A4 helpful."

I don't do fiction on TV. (It gives me that fingernails-on-blackboard feeling.)

By "fiction on TV" do you mean prose fiction adapted for TV, or fiction in the broader sense of "made-up stuff?"

I haven't read Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the United States but his 3-volume Cartoon History of the Universe is excellent, so I'd guess the US one is, too.

I'm slowly working my way through Chicago: City of the Century, which is about Chicago in the 19th century. It's pretty good and I'm learning all about the birth of the grain market and railroads and whatnot. I'm reading slowly because I have poor concentration--it's not the book's fault.

I believe Daniel Boorstin has a book called The Americans, and as albatross notes, his book The Discoverers was excellent. So that's probably worth a peek.

Most of my history reading concerns private lives & sexuality, and American history isn't exactly fascinating when it comes to that stuff. But I did just pick up Sin in the Second City, about prostitution in olde-tyme Chicago.

Say, I like Sarah Vowell an awful lot. She's so fun to read I forget she's a historian. Assasination Vacation is awesome--it's about the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assasinations, and Vowell's travels to the various locations involved. And she has one coming out later this year that's about the pilgrims.

Reading editorials, news articles, popular press history texts - so much easier now that I've seen a dozen trolls disemvowelled. That being a critical reader stuff that they tried to teach in High School finally took, but in a most unexpected way.

The former is a great antidote for the "Deeds of Great Men" presentations of American history.

Mentioning the latter reminds me that a good chunk of the first volume involves a cartoon adaptation of Herodotus, so let me add Herodotus to the recommendations. First, it's pure entertainment value, second, it's our one source for what was actually going on with the Greeks and the Persians as warped in 300, and finally the yarns about how the Scythians get gold from gryphons' nests, et al. should serve as a handy reminder that no historian should be trusted much farther than you can throw him.

I get along a lot better with YA now that I've realized that books do different things for me. You'd think I'd have figured that out sometime before grad school, but no. The commonalities among the YA I seek out seem to be the genre, because I was not interested in being a young adult in my own time and am not interested in being a young adult in this one either, and a combination of length and simplicity.

That last is problematic. It's not that I doubt that YA can be complex, but that I seek it out when complexity is not what I want. I have other books to give me complexity in morality and plot. But simplicity isn't exactly the word, and I apologize for making it do extra work. What I want is brain-shut-up-now, in book form. YA books as a group are similar to fantasy romances as a group. They are satisfying.

The thing is, I can't find very many grown-up books that do the same thing without being stupid about it. Fantasy romances come closest. But there are many books that I have read just to be reading something-- just to get the brain to shut up-- that were nowhere near as good as the YAs.

YA books have a particular combination of brain-shut-up-now and a lack of active frustrate-making, if I may depart from common English.

Besides, Tamora Pierce is nine kinds of awesome.

Grandfather Stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams
(about life near the Erie Canal when it was being constructed.)

The Family on Gramercy Park by Henry Noble MacCracken. (New York City in the 19th c.)

Roughing It, by Mark Twain. The Old West of the Western movies is about as real as Middle Earth; this is what it was really like, by one of the most perceptive (and funniest!) writers in the English language.

If you like this one, you can try Innocents Abroad. Not so much American history, but the narrator's attitude is fascinating.

Sisuile, #92: ...girls who read these books don't accept "Because you're a GIRL!!" as a valid reason that we can't be or do something. But the way many of these authors pushed that point home was by just having it be so. It wasn't a big deal in the books, why should it be so in the real world.

Marion Zimmer Bradley expressed this, in her submission guidelines for the Sword and Sorceress books, as "Grant your strong woman and go on from there." And you can really see the evolution of that approach over the 21 years from the first of those anthologies to the latest! (Lindra, if you like that sort of fantasy at all, you'd probably enjoy the series. They're not YA, but there's nothing in them that would raise a parent's eyebrows either.)

and @143: That experience of "finding a place where everyone else is more or less like you" is what got a lot of us older fen into SF fandom (or sometimes the SCA) in the first place. And even now, among my current circle of friends (who range from the late 20s to mid-50s in age) it seems like about once a month somebody will make an appreciative comment about how nice it is not to have to explain whatever the phrase or reference was that they just used and everybody Got It. (Typically, things like the Square-Cube Law or time dilation.)

Diatryma, #169: I think what you're talking about here is what I call "brain candy". Something sufficiently engaging to focus the attention, but not so complex as to make you work to read it.

I recently finished Klondike Fever by Pierre Berton, about the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. (Apparently there's a revised version out there called just Klondike, which I hadn't realized when I bought my copy.) It's beautifully written and drives home the sheer weirdness of human behavior under the spell of imagined wealth. Most of the book is taken up with the routes aspiring miners took to Alaska, simply because the journeys were so difficult, and so many travelers were unprepared, that they often took many months.

The Worst Hard Time is also very good, and about a place and time I think I really should have learned more about back in school.

As to Marcus' language, I was disheartened because it's an awful lot like I write in my LJ. I wrote well up until about four or five years ago and I'm not sure what happened. Probably something else with my brain. I'm getting better at puns and joke-retorts, though.

"Brain candy" isn't exactly what brain-shut-up-now is; it's more like if the candy is sour rather than chocolate and I have scurvy. I finished Dorothy Dunnett's fourth Lymond book and thought, Okay. Magic Study is out. I want that book. Can't find it. WHERE. Oh, look, Anne Bishop. This'll do. It's completely necessary at times.

Leah Miller: My favorite YA character of all time seems all-but-forgotten nowadays, which is sad. Richard Peck's Blossom Culp (The Ghost Belonged to Me, Ghosts I Have Been, etc)

Is one of those titles The Year of The Ghost? (Presumably the first, from the blurb.) I saw that, but didn't take it this time. (My browsing got cut short when they turned out the lights on me. ;-) )

Niall McAuley @#153: About time... she's been my "forum-wrangling" exemplar for a year or so.

Sisuile @#143: I hate that feeling of living on the outside looking in, without any companionship – that may be where the trope of striving for ‘normalcy’ comes in

Leah Miller @#140: Characters stand around and say "Oh angst! I have powers, oh woe is me, I just want to be normal." I've never really grasped that, not for an instant. ... I've just now made friends with a few people who hid their intelligence during high school ....

Besides the kids who are merely "intelligent", there's also those whose intelligence is... complicated. In my own case, I had a complex pattern of startling strengths and puzzling weaknesses -- and some of those weaknesses specifically affected my social capabilities. It was only about a year ago that I self-diagnosed with Nonverbal Learning Disability.... Part of processing that understanding, has been recognizing that there's simply no question of a magical normality -- because without the NLD, I wouldn't be the same person.

(Yeah, the recent recognition of the autistic spectrum will help with acceptance, but they're still going to be "different". For that matter, auties hardly account for all the "odd" kids.)

It's interesting to me how thoroughly our default understanding of history is created by fiction. I'm sure this isn't all that new (anyone read Ivanhoe or watched a performance of Julius Caesar lately?), but it's still strange. And people absolutely do make political, social, and moral arguments on the basis of those worlds which were often made up explicitly to make a particular modern-day political or social point.

I have slowly gotten myself used to eating salads on a pretty regular basis. We pretty much always make a simple balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing. I've tried keeping the mixed dressing in the refrigerator, but it turns clumpy and kind-of disgusting looking. Can I just leave it out on the counter in a closed container? Or should I just keep it in the fridge and mix it back together when I'm ready to use it?

Also, any suggestions on simple dressings that might add a bit more variety? I want to emphasize simple, here, because we're just barely managing to cook anything that doesn't come pre-made and ready to microwave, at this point.

The clumpy-clotted look is because the oil is solidifying from the cold (in the same way bacon fat melts in the pan, and then hardens). If you take it out a little before you want to use it, the clumpy look will go away, and the mixing will be easier.

To amend it... a little mustard, some "feathereed" herbs (take the herb into your palm, and vigorously rub it with the ball of your thumb, until it's a light powder, as with sage), a bit of cracked pepper.

You can try using different vinegars, or add some spices to the vinegar; or the oil (don't do that with garlic, you run the risk of botulism), or some juice from cutting the tomatoes for the salad.

For a lighter dressing use rice vinegar, no oil required. You can add a few drops of nam pla/nuoc mam, or worcestershire.

Use different sorts of olive oil, toss in a few drops of sesame oil.

That ought to get you started.

Fancier dressings that involve egg yolk or such would presumably be a different matter, of course.

The problem is that things were going well enough that I got cocky and decided I could survive lunch with the whole gang. That necessitated making polite conversation with their mother, who is such an idiot that I think I lost several I.Q. points just being near her. I am utterly astonished that my (far from stupid) father has spent 20+ years sitting across the dinner table from this bleached-blonde, Botoxed, and (yes) breast-implanted bimbo. I can see now why he worried about whether the twins would be smart or not; he's interbred with a Barbie doll. One of the "Math is hard!" kind. I spent a lot of time at lunch staring discreetly at her (perfectly smooth and utterly immobile) forehead. I don't think I've ever before seen what Botox does.

The conversation wavered around dangerously from politics (where I watched with fascination as my father shot down her conspiracy theories about Obama's lack of a lapel pin and Rev. Wright and agreed with me about the serious issues facing the country, even if we disagree on solutions) to religion (where I let my father take the fire for not having raised me correctly) to the very edge of insulting my mother, which might have caused a blowup had I not been peeling my jaw off the floor at the level of stupidity involved. I mean, teh stupid, it burns. I smiled sweetly and discussed things that happened in Texas when I was a child. (Yes, you bimbo, no matter what there are still 15 years of history here that you aren't part of.)

The boy is a typical hyper 13-year-old, as far as I can tell (he's ADHD and on drugs for it), kind of bratty, but probably no more so than the average teenage boy.

I felt sorry for both twins during the pre-lunch conversation and at lunch; they weren't included at all, though I tried periodically. I even tried to get them excused from what was obviously commanded presence when they were looking desperately bored by the political debate, but my father was quite firm: they should be interested in politics. Even I could hear the unsaid "....Susan was at that age!" Ouch. We were definitely playing the "Prodigal Daughter Returns" scenario, and we were going to be one big happy family no matter what. Gack.

Predictably, at lunch, the girl spoke hardly at all. The food arrangements disturbed me: the adults had sandwiches, the boy had chicken fingers and french fries, and the girl had a pork chop the size of a cigarette lighter and a salad. They've got on her a diet again/still, and while she has a bit of baby fat, I wouldn't call her overweight. Incipient eating disorder, I bet.

Anyway, the whole performance so delighted my father that he promptly started laying on the heavy bribes, which was at least as stressful as everything else. Does it make a difference if the blatant reward is for something I was doing anyway? A sort of ex-post-facto bribe? I didn't do it with such expectations, but now that I see what the rewards could be, can I continue to do this sort of thing without them being a factor in my decision-making? I've spent 15 years demonstrating my ability to walk away from bribes, but this was overwhelming. And accepting gifts from my father is the path to damnation, I know. I cannot become dependent on him, and I'm not sure I can accept anything at all without setting foot on a very slippery slope.

I clearly still have enough leverage to get more time alone with the girl - I'm working on getting a larger piece of time next time I'm in the city. I asked her if she wanted to get together again and she said she "liked hanging out" with me, but it's hard to tell if that was sincere or simply what she was supposed to say. I wish I'd gotten to see her bedroom and her bookshelf. I did notice her tiny little ankle tattoo, which I suspect is a secret, since after I noticed it she spent the rest of the conversation with her ankles pressed together.

So I was overwrought and slept not at all Sunday night when I got home then staggered around Monday like a zombie. I'm still processing madly and not sure I haven't made a major mistake in setting foot in this snakepit again.

(And all that was probably way more answer than you wanted, but I'm still pretty upset.)

In a boing-boing thread I made a comment that the army isn't full of mindlessly violent sorts, and the the use of weapons is actually pretty solidly controlled; with behavioral training.

One of the responses was two words, "abu ghraib" .

Sigh.

(the other was trivially braindead; from the person I was talking to, being called a capitalist lackey and dupe no longer has any sting)

(n.b. I am not asking people to go over there and jump to my defense. I'm just having one of those, "I'm tired of this shit" moments)

albatross: there is no dumb food question (well, Ok, the idea about the foie gras and asparagus sorbet... that's dumb, anything else, is ok).

Life on the Mississippi is another good one, with a healthy dose of future-shock retrospective as the elderly Twain travels the river after it has been tamed and electric lights twinkle on the shore.

Balsamic vinegar is good in dressings too. And a dash of Worcestershire or A-1 sauce can add interest. (Can you tell I usually take the "dash of this, dib of that" approach?)

Susan: Sounds like things went pretty well with the girl, and as for lunch... well, sometimes "you" just need to be reminded why you don't usually do that! ;-) It sounds like you handled yourself pretty well, but even so, that sort of thing can take a while to recover from.

I've been looking for books that make American History interesting.

Every couple-three years I dig out and reread Kenneth Roberts, each time thinking they'll be less good than I remembered. They hold up.

I'm not vouching for it; I just found it up there after about 10 years of inattention to those shelves. Nonetheless, I expect it to be of some interest when I get the rest of the dust off and look into it.

(Yes, this is rather like describing "literary fiction" as just another genre. People will go thru the most amazing mental contortions to avoid recognizing the glaringly obvious.)

and @180: For an interesting change from the basic oil-and-vinegar dressing, try oil-and-lemon-juice (or lime juice). If you can find something labeled "Greek salad flavoring" in the herbs & spices area of the grocery, add a little of that. (Penzey's sells a good Greek salad flavoring mix, if you have one in your area.) ISTR that this is called "ladolemona", but I could be wrong.

Susan, #184: That was way more answer than I expected, but not at all unwelcome. As Terry said, if venting here helps, do it. Also, you have a different flavor of Family Weirdness than I grew up with, but if you ever want a more private sympathetic ear who would be less emotionally involved than a close friend, feel free to e-mail me.

Was it Tolstoy who said that every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way? That's not the flavor of misery I grew up with, but I can see it burns, as you said. Feel free to vent; you write well enough to make it entertaining, though not light entertainment.

The latter. I can't stand TV SF series -- be they Star Trek, or Torchwood, or BSG, or any of the others -- or TV drama in general. Something about the general production and acting style that's used to cram drama onto the small screen irritates the hell out of me. The inanity of the world-building and plotting doesn't help, either. And the final straw is the incessant advertising spam intermissions. Upshot: I don't watch non-documentary TV these days. (I'm even developing a problem with News coverage due to the tendency to superimpose a narrative over everything.)

So you're an old-fashioned TV-hater, but you grant a dispensation to one or two categories. I respect that. Myself, I love TV drama, but I love it partly because it's formulaic, and the cliches and set pieces give me a warm fuzzy feeling. It satisfies my need to believe that the world is governed by rules--rules like, if your office is home to both a pterodactyl and a cyberwoman, they must eventually fight each other.

Kind of like when I watch Perry Mason. Sure, it's strange when, time after time, Hamilton Berger thinks that, this time, he will get the upper hand on Perry. I guess he's the Wile E. Coyote of the California Courts.

No, he used to have a radio show.

I've got some idea of the cost to you, but it sounds to me like you did a sterling job. I sure understand the temptation of the bribes, and I hope you can come up with a way to not get them on you.

I haven't seen this painting the same way since I noticed just how many compositional elements point to, highlight, or emphasize George's crotch. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Father of our country indeed!

As for my writing, it's hardly up to local standards; I believe the succinct description was something like "literate person who has no idea how to write". Hopefully I will improve with practice (apparently I do well with plumbing stories.)

(Apologies to Radio Birdman and Jimi Hendrix.)

I used to look at a lot of this as "they're just trying to make a living," or "it's just how things are." Now I just see them as a kind of parasite, feeding on my attention, as concerned with my well being as a mosquito. Now, intrusive advertising p-sses me off. I've gotten to where I don't even try to be polite to telemarketers, where I just silently hang up on unsolicited callers who want some of my time (including pollsters), where I'll go to extra effort to avoid having any unwanted commercials crammed down my throat. I wonder if the experience of millions of people with spam, pop-up windows, and the rest will eventually lead the whole society to become this hostile to intrusive advertising. It sure seems like this would lead to a much nicer world to live in. Imagine if spamming people in snail-mail and spamming peoples' phones were as reputation-killing spamming their email, and so those things just became very rare. A large industry of parasites who live on stolen attention would die off, and the hosts (aka us) would be way better off.

[1] The tag is strike, not s.

Hm. I don't agree. It looks to me like most of the elements point to Washington's head. His cape, the upper arm of the man holding the flag, and the oars of the two boatmen in the front all point directly to his head/shoulders. The two boatmen on the nearside below the flag have lines in their bodies/arms that point approximately to the widest red part of his cape, which leads you back to his head. The flagpole itself also leads to that wide red spot.

Other than his leg (which sort of has to lead to his crotch) and his sword (which could be arguably leading again to the cape), what do you see pointing at his crotch?

(I'm a bit disappointed - that would have really amused me!)

I'm sure this isn't a new observation (people always talk about the "autism spectrum," and I'm spouting off in an area where I have no inconvenient training or knowledge to contaminate my speculations with facts. But it does look this way to me.

Well, either that or they start off wisecracking at each other and finish up defeating the bad guy, getting the story and snogging on the balcony.

...What?

Family can be so hard. [[empathizes]]

Is it possible to keep on doing what you are doing, and would do anyway, without accepting anything? That leaves a clear line for you, and makes it clear to everyone, including the youngster, that you are not being bribed into this, but doing what you want to do.

(*) I wonder if the Ferenghi use spam?

Did you watch the recent 10-part series on PBS, "Carrier"? Of course, I love Big Boats and also Sailors (in the platonic sense!) so I'm probably biased, but I thought it gave a really detailed and (seemed to me anyway) fair glimpse into the lives of military personnel. It's not by any means Blood & Guts 24/7.

I know (or think I know) you are/were Army, but thought you might appreciate the depiction of regular people doing military service, even if non-Army.

"Wait a minute. This was supposed to be Green Acres. What is that sehlat doing on top of my bull?"

In addition to John Barry's book about the 1918-1919 flu epidemic, I can recommend his book about the Mississippi flood of 1927--Rising Tide.

Bernard DeVoto is an old warhorse and an opinionated one, and a modern reader will find things in his books that, at the very least, cause the eyebrows to quirk up--but when he is on a roll, and fascinated by his characters, he is excellent reading. Across the Wide Misssouri is about the fur trade, and its ending days; The Course of Empire is a look at European settlement of the North American continent (I found it more of a slog than his other books, I have to say), and Year of Decision, 1846 is about the beginnings of the Mexican War. (De Voto was Not Impressed by Frémont, and not shy about it, either.) As a more recent balance to Year of Decision John Eisenhower's So Far From God is worth a look. Other books about the western US I can recommend are Dee Brown's, particularly Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow (about the transcontinental railroad--see also Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It in the World), and The American West. Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star takes a careful look at Custer. I don't recall if Ambrose's book on Lewis Calrk has been mentioned: Undaunted Courage; Alvin Josephy's Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes gives another angle on that story.

Bruce Catton's and Shelby Foote's series on the Civil War are both justly famous.

David McCullough's Path Between the Seas is about the building of the Panama Canal; his The Great Bridge is about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; The Johnstown Flood is about Robber Barons behaving badly (partly on the advice of their lawyers), among other things. Walter Isaacson has a good recent biography of Benjamin Franklin, and Ron Chernow one of Alexander Hamilton. Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals is about Lincoln and his cabinet.

Allen Eckert's A Sorrow in Our Hearts is a biography of Tecumseh; he has several other books of interest, including Wilderness Empire, about the Iroquois Confederation, a biography of the Shawnee War Chief Blue Jacket, and The Frontiersmen, which is the first book in a series about the settlement of Kentucky and the Old Northwest Territory.

William C. Davis's The Pirates Lafitte is good; he has also written about the Texan War for Independence and the Civil War.

Francis Parkman is an even older historian than Bernard De Voto; he was, perhaps, the first great American historian, and his series about the contest between Britain and France for control of eastern North America was the first serious look at this topic. It's worth looking at, at least in pieces; I'm partial to Montcalm and Wolfe, even though Parkman is, as a historian, both very out of date and burdened by his own prejudices--a New England Yankee to the bone, he hated both everything French and everything Catholic with a visceral loathing which he didn't even think needed to stay off the page.*

I'll stop now, but it's an effort.

I imagine that all of these should be available through the public library, so you'll only have to buy the ones you decide you love so much you can't live without them.

*There's a line in the Daniel Day Lewis version of The Last of the Mohicans where a Bristish officer declares "...the French haven't the nature for war. Their Gallic laziness combines with their Latinate voluptuousness with the result that they would rather eat and make love with their faces than fight." Parkman would have deplored the language and agreed with the sentiments expressed. (Don't hold back, Serge; Parkman deserves whatever you can deliver!)

P4rkm4n R SRS c4t; w0rld R SRS pl4c3. 51lly n0t all0w3d! (Really, Mr. Parkman, if you can't handle a little gentle mockery, all in good fun, do you need to mix in the marketplace of ideas at all?)

"Fetchez la vache!"

As for 1992's Last of the Mohicans, my wife thought it was weird that I was siding with Montcalm. That may be because her ancestor Benedict Arnold got wounded in my hometown.

(Plus, antipope.org is getting 10-15,000 spams a day routinely -- down from 20-30,000 at the point where I bit the bullet and sprang for a commercial spam filtering service. This is costing me real $MONEY to deal with, not just brains and time.)

(Plus, antipope.org is getting 10-15,000 spams a day routinely -- down from 20-30,000 at the point where I bit the bullet and sprang for a commercial spam filtering service. This is costing me real $MONEY to deal with, not just brains and time.)

Are books longer these days? I knoe the paperbacks seem to be thicker, but that could just be different typesetting and fewer words to a page. A quick Google gives the minimum length for a novel under the Hugo rules as 40,000 words, while assorted author's blogs suggest 100,000 words is usual today.

Anyway, I was following a link on Wikipedia, and noticed that an 8-novel series, published in a year, was being considered as possibly multiple authors sharing a pen name. But I recall the pulp-style spy/crime novels of the Seventies being pretty short.

So is 8*40k from one author so improbable?

(Shall we agree that Lionel Fanthorpe is an extreme case?)

I think this is exactly the attitude that Doctorow is challenging. Because superheroes are awesome--you can imagine being them, shattering all the stupid constraints that make your life miserable, making the world better with the sheer force of your own will. But at the same time, superheroes are really terrible, because they let you off the hook. After all, you aren't a superhero, so why even bother? Better to knuckle under, and not rock the boat. You'd just suffer worse, and nothing would change. Better to indulge your justice fantasies in your own head, and toe the line outside it.*

To be honest, your post @ 51 just oozes this mentality:

"The stuff Marcus is so arrogant about circumventing, the hey-look-at-me school of hacking, isn't the stuff we consider newsworthy or worth writing about, because it's what we live with. It's natural to us that we're suspicious of adults, that they aren't to be trusted without a lot of evidence saying we can.... We don't think about the photo IDs or the cameras because they're always there anyway. We don't like it, sure, but they're there, and why screw with it and make it worse when we don't need to? People always watch us no matter how many or how few cameras there are, and we can't do anything about that."

Once that mindset has been accepted, the idea that you ought to be challenging the system is simply insulting. It feels like some outsider, who has no idea what your life is like, is telling you "Just try harder! You could get treated better if you just put a little effort into it!" Which is patronizing as all hell, no question. What the hell do they know? They aren't in your shoes. They don't know how hard it is. Once you've given up, the idea that you might have made the wrong choice is an uncomfortable one to contemplate.

It might be true, though.

The history of progress isn't a story of enlightened elites handing down privileges out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. It is the story of the down-trodden demanding them. Nothing ever gets better because people kept their heads down. Obedience never won anybody freedom--just the illusion of it. Everyone who lives under injustice has to make a choice: to challenge the system and risk being destroyed themselves, or to just accept things the way they are. It's not an easy decision to make, and I don't think there's one right answer for every person and every situation.** But it sure is a lot easier to make if you pretend there's no choice at all.

Once superheroes become an opiate instead of an inspiration, superheroes have become part of the problem. If not being Marcus is an excuse for not even fighting, not even trying, then we're fucked. Because you're right--none of us are Marcus. There's no one there to save us. If we want saving, we're going to have to do it ourselves. So we need heroes like Marcus--not to lead us to safety, but to point us in the direction that we need to go.

*The particular set of indignities and insults that come with being a teenager are particularly prone to this. After all, wait another four, seven, ten years and you'll be free! (Or so they keep telling you.)

**Actually, that is one of the things that make Little Brother so great, the way Doctorow captured the ambiguity and tension between revolution and safety. It's a decision that Marcus struggles with a lot, and doesn't always come up with the same answer. Same with a lot of the other characters. Hmm. Maybe more on this in the Little Brother spoiler thread.

The part where gur thl qvfnccrnerq bireobneq really got to me.

I’m scadian and being dragged into fandom by my fiancé (notice the kicking and screaming?). That sense of belonging is *still* the main reason people join up, as far as I can tell. They understand my extra-long striped scarf in 70s colors...

Susan @ 184

Family can suck, but it sounds like the girl might end up in pretty good shape. If you need someone to process at, I’ll see you on Friday. Mike read me the wrong time off his flight info, so I can do dinner if we have it later…(6:30/7ish)

"If you don't, you can just forget about that slice of cheesecake young lady!"

/selfparody

"Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed. Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you... my only son."

*..and other minor charges, depending on state regulations, etc. etc. Taxes and title are separate. Additional fees may apply.

I notice that con artists never say what the song is.

You can keep the cheesecake. :) Will respond to your post at 229 in the spoiler thread.

That is a really useful and accurate observation, about intrusive thoughts. I'll quibble on one thing: people who "hear voices" really are having the sensation of auditory input. Including mumbling, garbled speech, volume changes, and localization in space. These are all things that an internal monolog - even one gone horribly awry does not have. This is a pretty good example of a discontinuity: it's either perceptually internal or external.*

*interestingly, while auditory hallucinations are considered a quite serious breakage in one's psyche, visual hallucinations are considered pretty harmless, common, normal, and downright expected in cases of insomnia, frex.

But the experience has stayed with me. No-one is unaffected by advertising (or propaganda). Even if the stuff doesn't cost you anything more than momentary displeasure (a lot of moments these days, now that the FCC has been captured by the avertisers), it affects the management of the commercial stations, who after all are selling their audiences's time and attention. We are their product.

Advertising, though, is limited by the physical limitations of paper and broadcast media. Spam, on the other hand, is as limitless as the internet. If spam was simply outlawed, and processing transactions on behalf of spammers led to fines, there'd be almost no spam--the banks that are currently making money processing the transactions would refuse them, and the rest would follow. But the spammers have captured the legislative process and it will probably be a generation before the pols notice that they could make their little constituents happy by outlawing spam. It would also help if MS had not made such a business of marketing vulnerable systems. Even Apple has got on the bandwagon; the successful attacks on Macs are, I hear, largely via Apple's Safari browser, which is apparently even less secure than Internet Explorer.

Michael Weholt: I like such programs. I've had the chance (over the course of some 16 years) to play with all but the Coast Guard. I like big boats. I may have to track that down.

I just get tired of having a subset of idiocy tossed out as the norm, and then having to both condemn it (while pointing out the problems aren't those of, "a few bad apples" and not systemic; even if institutional), any time I mention the Army.

It get more tiresome when the basic premise of the commenter who brings it up, is something I am actively agreeing with.

Makes me cranky.

Looking forward to it =)

Hmm. Pardon me for being sceptical about that glow, but I got screwed like this once before by that Naismith guy. "Prime farmland," he said. "Middle of my family estates," he said.

I don't know nuthin' 'bout the military either, but the sense you got was that these sailors were giving us a pretty much no b.s. portrait of life aboard the Nimitz on a 7 month deployment to the Gulf.

The part where gur thl qvfnccrnerq bireobneq really got to me.

Yeah, that was sad. The part that *really* got me tearing up, though, was at the very end where the poor, lowly sailor got home and svanyyl ubbxrq hc jvgu uvf certanag tveysevraq naq fur qhzcrq uvz. Gung fprar jurer ur jnf pelvat jvgu uvf ohqql fnlvat "V tbg abguvat, V tbg abguvat" naq guerngravat gb dhvg "guvf fgvaxvat wbo"... ernyyl oebxr lbhe urneg.

Poor kid.

So apparently my friend is only a fan of her own reproductive rights. Her reasoning is that the adults around this girl will have to bear the consequences if she gets pregnant, so they're entitled to make this choice for her.

This same friend is also, herself, unexpectedly pregnant, because of having unprotected sex with her now-husband. Had they not gotten married, her parents would, of course, have helped out with the cost of raising the baby. That's ok, though, because *she's* an adult.

I'm not saying this girl should be having unprotected sex...but neither should my friend, and she'd go ballistic if anyone suggested she should be required to do *anything* she didn't feel like doing.

Ugh. I anticipate a couple of extremely not-fun conversations in my immediate future.

If people like you two ever start writing for TV dramas, I might actually watch some!

I'm glad Saturday went as well as it did, and isn't Botox scary? Now they say it can cross the blood-brain barrier, too.

*I think we can all see how an insecure adolescent could see it that way, right? it may be a hard idea for him to handle, but if there's a therapist in the picture, they'd be likely to see the point.

Well, that's certainly unfortunate decision making on her part all the way around, no matter the stance on reproductive rights. As noted up-thread, teens don't take hypocracy well.

Good luck.

But I recall the pulp-style spy/crime novels of the Seventies being pretty short.

I don't have any hard facts about it, but a lot of my paperbacks that I bought in the 60's and 70's were densely packed with small type. A Travis MgGee novel in the 60's would usually average 150 pages; recent reprints have widely spaced and larger type, and have gained over a hundred pages because of it.

Serge, I did find a promo copy of the new Dan Dare. It looks really good!

Susan, I think DWJ is one of the most underrated authors of our time.

The Hunt Museum in Limerick, IR has one of the most amazing and varied collections that I have ever seen, and I've been in a *lot* of museums. I've been working with their website ever since my visit several years ago, usually frustrated because I can't ever get a response from their webminister or research-question person about dating or size or back pictures or anything. Still - these people were mid-century well known antiques dealers and this is the collection of things they decided they liked too much to sell.

Now, I've come up with an avenue of research that may have a k'zoo paper in it for next year and I know they have a statistically significant sample of what I'm looking at. However, this is the point when they completely rebuild the website, pulling the online collection down. As far as I can tell, they are the *only* museum to even care about the findings and accessories enough to post all 100 or so of their collection online. Or they were!

Grrr. Argh. Research - how did they do it all those years ago? ;)

Good luck from me, too. Sheesh. I don't suppose your friend can be convinced to downgrade the contraceptive shot to a Condom Talk impressing the importance of leaving the condom/no condom question alone until she's old enough to have the full range of contraceptives available to her?

Contrasting the condom talk as encouraging responsible decision-making about her body as opposed to the shot encouraging reliance on contraceptives as a failsafe might help your argument.

Washingtonpost.com wants identities of readers who post comments

This is a fairly normal treatment of heroic doings, using a not-entirely isoceles triangle as the thing that gives the painting "stability", a feature of many High Renaissance paintings that has persisted, particularly in so-called "history paintings" (see Jacques-Louis David, especially "Oath of the Horatii" and "Napoleon Crossing the St Bernard Pass").

What Mark is picking up on is a subsidiary triangle, inside the main one, with the crotch at the apex. But the main triangle is indeed the outer, larger one, apex at/near Washington's head, and with all sorts of stuff pointing to it. There are actually at least two more triangles in the picture (look carefully at each end of the boat), so it isn't entirely static.

That said, I am reminded of local folklore involving a statue of Washington on campus here; seen from certain angles, the scroll that he holds looks remarkably like a body part.

/me dies.

Can haz cheezburger naow, plz???

I *think* I can see the smaller triangles. There's sort of a vague one with the two nearest boatmen and Washington's crotch (?) and four and a half* of the men at the back of the boat also form a lumpy triangle. Are those what you're talking about?

This was a very interesting exercise, to really notice all the directional elements pointing at Washington.

And to come back to nerdycellist's original quote - photoshopping the guns out of this painting would be trivially easy as I can only find one.** Of course, it would also be even more silly than it seemed originally...because there's only one gun. (At least, I think that's a gun the fellow in the middle of the huddle in the back is cradling.)

*The upper body of the boatman in green isn't part of the triangle.

**A larger reproduction might reveal more guns, but I think that in most school textbooks, the image wouldn't be much larger than I'm seeing on-screen.

Oh, and congratulations, Charlie!

Charlie Stross @ 266: You can haz.

...I keep wanting to translate cat macros into Mandarin now that I have, roughly, a basic cat macro grasp on Mandarin. Like, "Do not want!" 不要, bu yao.

I know "you haz", 你有, ni you, but wasn't sure of "you can haz" until I looked it up just now, and found, via google.cn, that Nike has used the pun on their name to good effect. See, "you can" is "ni ke yi"...)

I may be thinking about caches a bit too much...what I'm doing these evenings is cataloging all of the cache files that people sent us* so we can patch gaps.

-----
* From this I am learning two things above all: we have a lot of people who comment here in a randomly selected 2-month period. And we have many wonderful community members who did a lot of work saving caches off, zipping them up, and sending them in. I am impressed and humbled.

"Alive! It's alive!"

There needs to be a Making Light medal for these kinds of things.

Also, reading upthread, Serge @223 is win.

And so is bed. Bed is definitely win. China time says 2:46. Class time is 7:50. Yugh. (In case anyone wonders what I'm doing posting punch-drunk and talking in intarweb-speak and mashed-up Mandarin, I just spent about six hours tossing together Business English finals -- brain-rotting material even when it isn't. Bu yao. Zai jian!)

I'm pretty awed myself. My wife who's off on a trip heard about it from me on Monday and was completely boggled that the site had been largely restored via volunteer labor within just a few days.

Companies have completely failed over this kind of disaster, as I'm sure you realize.

I don't suppose your friend can be convinced to downgrade the contraceptive shot to a Condom Talk

Fortunately my friend is not in a position to decide what happens, although she has quite a lot of influence, and would probably be the right person to deliver the condom talk if she wasn't pregnant herself. Hopefully that talk will get delivered by someone soon. I think the girl knows about condoms, but is acting out and indulging in deliberately risky behavior because of Stuff. Having big choices imposed upon her by adults is unlikely to help with that, I think.

Fragano Ledgister @#261:

Or was there just silence or stern Thou Shalt Nots?

Stern Thou Shalt Nots, lots of 'em. Those work, right?

A. J. Luxton @#270:

Somewhere in one of those not-fun conversations you might want to tell her that Depo is potentially dangerous for teens as it can deplete bone mass, and during periods of bone growth that really doesn't sound like a good idea.

Amen to that. I told her that Depo has side effects that are probably going to be more problematic for an adolescent, but I couldn't remember what the specific bad juju was until I looked it up later. She did listen to me with a fairly open mind, but she still thinks that a teenager shouldn't get to decide, blah blah blah. I pretty much said that on the one hand this is a troubled child, who needs to be helped and protected, and on the other hand this is a woman, whose rights are supposedly important to both of us.

Hopefully as my (newlywed) friend finds her bearings within this new family she'll chill out a little and be able to help the girl out by connecting with her, instead of trying to be the voice of authority.

I did want to say "well done" to Susan for making it through the Family Ordeal in possession of her wits, her integrity, and her freedom*. Like I said before, any one you walk away from counts as a win.

-----
* Both in the sense of staying unbought and in the sense of not requiring arrest for the murder of a Barbie doll.

@selfboot

Oh, and thank you muchly for your efforts to save everything!

That leaves me free for lunch and dinner Saturday, pending networking. I have made a post re. Kalamazoo on Rixo with an open comment thread should this require discussion, or should anyone just want to discuss anything Kalamazoo-related, since I am very lightly commented and cherish every one I get. I will later make a more professional post on Kickery as well, which should provide amusing contrast for the four or five people who read both blogs.

I am but a cog in the machine in the effort to save things. The only unique thing I did was to open a few threads on my blog and set Patrick and Teresa up with accounts there.

I have the remains of a beheaded Barbie doll hidden in my house right now.

...and Ken did it!

I'd be very wary of a Depo shot for ANYONE, given the side effects.

I'd think a visit to the GYN is non-negotiable for the teen, but that choice of method ought to be a matter for the girl and her doctor to figure out.

Remembering my own teen days, it was a lot easier to discuss such matters with a doctor than it was to discuss them with a parent.

...and Ken did it!

Those love triangles with GI Joe always end badly. Wait, maybe it was Midge.

Ha!

Serge # 288 -

I don't know - the CSI:Mattel team is still working the scene.

The horror!

I *love* that. She just went up in my book.

Yeah, but they are (or should be) closed systems, without all sorts of random google caches that can be saved off by just anybody. I think the fact that we're open is how we lucked out.

Yes, those are the two. It's also interesting, now that I look yet again, that you can either see Washington and the guys behind him to our right as a triangle, or the two guys as one triangle and Washington as his own triangle. All the little interlocking tangrams, almost. Quite complex, really; given all that's going on compositionally, I think Mark is stretching his take just a little. (Out of shape, perhaps?)

(Don't get me started on the placement of the reds; I could natter on for quite a while and I'd be doing even more infodump to get there than Cory has got in LB. Not that his infodump is at all a bad thing.)

Little Kathy goes to class, and during Show & Tell, she displays her Barbie doll. She says, "And this my Barbie doll. Barbie comes with GI Joe."

Teacher says, "Kathy, don't you mean she comes with Ken?"

"No, teacher. She fakes it with Ken."

That reminds me of the cat named Buuyo from Inuyasha. (Who serves the sam purpose in the series as R2D2 did in Star Wars, albeit, only for one episode.)

Given Rumiko Takahashi's predilection for multilingual puns, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a factor in Buyo's naming. (The poor thing is put upon by Inuyasha and pretty much everyone else, in the way slow, pudding-like cats tend to be.) My google-fu is inadequate to find the Kanji equivalent for the cat's name to compare. Perhaps you might have better luck.

Anyway, Mandarin cat macros?
WANT, PLZ

don delny @ 238
The point about different value judgements of auditory vs visual hallucinations is really interesting and I'll have to think about it some more. I wonder if it's to do with the amount of (perceptually false) information in each medium. Language is seen as more important .

I've wondered about that a great deal myself. The folk-science explanation I've gotten from professionals who should know, is that auditory hallucinations require to the brain to actually produce language from scratch (instead of simulating, replaying memories, or repeating sounds in the environment). That would require the cooperation of some pretty high-up brain functions, since language production is very hard and very abstract , so the hypothesis is, if something that is supposed to be directly managed by your conscious awareness is going off and doing it's own thing, you have a very serious problem.

Meanwhile, we are in the habit of producing visual hallucinations every night, multiple times a night, which seems to involve something less than 'real' tactile experience, and something closer to day-to-day visualizing of stuff.

Anyway, that's all I really have to say on that, it's not really my area, so I'm totally lacking in further insight.

I'm wondering about that in part because Depo doesn't answer all the objections to unprotected sex. Pregnancy is a temporary condition, and seldom fatal.

...

Anyone who wants to help catalogue saved caches of Making Light should feel free to speak up. It's more work than you'd think.

...

Terry, you should have dropped an eyeball on me.

Alex, thanks.

I was talking with a friend about the design constraints of Barbie dolls and the consensus seemed to be:

1. the doll needs to be big enough to make dressing it practical for small children AND so that standard kinds of cloth can be used to make the clothes.
This lets out modern GI Joes and Star Wars action figures: they are too small to be dressed in anything other than plastic.

2. the doll needs to be small enough to be grabbed effectively by small hands and light and weildy enough to be carried
This lets out previous iterations of baby dolls, many of which were pretty big.

Given 1 & 2, there's a limit to the kinds of proportions you can give the doll. Sadly, unrealistic proportions make for a* pretty good design solution if you also want to put clothes on the doll that are like grown-up clothes. (Even the bizzaro chest pyramid.)

*yes, a, one, single solution. There should be others. No, I am not defending Barbie as a cultural institution in any way.

Those dolls sold out and became collectors' items very very fast, as they were abruptly discontinued once somebody informed Mattel management exactly how they were accessorizing Ken.

* Studiously avoiding the phrase "came with"...

Teresa, I'm sending you some email. This cache sorting should not be manual work, at all. Let me see if I can help out, as this kind of solution is where my talents are located.

I could natter on for quite a while and I'd be doing even more infodump to get there than Cory has got in LB.

but it would be art history/criticism geekery! we hardly ever get that around here!

(that was a "do it!" vote.)

Most of it is blatantly pornographic.

Bur I think the best line in it is, "And then Dick Cheney had his heart attack".

No, it's not the conclusion of a porno scene. That isn't something I'd want to put any character through.

Autism in particular definitely shades straight down into "normal tendencies". My stepfather is a classic example -- clearly not diagnosible, but he's an engineer, with the characteristic mindset, plus bare shadings of some of the "autie" characteristics.

Both visual and auditory hallucinations are more common than most people realize -- it's just that most of the time, they're temporary episodes while overtired or in response to trauma. There are also people who have regular hallucinations, but who also have the social judgment to keep quiet about them, and usually to ignore or discount them.

Consider that social customs in general include standard routines for community verification ("Hey, do you see that?") and for negotiating over consensual reality ("you're overtired, go to bed", "dude are you stoned?", "It's a vision!", "not that again..."). Our social behavior has evolved to deal with cases where only one person in a group "saw something", and we're collectively pretty good at reality-testing such things. (Religion represents a couple of bugs in our strategy, but then there's always a tradeoff for difficult tasks.)

Maybe part of it is because it seems like a different sort of whining to to what I did here (and who else has amusing switches between the US/British from/to after different?).

I guess that what irks me, personally, didn't seem worth invoking the moderator, and I didn't want to seem to be using an outside relationship for special privilege.

I will try to think of the eyeball in future.

Ewwwww...

The reason I call it the Goddamn Tapes is that as far as I can tell, people don't have that voice naturally; they get it from dealing with other people who tell them stuff like that over and over again, until it gets internalized. The Tapes are the voices of your perfectionist parents, your tyrannical teachers, your bullying schoolmates, that abusive ex-boss -- anyone who routinely deals out verbal attacks, still living in the back of your head long after you may have gotten them out of your life.

Charlie, #226: One of the things that has changed as a result of spam is that now (at least in our house) the term gets applied to more than just e-mail. Telemarketers are "phone spam", junk mail is "postal spam", flyers on the porch are "door spam", and those cheap coroplast signs on metal step-stakes are "street spam".

And it's getting hard for me to watch Bones (the only TV show I'm currently following) on live broadcast because so many of the commercials are just STUPID AND IRRITATING. I'd rather wait a day and get it off the torrent instead, and then pick up the season DVDs when they're released.

Randolph, #242: I was thinking just the other day that the entire paradigm of broadcast TV has been seriously broken since the advent of the VCR. If the whole point is to sell advertising time, but much of the audience employs some mechanism (VCR and fast-forward, Tivo, torrents) that allows them to skip the advertising... well, the advertiser is clearly not getting what they pay for any more, are they? And the people who use those commercial-skipping mechanisms are precisely the cream of the audience -- those who are likely to have the most discretionary income to spend on whatever the commercial is advertising.

I was also thinking, in the wake of a particularly obnoxious commercial, how nice it would be if there were some kind of automatic feedback system to "vote up" or "vote down" a commercial while it's running. Yes, I was wishing that my TV shipped with a mouse. :-)

Charlie, #249: Seriously? That I'd buy in hardcover!

Mary Dell, #250: Ouch. My sympathies. Sitting down with the young woman (AND her boyfriend!) and trying to convince them that this is a good idea -- and that even if she gets the shot, they should still be using condoms anyhow! -- I can see, but not forcing her to do it.

Is she by any chance a casualty of "abstinence-only" sex ed? ... oh, never mind, I think you answered that.

"Acting out because of Stuff" -- oh, do I hear that! My own adolescent rebellion (which was wildly delayed even by the standards of the time; it didn't reach full flower until I was about 20) was strongly shaped by my parents' negativity about sex. Having sex and enjoying it was by far the worst thing I could do to them -- much worse than smoking, drinking, or doing drugs! In my own defense, (1) I did approach my doctor for the Pill... though not until I'd had unprotected sex once; and (2) this was pre-HIV, so at least I didn't have to worry about ending up dead.

Susan, #305: That's a fairly recent development -- as in, within the past 30 years or so. I still remember the days of the all-white, always-blond Barbie, when token attempts at diversity were made only by giving her friends of different ethnicities.

It's pretty geeky, all right. I wrote a dissertation that had a whole chapter (it seems like, at a remove of almost a decade) on non-pyramidal form, and how some artists used color to subvert pyramid form or work with/enhance the non-pyramidal stuff, to the point that one of my committee informed me after the defense that she now looked at paintings in a whole new way. (Ghu knows if any of it stuck.) The more I look at the Washington painting, the more I think something weird is going on, I'm not just sure what yet or why. Ping me here in a few days if you're still interested.

If I didn't know the parties involved, I'd be inclined to wonder if the situation was being misrepresented, or invented out of whole cloth. In this case, alas, it's not. Custodial parent is forbidding sex, and won't discuss birth control, because without sex, birth control not necessary. If the girl gets pregnant, she will have to go live with someone else. Which she would probably prefer. So my friend is trying to avoid having a miserable, pregnant teenager turn up on her doorstep. Which is understandable, but she needs to adjust her focus.

Most of it's personal, but the professional interest is beause of the personal. As a photographer, how to build/see a picture matters.

And yes, I agree that something strange is going on in the picture.

Lee: re commercials: Yep. I don't know if it's me, or what, but I see a whole lot more commercials which are either stupid; or assume the customer is.

Add the one's aimed at those kids on my lawn and I get a bit tetchy.

Does Custodial Parent acknowledge that sex has already HAPPENED, despite the prohibition? Or is Custodial Parent in the dark, or in denial?

How old is Teenager, anyway? How old is Boyfriend? Is there a danger of a statuory rape charge if Custodial Parent is forced to acknowledge and gets their knickers in a twist over it?

If it seems like the best plan to keep Custodial Parent in the dark, maybe Pregnant Friend could take Teenager to Planned Parenthood -- sliding-scale services, and unless my Google-fu is failing me, it doesn't look like mandatory parental notification. And since she's already had unprotected sex, STD testing, and the HPV vaccine!

I'm assuming, given your description, that Teenager was enthusiastically willing and not feeling coerced by Boyfriend, but that might also be a useful discussion for Friend or perhaps Doctor to have with her.

It makes me wish we had Betan customs, with universal implants at menarche (ones without nasty Depo side effects and that stop your periods to boot!) and a cultural understanding that adolescents, thus protected, were then free to figure things out on their own. But since we don't, I'm in favor of maximizing both education AND safety for young women, with the hope of granting them maximum agency.

And... my daughter's twelve. I hope I'll be able to do right by her.

Send me a chunk. Or however you are doing it...

Note: I do best if I get a chunk I can finish and then take on the next chunk.

Rat-like, I'm pathetically addicted to small but frequent rewards.

It's often risky to read to much of an author's beliefs into a novel, but I note this passage from Glasshouse:

Back inside, I try to watch some TV, but it's inane and slow, not to mention barely comprehensible. Bright blurry lights on a low-resolution screen with a curving screen, slow-moving and tedious, with plots that don't make sense because they rely on shared knowledge that I just don't have. I'm steeling myself to turn it off and face the boredom alone when the telephone rings.

On putting Making Light back together:

Strangers have arrived in the market of memories, not in ones and twos, but by the hundreds. Searching for forgotten thoughts of Go Bags and Flu Packs, musings on Slush and Snow, stories of cute hamsters and frankly obscene dinosaurs. They offer the most extraordinary deals for mere scraps of political discussions, fragments of poetry and particles of an anlaysis of fanfic.

A thousand nights spent watching movies where the scientist's creation turns on them have changed hands this morning alone, and a thousand more in the afternoon. When asked why they give so much for the memory of mere words on the screen, they just laugh and make light of it.

(This is my thanks, and also my apology for being too busy to be of any use)

* And then they burst into song

I handled it so-so (did pretty well there but ought to have looked elsewhere to vent; as I don't want to put Teresa in the position of appearing to have a conflict of interest.

And yes, she is, from my limited interactions, a pretty smart person; seems clued-in on how to talk, argue, and play on the net. I was pretty sure that the conversation wasn't going to become personally toxic; though part of that because I refuse to let it.

How I intend to make that case can be seen there.

And Skullhunter has proven himself as clueless as I told him he was.

:)

http://sclayworth.blogspot.com/2007/06/blog-post.html

Mary Dell, I knew a girl in college who loved sex, but refused to go on hormonal birth control because her mother might find out. The conversation was related secondhand, or I would have suggested faking extremely painful periods or irregularity. Birth control pills are useful for more than preventing pregnancy.

I frantically needed cheering up when I found that video.

Just sayin'

I'm certain you'll do fine by your daughter. One of the potential blessings of being an SF fan is being able to weigh all sorts of different ways of doing things, long before you actually encounter them in RL. Just don't make her get married in the nude ;)

from Diatryma @#335:

I was genuinely on the pill for hormonal reasons, but it was during a time in my life when I wasn't getting any love anyway, so the excuse was wasted. But I knew plenty of other women who took it "for cramps" so they wouldn't have to cop to being sexually active. I'd like to think times will eventually change so that this kind of silliness won't be necessary.

Law and Order:SVU is a hypnotizing train wreck for me the few times I've gotten hooked into watching it lately. I started out watching on a regular basis, hoping they were really going to treat the subject of sexual crimes and victims with some respect and clarity. They did better than anyone else on television* for awhile, then they descended into bathos to show how horribly the job affects the cops who have to deal with the squick on a daily basis. I mean, come on, the female lead is a child of rape and uses her police contacts to track down her "father", planning to kill him? No new insights were left unharmed in the filming of that episode.

What did stop me from seeing it for a long time was that I got the feeling they were choosing their subjects for their exploitation value, titilating rather than showing, talking rather than doing. But recently I've seen a few episodes (thank the DVR for that), and noticed the interest in technology you mentioned. Unfortunately, the train went off the track there too, because, while they often get the words right, they rarely fit them together into coherent phrases, let alone sing them to the tune correctly.

My favorite example: an episode that should have been titled "This Horrible Second Life". This week's Guest Deviant is in a social virtual space whose name was some variant of "second Life". The Good Guys needed to track him down knowing only that he was logged-in looking for a victim. I can't remember exactly why they wanted to make him think it was later than it really was (the legal bafflegab was getting thick), but they decided that they needed to go to the central control room (!) for the site and make the virtual sun come up hours early. Looking at a monitor one of them says "There are more than 3 million people logged in now, how do we find him?" and the techie walks over to the wall and pulls up on the switch bar of a 100 amp circuit breaker, like the kind you find on the wall of a server room. And that's what turns on the sun. I missed most of the climactic scene because I was laughing too hard to see the screen.

* A faint damn if I ever wrote one.

But then, I had a good enough relationship with my mom that I actually told her that I thought I was going to have sex, and discussed the reasons why I had chosen the person I had. Much easier decision to make without all the extra family drama attached.

And I'd never MAKE my daughter get married in the nude, no matter how amusing it was when Deanna Troi's mother did it, but if she decided she WANTED to (depending on how her religious explorations settle out, it's a possibility), I guess I'd do my best to help her find a location where it could happen without anyone getting arrested.

Feh.

The original isn't terrible (though it's struggled since Jerry Orbach died), but even that has moments (usually when the legal reasoning falls apart; or things which aren't true are said. They routinely go off the rails when they use a military backdrop).

my art school tended to emphasize the conceptual over the formal, (in both art history & studio art classes,) which i somewhat regret. now, even though i've got a degree in visual arts, i don't feel like i have more than an intuitive handle on colour or composition. & the only times i heard about triangles/golden sections were in textbooks or the one high school art history class i took.

& yeah, really, i'd love for you to change the way i see washington crossing the delaware, forever.

Steve C @334:
My window unit AC often sounds like the neighbors are having a party when I'm trying to go to sleep. Not rowdy or anything, just definite rhythmic rise and fall of several people in conversation. It bounces of the wall of the bedroom wall so it sounds like it's not coming from our side yard, which is where that window is.

I like the clueless tech stuff. Partly because it can be funny, partly because -- as I suggested above -- there's something really fascinating about stuff like the Grand Central Freeze appearing in a police procedural. L&O is like the Police Gazette or Spicy Detective Stories of our day.

Not a hallucination, but in that category, is a fascinating special effect my brain puts on under a specific circumstance.

I wake up from a really deep sleep to either a) take a leak, of b) shout at the dog to get off the balcony and stop barking at cats. I quickly stumble back to bed, without having had any real stimulus so I'm still half-asleep and really thick headed. When I close my eyes and settle back to sleep I see behind my lids . . . a really peculiar phenomena.

You know those simulations of a insect-eye-view you might see in a horror movie or science show? Lots of little almost-identical images?

This special effect is kind of like that. An irregular mosaic of dozens or scores of images filling up my behind-the-eyelids visual field. The images are not identical but are related. Like: Candy. Or: Limbs. Or: Chairs. All vivid and mobile and colorful, jostling slightly as though being displayed on small roughly oval LCDs held together in a rubber frame.

My theory: What I'm "seeing" is a sort of a video clip art collection used for categorization and identification. (As I understand things neurological, not actual images but bundles of attributes which are interpreted as images.) Normally it's only accessed subconsciously, but here the data is getting routed to a place where it's "visible."

Go figure.

You are, you know.

Should you, or any member of your team, be captured, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge.

Good luck, Vicki.

There is a wonderful web site called Scarleteen(dot com) that covers teen and young adult sexuality and sex education issues. Even chapters on what adults can do to help guide the younger generation.

But the problem with that is that 不要 is perfectly grammatical Chinese. It doesn't has the flavor of LOL at all. Maybe substitute in characters with the same sound but different meanings? (卧有个味到。)

Mary Dell @ 276: "I think the girl knows about condoms, but is acting out and indulging in deliberately risky behavior because of Stuff. Having big choices imposed upon her by adults is unlikely to help with that, I think."

Is it just because I recently finished Little Brother that the idea of trying to force a teenager to do, well, anything against their will seems inherently flawed? Their capacity to rebel far exceeds the adult's capacity to enforce, and it only increases.

@ 325: "Custodial parent is forbidding sex, and won't discuss birth control, because without sex, birth control not necessary. If the girl gets pregnant, she will have to go live with someone else. Which she would probably prefer. So my friend is trying to avoid having a miserable, pregnant teenager turn up on her doorstep. Which is understandable, but she needs to adjust her focus."

Sounds like the custodial parent needs a sharp smack upside the head with a good sturdy cluestick. (And did the idea of STDs ever cross Depo-advocate's mind? Sheesh.)

Mary Dell, I think one of the possibilities that Teresa was alluding to is this:

If your friend is going slightly bonkers with advocating forced birth control for her teenage relative, while she herself is unexpectedly pregnant, her panic may be rooted in the thoroughly inexpressible and unacceptable thought of "But I'm not ready! I didn't want a baby right now and I can't deal with this myself and I wish I didn't have to have it!" (Especially if that thought is all tangled up with a lot of directly contradictory thoughts.) It doesn't make it right, but it may make it possible to think more charitably of her.

I always found facing the prospect of parenthood was pretty panic-inducing even when fully planned, let alone unplanned. (And I didn't even have to harbor the parasite in my body for nine months!)

Vicki @ 332 and I think we're really cued to names - even something that sounds slightly like my name can grab my attention. The brain is watching for this sort of stuff. When I lived abroad for a while the pronunciation of my name was different and it took me a while to be as aware of the different pronunciation.

don delny @ 310 I find the neurology of auditory hallucinations really fascinating - there aren't many good explanations of what's actually happening. I used to work with Deaf people and some people who were native BSL speakers experienced "voices" (linguistic like experiences of an other communicating with them) when they spoke no English. These communicative hallucinations weren't visual (they didn't see people signing) and communicated things at a complexity above that of the persons grasp of English. I think this suggests that meaning is (somehow) separate from mode, and that many auditory hallucinations are hallucinations of meaning. I wonder if visual hallucinations (and the sort of thing that Steve C. is taking about @ 334) and somehow different. Maybe this is why we (culturally) treat visual and auditory hallucinations differently.

#315 ::: Ralph Giles @ 315 I can't remember who speaks in my dreams - I'll also have to pay attention next time I'm asleep. I do remember that when my sign was good and I'd been using it continually (to the exclusion of English) I'd remember dreaming in sign (but I'm not sure if I saw anyone sign - rather that the memory was in sign - if that makes any sense).

The closest I can come up with is an episode of the main series in which a cop had to come to terms with having a gay child. Of course, the cop then got his gay child to help fink someone out.

(Yes, someone deserving--aren't they always?)

There's my greatest problem with it--it's as sex-negative as it's possible to be.

Another L&0 cue to the audience that something may not be right about someone, and may make that person a likely suspect, or a likely victim, is when an adult is a comics fan. I can't wait for an episode where the suspects are Edward Norton, Ben Affleck, Michael Clark Duncan and Jon Favreau.

Despite myself, I enjoyed aspects (okay, the ending, which contained aspects of both vengeance and rare mercy on the prosecutor's part) of a recent episode involving a cult built around an imprisoned serial killer/artiste. God knows, I find people fascinated by serial killers to be a bit disturbing themselves, but I don't think they are accomplices waiting to happen.

("I woke up this morning and I fell out of bed
Trouble waiting to happen
The mailman brought me the Police Gazette
Trouble waiting to happen")

I also impressed my wife by calling most of the plot twists (as I remember it--she's here and can correct me) before they happened, and perhaps that was part of my enjoyment.

Steampunk makes the New York times. No mention of Girl Genius, yet...

#300, Fragano -

For a long while, if it wasn't the traditional blue-eyed blonde, then it wasn't Barbie. It was Midge or Miko or Brenda or something like that. They were friends of Barbie, part of the Barbie brand, but not Barbie herself because she was a particular character. I remember being quite impressed that the faces on the other dolls were different. They weren't just the same mold with different colors or different hair - they actually had different faces.

I think now that they're all just Barbie, though.

#307, Serge -

I think that is sort of why more realistic Barbie-replacements are doomed to fail. Because Barbie has such a tiny waist and such a long history, any doll that replaces her has to fit in her clothes or be rejected. Since the problem is the shape of her body, any replacement has been poorly accepted.

I had a Wonder Woman doll in the 70s. She was probably the right proportions compared to Barbie, height-wise. If you assume Barbie is somewhere in the 5'4" to 5'8" range, Wonder Woman was 6'2" to 6'6". But she had a realistic body. So even though I had a pile of Barbie clothes, Wonder Woman only had two outfits, and therefore wasn't worth playing with. (Yes, I realize that says something rather unfortunate about my childhood play, but it is truth that I'd rather have played dressup than super-heroes. Super-heroing required the generation of plot, which I couldn't do at the time.)

(Me) Does that count?
(You) Only to ten, Mudhead.

That reminds me of the graffiti I once saw in a theater's toilets. Something had been written on one wall about some ethnic group's people multiplying like rabbits. To which someone had added "So do bigots, and they can't add or subtract."

Say what?

Let me guess. Gene Roddenberry was still alive when that episode of ST-TNG was cooked up.

Guess what Kurt Busiek's latest issue of AstroCity was about?

Standalone story Her Dark Plastic Roots is about Beautie, one of the members of AstroCity's Honor Guard. Not only is she strong, but she can also fly. And she's a doll. Literally. A life-sized Barbie-like doll who doesn't know who or what she is, and who begins to wonder one day in a toy store displaying many action-figures based on her.

They don't think. There's nothing but air and the molded roots of their plastic hair behind those flat painted eyes. She knows that. But sometimes she wonders, nevertheless. If they feel like she does. Or if they know something. Something she can't quite--

For no reason at all, it reminds me of my all-time favorite piece of men's room graffiti:

In one hand: "I fucked your mother."

Below in a neater hand: "Go home, dad. You're drunk."

I too would be interested in some nattering about red (or color in general, for that matter.)

#323, Lee -

...those cheap coroplast signs on metal step-stakes are "street spam".
There was recently a hand-lettered sign out on a frequently spammed corner in my neighborhood with a phone number encouraging us to call to fight "spam on our streets."

And thanks for the word "coroplast." I needed that one.

I was also thinking, in the wake of a particularly obnoxious commercial, how nice it would be if there were some kind of automatic feedback system to "vote up" or "vote down" a commercial while it's running.

I *think* that Tivo can already do this. Not with the thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons, but I think the Tivo company can see what you watch clearly enough to notice which commercials you actually watch as opposed to which you flash past, if they choose to use the technology. At least, they used to tell us what the most-watched scene in a series-finale season was, so I'd think the commercial thing wouldn't be difficult. (I try not to think about the privacy implications.)

#339, Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

The Second Life episode was CSI:New York, not L&O, but it was maddening either way.

I can help catalog saved caches. (You won't get a response to an email until I get home tonight - can't check this address from work.)

Amen to that--hormonal birth control makes me crazy. I tried NuvaRing, loved the convenience of it, but when the third month came and I was still weepy, bloated and irritable, I decided it wasn't worth it.

I am now on a very low-dose version of the Pill as treatment for PCOS, and it's working out OK, but it's made the emotional consequences of PMS rather more noticeable.

Oh, yes. That part was the same mold with different colors of plastic. Otherwise they couldn't share clothes. Because it is realistic that a black woman, an asian woman, and three different caucasians would all be able to wear the same stuff, or want to. (I think I was ten when I noticed and was impressed by the faces. I'm not so impressed anymore.)

Although...if it were another doll, would we be complaining that they had the same bodies? Dolls' bodies in the same line are expected to be uniform so the dolls can share clothes. Would we care if the bodies they all have alike weren't so unrealistic? Is it possible to have a "realistic" adult female doll? To be truly realistic you'd have to have a variety in busts, hips, and heights at least, and the clothes-sharing that was my favorite part of the play is absolutely gone as soon as you do that.

#377, Serge -

I love paper dolls and have been trying to decide if I dare use the color printers at work to print those. I'm very, very tempted.

As I understand it, the issue is the transference of body image from the doll to the girl playing with the doll (i.e., that the girl conceives of the doll's shape as an ideal human shape and deprecates her own as a result). I've no idea (being male, after all) of the extent to which this is actually true.

Sorry, I didn't mean to pound you with the "but they're for dressing!" point. It's just my thought process on the subject (especially that second paragraph). I really think that replacing Barbie with anything more healthy for the self-image is doomed to fail on that one point alone, and it seems like most anti-Barbie discussions don't bother to mention it. I didn't mean to harp at you.

I don't really know how big of an issue the transference is either. I don't feel any, but I sort of lucked out in the genetic lottery towards the current standards, so I have few body issues that can be laid at Barbie's door. (Most of mine are blameable on magazine photos.) I might also feel the transference less than some Barbie-owners because I didn't make up stories or role-play with them, so my identification with them was very low.

Of course I wanna. The question is, do I wanna print them more than I wanna not get caught? Because if I do one, I'll fail to do the other.

Exactly, but they tell me I shouldn't be on the patch any more, even though they still make it. So now I spend a week even more bitchy and with less patience, since my docs won't let me not be on some heavy form of therepy.

Mary Dell and others -
Something to think about with the Pill v. any of the other hormonal BC methods - college students very rarely have anything like a consistant morning routine which makes an every-day pill more of an issue. Also, if Custodial Parent doesn't think BC is appropriate, the weekly/monthly forms are a whole lot easier to hide.

I'm in a similar situation re my fiance's daughter, however for her, preventing her from having sex too young will be the issue (she's 10). And it's really, really hard not to be the Voice of Authority when he just...isn't and there should be one. Someday we may get to the point that we're more friends, but for now, boundary setting is *hard* and uncomfortable and liable to produce shouting matches. I can't imagine doing it when she is *any* older or with me pregnant. Your friend has my utmost sympathies.

I wasn't especially interested in doll clothes, but I felt the lack of long hair to style - the Barbie I wanted was the giant Barbie-head with stylable hair. I eventually grew my own, only to discover in dismay that it was hard to do fancy things to one's own hair.

Why couldn't we have had this discussion on Tuesday morning? I was here *very* late that night, and anyone catching me probably wouldn't have cared.

And we all know that grownups that love paper dolls are just wrong and creeeepy. Sci-fi fans shun them.

When I was on the Pill in college I took it at 10 pm, that being the time of say when I was most likely to be awake and near my purse. :)

I eventually grew my own, only to discover in dismay that it was hard to do fancy things to one's own hair.

Isn't that annoying? Best I can do is French braids.

I've got your worms right here
They're filling up your ear
and the songs are repeating until you're wear-
y of them
of them

...which you attached to a doll-sized Barbie's body?

Even with Preview I still make mistakes.

While I understand the complaints about Barbie's proportions, I don't necessarily agree with them.

I think of Barbie as a sort of three-dimensional cartoon (even before the animated versions appeared). The distinctive "grown-up" features are exaggerated for visibility on the doll's scale, just as faces and forms are caricatured for a cartoon, and the kids are perfectly well able to filter that out automatically. Blaming Barbie for girls' body-image issues is a classic example of scapegoating -- and indeed, magical thinking. (The racial issue is trickier, but that seems to be clearing up slowly.)

That said, it would be nice to have alternative body shapes in the lineup, including some honest representations of the kids themselves, and of older people. The trick is giving each of those enough wardrobe that the kids can accept the natural restrictions on interchange. "Oh, Donna can't fit into Margaret's dresses, but she can borrow her scarf and hat..."

I was reading somewhere (probably the NYT a couple days ago) about Tivo's prediction record with reference to "American Idol". Apparantly they took note of what segments viewers were replaying vs fast-forwarding the most. Some predictions worked, but the latest did not.

Actually it sounds more like Corto Maltese's lesser-known cousin.

I have wondered if there isn't some scapegoating going on, too, especially given my own feeling that what she looks like has nothing to do with me. (Your cartoon idea fits the way I thought of her as a child.) There are plenty of sources for girls to pick up body-image problems that have nothing to do with Barbie, and they're exposed to them for longer.

Of course, you want her to be using contraceptives if she is sleeping with her boyfriend (a sexually active 14 year old is a bad thing, but a pregnant 14 year old is much worse, and an HIV positive 14 year old is pegged at "bad" on the good/bad meter).

I'll admit to being a bit baffled by the controversy about the HPV vaccine which you see some places. It's almost certainly true that your teenage girl would be better off not sleeping around. But it's hard to see why the penalty for this imprudent behavior ought to include maybe dying of ovarian cancer at age 40, perhaps leaving behind a husband and a couple kids for a little old-testament-style vengance heaped upon the later generations. (But then, there's a lot of resistance to vaccines out there, for various weird reasons.)

It makes me wonder if there's not something stopping them from doing it with the commercials, if they can do that. Even with the gaps in the info your example shows, I'd think it would be something advertisers would want, because it is better than any other source they have. Is Tivo worried about a consumer backlash? Or is the technology just not robust enough for that? Because it seems to me that selling info on what commercials get watched would be an obvious and lucrative application of that ability.

Serge @371-- properly, it shouldn't be pointing up at all when it's running. It's a sieve for compost. We've always had to sieve ours, and it's literally backbreaking the way we'd been doing it. My husband first had the idea to somehow use the drum from our old dryer, then recently got the inspiration for attaching the mesh to the cement mixer.

Michael Roberts @378 -- now my subconscious is going to try and create a pasta recipe for "Serge Guyanese".

Susan @388-- ...I felt the lack of long hair to style - the Barbie I wanted was the giant Barbie-head with stylable hair. I eventually grew my own, only to discover in dismay that it was hard to do fancy things to one's own hair. Oh, me very much too! I blame my obsession with long hair on Penny Robinson / Angela Cartwright on Lost in Space.

And my mom was also concerned about the potentially warping effects of Barbie's...proportions on a 5-yo, so she didn't want me to have one. Luckily my aunt bought me one immediately. Heh. She was a healthily subversive influence all through my childhood. It's too bad she lived so far away.

I think the problem with the HPV vaccine is that in order to be effective, you need to administer the first course well before they get exposed, so typically pre-teen.* Parents freak out at the idea of their children voluntarily engaging in sexual behavior (squick!).

A decent argument for HPV vaccine for such parents is to point out that not sexual behavior is voluntary, and the vaccine is another way to protect their child.

*Exposure to HPV can be well short of what a teen might consider 'sex'- it's in the same family as warts, but is still transmissible without visible sores, so relatively trivial sexual contact could do it. The prevalence in women is something like 44% in ages 20-24, and factoring in that there isn't a test for it for men**, it's easy to catch.

**you'd have to scrape cells off...ouch.

Debbie:
I was so annoyed that by the time I got hair long enough to play with everyone was too grown up to want to play with my hair. Some opportunities come too late in life.

R.M. Koske: Is is possible to have a realistic adult female doll? Yes, but "RealDoll"s have different problems.

Re BC: (TMI warning for those who don't want to read; even vague, gynocologic info)

Maia has tried lots of varieties (lessee, depo... convenient, but she gained weight and decided the potential side effects weren't worth it. Diaphragm... a nuisance; and she has horrible periods. Awful mood swings. Nuvaring. I forget why she stopped that. The patch; awful allergic reaction to the gum). Right now she's using the Mirena IUD. Apart from having to go to PP to get it because Kaiser wouldn't install one to someone who hadn't had a kid yet, and some horrible (and I mean really bad) cramping; for a couple of days, she's been very happy with it.

We went to get it looked at on Tues, which was when I saw the Plan B poster at Kaiser, but in two and half-years there haven't been any unpleasant side effects and she's not had any periods.

End TMI

heresiarch: The HPV thing infuriates me. One a rational level it's horrifying, but on an emotional level it gut-punches me.

Because a friend of mine died of ovarian cancer. No way to to know if it was HPV related (it was going on 20 years ago). She was 27.

Irwin Allen does have a lot to answer for.

It begins with a summary on Vanity Publishing v. Self Publishing v. Traditional Publishing, and their respective merits or lack thereof, then transitions that flawlessly into what is wrong with Hilary Clinton's campaign right now. It's like he tailor-wrote it to the Making Light audience, which, considering I initially found him here, may even be the case!

A Barbie doll is a simplified human form that displays play clothes plausibly. A costumer and dollmaker friend is mine is fond of pointing out that realistic clothes require an unrealistic doll; the weave of the fabric can't be scaled the way the height of a doll can be. So...so...I think there's a conclusion in here somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is.

Perhaps a beef dish, so we can claim it's no bull. Lettuce begin...peas feel free to add another ingredient.

Serge, please don't stew over this, or feel crabby about it.

Fortunately I've managed to replace it; I'm off to see Iron Man tonight and have been singing my own theme song to the tune of Goldfinger:

Iron Ma-an
He's the man, the man with the Midas touch
An iron touch
Such a cold finger
Beckons you
Into his den of gin
But don't go in!

albatross @ 213:
Once money, gifts, the remnants of the family farm, etc. get involved, things can go well, but they can also go south in an awful hurry. I would like to believe that this is all on her side: she was raised by someone with unhealthy attitudes about money and control, and these rubbed off on her. But then I realize that I was also raised by someone (her) with unhealthy attitudes about money and control, so it's probably a problem on both sides of the relationship.

Oh, same here. I have huge twitches about gifts if there's even a hint of quid pro quo involved. But my father is consciously manipulative that way; if nothing else, observing the divorce fight made that obvious. And watching my sister provided an excellent example of what happens when you think you can get the good stuff without the getting the badness.

But it's a complicated situation. I mean, I let him buy me dinner. But I let my mother buy me dinner, too. So it's not a "not one thing, ever" sort of line. Would I mind if he bought me theater tickets? Probably not. But we're talking a different level of spending here, and the income level difference complicates things.

Does it matter if the overt excuse for the present is my birthday (coming inconveniently soon)?

Does it matter if to him it's pocket change but to me it's huge? He isn't necessarily trying to overwhelm me with expensive stuff, he just doesn't register "expensive" at the same place I do. (Or he could be trying to overwhelm me. Always possible.)

Does it matter if it's something ephemeral (theater tickets? trip? really big trip?) instead of concrete? Would not having an object to look at and think "I'm a whore" help? Or would the memories themselves be tainted?

What if it was something I needed professionally? Is turning it down on principle insane?

Or would it be better if it was a pure frill that I wouldn't have ever missed if I didn't have/do it? Or something I suppose I ought to have but don't actually want or care about?

And how much weight should I give to the fact that this is, after all, my father. I wonder how much the accumulated interest over a quarter-century would be on unpaid child support? Can I deal coldly enough to consider that I'm entitled to some payback?

Nancy @ 219 & fidelio @ 252:
I don't think the girl would catch the bribery element. How much time do fish spend thinking about water? Her entire life has been lived like this. That's why it's amazing she's not a spoiled brat.

Also, fidelio:
isn't Botox scary? Now they say it can cross the blood-brain barrier, too.

That really might explain a lot!

Marilee @ 331:
The rest of my father's family makes him look like a model of mental health and intelligence. But watching how he speaks to Barbie Doll certainly clues me in about past history - my mother would never have put up with being patronized like that.

Anyway, what I probably ought to do is simply tell him straight out that I don't want him to buy me anything because I want to stand on my own. He might respect that. Briefly. This is unlikely to be something that is dealt with once - it will come up again. Regularly. He's every bit as stubborn as I am and not under my control - he's quite capable of taking the decision out of my hands by going ahead with a purchase. Actual presents may be harder to turn down than hypothetical ones - what do I do, throw it in his face in front of the kids?

And...I'm human. I'm tempted.

When I got to college I cut it to just below my shoulders and then went around baffling people by complaining about how short my hair was.

I didn't have Barbie as a child and never much felt the lack, honestly. But then I'm a cradle bibliophile and was delighted to get books at the age when most girls wanted the Barbies anyway. (Okay, I also loved stuffed animals. Nowadays I have cats and they're so much better.)

I don't know if I can make less than a pear of plays on vegetables, the ideas won't legume my mind, and if I canteloupe with them now I will have to marry them to some other thread.

I feel your pain. I've dealt with this over time with my mom. Some of the difficulty was resolved as I became a reasonably successful adult, so that gifts/money she was likely to offer fell into the "nice, but not necessary" category[1]. Because that makes it both easier to reject, and easier to accept. If you know you can't afford to say no to the gift, you know you also can't afford to say no to the strings. If you *can* afford to say no, then the strings are also optional--you can decide whether it's worth it, and it's even easier to do that when the strings are defined by the gift-giver retroactively ("How can you say no to me after all I've done for you?"). If they've just bought you a house, it's hard to come up with an answer to that question. If they've just bought you a nice new outfit, the answer is a lot easier.

It's like the difference between a casual romantic interest taking you to a nice dinner and movie (pleasant, but not a necessity) or paying your next semester's tuition. With the best will in the world, that second gift is going to involve some heavy implied strings, and it's going to be very hard to say no to them in any number of ways. And this is pretty much intuitive--if you overwhelm a potential romantic partner with your generosity early on, you're likely to chase her/him away, for just this reason, even if she/he never puts the issue into words. By contrast, even if they take you to a much more expensive dinner and movie than you could have afforded on your own, the dinner and movie are really, fundamentally different.

On the other hand, my mom managed the divorce settlement amazingly well. She got child support for my sister (I was already off at college, and living in my own apartment), and got an agreement that my dad would pay for our college tuition and living expenses, instead of any kind of alimony. Since he was pretty inclined to do this anyway, it wasn't a hard negotiation, and it led us both to graduate with a minimum of debt. Whenever I'm inclined to think badly of her in other areas, I remember that she took that emotionally laden down money negotiation, and handled it about as well as it could have been handled.

[1] This has become more complicated recently, because we're getting ready to probably buy a house. My mom might give us money to get, say, the yard fenced in or something, as a gift to her grandkids. Not necessary, nice to have, but with an opportunity to take an already rather overwhelming financial/emotional/family decision and crank up the drama a bit[2].

[2] I have the excessive family drama gene from my mom's side of the family, and the excessive denial of real problems gene from my dad's side. I probably create all kinds of excessive drama in my own marriage, but of course I don't really notice much it.

Camouflage doesn't have to look tailored.

The Uniforms were almost all US military, with a 1950s feel, maybe Korea. No M14 rifle. and no Thompson or M3 submachinegun, that I recall.

These days, G.I. Joe is a movie action hero, a plastic Vin Diesel, and if you want the soldiers you can get them, as serious collectors' replicas of historical soldiers.

They even have stubble and grime.

I'm frightened to think of what the talking versions sound like. That might expand your childrens' vocabulary, but maybe not in the direction you had hoped....

That's terrible about your friend. I'm very sorry to hear that, having lost a family member, myself, to cancer.

But just as a matter of general information, and though IANAMD, I believe the link between HPV and ovarian cancer is extremely tenuous at the moment, and may not exist at all. The strong link is between HPV and cervical cancer.

@ Don Denly #312

I can call at least a moderate amount of bullshit on that design excuse. I know from about a decade of rigorous playtesting that skipper is infinitely more realistically proportioned, has plenty of clothes, is generally easier to dress than barbie, and breaks less frequently. She can wear and look good in any style of clothes a barbie can (though she doesn't fit all the clothes made for barbie), excepting high heels, AND she already has an existing library of clothes. More below.

@ Susan, Serge, R.M. Koske, David Harmon et al on Barbies:

When I finally did start playing with barbies, I was immediately more interested in Skipper and her friends. They had what I recognized as far more normal proportions, and their faces were more open and sincere. She also had a really good set of friends, and I had a blond, a redhead, a dirty-blond, and a brunette with curly dark hair (this was the only barbie I ever found with textured hair, she was very cool and important. Along with the redhead, she was the leader). I also had an african-american Skipper... it often struck me as amusing that Skipper and Barbie had a lot of friends of other races and hair colors, but they also always had black versions of themselves... instead of trying to differentiate these dolls as different 'characters' in the world. I'm not sure if that was a particular eccentricity of the 80s and 90s, though. Later, Disney made little mermaid dolls of Ariel and one of her sisters. Unlike the later Jasmine and Belle dolls, these were done up in the Skipper Template. Finally I bought a babysitter's club set also made to the Skipper specifications, to get even more diversity (I really wanted the asian girl in the skipper template, and the dolls were like five for $30 on sale.) At that point I could have cared less about the babysitter's club, I just wanted more skipper template girls with new faces and skin colors.

They did give Skipper a boyfriend, though I believe they only made a few versions of him. I only had one of him, as there was no additional variety to seek out. His name was Kevin, and instead of looking smirky and insincere like Ken he simply looked innocent and gobsmacked.

Clueless people still bought me conventional barbies, of course. So I ended up creating an elaborate fantasy world where the Barbies and Kens were evil overlords who would constantly kidnap poor Kevin, and then the Skippers would have to go and rescue him.

The african-american barbie I had and her ken had faces that looked much less evil and insincere than the blond, smirking normal Barbies and Kens. I also had a weird redheaded 50s rocker barbie who just looked like a trickster, so they weren't part of the Barbies' evil plan. I figured that since they were obviously older, they'd be the wise advice-giving people (Jasmine and Aladdin joined them shortly after... for some reason I was always very excited at getting barbies that 'looked different' from the other ones. My selection of dolls often hinged on 'which one looks the least like someone I already have').

In addition to all these, I had a barbie-style doll designed to be an adult female modeled with realistic female proportions. I kind of ignored her; partially because she didn't come with enough outfits, but mostly because she didn't have a very well-sculpted face. Expressiveness of the face was all-important to me, and having in-scale-proportion human faces on dolls that size isn't a good idea... all the features are too small to impart emotion. (Note: Skipper also has a larger head. More brain?)

While my big fantasy world is a significant tangent here, I guess that's what open threads are for. And I do hope it illustrates some key points:

Kids read more into their toys than you think. They study their toys to figure out how they relate. They watch cartoons and know facial expressions well... if you don't think every design detail of their toys has a profound effect on how they think about the world and how they choose to play, then it's been too long since you were a kid.

Girls would be perfectly happy with skipper-modeled dolls, or differntly modeled dolls of any size or variety - they would just have to be supported by a large number of accessories and a decently-sized world. I was often told how cool my collection of skippers were, and my friends played with them enthusiastically. In many cases they recognized their superiority, and I'd see mini-skipper-collections springing up in their barbie collections.

The games we play and roles we figure out as kids do influence us as time goes on. The first ten or so fantasy stories I wrote had tall, blond, statuesque villains, and all the heroes were shorter, younger girls with red or dark hair. There are a bunch of other story conventions I used for many years that I'm sure were heavily influenced by my old barbie-generated stories - stuff I was using as late as college. It has a strong influence, it cuts deep, and it lasts.

I don't think the girl would catch the bribery element. How much time do fish spend thinking about water? Her entire life has been lived like this. That's why it's amazing she's not a spoiled brat. No, I meant as a reason to give him, depending on how things were offered to you. Because even if it would never dawn on her, he might see it as a reason to say no that wasn't all about him. Of course, given the likely extent of the issues he has with amour-propre and how he sees himself, he probably feels he is supposed to be showering largesse upon you all (since you're all supposed to be the adoring and attentive audience) and is trying to erase, in his own mind, issues like those years of missing child support. Because it wouldn't suit the script*, after all.

Good luck sorting this out, and keeping your sanity in the process.

*To a certain extent, we're all starring in the movies in our heads, and playing bit parts in others' movies at the same time, but if we're wise we know that the movies are just in our heads, and may not match reality, and that other people have them playing as well, with different scripts and stars. It sounds as if you father is determined to be everyone's auteur, and star in every picture in the multiplex, no matter what.

That said, I do recognize the tensions and hazards involved. It can be a delicate dance.

The reason I call it the Goddamn Tapes is that as far as I can tell, people don't have that voice naturally; they get it from dealing with other people who tell them stuff like that over and over again, until it gets internalized.

That hasn't been my experience, honestly; I've had them since I was a teenager, and while I'm not saying that my life was absolutely idyllic, I didn't have anyone abusing me verbally on a regular basis either. OTOH, I am prone to depression, so that may explain it.

I just wish I could find a way to turn the Goddamn Tapes off...

Same problem as the Pill of not protecting against disease, with the added issue that the "string" can form a conduit to bring organisms further into the reproductive tract.

Some practitioners are hesitant to fit one on a woman who's never had a child.

And, at least in my case, the Copper-T gave me near-constant spotting, which was absolutely wretched. Yes, I CAN have sex while I'm bleeding. No, I don't always WANT to. It definitely puts a damper on certain aspects of the proceedings.

This is why I keep saying the teen needs to have a good thorough conversation with a doctor!

Is that what David Bowie's talking about when he says "We got a message from the Action Man"?

I think part of the reason that I've gotten to be so good with my own is because I practiced a lot - all Mom could do were basic braids and I wanted something fancy. But I only got to braid my own hair until I got to college/SCA, at which point I could play with other people's hair. I'm still not as good with other people.

B.Durbin @ 415

My hair got cut "short" about a month ago. This means that my braid hits between the shoulder blades instead of on my lower back. It has been a very odd feeling.

And cats are just living stuffed animals. At least mine are.

TW @ 425

I *have* to have some of the hormones, unfortunatly. Talked to my doctor the last time I was in - I run short on some things and she can't monitor them as well. The thought of Depo or an IUD is lovely and not for me.

The Goddam Tapes... that's a really great phrase. I'm going to have to chime in with those who argue it may not be entirely sourced from external human interactions, though.

I was having a converstaion with a friend recently about the economy and the future of housing and jobs for our generation, and how we're likely going to be the first generation to be worse off than their parents. At the end I felt overwhelmed and said, half-jokingly:

"Bah! What happened? I was told that if I worked hard it was supposed to be easy and fun and incrementally better!"
And he replied, entirely earnestly "I was told that nothing would ever be easy or fun, and then I would die."

Which left me entirely flabbergasted for a few moments, and I'm still not sure what the appropriate reaction would have been. I don't think that my rather stumbling "...Really?" did anyone any favors, but it wasn't a complete disaster. The thing is, we're both pretty neurotic and we both have tapes even though we come from entirely different family cultures.