Chapter 1: Millpunk = Cyberpunk..

Can anybody advise this online author on the best way to scrape off a parasite called "general-ebooks.xyz"?

My daughter was horrified by the life sucking machine, had nightmares for days afterwards, and will not watch the movie again. The scene wasn't even on my radar as something to worry about showing her.

Now the scene in "Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" where a woman in a empty apartment is attacked by a savage rottweiler which then turned into some kind of tentacle monster demon which started tearing the walls down - *that* she treated with bland indifference.

Which all makes sense in retrospect, because

a) The Mortal Instruments books were terrible dull rubbish and no better as a movie.

and

b) metaphysical terrors are far scarier than physical ones.

I believe that Serge has expressed the theory that one of the things that people in Steampunk stories are interested in is Electricity. It is the New Technology of the day that will Bring Us To The Promised Land and/or Wreck Everything Forever.

By analogy, the hot new technology in Millpunk stories would be steam power.

I'm pretty sure Fury Road is the best summer blockbuster I've seen in theaters (I'm 30, calibrate accordingly). In my judgement it handily surpasses its predecessors and I expect that in years to come it will be accepted as a member of the top tier of SF action movies, along with Aliens and Terminator and so on.

The feminism the MRAs were freaking out about is there, but it's pretty low key. Really it's a stark reminder of how poorly other big budget action movies handle women; here, escaped sex slaves have agency, and their actions matter. Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure every woman in the film does something significant at least once. Which, again, doesn't sound like much, but it really is when measured against the competition.

More, while it's a Mad Max movie, it's not actually a Mad Max movie. By which I mean it's not Max's story, it's the story of Furiosa and her charges, and Max's role is that of a valued ally, not the primary protagonist. Hell, he's not even the most interesting male character in the film

Anyway! It's gorgeous. The action is excellent. The details of the setting are gloriously deranged. The character stuff is surprisingly good. The War Boys are excellent mooks.

If you like action movies at all, make the effort to see it in theaters.

I want millpunk, horsecollarpunk, ImperialRomePunk (legionpunk?), dieselpunk, rocketpunk and jetpunk. Every historical era has something to tell us, and we have something to say about every historical era. You can punk anything that was once a new technology that opened frontiers. Millpunk speaks to localism and renewable energy infrastructure; horsecollarpunk to land reclamation and remediation; RomePunk to our international system; dieselpunk to the breakdown of our industrial base and appropriate technologies for developing nations; rocket and jetpunk speak to the return of the spacerace -- Who is Elon Musk if not Harriman?

MaxL @5:

I'm happily surprised - it being the fourth movie in the franchise and filmed after such a long gap didn't fill me with optimism. I guess I'll be seeing it now.

Just about my favorite movie fact ever: they were going to film in Australia again, but unexpected rains made the desert bloom, so they shifted filming to Namibia.

The feminism the MRAs were freaking out about is there, but it's pretty low key.

you'd never know that from the piece NPR did on it.

Neil W @ 4... "...Serge has expressed the theory that one of the things that people in Steampunk stories are interested in is Electricity..."

Or words to that effect.
I'm surprised - pleasantly so - that anybody remembers my "Steampunk and Hollywood"

cleek @ #8... Interesting. I had no particular interest in Mad Max 4; I didn't even see Mad Max 3. But that review gives me the hint of a whiff of just a tiny bit of what I liked so much about World War Z; the interesting thing about the post-apocalypse, to me, isn't the fighting between scavengers over the remains, it's the people who are trying to rebuild.

That being said, my suspension of disbelief is choking on the idea of a post-apocalypse where gasoline is easier to get than water.

The creepiest thing about the life-sucking machine, for me, was not the machine itself but Chris Guest's deadpan "disaffected scientist" delivery. Possibly because I can easily imagine Mengele et al acting the same way.

"And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest... how do you feel?"

Open-threadiness, political edition:

Prior to the UK election, the Telegraph had a "tactical voting" tool that told you how to vote based on your location and which of Cameron/Milliband you wanted to keep out of No. 10.

Buzzfeed and Private Eye have analysed the tool's source code, and found that for the whole of Scotland, the tool was hard-coded to give an answer of "anyone but the SNP". Regardless of your politics.

I'm heading out to Bend, OR in an hour or so.

Might see Fury Road tonight.

Tomorrow, launching rockets, including one with a spoonful of dog ashes and a wad of dog hair. Simulations put ejection altitude at 2,880' or so.

Dutch windmills play a prominent role in the Alfred Hitchcock World War II-era movie Foreign Correspondent. I saw it on TV a while back, and would happily see it again.

The disfigurement/albino comments put me in mind of Jim C. Hines' series' on representation in fiction. He had an essay by an albino individual (Nalini Haynes) on how badly she had been treated - explicitly because albino is used as a shortcut for evil in fiction, virtually every time an albino character shows up. Part of Invisible.

This year's selection of essays (not yet released for purchase), plus a few essays that didn't make it for reasons of space, are all linked here.

It's a fascinating pair of essay collections, from a diversity of views. Figured anyone here who hadn't already heard of it would be potentially interested.

As a note, I find the commenting community on his LJ much more congenial than the commenting community on his actual blog.

John Mark Ockerbloom @ 14... An excellent film.

I thought some K. J. Parker gets close to Mill punk.
There's also surely room for some early industrial evolution stuff, before steampunk.

Claire: Yes ... and yet once in a while there's some real gems in the blog commentary, so I keep checking both. And I'm starting to learn when to stop looking at the blog one to avoid running myself out of sporks.

MaxL, #5: One of the things the MRAs are screaming about is precisely that Max isn't the protagonist. Why, they cry, is the movie even called "Mad Max" if it's not about him? I suspect a suggestion that this is "Mad Max, the Next Generation" would not go over well.

The fact that a level of female presence and agency which you describe as "pretty low-key" provokes that kind of reaction shows just how badly women are normally treated in big-budget films.

Claire, #15: Yeah, that essay was an eye-opener for me. And I immediately had the unpleasant suspicion that one of the reasons behind the "evil albino" trope is that it's an easy way to mark someone as Other visually without risking people asking questions like, "why is your bad guy dark-skinned when all the other characters are white?"

guthrie @17 - K J Parker is very much interested in the details of how things work, are built and are made. Also in at least one novel gunpowder is the ULTIMATE WEAPON, which according to my un-fully-worked out theory is similar to the trope of electricity being the future in Steampunk, and the way that nuclear secrets are often macguffins or the ultimate weapon in alternate 1930s/Dieselpunk.

(Meanwhile actual 1930s SF seemed to think that rays and gasses were the future of, well, everything)

/overgeneralisation

Was watching Princess Bride the other night, the first time in many years for me, with a bunch of friends, including two who were among that day's lucky 10,000, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it aged. The writing's good. The places where it "falls down," as abi puts it, ruined it less for me than I had feared because the rest of it held up well, and also because I'm used to calibrating for 1987.

And yes, millpunk! Yes, please! There are some Hokusai prints that inspire (currently on show at Boston's MFA)--for example, this one.

What millpunk currently exists?

And...another reading list request. I enjoy reading French but don't know the Francophone speculative fiction scene *at all*, aside from a certain M. Verne. If I should happen to find myself in the vicinity of a French-language bookstore, what contemporary authors should I try?

Dear gnomes,
Sorry for double-posting; I screwed up the second URL in the first post. I humbly offer cookies (store-bought, but offered with a good heart) and blueberry juice.
Love and contrition,
Tz.

I've wanted millpunk since seeing James Burke's original Connections series and getting the tie-in book as a birthday gift. So much potential there.

Well, you know, S. Morgenstern was a man of his times.

Worth [re]visiting David Macaulay's' Mill, too.

Millpunk = Stories about alternative technologies that involve either James Mill, or John Stuart Mill, or Harriet Taylor Mill as central characters. Must involve logic, political economy, liberty, and left-wing (I nearly wrote 'left-whing') Whig politics along with steampunk, windmills, watermills, and Thomas Carlyle as the villain.

Across the silences these words are true
that answer sorrow with a worthy smile
but will not pause to soften nor revile
your efforts, nor the feelings that are due
this passing day. What is it we review,
among the many sights that might beguile
each voyager who reaches this last mile,
is that the known provides us with a clue.
Some would be said to answer that the day
is not sufficient for all that we need;
but we must struggle onwards into night,
actors and viewers of the self-same play
not certain if our desperation’s greed,
but ever hopeful we can get things right.

Fragano @ 26... What about Hayley Mills?

Tzohoqiel @22:

I've unpublished the first post for you.

Nothing wrong with store-bought cookies. And blueberry juice is a rare treat. As a young gnome, I had access to essentially unlimited quantities of huckleberries in season, and that entire flavor family is dear to me.

Or even Haley Mills on a windmill.

Allan Beatty @30, was that the right link? Haley Mills on a windmill made me think of this.

Given that Westley was attached to the machine through suction cups, playing up the machine as a mill invites a variety of insucken and outsucken puns.

The film of The Princess Bride falls down more often than that for me. It’s generally a sort of sloppy mess, and certain scenes that were no doubt intended to be read dramatically come out as funny due to editorial or directorial ineptness. (I’m thinking specifically of the scene where Buttercup throws Westley into the ravine.) The novel, on the other hand, remains one of my favorites.

The Mill and the Cross features some good interior windmill footage, but I can't fully recommend it, because the director evidently thought that being about a painting (a Bruegel) it should therefore contain as little movement or dialogue as possible.

"I’m thinking specifically of the scene where Buttercup throws Westley into the ravine."

That wasn't supposed to be funny?

Here's your future!

My wife got a new car [or her company did, for her use] and it has a backup camera, stereoscopic front mounted cameras to detect when it's braking time (or when the car in front of you at the light has started moving) and when you're drifting out of your lane, and blind spot radar ($daredeviljoke) .

My FIRST reaction was "What is the car complaining about? Oh, fine."

My second reaction was "Holy shit, this is almost literally straight out of Snow Crash."

My third reaction was "... and this is pretty much one smartphone of hardware and two apps."

@upthread: I'm not sure if legionpunk should more properly be roadpunk or aqueductpunk.

Serge Broom # 28: Millspunk would be a different matter, and that would include Hayley Mills, C. Wright Mills, Charles Mills, The Mills of God, and so on.

Millerpunk is another alternative and this would involve Joe Miller, Judith Miller, Arthur Miller, the village miller &c.

Two years ago, all the Mills would have gone over my head. I've since taken a couple of Victorian Lit class.

Forget advancing the world or getting a good job. The real value of an education is that you get the jokes.

Fragano @ 37... And Hayley's dad John Mills.

It falls down in a few places (there's a lot of gratuitous stereotyping of the Irish in particular), but on the whole I would recommend Shirley as some pretty darn good millpunk.

I had a friend whose favorite book was Princess Bride. He kept one copy in his car and another in his bathroom, reading it over and over.

Steve #3: Our daughter was likewise freaked out at an early age by the movie. Kind of like me with Invaders from Mars (gah! those people getting sucked into sand pits - scarred me for life)

@37, speaking of Judith Miller...

today she's discussing journalistic integrity with James O’Keefe.

irony is insufficient

B Durbin @34, it’s not a comedic scene in the book. Or if it is, the comedy lies in the exaggeration of romantic clichés, not the clumsiness of the events depicted. The biggest differences are (1) In the film, Westley shouts out “As you wish” while bouncing down the ravine wall, while in the novel, he says it after coming to rest on the bottom; and (2) in the book, since it’s a book, we don’t see them bouncing and tumbling.

Avram @32: now I'm just the opposite about Princess Bride. I found the novel way too much "see how clever I'm being with this framing sequence about the grandfather? Aren't I clever?"; and the movie gets rid of most of that, playing it with a much lighter hand. The entire film is full of things that are intentionally funny like the pushing him down the hill that work for me. And I need to watch it again.

Em @38: *huge grin* May I quote you?

Tom Whitmore @44, what makes you think the humor in that scene is intentional? That’s basically a pratfall, a form of humor I can’t recall any other examples of in the movie, and it runs contrary to the nature of the scene (a dramatic revelation) and undermines the image of the hero’s competence.

Though I suppose it may not have been a dramatic revelation for people who came to the movie not having read the book. It’s a lot easier to figure out that the mysterious Man In Black is Westley the Farm Boy when you can see them being played by the same actor.

I would say some of Miyazaki's films resemble millpunk.

My coworkers and I recently decided that the next -punk genre of literature should be about ceramics: claypunk. Naturally, the first book would be called Bone China.

(Also, I thought the tumbling down a hill scene was deliberately funny, too.)

On the HLN front, local fan is going back to school on Monday.

Part of this is that I've been "away" from my field for about 5 years, after company I was with bought another company and made my position what the Brits have quaintly called "surplus to requirements"

I found out that I had two things a'gin me: No degree (4 decades of experience don't count when the software that eats the resume submission apparently doesn't know about the "or equivalent experience" in the job posting), and that 40 years of experience.

Unfortunately, the people in HR are up to the task of addition, and looking at a presumed age to start career, and the amount of experience and jobs shown, leads up to a number higher than what they want to see. Or, after rejiggering the resume to not explicitly show that amount of time, and getting the interview, when The Olde Guy shows up at the appointment time it quickly becomes a matter of "this looks nice, we have other candidates to see, we will call back if we want a second interview"

And now I'm looking at the fact that I've been out of the IT/MIS/EDP world for too long. The last mini-interview I had I was declared as "overqualified" and "your skills are too rusty." From the same HR person, in the same interview.

So, now that early entrance into Social Security has given some income security (over that gained working part time nights stocking at Big Box Home Improvement Chain), I can go back to school.

I'll be starting off at a community college to get an AS in Info Systems, and hopefully transfer to a 4 year school after that.

I'll be full-time for the summer semester and full-time as well into the fall.

And am nervous as a cat with kittens

ObHumor: at the "new accepted student event" I was twice mistaken as an instructor and thrice for a parent Taking The Tour

Claypunk could be about ancient Mesopotamian or Indus Valley type civilizations. In which case (following on from my what-is-the-future-in-this-period idea) the disrupting technology could be bronze.

I watched the film as a preteen with a head full of cautionary tales of toxins and radiation poisoning, and for me there was a huge Fridge Horror element to the life-sucking machine.

Westley is resurrected, but nowhere is it said that the overall results are reversed, so he could drop dead again at any moment. That worried the hell out of me, and the otherwise lighthearted ending did nothing to reassure me, because no one in the film ever offered the requisite handwave to fix it.

I will just note that a more general category than millpunk would be millstf...

Lee @19 said: One of the things the MRAs are screaming about is precisely that Max isn't the protagonist. Why, they cry, is the movie even called "Mad Max" if it's not about him?

See, that's what I don't get. The first movie (or second? The first one I saw) opens with a narration from an old man (who we later learn is a child character who shows up in the film) about how Max has accreted layers and layers of legend and myth upon himself in the course of the narrator's life.

I think there are quite fertile grounds for telling all KINDS of Mad Max stories, some of which are in-world legends and some of which purport to be 'what really happened' that INSPIRED legends.

Craig R. @ 49

Good luck with school :)

MillSF?

Tommy "Ray" Gun is a millcaptain, one of the elite guardians of the Polder. He patrols the walls of the world from the enemy known only as the Flood. Then one day central command sends a new secret weapon, a firey machine that will hold the line even when there is no wind. Will he be able to overcome his antipathy to the new technology? Can he combine the best of the courage and nerve of the old methods with the new to defend the civilians? How badly will he patronise steamcaptain Angela "Maneater" Tiger and her team of female engineers?

Find out in A Boon for the Mills.

Back in very early days, the big technological innovation would have been the discovery of fire... and, maybe, the use of soft, fungus-ridden wood as tinder... fiction about that could be punkpunk.

(Meanwhile, if you are snacking on mill-based fiction, don't forget to floss.)

I have a completely out-of-nowhere open threadly musing and some odd questions.

I was not feeling well recently, and I marathonned a TV series. I had an extremely strong emotional response to a character in that series, that manifested in a way that loosely resembled attraction to a real person. As fans, this is a thing we all know happens. People get crushes on characters. Sometimes they write fanfiction. Sometimes they just collect and reblog gifs. It's a fairly universal experience for sensitive souls of specific types... but I realized I'd never read a short story about it.

I have sort of half-written briefly about the phenomenon myself, usually as part of a review piece. The closest I've ever come to exploring it in story format was a blog entry about the video game Mass Effect where I mixed gameplay motivations with my character's emotional state as I described the relationship-based decisions in that game. But Bioware games encourage you to roleplay, and the entry wasn't really from my perspective. It wasn't about a human feeling a strong emotional connection to someone who doesn't exist, it was about how the game successfully engaged my imagination in the way it was designed to. It was from the perspective of Shepard, the person who the game had invited me to be, someone who DID exist in that same universe. Or rather, it was an exploration of the feelings they had deliberately evoked in me, filtered through the character they created for me to identify with.

I've read science fiction or fantasy stories with concepts that were sort of vaguely close: someone falls in love with a person they think is real who turns out to be a robot or an AI or an especially sophisticated NPC in a futuristic online game. I've also seen genre stories about the opposite, when someone starts to have feelings for a fictional or inanimate person or thing, only to later learn that there was a real person behind them. Or maybe it's a Pygmalion, and they make a thing, fall in love, and give it life... not necessarily in that order.

I feel like the default response to these feelings is creativity in the "fan" sphere: fan art, fan fiction, fan curation... without ever formally commenting on how fictional thing has triggered very real emotions. This particular character had left me with a physical pain in my chest, and at several times the show gave me something approaching a mild panic response of a type I have only ever had before when someone I cared about was in legitimate trouble. But when you know you're having these responses due to a fictional thing, it allows you to stand slightly outside them, and thus see them clearly while still feeling them strongly... something that is often impossible when a real human is involved. It's an interesting phenomenon to explore.

I finished the series and started to feel better, and some notes I had jotted down for a review had turned into half of a short story about the experience. I'm still trying to figure out if I have the other half of that story in me or not, and it's so WEIRD that I'm not sure how it should be shaped in the end.

Can anyone think of any short stories that cover that topic without the genre trappings of 'but what if they're actually real'? It's not that I won't write mine if I find it's been done, I'm just genuinely curious.

If stories about this kind of interaction with fiction ARE fairly new, what genre would it be and what kind of publications might be interested in it? If I go comedic, I was thinking McSweeney's or the Toast, but for a serious version I'm at a loss. It's inextricably fannish in theme but it doesn't really have any speculative elements. It shares qualities with certain varieties of literary fiction, in that it's an emotional exploration of an otherwise mundane experience... but like I said, while I think the experience is universal, it's also nerdy and weird.

On claypunk, I seem to remember Terry Pratchett doing something with the Chinese terracotta army, and of course the golems.

I grew up near Wilmington, Delaware. One of the standard field trips for elementary school kids was to go to Hagley Mills, the ~1802 duPont gunpowder mills. They're water mills, with about five of them along the river, built with three heavy stone walls and a lightweight wooden wall facing the river for when the mill explodes, as occasionally happened, so that it doesn't set the whole row of them on fire (as happened once before they figured out that they should prevent it.) The museum there also has exhibits on flour milling and other colonial-period industry along the rivers, and examples of what rich people's houses were like back then, including furniture and clothing. A bit farther up the river is a much newer museum, with paintings by various generations of Wyeths who lived near there; one of the granddaughters was docenting the last time we visited. I grew up in burbs and more forested areas nearby, but the open rolling farm country out past there has an emotional resonance for me that I get reminded of when Abi's writing about polders.

Bill Stewart #58:

The clay warriors was from "Interesting Times" & golems feature in "Feet of Clay" and show up in some books after that.

There's also a whole other world of wind-powered technology genre out there, from Aubrey/Maturin and Hornblower all the way to Capt. Jack Sparrow.

"Bring me that horizon..."

Quill @ 45: Of course!

Steve Wright @56 said: Back in very early days, the big technological innovation would have been the discovery of fire

Personally, some time ago I realized that the invention of proper textile string (not just animal tendon or existing vines of fixed size; breaking some substance down and respinning it to add strength and theoretically-infinite length) must have been a complete game-changer. Nearly a singularity point.

Possibly our first, depending on whether it or control of fire were earlier.

Lucky 10,000 moment: I just got to show two kids a video about how cranberries are harvested (flooding the fields). They clearly found this massively sensawunda-inducing.

Can't open the RedHarpy particle without a Ravelry account. Is it worth setting one up, given my lack of knitting?

Cleek@8

You can kind of see what I'm driving at in that article. If you strip it down to its basics, what that article says is
A: Charlize Theron plays a badass
B: There's a tribe of old women who are effective killers
C: The escaped "wives" are actual people, not just attractive victory tokens.
D: The author of the Vagina Monologues is pleased with the strength of the women in the film

Women who survive on their own for decades in the post-apocalypse might get pretty good at killing? One woman in particular might be excellent at killing? Women can take active part in their own liberation?

This is all real basic stuff, and as far removed from radical feminism as it can be. It just highlights how...I dunno, anti-feminist most big budget movies are, and, yes, the incredible misogyny of the men who freak out about even this much feminism.

The movie doesn't do much (I would say it doesn't do anything) to emphasize that these are women being effective agents. They're just characters with agency, who do important things, who happen to be women. Which is feminist! But radical? Nah.

I mean, I guess it's fiery feminism in that there's gunfire and Molotovs and exploding cars and it's so cool.

It's a little felted wool knitted top hat, with an integral swirling colorwork pattern around the sides, Bill Stewart @64.

Is Fury Road comprehensible for someone who is completely unfamiliar with the earlier movies?

I haven't seen it yet, but from what I remember the first three films all function independently of each other.

#49 ::: Craig R
Not reading to the end here, just posting. First of all, damn, I'm sorry. I've been in a similar position. My current IT employer overlooked my lack because of experience and expediency. The client wanted a contractor and they wanted a butt in that seat. That was 4 years ago, now the postings say bachelors only. We will not talk about my endless degree debacle and my mutiple crazy IT certs.

My current corp does business in the UK, and they're based out of Brussels. They'd be a fool not to hire you. Email me at trishb at gmail if you would like more info.

Leah Miller #57: I believe the general idea has shown up in comedy, but mostly as mocking the fan for "getting too involved" with the characters. A more sympathetic take might well be breaking new ground.

Ooh, a new-ish open thread! Making Light, your friends at superexecs-dot-tumblr wish you to know how honored we were to make it to your sidebar. To celebrate, we wrote a brief fic of what might happen were Hollywood to contemplate a movie about the activities of this fine site. Sadly, we now wish for nothing more than a quirky indie film about moderators who solve crimes while contemplating the beauty of science and culture in modern times. It would be like the opposite of nihilism.

#68 Chris

I saw the new Mad Max as someone who has only seen the original films once, a long time ago. A few of my friends have never seen them. The movie was totally comprehensible for them, with a few notes.

A lot of stuff in the movie has that sort of lived-in world thing that, seeing as it is a sequel, makes you wonder if all this stuff was explained in an earlier movie. Turns out for the most part, nope... the few things that are a reference to the old movies are pretty easy to suss out, and everything else is old-fashioned "this is how it is, draw your own conclusions about how it got that way" worldbuilding.

As long as you're prepared to do the standard science fiction in medias res inference drawing, you'll probably do fine.

I know I am a Sasquan member. My name is in their membership list and I have the Paypal receipt.

I have discovered that I have no email from them stored on my mail systems, nothing about Hugo voting or anything else, the new site-selection voting page doesn't recognise my email address, and their Contact page appears broken.

It's possible that something got auto-deleted as Spam, but why would their emails get classed as spam? Since my email address, as used by Paypal and the specific one required for Paypal to work, is of the form ****@****.org.uk I am beginning to wonder if it might have been truncated in their records.

I am not going to claim to be blameless, I should have noticed the silence, but this, mixed with the delays in even making non-US payment possible, is starting to make Nolacon II look good.

Dave Bell - I got my Hugo PIN and membership number from Sasquan on May 1, so if you haven't heard from them by now, something's gone wrong somewhere. (The email came from sasquan at sasquan dot org, and gives a contact for queries - hugoadmin at same place.)

Dave Bell.

I'm in the UK and I have had no problems with Hugo nominations or voting with Sasquan - it was all really smooth. So something has definitely been messed up in your case. Having just poked around - yes the Contact Us bit of the website is broken.

Not sure if the sasquan.org email addresses are outgoing only but it might be worth a go I suppose. Also maybe DMing the sasquan twitter account might get you a reply with a contact email address

I wish site-selection could all be online too (grumble, grumble).

Dave Bell.

I'm in the UK and I have had no problems with Hugo nominations or voting with Sasquan - it was all really smooth. So something has definitely been messed up in your case. Having just poked around - yes the Contact Us bit of the website is broken.

Not sure if the sasquan.org email addresses are outgoing only but it might be worth a go I suppose. Also maybe DMing the sasquan twitter account might get you a reply with a contact email address

I wish site-selection could all be online too (grumble, grumble).

Buggrit - ignore the double post, I got an error the first time I tried posting. I even rechecked to see if it had made it to the server before reposting.

Sasquan responses: Hmm. I got a Registration Confirmation and the Site Selection announcement -- neither of which seems to have a registration number etc.

I had to go to the Sasquan site and re-request my PIN (which you can do with name and e-mail). When it came (immediately) Gmail had put it in the spam folder because of the domain it came from (host415.hostmonster), and I had to go in and mark it not spam.

Sasquan does seem to truncate things - for reasons best known to themselves, they have left the final "t" off my surname. (I am minded just to give a wrigh smile and move on, personally.)

I have tried the PIN request, was able to confirm the specifics of name/email were recognised. but no sign of any email with the PIN yet. And the same name/email combo on the site-selection payment system was not recognised by the web page.

I am not impressed. Am I over-sensitive to wonder why I should bother?

It all still could be a spam filter behind the earlier missing emails, but what did they do to look like spam?

I'm looking at the Hugo voting email now, and I can't see any problem with it, on the surface. The only thing I can think of is that some random string in it has fired off an alert somewhere. Maybe your voting PIN is the same as some Nigerian prince's bank account number, or something?

Google was explicit that it had put the message in spam because of its source. I had no issues with other notices which were sourced from sasquan.org.

James #80: Argh, I wish sites in general would get their act together about making their return addresses match their site domain.

Where on the site did you file the request? The first couple of links I found didn't have anything relevant, and the next couple are hanging on load.

Might be the Hugo PIN lookup page? Or have you already tried that one?

Steve Wright #86: That looks right, and I hadn't found a link to it. Thanks!

And they say that the E-mail will come from hugopin@sasquan.org, so maybe they have got their act together there.

Me 87,88 But the mail did in fact come from swocorg@host415.hostmonster.com . Not only did this not pass the spam filter, it wouldn't have passed my wetware review of the spam bucket!

Thankfully, this time I had the prior notice from James #80....

superexecs @72: Hey, you sold me at manic pixie dream scientists.

About six hours with no sign of a response, and nothing in spam...

This does feel a bit slow, but with the time zone difference and the turning on of on-line payment for site-selection, I'm not so bothered. But it does feel like a part of a larger pattern of cock-ups.

Not punkish, but contains some medieval history:

Osteoarchaeologist Alison Atkin made a research poster about the Black Death using stick figure cartoons. I love the snarky rats in panel 3.

Em #38: Of course, that's the whole point. Education opens up whole new fields of jokes.

Claypunk

Elliott Mason @ 63 wrote about spun thread as "a complete game-changer. ... Possibly our first, depending on whether it or control of fire were earlier."

Fire is over ten times older, showing up 500,00 years ago, and as under our control some 350,000 years ago, while [detected] textiles "only" show up some 20,000 years ago. (C.f. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years - Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber)

My Hugo PIN email came from sasquan@sasquan.org on April 30.

While it seems likely that control of fire would have come first, it also seems unlikely to me that we would find any traces of cord if it did exist 300,000 years or more ago. Organic matter decays except under extraordinary conditions.

While it seems likely that control of fire would have come first, it also seems unlikely to me that we would find any traces of cord if it did exist 300,000 years or more ago. Organic matter decays except under extraordinary conditions.

(Blame #98 on an Internal Server Error, and gnomes may feel free to delete it and this.)

Clifton #97 - actually you don't need the cord itself, you just need the impression of it on something such as wet clay, that is sufficiently detailed and preserved well enough that you can say it was actual cord. So I suspect there may be evidence of thread/ cord from a lot longer than 20k years ago. Or it may have been trampled underfoot and broken a couple of thousand years ago.

But before spun thread they surely had cordage, i.e. rope.

I know that EWB is very out of date, but it took a while to find more recent references. Here's a 2009 article (paywaylled) saying they have evidence for 32,000 years ago:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/stone-age-twining-unraveled
Here's an article about Europe:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=4388457&fileOId=4388462
Which includes information on dressed Venus figurines from 25,000 years ago!

Dave Bell @74: The way Paypal is set up, the only confirmation you get is from Paypal when you use that to pay for a Sasquan membership (and it says that on the page before your pay). On your other questions: info@sasquan.org is a really good place to get answers.

Steve Wrigh(t) @81: if you drop a note to info@sasquan.org, they're really good about getting information to the appropriate people to correct a typo. It's also possible to write directly to registration@sasquan.org; I've been spoiled by info@ being really responsive, though, so I tend to send people through them.

Tom Whitmore @101 - thanks! But, with a name like mine, I don't mind being a little distinctive for once. "Steve Wright" may not be "John Smith" common, but it's common enough.... I once worked with another Steve Wright, leading to many office emails along the lines of "Your last message has come to the wrong Steve Wright. I will forward it to the right Steve Wright, unless I am wrong and I am the right Steve Wright, in which case I'm forwarding it to the wrong Steve Wright, all right?"

Being Steve Wrigh for a bit may actually come as something of a relief.

Just signed up for sasquan; confirmation email from "swocorg@host415.hostmonster.com", it's mixed HTML email with the dreaded "!x-stuff-for-pete" fields, and my ancient copy of Eudora mutters:

"18 encoding errors were found. Message and/or attachments are probably corrupt."

which is nice to know.

Wait and see if I get a Hugo PIN anytime soon.

TrishB p #70 -

Thank you very much for your kind offer.

Alas, I'm on the wrong side of The Pond (the Worcester I live in is in Massachusetts, Not in the West Midlands), and the only (human) language I speak is 'Murrican English.

One of the things I'm looking to accomplish with going back to school is to get the paper (vellum-like?) credentials to give me more ammunition to fight the Tyranny Of Agism! (::strike heroic pose:: [well, for a certain value off "heroic])

The paradox here is that, when I started taking my Social Security benefit, even at it's reduced rate (because I'm starting before the "proper" retirement age) it is giving me between 3x and 4x what I was able get from the work I was able to get since I was laid off. So now, in my "twilight years" (and no, I'm not going to *sparkle* - only David Bowie is credentialed to do that) I can actually afford to go back to school.

This is a path that, I hope, will allow me to be an example to my kids (from both marriages) that its never to late to keep going, and to try to make a change you want in your life.

As I mentioned up-thread, my current plan is to take the "2+12" route. That is, take the Associates in Science degree, and then matriculate into a 4-year college and take the Bachelor of Science degree with another 2 years.

One of the thoughts I've had percolating in my little tea-kettle is that I may load up on Education credits and maybe go back and teach, at the Community College level.

If the Community College system can survive, it can take the place of the advanced trade schools that, right now, are dominated by the for-profits such ITT, Premiere Education Group and the late, unlamented, American Career Institute.

These schools provide the more tightly-focused needs for students for whom the 4-year degree is not the best choice. There are students for whom, either because of temperament, talent or financial circumstances, an A.S.: rigorous classroom prep, along with internships and the work-study model can help prepare someone for a position in the workplace.

The community college model also allows someone who had chosen the "wrong" (for them) career path to retool after they had gotten a prior 4-year degree, only to find that what they had chosen was not going to work.

Because of the employment-based focus of many community colleges, the most effective instructor base are those who had actually worked in the fields they will be teaching in.

Part of this ties back to what, for me, is actually grounded in my faith: to give back to the community, and to serve those outside myself. (It could also be a residual of the over-responsibility learned from growing up in the household situation I had )

Oh, dear. This went on much longer than I had meant to.

Never Give Up! Never Surrender! [Oops. Wrong movie)

I wonder what the chances of a refund from Paypal are, for non-delivery of goods and services. Oh, I'm a long way from that point, but I can't get Nolacon II out of my head.

Craig R. # 104
That *should* read '"2+2" route' rather than "2+12."

I'm not looking for *that* enriched an educational experience
,

Thanks to a friend, I now have Seriously Unnaturally-Colored Hair, and it makes me happy.

Bright purple. Well, darkish. On the bluer range of purple. When I look at a light fixture up through my bangs, there's a bright-purple-glowiness to the strands that looks like looking at plastic doll hair.

I have My Little Pony hair, and it tickles me inordinately. Especially since it's the color of Twilight Sparkle's mane (mostly), but the TEXTURE of Pinkie Pie's. :->

Craig R--if you would email me, I would appreciate it--I'm in Springfield. I'm somewhat pre-occupied right now, but ffgrvaznaa@znffzhghny.pbz or Fnz.Fgrvaznaa@tznvy.pbz will reach me.

Just finished watching Left Behind (Nicolas Cage, not Kirk Cameron) and, astonishment of astonishments, it wasn't terrible.* (The one Kirk Cameron I tried was terrible.)

Story started with the protagonists asking the classic questions, "So why would a benevolent god [give babies cancer/allow earthquakes to kill|displace thousands of people/&c] and didn't even bother to try to answer those questions, leaving me thinking, "Guys, you're not bolstering your case...."

Essentially read like the producers were sitting around, trying to come up with movies to make. "Hey!" one guy says, "We haven't done the classic disaster movie in a while." "Yeah, but that's old news. What new spin would we put on it." "Hey, I have an idea!"

But it was a serviceable action/adventure movie, with a not completely implausible (aside from that one issue) plot.

* Well, except the music soundtrack, which varied wildly from "Hey, that's kinda nice." to "Seriously, you couldn't find a good piano lounge player?" Basically, it felt like a hodgepodge of drop music.

Steve W., #102: Oy. Watching a "who's on first" is funny. Being part of one... not so much.

Craig, #104: Best of luck in your new endeavors.

Open-threadiness which is related to two spoiler-filled discussions but may, I think, be of general interest:

Marvel Unlimited is currently having a one-month-free-trial promotion - they do require a credit card number and'll charge you for next month if you forget to cancel, but use the code "ULTRON" at checkout. I'm poking around in there and, among other things, they have the Matt Fraction run to date on Hawkeye, which some folks had expressed interest in reading. They also seem to have the current run of Black Widow, which I've really been enjoying.

The interface on a computer is needlessly-clunky, but I'm quite pleased with the app on my ten-inch tablet screen. I was worried it would be too small, but it's mostly not and when it is*, the zoom function's very intuitive.

*Which would probably be helped if I actually _wore_ my glasses. Oops.

Tzohoquiel @ 21:

I enjoy reading French but don't know the Francophone speculative fiction scene *at all*, aside from a certain M. Verne. If I should happen to find myself in the vicinity of a French-language bookstore, what contemporary authors should I try?

I don't know what your level of proficiency is, but I'm told by native-French SF fans that the translations into French of the Hitch-Hikers series are utterly brilliant. The translator was an SF writer themselves, and chose the route of rewriting, when appropriate, Douglas-Adamsy jokes and wordplay that feel native-French rather than adhering to a literal translation. The caveat is that they are wildly idiomatic, so not suitable for the unskilled. Or, viewed another way, a lovely literary corpus to have on hand for aspirational purposes....

I'm also told, this time by a Swiss Francophone, that the translation into French of Lord Valentine's Castle was superb.

Mind you, all this is hearsay (I speak French hardly at all save for food terminology), but at least it's hearsay from native speakers with a direct interest and discriminating taste.

As far as authors writing natively in French, I'm afraid I can't be much help. Maybe figure out who translated Douglas Adams, and then seek out their own original work...?

Cadbury Moose: My webmail application could not display the confirmation email from Sasquan at all - sent me to an error page - but Thunderbird displayed it OK. All the rest of the emails from them have been fine in both mail readers.

Tzohoquiel @21 - I quite like Élisabeth Vonarburg. You might find the list of Prix Boréal winners a handy place to start? That said, that's specifically a Canadian Francophone SF prize, and there's always that "has this thing made it to other areas of the world" question I tend to have when I recommend locals.

(Someone I was talking to today who enjoyed eighties power ballads had never heard of Honeymoon Suite! Imagine!)

Serge Broom @39:
Did you ever see the scene between John Mills and Ralph Richardson in the movie "The Wrong Box"? Where they're brothers who haven't spoken in many years and John Mills has, shall we say, an agenda? One of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Craig R. (or anyone else in a similar situation): if you are fluent in either Perl or Python and are looking for work, drop me a line (firstname dot lastname at Google's email domain, or firstname at ziprecruiter.com).

I picked up a couple of native french language SFF novels when I was in Quebec for a few days, by the simple method of looking at the copyright page and putting back anything with a translation date. I have: "A l'image du dragon" by Serge Brussolo; "Le Silence de la Cité" by Élisabeth Vonarburg; and "La trilogie de Wielstadt" by Pierre Pevel.

This question also prompted me to do a bit of googling around (using google.fr with the language set to french) and I found the Quebecois SF magazine Solaris. The first list of author names I saw on that site looked very francophone, so that could be a good jumping off point for finding french SF authors.

That name took me years back. I do not read French but the translation of Brussolo's "Le Carnaval de fer" was one of the novels I learned what SF can be from. I haven't thought of him for ages (or seen him mentioned) - I need to see what is available in English from his books.

@63 One theory is that the "killer app" for agriculture in South America was growing cotton to produce rope for nets for fishing.

Of the French SF authors whose works I actually know, I find Michel Demuth died back in 2006, but Jean-Pierre Andrevon is still going strong. These two used to be names to conjure with in French SF, but my knowledge - like my French - is terribly rusty and out of date.

Dave Bell @105: on my experience, your chances are very good. I've had to ask for a refund via PayPal twice, once because goods failed to arrive (the whole site turned out to be a scam, and was shut down following that investigation), and one for services not provided. In both cases I got my refund.

---

I'm not a film person. Not a film person at all, in fact. I overload rather easily (am neurotypical as far as I know, but extremely introverted), and the high information speed in a typical film or TV programme can get a bit much. I feel I can't pause and think and take it in properly. The programmes I do tend to enjoy have a more leisurely pace than average, and there's time to enjoy the scenery. Oh, and right now I'm struggling badly with anxiety, so everything is a lot worse.

Nonetheless, curiosity won, and therefore I'm going to see Mad Max: Fury Road this afternoon. I'm not 100% sure this is a sensible idea, but I have to know what all the fuss is about. At least I'll be bringing some... er, mad maths... to retreat into if I need it.

Wish me luck?

Re: Dave Bell's missing registration: At last check, Paypal allows 180 days to file for an Item Not Received disputes, which I believe is what this would fall under. Do check this still applies; they've been updating their buyer and seller protection TOSes in advance of the breakup with eBay.

Do be careful how you word any request for a refund. Paypal only recently added coverage for digital ... stuff.

Also note that Paypal's customer service is rather sucky, and error prone. I sell on eBay for a living*, and have had some rather epic issues with Paypal in recent months specifically in regards to buyer and seller protections.

Read Paypal's buyer protection guidelines. If you know you are entitled to protection, be prepared to fight for that protection (magic words: "Please transfer me to your supervisor.") Be pleasantly surprised if everything goes smoothly.

(*Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. Paypal just doesn't train their people very well. I am reasonably convinced that eBay's upper management, by contrast, draws their inspiration from Kafka.)

#104 ::: Craig R.
Craig, I'm not quite sure how I misread your post to place you in the UK, sorry about that. My current location is SW Ohio, but I went to school in the Berkshires, and have been to the city I remember as "Wustah." Unfortunately, my company doesn't seem to have any locations in Massachusetts, which seems odd.

Best of luck with with the search and with your ongoing quest for education.

#104 ::: Craig R.

"The community college model also allows someone who had chosen the "wrong" (for them) career path to retool after they had gotten a prior 4-year degree, only to find that what they had chosen was not going to work."

This somewhat describes my situation. Although the degree that places me on the "wrong" career path is not a 4-year degree. I keep debating how I am going not only to learn the new field, but prove that I have. And I am prone to paralysis by analysis and somehow deeply afraid of spending money on myself.

Dave Bell -- before initiating anything with Paypal, please try contacting the seller directly. It almost always saves time, and disputes can usually be resolved. I say this as someone who buys and sells on eBay a moderate amount -- and I also say it as someone who has seen Sasquan respond to people who talk to them directly. If that fails: by all means, go the Paypal dispute route. But try the least intervention first: asking directly "What's going on here?" to the people involved.

Lady Kay #124 -

I (0bviously) don't know what your financial situation is, but one of the Godsends for those who do not have a prior Bachelor's or higher degree is the Pell Grant program. It can help a lot to offset the costs.

There are also other grants and scholarships aimed at the "non-traditionally aged student."

One of the basic things that all financial aid avenues look at is the Effective Family Contribution (EFC): this is the magic number that says what the family (or oneself) is supposed to be able to contribute. To find this number, you invoke the sorcerers at . this will lead you to the federal government site to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

The application itself has no cost associated with it, and you don't have to actually have a particular school in mind when you fill out the application. You can update the application, online, if and when you decide you want to try for a school.

It's painless to fill out, the application can also, if you agree, to directly link to the IRS files to pull up income/effective income/etc from you tax return filed for the previous year (e.g: for the 2015/2016 academic year, numbers from your 2014 federal tax filing can be automatically filled in. If you didn't file in 2014 you can type in income figures yourself. It took about 20 minutes, total, for me to fill out separate FAFSA applications for myself and for the older sprog, who is on the edge on whether or not he wants to try school this year.

I understand the feeling of not wanting to spend monies for yourself, but sometimes you have to make that investment in yourself. There's an old saying, that I've seen in contexts as varied as the military, crisis management and counseling: "Do *something.* It might be the *wrong* thing, but at least it will be *something." And remember, sometimes the correct thing to do *is* to do nothing, but only if you have considered other courses of action and the consequences of all those actions. (says the guy who waited far to long tto take that first step)

Make the investment in yourself.

I'm reminded of Always Coming Home, where everything to do with electricity is part of the Millers' Art. You call a Miller to wire your new house.

Claire 15: The disfigurement/albino comments put me in mind of Jim C. Hines' series' on representation in fiction. He had an essay by an albino individual (Nalini Haynes) on how badly she had been treated - explicitly because albino is used as a shortcut for evil in fiction, virtually every time an albino character shows up.

Much like the way effeminacy/homosexuality (treated as the same thing in Hollywood movies) was treated until the 60s, and to this day in trashy low-budget garbage.

Lady Kay:

I got a bachelor's degree in religion back in the 1980s, thinking that I wanted to go into the ministry. That turned out not to be the case, and I spent the next decade & change raising kids and doing a lot of bits and pieces of things (freelance writing, tax prep, teaching tax class, grading standardized tests, etc.). I did a short stint in grad school studing comparative literature, but left before getting my degree, partly due to a painful neck injury.

I went back to school when I was 45 (community college) to become a physical therapist assistant. It was significantly different from the B.A. (harder in some ways) but at the end I not only had a new skillset but could prove it, both via the national licensing exam and via 3 clinical rotations before I graduated.

I'll be 54 next week, and I'm in the middle of getting a master's degree in Public Health, partly because the PTA job market is not great (esp. in a town that graduates 15-20 new and well-trained PTAs every year) and partly because I can see the day coming when lifting heavy patients will be too risky for me, and I need to be able to work well into my 70s if I'm ever going to afford to retire. It gets a little harder going back each time, but I'm making it, in spite of being in classes full of people the same age as my youngest child.

I second Craig R's comments about the FAFSA and also about investing in yourself.

My problem isn't so much the BA, as the other degrees piled higher and deeper on top of it. So it is sort of the opposite problem: too much and too specific an education.

I have seen the first episode* of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on the BBC. It is competent and well acted; quirky and definitely wanting to lurk near the period-drama space; sometimes spooky and often amusing**. As yet I cannot give it my unqualified approval, but I shall endeavour to watch the next episode.

* Entitled, inevitably, The Friends of English Magic.

** My favourite joke being when Mr Segundus reveals that he was given the prophecy that two magicians would return magic to England, his companion declares that they are two magicians and John Segundus and Mr Honeyfoot sounds very well***.

*** I have compared it to the reference (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, 2004) and in the novel that line does not echo the title****.

**** Indeed, that is both the great advantage and also the potential downfall of the TV show; that by sharpening the dialogue and streamlining the plot in order to fit into the schedule***** we might get a greater proportion of what is good and interesting about the story with less wandering and rambling, yet if all the rambling and wandering were removed, there would not be much left of the novel worth talking about. It is a dilemma that I will be curious to see resolved.

***** Although as it is a one hour show without adverts (I believe about 56 minutes of running time) over seven episodes, it is hardly a fast paced adaption.

Disney's Silly Symphony, "The Old Mill"

The Coen brothers Miller's Crossing.

Wandering back to millpunk, does anyone know of a good non-fiction book about windmill technology? I'm thinking specifically Dutch windmill technology (hi Abi), and it's okay if it's in Dutch, because in that case I'll get two copies and Dad and I will work on it together as part of me learning Dutch. Though English is fine if that's what's available, and I could read it more quickly.

Hmmm. It looks like I should have read the Low Tech Machines windmill article *first.* Let me rephrase the question a bit; does anyone know of such books other than the ones given as references in the article, or have particular favorites among the references?

At Wilder Ranch Park in coastal CA, the farm-family's engineer son build a water-driven shop
with a couple medium-sized Penton wheels to drive belts, and later, an in-shop electrical generator driven by its own small Penton wheel. It's all been preserved.

I gave (some) of my late dog's ashes an interesting dispersal method . . .

Me and the Dog Lofter rocket (A "Caliber ISP" by LOC/Precision):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan...posted-public/

Loading ashes (in a coffee filter) and a wad of Kira-fur into the rocket's parachute chamber:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan...posted-public/

Video of the launch (using an Aerotech RMS I218R-M):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan...7624384568387/

Unfortunately I lose track shortly after lift-off. The club president also made a video of the launch; hopefully his turned out better.

The deployment was successful. There was no trace of fur or ashes in the rocket. Predicted altitude was 2900 feet, deployed altitude (on the way down) 2800 feet, but I'm calling it 2700' because it peaked over earlier than I expected. I really need to get with the 21st century and get an electronic altimeter!

The rest of the ashes, which fill a small tin (which a friend suggested looked like something Great Aunt Gertie would buy her Olde Fashioned hard candy in) will get distributed around Kira's old stomping grounds via spoon.

Neil W @130

To some degree, we have an echo of a BBC adaption of a book by Dickens. I recall them from school as long, and a bit slow, and the BBC has made many adaptions of them which need a certain compression and re-pacing even though a long TV serial.

BBC DVD collection of adaptions, 1977-1999

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as a book, has some of the same feel as Dickens. And those adaptions are old enough that some of the programme-making skills could have been forgotten. But there is reason to be hopeful.

Also, Wolf Hall

Dave Bell @137 - I had some deja vu of watching Dickens adaptions while growing up although, of course, this is set before most of Dickens'* work, and, indeed, before Dickens himself was born**. From memory the BBC tended to show them in the autumn, and I am slightly puzzled as to why they did not schedule Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell similarily. It would seem to me exactly the kind of thing to put on when the nights start to draw in.

* As his novels tend to take place over a number of years they often begin in what was, to him, a historical period. In a couple of them the development of the railways occurs in the background. I seem to recall that he began by being hostile to railways, but later was reconciled (although his comparison of the British Railway Buffet to the fare of Coaching Inns or continental railway food was not complimentary to the first mentioned).

** We are, in fact, in a prime millpunk period although I suspect that the TV show will not divert from the book in that direction.

I would like to read a cheerful story with a happy ending. Would someone point me to one?

John A Arkansawyer @139, novel or shorter work?

Stefan @136

What a fine sendoff. I've always been partial to LOC and to the redline motors; an excellent choice of motor and rocket to say goodbye to Kira.

"Tomorrow Is Waiting" at Strange Horizons. It's in the archives, somewhere around 2011.

William Kamkwamba might be considered a modern millpunk.

OtterB @ 140: Shorter work, easily accessible to someone whose cupboard is bare of spoons.

Diatryma @ 142: Thank you. I'll be there when I can.

John A. Arkansawyer:
Monkey King, Faerie Queen, by Zen Cho.

(Hat tip to Marissa Lingen, who linked to it recently in her LJ.)

A question here: someone gave me a Nook Color to use as an e-reader. I am finding it slow and clunky to handle. I had to visit the local BN store to get it running. So far I have not managed to download a single book.

I really want an e-reader, so I will keep trying to use it. However, I have the feeling it is not going to work for me. It's heavy and the technology is 7 years old. Folks have suggested I look at the Kindle Paperwhite. I expect to be (mostly) borrowing e-books from the local library, though I may purchase one occasionally. If you have a Kindle Paperwhite, I would love to read comments about things like ease of use, battery life, readability, etc. If you have another e-reader you want to recommend, I'd love to read those comments also. Thank you.

I really like my Paperwhite for reading fiction; nonfiction is not so great because going back to check things isn't easy. The battery life is pretty fantastic. It weighs less than a thick paperback, even with its protective case, so it doesn't make my wrists tired.

All the language creation in this thread (millpunk, aquaduct punk) reminds me of a delightful new word I heard last week: shibbolized.

Among other things, "Shibboleth" is the name of a "federated identity solution", a web-based single sign in. Someone describing the system to me said that "once you sign in, once you've been shibbolized, you don't have to sign in on the other sites."

Shibbolized--to be recognized as a member of an accepted / permitted group. Instead of a bartender saying, "I need to see your ID", they could say, "I need to shibbolize you."

That would be wonderful.

Doug @148: would you mind if I quoted you on this to the American Dialect Society?

Tom Whitmore @ 125 -- oh, yes, yes, sorry, I should have mentioned that. Please let the seller try to sort it out first, before filing a case. Filing a case hurts the seller, and if they have enough cases filed against them, they can lose their Paypal account.

Paypal isn't as evil about seller defects as eBay is, but you don't want to give a seller a black mark with either company if it's a legitimate problem AND they are willing to fix it.

FWIW.

I both buy and sell on eBay, and have since the late 90's. I've done it professionally, for a few years -- serious enough that it's now my full time job, with a fancy LLC after the business name and all that.

In that time, I have run into exactly two true scammers, and only one required resorting to eBay Buyer protection. The whole process took about a month for resolution, but it did get resolved. It would have been resolved faster, of course, if eBay hadn't had a system glitch where they took the money from the seller's account and never deposited in mine and I had to call them several times before someone recognized their was a system issue and it was fixed, but that's just par for the course with eBay and not actually a surprise.

(The other scammer showed his colors before I ever paid him anything, and I told him to go pound sand.)

I've had to fall back on SELLER protection any number of times, both under Paypal's umbrella (generally due to fraudulent credit card chargebacks) and eBay (usually due to feedback extortion, or what I've now heard called returns extortion, due to the, ah, flawed, design of eBay's new returns process.)

Jim Parish,

I am all about spreading the word of shibbolizing.

(Note: I cannot and do not make any claims about the company named Shibboleth and am not affiliated with them in any way, except to be grateful that they inadvertently led to the creation of such a great word.)

To quote the eminent philosopher Calvin, "verbing weirds language."

Lizzy L @146, I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (a couple of years old; I think the current is the Tab 4 - which as I understand it is also now making new Nooks). I've been happy with it for reading. I have a Nook app (which I use most of the time for book purchases), a Kindle app for things that aren't available for the Nook, the Overdrive app because that's what my library uses for e-book loans, and the Aldiko free epub reader for things from Gutenberg, direct publisher purchases, etc. I find the 7 inch screen quite comfortable for reading; it's a little small for email/web stuff but usable in a pinch. Battery life is pretty good, especially if I turn off wifi, though I think it's slowly declining.

EBook reader: I use & like a Nook color HD. I don't like its method of setting up a bookshelf for an author which is really clumsy. But the main library is fine & the reading experience is about the best.

I would've preferred Mobi but Amazon bought them & Amazon's ability to remotely edit your library is a deal breaker.

Lizzy L @ 146

I have a Kindle Paperwhite (and a couple older kindles). It survives about 24+ hours of continuous reading - as long as Wifi is disabled(if I read 2-3 hours per day, it can go a week without charging). It's very light and very compact. Some people prefer covers which bulks it a bit; mine had been walking around without one for more than a year and it is still ok. YMMV of course.

Loaning from the library is very easy (well - ours is plugged into whatever system allows Kindle loans so it goes through my Amazon account so I checkout, it puts it into my Amazon queue and then all I need is wifi to get it on the kindle).

Now - I read mainly fiction on it - because with non-fiction I need to flip around but narrative non-fiction also works. Then it comes down to books formatting - some of the things are still hideously done.

PS: I also have a Kindle Fire - but it is for comics and some picture books - it is a tablet and that is not good for reading for long (in my opinion - it is a computer screen more or less):)

Thank you for all your replies. OtterB at 152, I considered the Samsung Galaxy that Barnes & Noble is selling as an e-reader (for one thing, they will let me trade in the Nook and get $50 off the Galaxy's price) but I don't WANT all the bells and whistles that the Galaxy provides. I use my home computer for that. I specifically need an e-reader for reading on airplanes. I don't intend to do anything else with it. (I don't have a smartphone either. I tried one: hated it. Vision issues make it hard for me to use.)

Lizzy L,

And you can increase the font on these things when needed (so you are not stuck to the 7 points that the publisher chose for a book for example) :)

Stefan @ 136 et al: Fascinating to find two people here with interests in high-powered model rocketry. (I did a bit with Estes >45 years ago, so I never got above a C-class engine.) However, Flickr is 404'ing me on the links; are they really supposed to have an ellipsis in the middle?

HLN: the Prius finally reported 60mpg on a trip, and the solar panels finally yielded a rebate from the electric company. Now if the damned wrist (damaged while moving snow to make room to remove more snow) would just heal, this Bostonian might actually believe it's Spring....

@Chip:

Hmmm. No, there shouldn't be ellipses. I wonder if a cut and paste went wrong (I copied that post from another I made at a rocketry board):

Loading hair and ashes:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/17774512526/in/dateposted-public/

Me and rocket:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/17614548349/in/dateposted-public/

Launch video:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/17614455759/in/dateposted-public/

Lizzy L @155, and I thought I wanted all the bells and whistles, but have turned out to use it as an ereader far more than anything else.

#137 Dave Bell: BBC DVD collection of adaptions, 1977-1999

My brain parsed this as: BVD collection of adaptaions, 1977-1999, which prompted visions of a catalog of men's undergarments and an historical explanation of those modifications: "The trending need for sagging pants prompted this change for a higher support brief that also provided an aesthetic view of the fabric just below the waistband."

157
Mine is still getting an average of 46mpg (after 13 years), but I know it gets more than that at least part of them time. (One tank of gas each way, between LA and SF: that's 400 miles. I stop in the middle to refuel me and the car, as well as at the beginning each way.)

It seems to me that some of what Harry Turtledove wrote could be considered aqueductpunk. I guess Agent of Byzantium is set about 1000 years too late, but for $REASONS in that world the Eastern Roman Empire still exists then and you get a bunch of alternate-history discovery stories for stuff that could almost-plausibly be discovered with the technology of the time.

Kevin Callum @160: This post, and others like it, are a main reason I read ML at all. You made my day. :->

Daniel Martin @ 162

Part of why I love Turtledove (most books anyway) is exactly this ability to tweak a small detail and then go ahead and write a novel that sounds as history if only that small details had been really flipped.

LizzyL @ 146, I have a Kobo Aura HD, which I like; it's got the same "paperwhite" e-ink as the Kindle and Nook e-readers, and a backlight with a good range of brightness.

It doesn't render all fonts, which I find mildly annoying, but it does have a very large range of font sizes to choose from. (And you can force it into one of a dozen or so fonts, if you hate the one the publisher supplied.)

I like not being tied to Giant Corporations; that's just a personal choice on my part. Haven't tried borrowing books from the library, so I don't honestly know how well that works. It generally lasts me one to two weeks before I need to recharge (reading at least an hour or two a day), but I keep wifi turned off for the most part. It does have a (very limited) web browser (limited largely by the fact that e-ink refreshes considerably slower than lcds) and a small library of games, including chess and sudoku, in case you run out of book before you run out of airplane flight.

165
I have one also - with the wifi not on. It's a pretty good readers, and I can adjust the text size and margins. (They do need a better way to find books in the reader's memory. The one they have clunks.)

Lizzy L: I bought an e-ink Nook 4(?) years ago, which after a great deal of use and abuse is finally giving up the ghost. Last Thursday I replaced it with a Nook Glowlight, and so far I'm very pleased. I haven't run the battery down yet, but my old one lasted about a week between charges--this is FAR less than they advertise, but OTOH they assume that people only read 30 minutes a day. I did the math and it's roughly the same number of hours.

I'm a little late to the Mad Max conversation, but I'm still squeeing about having seen it Saturday night. It was so good. I floated around the house for the rest of the night in a semi-euphoric state, kind of like after having eaten an exceedingly good meal, and not knowing what to do with how happy I was other than comment on it at random intervals.

And I thought it was a deeply feminist movie, in that the story proceeded from some core feminist principles, i.e. women and children are people, not property; and the patriarchy hurts men too. (The latter -- OMG such good moments of making me unexpectedly care about the antagonists. [rot13]"V unq n onol oebgure! Naq ur jnf cresrpg va rirel jnl!" Bu, nyy gur grnef. Rirelbar qrfreirq n orggre yvsr guna gung, evtug hc gb gur Jneybeq uvzfrys.[/rot13])

I thought its most radically feminist aspect was what MaxL mentions @66: The movie doesn't beat you over the head with the femaleness of the bad-ass characters. There's no "She's a bad-ass AND she's a woman! Gasp!" The movie just lets the women get on with being bad-asses, same as the men.

There also were no feminized slurs being thrown around, not even in the places that Hollywood's low bar trains us to expect. No men fighting with Furiosa called her a b---h. No one in the Citadel insulted each other by calling them womanly. Not a whiff of religiously supported misogyny qua misogyny could be whiffed--there was no "women are inferior" tenet to justify treatment of the Warlord's female resources; it was simply their cis-femaleness (ability to give birth, lactate, etc) that made them useful resources (and goodness knows it wasn't only the women whom the Warlord treated as property).

Which isn't to say their treatment as slaves was somehow better because of it. But the movie was better because of it. It didn't avail itself of lazy gender tropes. That was kind of amazing.

As far as being a worthy successor to the original Mad Max trilogy goes -- yes. Yes yes yes good Gods yes. Granted, I'm speaking as a 39-yr-old who never actually saw the original films, at least not all the way through, but sort of absorbed everything about them by cultural osmosis (mostly through the lens of Beyond the Thunderdome and Tina Turner's accompanying music video). But because of that, I came in knowing what to expect: stunt-laced car chases in the desert involving absurdly tricked-out vehicles, driven by characters displaying magnificently depicted grotesqueries and over-the-top rock-n-roll/punk regalia, all filmed in amazing scenic locations. I was not disappointed.

Also, I want to know more about the crows. Especially the ones on stilts. If that's what they were. I don't know.

p.s. If I get a double post, it's because of that 500 internal server error and I SWEAR I checked first before reposting!

Nicole, #168: So the movie was an example of "grant your strong woman (or, in this case, women) and go on from there." That does sound like something that would be both excellent and deeply offensive to the entitled sexist male.

Lizzy L @ 146,
My wife got the Kindle Voyager, the expensive super-light version of the Kindle Paperwhite for her birthday present - she had gone through a lot of reviews and agonizing before deciding on that one. The battery is supposed to be good for around 2 weeks reading. She is very happy with it*, finds the screen very readable, and is binging on some of the super-cheap Amazon "megapacks" of classic SF, from Andre Norton to "Doc" Smith.

I think the regular Kindle Paperwhite is similar in most respects but weight, and less than half the price.

[*] Last Friday night she ran into one major setback with it: it turns out if you are lying on your back on the couch holding the Voyager above your face to read, and you drop it, and then in a misfiring of reflexes you bat it corner-first into your mouth hard while trying to save it, its effect is pretty much the same as being punched in your mouth with brass knuckles. It took at least an hour with ice and pressure to stop her lip bleeding; we were thinking it might need stitches, but it finally quit just as we pulled into the ER parking lot. This can't strictly be considered a problem with the Kindle, though.

The Hugo packet has been released.

It's only now occurred to me that I have no idea how to judge "best" editing, as I have no idea what specific editors received as compared to what was published. (It occurs to me that I've been judging editing in films also based on no real evidence--judging the result without seeing the raw materials. I cannot believe that Clint Eastwood's editors have as many ways to edit a conversation as Michael Bay's do.)

At any rate, this year it's easy to vote on the editor categories--No Slates, thanks very much--but for 2017 I'd be curious how people judge.

And a more open-thready topic: last Wednesday I read My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It's got a spare, economical prose style to it but I thought the story was fascinating and parts of it really moved me.

johnofjack @171: There are a lot of different parts to editing. Choosing what to publish is one major one: and developing to its best potential is another. If there's an editor consistently bringing out work that you think is superlative, vote for him or her.

Part of this is historical evolution, of course: Best Magazine begat Best Editor when anthologies started producing really amazing stories; Best Editor began Long Form and Short Form when folks realized there was a real separation between the skills and folks didn't like lumping them together. (That's very condensed, and not intended as True History.) The Editor Hugos don't have the history of either short story or novel to look back on -- it's slightly easier to figure out what makes a good story than what makes a good editor. But they are both (at the high level of deciding which deserves the award) generally a matter of taste rather than of objective ability.

There is a certain level of basic competence which can usually be assumed.

If you find your hands cramping from the weight when using an e-reader, I have found that a slightly bulky case helps immensely; while it actually adds a bit to the weight, it lowers the perceived density and makes it feel lighter. At least for me. Alas, the case I'm using isn't made any more, because I love it to death and would recommend it to everyone. (It zips up, which makes me much happier if I'm carrying it between house and car in the rain!)

As to which e-reader I have, it's a cheap old off-brand Nook, but it's good enough for my purposes.

Friends and I saw Mad Max and beyond the usual reactions, we wondered when "Teardrop" came in. It's in the featured music lists! We thought we had good Teardropdar! When does this song show up?

johnofjack, #171: I can't really offer any advice about Long Form Editor -- that's one I tend to skip for exactly that reason, and because I don't know who's editing whom -- but I do read a lot of short-story anthologies, and those put the editor's name right on the cover. Now, I pick anthologies (especially theme anthologies) based on "does this look interesting?", but when I'm done I generally have an overall feel for the anthology, and over time I do tend to notice that certain editors produce anthologies that I like very well on average, and others don't. So then I start paying attention to the editor's name as well as the theme of the anthology. Of course, Martin Greenberg was a very tough act to follow!

(One of my schticks, when reviewing an anthology, is the Waste of Ink Award. Some anthologies are pretty good overall but have one real clinker, and that gets noted. If an anthology has no Waste of Ink Award, that also gets noted.)

I too just saw Mad Max, and I'm far more pleased with the movie than I expected. Which is to say: I expected to be pleased with explosions and turned off by grotesques, and instead I was completely engaged all the way through and sold on the world and the characters. (Oh, some of it doesn't hold up to second or third question levels. But it holds up just fine for the length of the movie.) If we get a spoiler thread, I will burble there; otherwise, I will just say that it hits some similar buttons for me that Jupiter Ascending did. Forthright statements about personal autonomy, and things dramatically exploding!

LizzyL @ 146:

I had an iPod Touch, then an iPhone, and now an HTC phone. They all mostly got used as e-readers, plus Twitter, and GPS when travelling or navigating a new home city on the other side of the world. At the moment I use Kindle and Aldiko apps. I have to charge the phone every day or two, but that's fine.

It is one of these YMMV situations. Personally, I find the e-paper refresh thing intensely annoying. Other people obviously don't. When it comes to actual screens I find that the smallish size of a phone makes it easier to avoid specular reflections. If I wanted an inexpensive pure e-reader I'd probably try for a second-hand smartphone, perhaps with a new battery.

A while back, someone (?CHip) posted about genetically engineered yeast that made morphine (though starting from something that had a lot of the hard parts filled in).

There's been quite a lot of progress very recently. The researchers can now do all the steps but one in yeast, and they know what enzymes do the remaining step in poppies.

Tzohoqiel @ 21:

One of the greats of contemporary French SF is Pierre Bordage.
I would recommend first his Guerriers du Silence trilogy. This is Space Opera, with a lot of influences from Star Wars and Dune.
The Wang duology is very good as well. It's a near future where the whole European and Asian political landscape has been transformed almost beyond recognition. Concerned mainly about refugees and North/South East/West borders.
I haven't read but have heard a lof of good things about his Enjomineur series (fantasy set in revolutionary France).

Very nice as well: Mathieu Gaborit's Abyme duology (dark fantasy). It was adapted as a table-top RPG.

KevinT

Mad Max: went in with considerable trepidation, came out buzzing. I really enjoyed it. The usual "film overload" problem didn't arise because the plot is simple enough that it didn't need exposition at breakneck pace; I wondered if all the chases might cause it, but apparently my brain files those under "scenery" when the context is film. I had also been worried about the violence, but although the film is certainly violent, it's not gory. There's a crucial difference.

What made it for me was what always makes it: the characters. Show me good, well-drawn characters reacting believably to the situation they're in, and I'll show you what a happy mongoose looks like. I'd actually see that again, and I could probably count the films I'd say that about on the fingers of one hand.

There were a few problems, as there always are; the biggest was the overwhelming whiteness. Some darker faces would definitely not have gone amiss. Even so, I think it's very much a step in the right direction and would highly recommend it.

johnofjack @171 - so far, my evaluation is, I'm afraid, largely based on negatives; if a story has multiple, visible problems, I'm inclined to think a good editor would have made some effort to fix those problems, so whoever left them in... isn't a good editor.

(This is largely, but not wholly, subjective - I'd expect a professionally edited story to have decent copy-editing, so things like typos and continuity errors should be caught.)

I guess you can also look at things like the selection of stories for anthologies - see if they fit the theme (if there is one) while exploring different aspects of it, that sort of thing.

How to approach the "long-form" editing award... without some notion of the raw material the editors started from... well, I will need to give plenty of thought to that.

Every time I think or read something about Fury Road, I find another thing that utterly defies convention and expectation.

The fact that an action movie completely absent the Campbellian monomyth structure has gotten a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes is so heartening. The fact that they managed to tell a story that shows people recovering from a life of exploitation without glorifying it or using it for shock value is incredible. And everything about Max and Furiosa's interaction throughout the piece is just... refreshing and revolutionary.

But what got to me the most was that they managed to create one character that evoked this weird, complex feeling. I spent a huge chunk of the movie deeply invested this character, thinking "oh no please don't die or get maimed but also don't achieve any of your goals please don't achieve any of your goals."

The elevation of a stock minion character to what he becomes in the film is just... yeah. So much great stuff about toxic masculinity.

Screw it, I'm gonna do a big chunk of rot13'd spoilery discussion.

Yrg'f gnyx nobhg Ahk.

Jura jr zrrg Ahk, ur vf 100% va snibe bs gur flfgrzf bs guvf jbeyq, gur znlurz, gur qrfgehpgvir nqurerapr gb cngevnepuny fgehpgher naq tbnyf. Ur'f abg fubja nf n frafvgvir fbhy jub vf n ivpgvz gb gur flfgrzf ur vaunovgf... ur tybevrf va gurz rira nf gurl unfgra uvf qrngu. Ur vf nf crefbanyyl vairfgrq va guvf flfgrz nf nal bs gur bgure fpernzvat zvavbaf jub xvyy naq qvr sbe gur nagntbavfg, haguvaxvatyl gerngvat crbcyr nf bowrpgf... Ahk fcrpvsvpnyyl guvaxf bs Znk nf abguvat ohg n ont bs oybbq gb shry uvf uvfgbevp qrngu qevir ba gur Shel Ebnq.

Naq lrg, gur npgbe'f cresbeznapr tvirf guvf punenpgre na haqrepheerag bs flzcngurgvp wbl, yvxr n xvq gelvat bhg fxngrobneq gevpxf be cynlvat ivqrb tnzrf. Va nqqvgvba, gur jvirf hetr hf gb rzcnguvmr jvgu uvz rira nf ur frrxf gb erghea gurz gb n yvsr bs fynirel, npxabjyrqtvat gung uvf vtabenapr naq pbzcyvpvgl ner gur erfhyg bs gur fnzr flfgrz gung pbfgf gurz gurve bja ntrapl.

Uvf pbairefvba njnl sebz rivy pbzrf jura n pngnfgebcuvp crefbany snvyher oevatf ubzr gur vqrn gung ur unfa'g yvirq hc gb gur hanpuvrinoyr fgnaqneqf frg ol uvf fbpvrgl, naq gung ur arire jvyy. Rira gura, ur qbrfa'g unir gur gbbyf gb frr nal bgure bcgvba, fb ur whfg pheyf hc va n pbeare naq jnvgf gb qvr. Jura Pncnoyr qvfpbiref uvz gurer, ur vf fhcerzryl ihyarenoyr, ragveryl tvira bire gb uvf uheg naq qrfcnve. Fur nccebcevngrf gur gurzrf naq ynathntr bs uvf gbkvp aneengvir gb qryvire n zrffntr bs trahvar pbzcnffvba.

Gura vg'f whfg terng gb jngpu uvz tragyl oybbz va gur cerfrapr bs crbcyr jub npghnyyl pner nobhg uvz naq inyhr uvz sbe ernfbaf orlbaq uvf hgvyvgl nf qvfcbfnoyr pnaba sbqqre. Uvf erpxyrff raguhfvnfz naq tyrrshy qnevat ner fgvyy gurer, ohg abj gurl'er hfrq va freivpr bs n arjsbhaq pbzzhavgl gung frrf uvz nf n crefba engure guna n qvfcbfnoyr pbzzbqvgl.

Tom Whitmore @ 172, Lee @ 175, Steve Wright @ 181: Thanks.

It's not uncommon for me to read a book with typos, but since I discovered that authors can't always get them corrected I quit keeping track of them. That's a road I'd rather not start back down, so it's also useful to be reminded that I don't have to vote on Long Form Editor. :-)

The Mad Max movies have links, but they're not a serial. The first is very different. Even with the way cars have changed, it's got a here-and-now feel. Max starts out at the top, things in his life turn bad, and he falls, big-time.

There's no real explanation for the changes in the world, just legends told by characters, and Max becomes one of those legends. But they're very much about redemption. He's not a good man, he's a killer, but he tries to make good choices.

There's a story-arc, more than just the car-stunts and the violence. And George Miller is a good story-teller. Like Max, he tries to make good choices in how he tells the tale.

And the Max we see is the Max that people have remembered. It was maybe made explicit, all those years back, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Thanks to all those who made recommendations yesterday. I was learning a valuable life lesson in what happens when your insurance company changes your meds for you. Today, I have spoons.

As a token of my extreme: You're just messing with me, aren't you?

Dave Bell @ 184: When to print the legend and when to leave the facts in.

6: Millpunk speaks to localism and renewable energy infrastructure

Or does it? I mean, it would _now_. But back in the day when windmills and watermills were cutting-edge, they definitely were not symbols of low-cost appropriate technology putting power and agency into the hands of the ordinary person. They were a major capital investment, there was only one of them around your area, and the miller was a powerful man in the region - and a major source of income for the local lord, who took his rakeoff of every sack of grain brought to be ground. And they periodically exploded, of course.

My theory about steampunk (which is mine) is that it's a way of trying to recreate the awe and terror with which Victorians regarded the Industrial Revolution's products - you can't say to a modern audience "imagine if there was a steam-powered warship at sea!" and get that reaction, but if you turn it up to 11 and say "imagine a steam-powered Land Leviathan trampling entire cavalry brigades!" then you're getting there.

But millpunk wouldn't be the same, because mills (as I mention above) weren't a revolutionary technology - they reinforced the power and authority of the powerful, rather than undermining it. The punks in millpunk would be Luddites, not millwrights.

Something that was really not clear to me in all my school-induced studies of American history, that I did not learn until reading some nonfiction as an adult after college, is that the settlement of the Americas was industrial.

The New England settlements were driven, in large part, by the need of the British Navy for tall, straight trees for masts. New England's forests were brought down to water mills and shipped across the water. The colonial American textile industry was never an idyllic homespun era except for very briefly around the time of the Revolution: it was intensive production in households by skilled guild workers, highly regimented and separated by task.

We have a national myth of the ubiquity of Plucky Self-Reliant Frontiersmen, but any actual examples of the species are brief and surrounded by a sea of intensive production. Even the "empty" lands the northern settlers came into were intensively cropped -- the crops just didn't look like European crops, monocultured into square tilled fields. They were intensely managed forests that gushed food not because of "divine Providence and bounty" (as the settlers naively assumed), but many generations of hard, skilled, knowledgeable work.

Mongoose, #180: While I can't argue with your statement about the whiteness of the film, I will also note that the customary progression with these things is all-white-men to some-black-men to some-women. I'm not going to complain about women, just once, getting moved up from last place to second in that sequence.

Just today I read a comment on Facebook by someone who dismissed wind power as a failed technology because he couldn't run his house on a back-yard windmill.

Oh, America! What are we going to do with you?

#189: I recently bought the soundtrack CD for "The Fantastic Mr. Fox." The first track (well, except for 2-3 seconds of intro) is "The Ballad of Davey Crockett," which I believe was the title music to the old Disney TV show / movie.

It is an over-the-top ode to frontier-fetishism. Just cringeworthy by today's standards. I can picture a generation raised by glamorous guff like that growing up to believe the axe-and-a-gun-and-a-bible version of American settlement.

I thought a lot of the point of steampunk is visible technology. A zeppelin is more immediately comprehensible than a jet. (Jets close to the ground still look like special effects to me.) You can see gears moving, which is not something you can say for electrons.

And some of it might be a chance to play with the Victorian era and the old west with a new set of cliches that haven't been used up yet.

On the other hand, I don't love steampunk. I don't especially mind it, but I don't go "goshwoyoboyoboy this is what I've been looking for!", so I might be missing something.

More generally, I've wondered why some eras inspire tremendous amounts of fiction, and others don't. Any theories?

I was expecting Russia after the end of the USSR to be a good place for fiction, but I haven't seen much. Maybe not in the US, or is it not at all?

#171 ::: johnofjack

I think another part of good editing is finding and cultivating good new authors.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 193: You just kicked a thought into my head: Is the rise of steampunk related to the depersonalization of current computing technology, the black boxes and drop-in applications that are replacing hand-crafted computing solutions, and for that matter, the rise of Information Technology and the corresponding fall of Computing Services?

(Why, yes, our department did undergo a name change recently! Why do you ask?)

Nancy Lebovitz @ 193: Probably most of the fiction is in Russian and hasn't been translated yet. Also, it apparently took writers a good 15 years to use up Russian communists as villains and switch to Russian gangsters (or am I thinking of movies here? Hard to say) and it may be that the cliché mines are not yet played out enough to do good fiction.

Also, those murals at the 191st St subway tunnel are beautiful, and I hope some agency figures some way of preserving them.

The particle on the murals in the 191st Street subway tunnel remind me of Rochester's Broad Street Aqueduct/Viaduct/Bridge (link is to Image Search results). Originally an aqueduct to let the Erie Canal pass over the Genesee River, it was left high and dry when the canal was diverted to bypass downtown, and ended up becoming part of the Rochester subway for 40 or 50 years, along with much former canal beddage. When the subway was discontinued after WW2, much of the track bed became highway (and is mostly part of 490), but this stretch stayed empty and is a constantly changing gallery of graffiti. It's also a gateway to an underground world of squatters, so it's best not to go in too deep.

The subway curved and passed under the Rundel Library, right over the old Johnson Millrace, which still underlies the building surrealistically, sometimes pouring out through vents in the wall that empty into the river. Intrepid explorers have obligingly taken vertiginous movies from the rusting old catwalk and posted them to YouTube.

On a related topic, the old Main Street Bridge used to be lined with buildings. From the street side, you couldn't tell it was a bridge at all. The link (again, to Image Search results) shows a painting that hangs in the Memorial Art Gallery of the river with the backs of the buildings, as well as an aerial photo of how it fit in, and another painting that I didn't know existed until just now that shows another angle. Also, an enterprising artist has made a 3D visualization based on the first painting.

Nancy Lebovitz @193 - I have a couple of post-Soviet-set books; the only ones that occurred to me off the top of my head were Anatoly Kurkov's Death and the Penguin, and Sophia Cresswell's Sam Golod (I used to drink at the pub in Oxford where she did a reading from that one, so it sticks in my mind.) I'm sure there must be others, but they are slipping from my memory at the moment.

With regard to editing... I'm catching up on the Puppy offerings, now the Hugo packet is with me, and I'm actually quite cross just now, because I've just read a thing by one slate member, and - aside from it being a pretty slight story - it is loaded with elementary punctuation and grammar errors; it's the sort of thing MS Word's grammar checker would put a wiggly green line under. (And I am no fan of that grammar checker, let me tell you.)

Either the (purported) editors didn't notice these things, or they did and they just didn't care. And I think that says a lot about the contempt they have for everyone - including the writers they're supposed to be editing, and the readers they're supposed to be entertaining.

(Ahem. I shall save the rest of that rant for elsewhere, where nobody will have to read it, I think.)

Stefan Jones @192: I can picture a generation raised by glamorous guff like that growing up to believe the axe-and-a-gun-and-a-bible version of American settlement.

My parents were devout subscribers of that mythos. (Dad born in '19, mom in '21.) My mom's favorite music was Sons of the Pioneers. My dad frequently talked in terms of "carving it out of the wilderness." There was, shall we say, a bit of a gulf between them and my 1970-inspired environmentalism.

I was expecting Russia after the end of the USSR to be a good place for fiction, but I haven't seen much. Maybe not in the US, or is it not at all?

Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko novels are still selling well and they're very post-Soviet. Ken MacLeod is keen on post-Soviet areas. The Sergei Lukyanenko "Night Watch" trilogy. Bruce Sterling, and some William Gibson (Pattern Recognition).

The pioneering bit in Time Enough for Love got on my nerves once I realized that shirt sleeve environments like that aren't going to exist on other planets.

I'd like to see a story where people play at pioneering, but the terraforming took work.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 193

I was expecting Russia after the end of the USSR to be a good place for fiction, but I haven't seen much. Maybe not in the US, or is it not at all?

Well - why would post-Soviet Russia be better than the last decade or so of Soviet one? Even before USSR went down, SF was allowed to say things that no other genre could - being a juvenile style for the most part (don't get me started on that) and requiring imagination, it was slipping quite a lot through the censors. And then the last couple of decades had not been as bad as the previous few in terms of censoring - not completely free but the cracks all over the place were bigger.

When USSR and the whole system collapsed, most of the countries in the region started catching up in the Western SFF and what never made it in before. The Russians kept writing (as did everyone else) - not much increase, not much change - except for a while when a lot of awful stuff was published just because it was anti-old regime (both SF and non SF books). But it is mostly same old, same old - the literature is there, it does not get translated much outside of a few popular authors.

Plus - the collapse of USSR brought the collapse of the whole system after all - you could have expected that all those behind the Iron Curtain counties would be good place for fiction. In a way some is there; very little get translated though (a lot less than from Russian)...

Steve Wright @ 197

Either the (purported) editors didn't notice these things, or they did and they just didn't care

*very sweetly* Depending on which story it is, chances are that the editor in question is on the ballot actually. Not that I advocate it but this kind of editor deserves to be all the way at the bottom of the pile...

OK, we have a Mad Max spoiler thread. Have fun!

Atomic Robo is now a web-based comic-book.

New story "Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire" began HERE this week.

I was just out at the pond, watching 10 or so LBJs have a pool party, when two different hummingbirds came in hovered around for a bit, had a little drink, and then put their tail feathers in as a birdbath while still hovering. I've never seen that before. After they had gotten wet they flew up to a branch and preened like any other bird. Never seen this before, and two of them did it within a minute.

The hummers here are a little crazy. We go though 1/2 gallon of sugar water a day, about 10 lbs of sugar a week, out of one feeder. They will eat from the feeder while it's being held, and even perch on your fingers if that's where they need to be to get a drink.

eric @204:

I was just out at the pond, watching 10 or so LBJs have a pool party

Um, can you possibly explain what an LBJ is in this context? I currently have a mental image of this pool party that is both extremely memorable and almost certainly very wrong indeed.

205 (what an appropriate number!)

I think it escaped from the Hugo IV thread, where birds have been discussed: 'Little Brown Job'.

P J Evans @206:

Thank you. That is a great relief to my mind.

abi @205:

Little Brown Jobs. It's a birding term, more or less equivalent to "some sort of sparrowish thing". Over in the Hugo thread (should we move the birding discussion here?), Annie's mystery birds are classic LBJs.

A pool party consisting of 10 or so Lyndon B Johnsons would indeed be something to see.

#209 ::: cyllan

A pool party consisting of 10 or so Lyndon B Johnsons would indeed be something to see.

It might well include Linda Bird and Lady Bird...

My mental image was all Lyndon B. As I said, both memorable and quite, quite wrong.

Clones should never go to pool parties together. Just...not.

@211

Well abi, depends on the clones. A pool party with the clones from Orphan Black will be a lot of fun. As long as noone gives one or more of them pencils that is.

Sorry, wrong thread. Yes, it's a Little Brown Job/Bird, not a former president. And I'm really sorry for that imagery that it invoked. But also laughing. Because now it's stuck in my mind too.

Steampunk as personal: also, fixable. It's like Kaylee coming out from under the hood in Firefly rather than working with waldos or something. If it's mechanical, then it's possible to fix-- whack it with a hammer, start up the boiler, weld something dammit. If it's electronic... you can't fix an iPad, can you? Steampunk can be built in a garage.

Who else here is going to Balticon? Should we plan some kind of ML meetup? Maybe dinner one evening? My schedule is pretty open, as far as I know at this point.

(repeating to try to shake loose an Internal Server Error)

213
Another birding term: 'escapes': caged birds that get loose and go feral. Some even find mates and reproduce. The parrots of Brooklyn, for example.

Mary Aileen @215 I am not going to Balticon, but am in the DC area and might be able to make a run up for a Gathering of Light.

@216 - Another example of "escapes," probably - There's been a population of little green parrots all over the New Orleans area for decades now. They roost in the palm trees up and down the main thoroughfares.

Pasadena has flocks of escaped parrots.

London has its parakeets, including out in the suburbs. I remember whole flocks of vivid green birds on the common in Staines.

Unrelatedly:

Revelations in the night,
as fires cool to ashen-grey,
we see with an imperfect sight
with only love to light our way

As fires cool to ashen grey
beneath the turning stars we run,
with only love to light our way
before the dawning hour is done

Beneath the turning stars we run
the twisting path of history;
before the dawning hour is done
the day is rich in mystery

The twisting path of history
we see with an imperfect sight
the day is rich in mystery
and revelation's in the night.

(For context: Day and Night are realms of magic; my character is touched by Day and the recipient of the poem by Night; mystery is one of the Night-realm's core concepts and revelation belongs to Day; the rune of Revelation is tattooed on my wrist and the rune of Mystery is in the locket he gave me.
For further context: my character is taking the sacred hallucinogens at the coming game and can expect to experience a vision of a hitherto unknown but important moment in history.)

There was a parakeet colony in a beach-side park in Glen Cove on Long Island. As I recall they had a big globular next up in a tree. I don't know how they stood the winters. Eventually they were cleared out.

Mary Aileen@215, OtterB@217

I'm going to Balticon. A ML meetup sounds good to me.

How does dinner Sunday evening sound for the Gathering of Light? We could meet in the hotel lobby around 6:00. Or would 6:30 be better?

If Sunday dinner doesn't work for everyone--alternate suggestions?

What I've read of the slated items in the Hugo packet is just abysmal, improved only slightly by imagining a Greek chorus of Crow and Tom Servo.

Elliot Mason at 189 -

and almost exactly the same at the time of European colonisation of Australia, unsurprisingly. The combinations of trees and grasses didn't look like the kinds of cultivated area that the Europeans were used to; so, obvs, the indigenous people weren't cultivating it.

And also exactly the same - I did not learn this in history classes at school.

My 79-year-old mother, who has suffered from horrible shingles (on her face, trigeminal nerve-a-go-go) for nearly a month, is now suddenly in surgery for an unrelated ailment.

Not even a little prepared for this. Freaking out now.

Prayers or their secular equivalent, please, I'm not picky. Thank you.

Patrick,

Good thoughts at your general direction. Hopefully it will be an easy surgery and a speedy recovery! Fingers and toes crossed for everything to be ok.

My fingers are crossed, Patrick.

I hope it'll be a quick and easy recovery, Patrick.

Patrick, prayers being sent her way, and yours.

Mary Aileen @223 Dinner Sunday would be okay by me.

Patrick, good wishes heading your mother's way.

Patrick, best wishes to your mother, on both problems. (I had shingles several years ago, on a facial nerve, fortunately not extremely painful. Do. Not. Want.)

Pulling for your mom, Patrick, and for you, in proportion, and for the doctors, to do what they have prepared and studied to do.

(My sympathy on the shingles, too. Horrid condition.)

Secular good health to Patrick's mom. Hope for equanimity to Patrick.

Wishing the best for Patrick and his mom, who's in hospital. Parents' health is one of the tough things about getting older.

Sigh.

A local rescue group has listings for two handsome belgian shepherd mix dogs. Gorgeous red and black fellows.

The rescue group refused to provide any details by email. "Come to our rescue event! Bring a leash! Walking the dog will tell you all you need."

Did a search. Found two different people complaining about them.

FFffffffhhfh.

Patrick, she'll be in my prayers, and I'll light a candle for her.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden #226: Best wishes and sympathies.

Stefan Jones #237: Ow. On a related note, my local SPCA seems to have a habit of lowballing dogs' ages. Besides my own case (they told me she was 3-4 years old, she was getting arthritis within 2 years), a couple of Mom's friends have had similar situations.

Pstrick, my best wishes for both you and your mother.

Patrick, my best wishes for both you and your mother.

And an internal server error may have saved me from typoing your name (with an s as the first vowel), but I doubt it.

Open-Threadiness.

So, given that the internet is entirely made of Words and Enthusiasm (h/t Erin McKean, there are certain things that Ought To Exist on it.

One such is a wide-ranging list of sets of rules for verbal games playable on car trips with kids. Like Botticelli, or Heads and Tails.

And yet I cannot find such a thing in Google. If it really does not exist I shall have to invent it, which means I get to learn how to moderate a wiki, I suppose. Am I just looking wrongly? Does anyone else know where to find one?

Patrick, #227: GoodThoughts being sent.

Stefan, #237: That approach would send me running the other direction. It's so obviously a variation on old horse-coper (or used-car salesman) tactics that it just screams, "These dogs have a problem!"

243
I've only ever met them by hearing the instructions.
(The most complicated one we played was
'I love my love with a [letter] because he/she is [word];
I hate my love because he/she is [word].
He/she took me to the sign of the [adjective noun] and we dined on [noun] and [noun].'
Every word you put in has to start with the appropriate letter. It requires vocabulary and imagination for some of them.)

I just happened across an article that reads like it ought to be in the Onion, only it isn't.

It's a walkthrough of a house built by architect Walter Netsch for himself and his wife to live in. The becrogglement just builds with every time they describe some completely bonkers aspect of the house in complete deadpan seriousness.

A two segments to tempt you to click through:

There are two small sitting spaces reachable only by built-in ladders; the new owners said they believe those were created as perches from which to view the Netsches' collection of art hung on the home's 30-foot-tall east wall.

"It's not a layout that works for a family with kids,” Smithe said.

...

One thing is guaranteed: the sunken triangular bathtub stays, he said.

Plagarism--the true gateway drug!

Sending thoughts and good wishes your way, Patrick.

PNH @226, I hope it all goes well.

Elliott Mason @ 245: It was in Chicago that I learned my lesson at the Art Institute: Never mock a piece of modern art until you've encountered it in person.

The photos look wonderful to me. It's obviously not for everyone. My knees tell me it might not be for me. But I once lived in an apartment where the upper bedroom was accessed either through its own upstairs door or the ladder down into the kitchen by the bathroom door. Standing on the ladder to chat, sitting in the upstairs hole with my feet dangling...how I loved that place!

You and yours are in my thoughts, Patrick.

245
I bet kids would love those, though.

Patrick, my best wishes for both you and your mother.

Kannon Sutra recited for your mother, Patrick, and good wishes going with it. Good luck with everything.

Patrick @226 - prayers said. (My own mother is 82, and has been in a bad way more than once, so I know what these times are like. Wishing strength to you and her.)

Patrick: Wishing you luck and tranquility.

Mary Aileen@223

Sunday dinner sounds fine. No strong preference as far as time, either 6:00 or 6:30 sounds good.

#249 ::: John A Arkansawyer

Richard Powers' art never looked like much to me on book covers, but was spectacular in person or in good prints.

Excellent analysis of Watership Down:
Introduction
Overview of what's going on in the book
A detailed look at why the book is politically important

I read the essays unspoiled, and I recommend doing it that way, but have a little summary:

Gur obbx vf nobhg Xvatfuvc va gur Whatvna frafr-- naq guvf vf fbzrguvat juvpu vf jbrshyyl vtaberq va zbqrea phygher. Gur pbzzba nffhzcgvba vf gung crbcyr va punetr ner gubhtugyrffyl qbzvanag, ohg pbzcrgrag yrnqrefuvc vf obgu cbffvoyr naq rkgerzryl inyhnoyr. Jngrefuvc Qbja vf irel fcrpvsvpnyyl nobhg jung Unmry qbrf nf n pbzcrgrag yrnqre, naq ubj fhogyl ohg npphengryl vg'f fubja.

Gurer'f nyfb n qrfpevcgvba bs jung vg zrnaf gb yvir jryy jvgu nakvrgl qvfbeqre-- ol uhzna fgnaqneqf, nyy enoovgf unir nakvrgl qvfbeqre.

Patrick: Good wishes to you and your mother. Don't forget to take care of yourself, too.

Patrick, best wishes for your mother.

@189 Someone much wiser than me -- and I wish I could remember who -- pointed out that by the time white folks got to the interior of North and South America, the civilizations that they met had already suffered an apocalypse-scale epidemic, like the one in The Stand.

One of the most enraging things I've ever heard at a convention... someone was speechifying about how colonizing Mars will be just like white folks colonizing the prairie. When I pointed out that people had lived here for thousands of years, I got a laugh and "no, no, it was empty!"

And then I had to stop talking because I was too angry to speak.

(Where I live, prairie doesn't just happen. You have to burn it every year or the trees take over. The local people had been maintaining this landscape with hard work and intelligence before "settlers" came and found all the magical pre-prepared farmland.)

El:

We had a car game that kept us busy for hours, sometimes, on the 10 hour drive to Missouri every summer. It's best with two or more kids, but a kid and an adult can play (with modern carseats, the adult should take the backwards side, as kids can't crane around any more)

It's also an alphabet game; the rules are that you have to spot a permanent sign of some sort that has a word beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. "X" can be in the middle of words (the exit sign is your friend!), but that's the only exception. Whoever makes it through Z first wins. (At or passing gas stations we spent a lot of time looking for displays of Quaker State motor oil!) We played one side of the street vs the other, which meant the kid on the left had to look backwards at billboards and the like. Overpasses are shared, but overhead signs with posts only on one side of the street get credited to that side.

I've heard of, but not played, a game where each side of the road counts cows, and if you pass a graveyard, all your cows die.

We had a good luck thing in our family where if you spotted a white horse, a red-headed girl, and a load of hay in an unspecified but fairly short period of time, it meant good luck, so if anyone spotted any of the three of them we'd all be looking out for the other two.

Not a car game, but a brilliant thing my grandmother did. She'd take a bag per kid, and decorate it with Christmas Seals and Easter seals (that part is optional [grin]), and put one small dollar-store-like car toy in it per hour of the trip, labeled with a number. That meant that when we were halfway down Illinois we weren't asking "are we there yet?" We were asking "Is it an hour yet?" And while most of the stupid little things were stupid, once in a while there'd be something that would actually keep us interested for a while....

I forgot to add that the toys were individually wrapped with tissue paper inside the bag, so we couldn't just choose the good ones and ignore the sucky ones. It occurs to me that wrapping them with paper towel might be a good idea, because a little extra paper towel available in kidspace is rarely a bad idea....

Patrick; you and your mother are in my thoughts. Best wishes for a quick recovery.

Oh, Patrick. My mom has had both shingles and unexpected major surgery, and as bad as both of them were, at least not at once.

My hopes are for things better for both of you. Certainly that the tide will have turned in several more days.

Patrick@226: Healing and strength to your mother and to you.

Patrick@226

Best wishes to both your mother and you.

Patrick, Thinking good thoughts for your mother, and for you.

Jeb Bush gets slammed for continuing to stand by the Iraq invasion". Hmm. Seems even the conservative media has decided to admit that was a mistake, but the actual candidates haven't accepted their marching orders.

(Of course, as others have pointed out, "If we knew then what we knew now" is a canard: We did know then, and ShrubCo went in anyway.

Patrick, I hope the surgery went well and that your mother is recovering and as comfortable as it is possible for her to be. Sorry to hear about the shingles; it's nasty. Prayers: check.

One great advantage of a workplace turned toxic is that it helps you discover new language uses.

As I was giving an honest answer to someone who asked me how I was doing today, I got asked, "Are you procrastinating?" I thought for a moment, as I was doing anything but, then said:

"No. I'm being procrastinated."

It's wonderful as a transitive verb, isn't it?

One of the best in-car games is probably Yellow Car, explained here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J4azAOhLgw

Nancy Lebovitz @200: I'd like to see a story where people play at pioneering, but the terraforming took work.

Interestingly, also Heinlein: Farmer in the Sky.

eric @204: They will eat from the feeder while it's being held, and even perch on your fingers if that's where they need to be to get a drink.

My mother had a bright red bandana that she'd wear when we'd go camping. At least once a camping trip, she'd get buzzed by a hummer, "Need to be pollinated?" They always seemed puzzled by the absence of sippy-parts.

Elliott Mason @242: Googling Botticelli car trip word game produces this list.

Patrick, hoping your mum is doing well.

Cally, we played that game as well, and I still play it on long road trips. My X exception (yes, I manfully resisted the temptation to make a portmanteau word of it) was always "Exit," though XING signs worked too.

In recent years, I codified the rule so that only EX- words count for X substitutes, and even more recently I toughened it up so that EX- words cannot be used as E words. This actually makes E a good deal more challenging, and I recommend it.

Typically, I start at the end and work backwards to A. When I was really addicted to the game, I would then work forwards again, and backwards again. Realizing I was hooked, I made myself turn away from it until I no longer parsed each and every sign and compulsively pressed onwards. I can play it a time or two on a given trip leg, and leave it alone the rest of the time.

A controversial part of my play is to allow moving signs, like trucks or autos that are moving advertisements. It's a slippery slope to allowing license plates, car models, and the boilerplate on commercial vehicles, but I limit it to advertising material. It doesn't much matter, because I am not competing with anybody but myself.

Also, I hate places that spell "quick" with a K. They are abominations unto the land.

Feeding the dread Internal Server Error...

I'm with Jacque.

Sarah @ 260: A recent theory related to this subject is that the huge loss in population in the Americas might have caused the "Little Ice Age" (the cooling period in Europe from roughly 1550-1850) due to the huge scale of the collapse in farming and the reforestation of farmed areas causing a drop in atmospheric CO2.

Kip W @ 276: "Also, I hate places that spell "quick" with a K. They are abominations unto the land. " I don't see why spelling it "quic" is any better.

Nancy Lebovitz @257: Interesting parallels between that set of essays on WATERSHIP DOWN and the way I read THE GOBLIN EMPEROR.

Patrick: Yikes, that's no fun. You're in my prayers.

David #268:

Does "what we know now" mean:

a. Iraq was no particular threat to the US? (Obvious in 2003)

b. Iraq's WMDs consisted of a few rusting chemical weapons shells from a decade earlier. (Knowable in 2003, but I don't know how many decision makers knew it.)

c. Iraq was going to require a decade long occupation during which we'd be trying to keep the lid on a bloody ethnic civil war, and which would end up with a very shaky, weak Iraqi government relying heavily on Iran for support. (Some people predicted this sort of outcome, but it was probably not widely known to be true. Nor can I really say how likely this was based on what you could see in 2003.)

My guess is that most politicians are answering based on (c). They pretty-well knew that Saddam wasn't a threat to the US[1], but they probably thought the whole invasion and occupation would go more smoothly, that we'd lose only a small number of soldiers and that most of the foreigners we'd kill would be conveniently off-camera and so not much of a political issue.

[1] I'd like to think our decision makers are smart enough to be skeptical of the claims of mobile biolabs and Nigerian yellowcake, but I think they're mostly not all that bright about technical stuff, so they may have believed it.

Tom Whitmore (281): I thought of The Goblin Emperor while reading those posts, as well.

First off, my prayers also go to Patrick with hopes of his Mom having a speedy recovery.

EM@245: I rather like what I see of that house, from how it's described and the pictures. It's nice to hear that two people who appreciate the home are going to keep it whole.

Mary Aileen @ 223: Sunday dinner is possible (I am not on call this weekend, for once) and I'm close enough to Baltimore to make it reasonable for dinner. Please email me at tvatre qbg gnafrl ng tznvy qbg pbz for the time, place to meet, etc.

Patrick, best wishes for your mom's recovery and yours...shingles is not fun at all, much less having to deal with an unexpected surgery.

And the Alphabet Game! We played that, but I am sorry to say we allowed all kinds of signs, stickers, and yes, even license plates. We didn't have as many billboards to choose from in those days. Why, we even had to play uphill, in the snow, with both hands tied behind..pardon me, there's kids on the lawn again.

albatross #283: All of those. (b) had been covered by inspections over the last few years, and (c) was what the people who actually knew something about the area were saying.

ShrubCo made a point of denigrating anyone who actually had expertise and wasn't willing to trade it in for "loyalty" (actually subservience, as in The Boss Is Always Right). And that was why we got into the clusterfuck, because one dry drunk wanted to show all the "eggheads" how he had a bigger dick than his daddy.

I love many things about that house, but the story-plus drop-off protected by a few portable stanchions and a velvet rope gives me the heebie-jeebies. I say that as someone who enjoys playing around heights; wandering through a room at home shouldn't have similar risks to climbing an easy crag route!

For the Balticon Gathering of Light, it looks like Sunday dinner works. Let's make it 6:30, in case Elise and/or Nancy Lebovitz want to join us. (They both have tables in the dealers' room, which closes at 6:00; I'm guessing that it takes at least a little time to pack up after that.)

So. Meet in the lobby of the Hunt Valley Inn, 6:30 on Sunday, and we'll go on from there. I'll be wearing my Fluorosphere button (bright yellow with a light bulb).

Thinking of you mother, Patrick.

I don't know if anyone here watches "The Flash" at all, but in terms of last night's episode, the obvious joke is "Rqqvr'f va gur fcnpr-gvzr-pbagvahhz!"

But on that note, why qvq ur xvyy uvzfrys? Fheryl n orggre bcgvba jbhyq unir orra gb yrg Rboneq tb naq gura gbqqyr bss naq unir n infrpgbzl naq vairfg va n pbaqbz pbzcnal sbe rkgen frphevgl.

#289 ::: Mary Aileen

Thanks for thinking of me. It does take a little time to shut down the business.

John A. Arkansawyer: context.

Patrick: prayers for you and your mother.

Is anyone here going to be at Nine Worlds in London in August?

Mary Aileen@289

I'm fine with 6:30 on Sunday. Just in case it matters, however, the Balticon Dealer's Room webpage currently says that the Dealer's Room closes at 5 pm on Sunday.

Michael I (294): Interesting. Either I misread it, or they changed it.

Let's stick with 6:30 anyway. I'd rather not change the details again unless there's a major problem.

Thank you all for the sympathetic words. My mother is recovering, and my sister-in-law (younger brother's wife) is on her way to Tucson to help out. Breathing a bit more now.

Patrick, your mother and your family have my prayers.

Glad to hear, Patrick.

Best wishes to Patrick's mom; may she continue to recover, and from the shingles as well.

Kip @276

Also, I hate places that spell "quick" with a K. They are abominations unto the land.

Abominations unto the land? Hardly! "K"s are almost as hard to find examples of as "Q"s. At least you can hope for a sign bragging about someone's product's quality!

The Rules Committee will take your "EX" rules under advisement. They are shaking their heads disapprovingly at the trucks, though....

Worrying about a sick parent long-distance is no fun at all!

(And I'm going to get shingles vaccine next time I see the doctor.)

@257 etc.: Interesting discussion. It reminded me quite a bit of _The Hallowed Hunt_ -- particularly the part about "King energy" and how it passes in succession, for reasons that are spoilery and/or obvious. Like _Watership Down_, _The Hallowed Hunt_ examines several kings and potential kings, starting with the prince announced to be dead in the very first sentence (a king who never was, but he was a lord and his lordship is examined), and continuing to examples that would be very spoilery indeed, but I am quite sure any reader will not have forgotten.

I think Siderea may harp a little hard on "a society that says that Kingship looks like The Threarah, not like Hazel", though -- seems to me both archetypes are alive and well, although not everyone agrees on which to prefer.

I am a bit puzzled by the decision to refer specifically to kings and kingship rather than to leaders and leadership more generically. The absence of thrones and scepters and other trappings of kings is not as odd if you're thinking of kings as just one particular type of leader, with the same ways of interacting with their people (except for Tabini-aiji, but this is going to be long enough already) but a shinier hat.

Other types of leaders, such as captains (of which SF has many to choose from, although one of the first to come to my mind was the non-SFnal Aubrey), have many of the same attributes and obligations, even though they are not kings.

Similarly, Admiral Naismith in _The Warrior's Apprentice_/_The Vor Game_, also not a king, also shown from the inside, some of the same principles seem to apply, including contrast with other examples, Oser, Metzov, and Cavilo. (And of course [spoiler], with whom he trades reproaches about deserting their respective peoples; both recognize the justice of the criticism.)

Of course you could say that a captain is the king of his ship and so captaincy is another form of kingship, but why is that better or more insightful than saying that kingship and captaincy are two branches from a common trunk? And then hadn't you ought to call the trunk something more generic to avoid confusion?

Mary Aileen@289: "Meet in the lobby of the Hunt Valley Inn, 6:30 on Sunday..."

I'll be there (at Balticon), and I will be there (meeting for dinner) unless other plans kidnap me.

PJ Evans @ 161: That's good for something that old (IIRC 2 models back). What kind of seasonal swing do you see in mileage? (I see at least 20%, but Boston is a lot more ... seasonal ... than the west coast.)

ajay @ 187: interesting point. I recall reading of a floor paved in millstones seized by someone enforcing a monopoly; it sounded realistic but I'm blanking on whether it was in fact or fiction.

Andrew Plotkin (303): See you there!

Another one here who kept thinking about The Goblin Emperor while reading those essays. That's at least 4 people making the same observation, which suggests that there's probably something to it.

Car games -- there's a license plate game my friends and I sometimes played on the way to cons. It works best in states with the pattern NNN LLL (3 numbers and 3 letters), and the idea is that the letters tell you what's in the trunk and the numbers tell you how many. So, for example, 288 NPC would be "288 non-player characters". Half the fun is coming up with creative things for the letters to indicate! We never kept score in any way -- it was a cooperative game.

chris @302: because Siderea is playing with the Jungian archetypes, and the term Jung chose to use was King. Those Captains you speak of are using the archetype without the name of King (and Siderea talks about this at some length in the essays: if Adams had used the term King we wouldn't connect with it as well because of the connotations that go with it -- which means that using the term Captain brings a different set of secondary associations which don't map as cleanly onto what Jung was looking at).

We played with that kind of license plate, too, Lee: making words with Scrabble scoring out of the three letters in the plate, in order, with a double word score for having the first and last letters of the plate be the first and last letters of the word, and a triple word score if the middle letter was also exactly in the middle. There was Discussion about what counted as the middle in a word with an even number of letters: if the letter is doubled there, is it the middle letter? That was never fully resolved.

I haven't been on in quite a while: big good wishes coming your way, Patrick, and for your mom an it be her own will.

Another road game is to be the first to spot license plates which add up to 10, e.g. XYZ 253. Only the first one to call out a given plate gets it; keep a running score; double points for something special (bus or police car), negative points if you add it up wrong and call the wrong license plate.

We played the alphabet game, but not with only the first letter of words - we could take any letter from any fixed sign. Our road trips were shorter though. If we tried the other way, we'd never win (we still didn't always win).

We had to stop during towns, but if you could read that tiny sign on a farmer's fence and get letters out of it, more power to you. As kids we did car halves, but as adults we still sometimes do it cooperatively.

CHip @304 - I half-remember a similar story; something about a Bishop's courtyard being paved with querns confiscated from the peasantry... but the details are obstinately refusing to come clear in my mind.

We did the license plate game by trying to make words out of the letters. Our rules were that you could add any vowels you wanted, but were downchecked for adding consonants. (Doubling a consonants was okay, so was making 'ck' out of either 'c' or 'k'.) We didn't keep score, just gave kudos for a good word. I still do this.

One long car trip, Georgia to New Jersey to Pennsylvania and back, my older brother (then a teenager) decided to keep track of which states we saw license plates from, with the goal of collecting all 50. We all helped look for new ones. He saw 48; the missing ones were Hawaii (makes sense!) and either Nebraska or Nevada (I forget which).

We used to play the alphabet game. I remember watching for eXit signs, Quaker State motor oil, and "E-Z" anything.

We also played a Geography game. Each person names a place that begins with the last letter of the previous place name. The name you give cannot have been used previously. Some letters are obviously easier than others.

My husband and his friends used to play Ghost (add a letter to the string, which must be part of a word, but trying not to be the one to complete a word).

OtterB, I think you forgot to change your nym back. :)

You're right, Mary Aileen. Not sure how that popped up - don't think I've placed an actual spam report for a few days. Oh well.

Oh, and I look forward to meeting the Balticon contingent Sunday evening.

Cally @261, sounds like Four-Legged Animals. You can only call animals on your side of the car, and if someone else calls them (we had a 16-hour car trip with four kids) you don't get them. I remember a livestock truck that we passed, then it passed us on a downhill, then we passed it again. It turned into "How fast can you count out loud?" I also remember someone (a friend of mine who had kids and took roadtrips) deciding that, yes, a graveyard kills your animals, but a church resurrects them.

Figuring out what someone's license plate would be if it were a vanity plate ("HEG, clearly they're a High Energy Guy") is good for minutes of entertainment.

Sandy B. (316): We did that variant before switching to the one I described above. It started when I was about 10 and decided that the LFT on our new plate meant we were Looking For Trouble. My mother liked that one, although really nothing could be farther from the truth. (We were an appallingly law-abiding bunch.)

OtterB (315): Looking forward to meeting you, too. I'll try to post a reminder here on Sunday morning.

We've been known to play something that started out as a forum game: "50 eggs." [from Cool Hand Luke.] Pick a word and try to find 50 songs that have that word in the lyrics. If you can just rattle off ten as fast as you can speak it's too easy; "love", "fire", "baby", etc. If you can't rattle off three it's probably too hard: "parthogenesis." In the forum version, if the original suggester was challenged and couldn't come up with a song that hadn't been mentioned, they got pelted with fifty imaginary eggs; if they met the challenge, the challenger got egged.

Elliott Mason @Hugos III/671: I can produce a long and entertaining rant about the squishiness of species and how species "work" as a piece of scientific technology (not all technology can be banged on a rock)

Did this ever get followed-up upon? If not: yes, please.

Cally, it's true that K is a hard one (J and K together can be a long haul), but Q is the gold standard of difficult letters, provided one has the EX exception.

As to trucks, there are vehicles now that exist for no other purpose than to be a moving billboard, and the display signs on the sides of semis are sometimes the only signs I see for mile after mile of driving. Clearly, your disapproval does matter to me, even though I'm usually playing against nobody but the signs.

On some familiar routes, I know just where the Q is going to be, and if I start playing late, there can be some genuine suspense over whether I'll clear the R before I get to it. There's one trip I take where I suddenly find myself in the Valley of the Qs: Quaker Steak, La Quinta, Quizno's, and Quality Inn are all happily nestled together in a fairly short stretch. I sometimes wish I could pocket one of them for later.

Patrick, I'm glad things are going well. I hadn't considered that you are being anxious at long distance here, which can be even more harrowing. I raise my water bottle to your mom: Health!

Sandy, #318: That sounds like a variant of Encore!, which is a board-game but could fairly easily be adapted as a car game. Two teams, 1 referee; the referee provides a word, and the teams take turns singing lyrics that contain that word. Lyric sections must be at least 8 words long to count, and the last team to successfully come up with a lyric gets first turn on the next round.

For the advanced version, throw in categories -- things like "women's names starting with A-M" or "commercial jingles" or "food and drink". (Hint: "Disney songs" should not be used as a category because it will go on FOREVER.)

Kip: there's a Dairy Queen that I wish I could put into my pocket for later, it's true. (Why oh why did a restaurant's movable letter sign stop advertising their pies a few blocks before it? Why??) Where I live there is a glut of Ws, but not a lot of Zs, either.

The Rules Committee hasn't decided about modern LED billboards yet. They're provisionally acceptable, but all arguments haven't yet been heard.

Trucks which are billboards, if they're parked by the side of the road being billboards, are ok. If they're in motion, or look like they expect to be moved any time in the next few days, not so much. That Quizno's delivery car, however tempting, is Right Out.

We had several car games growing up that no one has mentioned yet. Most of them are variations on the same theme of memorization and alphabets: Each player has to recite the whole list of preceding items before adding theirs for the next letter. Sometimes we did the alphabet backward for variety.

"I built a zoo and in it I put a(n)..." Anteater, Baboon, Cheetah...

"I went on a vacation and in my luggage I took a(n)..." Anklet, Bookmark, Calendar...

"I went on a picnic etc..."

Other people in the car would try to veto items that are too far afield from the stated category ("No one takes Angle Iron in their luggage!") or are repeats of a previous entry by another name ("You can't have tapirs, we already put anteaters in the zoo!") and the original person would try to defend the choice.

The other family car game we played was called Zit. First person to spy a white horse would yell "ZIT!" Over the course of a trip we kept lackadaisical track of each person's zit total. This game is embellished with arguments over exactly how white the horse actually was, or whether it even existed if no one else saw it.

Re: Car games.

Nobody's mentioned "slug-bug" yet; a rather violent car game from my childhood.

If you see a Volkswagon Beetle, you yell "Slug-Bug!" and thwak the sibling sitting next to you. Thwakking the driver is NOT ALLOWED. Neither is hitting hard enough to hurt, let alone bruise.... You have to be the first to say slug-bug or you don't get to slug anyone. Only one slug per Bug.

I gather that there's a modern update: "I see-us a Prius."

Cassy B @325
My childhood VW Beetle game, you yelled "Beaver!" when you saw one. "Beaver Cleaver" was for a red one. And "Beaver Bus" and "Beaver Bus Cleaver" for VW vans and red VW vans. I believe punching the person next to you was involved.

*snort* for "I see-us a Prius." I hadn't heard that one.

Em @290 Sadly The Flash finale does not reach the UK until next week (because, ironically, it travels very slowly, like by clipper ship or something I assume) so let me instead pose what I think is the most pressing question:

Why wasn't there an episode in which Barry had to be in two places at once, preferably dinner in two resturants across town from each other? My preference would be that the forensic lab is being outsourced and the eccentric investor insists on meeting this brilliant investigator*, and meanwhile he has a hot date with an investigative journalist who is far too close to finding out who The Flash is, but anything really.

The show can have that idea for free.

* "To the outside world I'm an ordinary forensic scientist," Barry declares at the start of most of the episodes. Seriously man, your day job would make you a regular on the Joe West show, and quite possibly co-lead in CSI: Central City.

Cally, I can understand your rule. If I ever get to play the game with you, I'll certainly honor it, regardless of whether we're in my car or yours.

Cassy B, my daughter calls it "punch buggy," and used to play it on any car trip she was on with a peer. When I was in grade school, I used to be aware that a friend of mine played it, and seemed to call it "P punch" or perhaps "peewee punch." The color of the VW in question was always called. "P punch the green one!" or "Punch buggy yellow."

Neil W, I'm aware of the plot device being used by Fred Flintstone, though not at widely separated venues. I thought about it recently in a discussion of a bigamist with two families.

Em@290

V guvax gur vffhr vf gung Rboneq qbrfa'g qvfnccrne hagvy Rqqvr npghnyyl qbrf fbzrguvat gung znxrf Rboneq'f rkvfgrapr vzcbffvoyr. Rqqvr xvyyvat uvzfrys qbrf gung vzzrqvngryl, juvpu vf jung gurl arrq. Ur pna'g trg n infrpgbzl hagvy (ng yrnfg) gur arkg qnl naq gurer'f fgvyy npgvir fcrez sbe n juvyr nsgre n infrpgbzl. Cyhf infrpgbzvrf pna bsgra or erirefrq. Fb Rboneq jba'g qvfnccrne sbe dhvgr n juvyr, naq znl abg qvfnccrne ng nyy.

Kip W @328, yes, I seem to remember we usually (but not always) named the color, too. "Slug-bug! Blue!" Not because it was required, but because there were unlikely to be two blue VW bugs in sight at any one time, but there MIGHT be a blue one and a red one, too. So "Slug-bug red!" was still available....

Michael I @329 - that reminded me of Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time, where (should I spoiler-protect a book that old? Oh, what the heck) gur jrncba bs ynfg erfbeg sbe qrnyvat jvgu Fbenvaln vaibyirf n cuvny pbagnvavat gur pher sbe n qvfrnfr fur nyzbfg qvrq bs ng gur ntr bs gra. Bar thl unf fgbyra guvf cuvny bhg bs ure crefbany gvzryvar, ohg fb ybat nf vg erznvaf haoebxra, gurer vf nyjnlf n punapr ur jvyy chg vg onpx... ohg, jura gurl unir ab pubvpr ohg gb xvyy ure, gurl fznfu gur cuvny, znxvat vg ergebnpgviryl vzcbffvoyr sbe ure rire gb unir yvirq cnfg gra lrnef byq, fb fur vafgnagyl snqrf njnl.

Jacque @319: I'd love to but could you ping me about it like maybe Tuesday if I haven't done it by then? I'm right now amidst frantic packing-for-con and am likely to forget you asked. :->

I discovered Punch Buggy in the company of people who all knew the game.

I still stand by my decision to punch the other kid back.

I think the URL says most of what needs to be said, except to note that both of them show a sense of humor about it:

http://happyplace.someecards.com/celebrities/jk-rowling-sees-neville-longbottom-in-his-skivvies-and-it-gets-awkward-on-twitter/

My kids learned "Slug Bug" from their schoolmates; I think I've also heard them call it "Punch Buggy". They also play "Cruiser Bruiser" (for PT Cruisers). They generally call out the color, for both kinds of vehicles.

My older son created his own game, "Two Cube", which apparently doesn't involve punching anyone, but requires simultaneously sighting two roughly cubical vehicles (Honda Element, Nissan Qube, Scion xB, etc.). The vehicles don't have to match in any way, and he doesn't mention their colors.

Here in Southern California, keeping track of Priuses would get tiring. I used to point out Teslas to whoever was in the car with me, but don't do it any longer as even they've gotten more common around here.

OtterB at #31, I may have had the wrong movie. IMDB was not loading for me when I wrote the comment, so I asked my BF the pop culture consultant. However the 1960s are a little before his time.

Today was the 2.5hr bus trip to Ames for Special Olympics Bikes. I found myself, once I was awake, looking for letters... then, around B, deciding that that way lies madness and let's just not.

And then I couldn't stop.

Argh?

Also, the cow/cemetery thing sounds very interesting and totally a where-I-grew-up thing rather than a where-I-live-now one. The two and a half hour drive goes from corn and soybeans to corn and cows, plus from interstates to two-lane roads.

The Guides' play was tonight and, scenery disaster overcome, went off without a hitch! They did a super job and I'm really proud of them. Here's a photo of the Evil Fairy (which doesn't show anyone's face, so I'm okay to share it).

Open threadiness: has anyone else here read Lloyd Alexander's second book My Five Tigers? I'm currently reading it aloud, and finding it a superlative book on why some people like cats, and what happens when a really good descriptive writer catches the cat bug. Originally published in 1956 in hardback; paperback from Dutton in 1973. It does not feel dated, at least up to halfway through. I'd love to see what another illustrator than Peggy Bacon would do with it; she's spare, and very much a 1950s print artist (think Wanda Gag, in her litho mode). Highly recommended for cat people; if it got reprinted, I'd buy at least 5 copies to share.

Sandy, #333: I'd back you on that. Springing a "oh, this rule says I can hit you" game on someone without warning is [REDACTED] amazingly rude, at the very least.

The first time I ever had a partner "poached" from me at an SCA dance -- when I had no idea that such a variant even existed -- was Not Fun, and left me with a permanent distaste for the activity, such that I would not dance at all if it was going to be done.

Hyperlocal news: my Amazing Fiancé and I walked at Commencement today. We'd filed and gotten our lollypops last week, but today was the parade-around-in-serious-regalia bit, and it was a good time. We're now, really and truly, Doctors.

Benjamin Wolfe @341: Congratulations! Welcome to the new Drs!

I do hope that either now or after you handed in your theses you took some time off, at least a week? I didn't (handed in my thesis on the Friday, started at new job on the Monday) and it retrospect that was a mistake).

Elliott Mason @332: could you ping me about it like maybe Tuesday

Reminder sent to work email. :-)

Tom Whitmore #339: That's tempting, especially given the writer. There's the old comment that "God gave us the cat so that we could pet a lion", which sounds much in the same vein.

But from 1956, I can bet there's at least one side to it that he didn't cover, namely the T. gondi issues.

My daughter not only knows Slug Bug but also brought me the game Banana, where you call out yellow cars. Taxis and other commercial vehicles don't count.

I was so thrilled the first time I got to say Banana Slug Bug!

Since she's a playful kid, this led to Pumpkin for orange cars, Spoiled Banana for yellow convertibles with black tops, Blueberry whenever one of us felt like a car was a nice enough blue.

Having a kid who likes to travel is a real blast!

Any plan for a Gathering of Light at Wiscon?

Dr Wolf #341 - congrats - here, open up this virtual bottle of libation-of-choice

I'll be at Wiscon. Come say hi at the Strange Horizons Tea Party.

When I was young, we used to play "race car" from the back seat. You start at a pre-determined position for the trip (usually 10th place). Each passed car advances you one position. Each time passed puts you back one. If you reach #1, you win one race. When the trip is over, you see how many races you won and compare to the last time you did the same trip.

Collusion with the driver not recommended.

Heh. When I was a kid riding in the back of the station wagon, my brother and I would play tanks-- the dotted lines were land mines and we were laying them down to blow up other cars.

Hyperlocal Adventures in (semi)retirement.

This morning I got an email from AFLAC in response to my resume I posted on Monster. However, they weren't looking for a part-time developer in the Houston area. They wanted sales and account reps.

Regretfully, I had to turn them down. I sent this email.

===

Thanks for your interest in my resume, but several years ago, I auditioned to be the voice of the Duck, and I was turned down.

If I can’t have first prize, I don’t want second.

Sincerely,

Steve Clayworth

David Harmon @344 -- no, you're right -- the time cat didn't bring the info about Toxoplasma back to him. It's a very different style from his later books, actually -- and I really like it. Very conversational.

Steve C #351

I get those e-mails from AFLAC at least twice a month.

You know you're at the bottom-end of headhunters' queues when you get an e-mail touting how your resume on Monster impressed them to no end, and that you would love it at this wonderful company, yada, yada, yada.

Then, about two-thirds into the body of the e-mail you see the position they are touting is..

Mail-room attendant.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Diatryma, that's pretty much what happened to me: the game became a compulsion, and I couldn't just look at signs without trying to move through the alphabet. For a couple of trips, I had to strive to let it be, and it was hard. When I looked at signs, I was keeping a mental tally of where I was, on a level somewhere below voluntary. When I finally got that mental voice to shut up, I was free.

I still play the game, but I can stop now. (The important thing is to remember to start soon enough that I'll get that one "Quality" sign in Pennsylvania, or not be caught short when I enter the Valley of the Qs.)

Benjamin Wolfe @ 341

Congratulations to you and your Amazing Fiancé! Welcome to the new Doctors!

Diatryma @ 348: I shall try to get to the Strange Horizons Tea Party! So far, I've met Elliott Mason.

At Balticon. I chatted with Elise in the dealers' room for a bit, and told her about the Gathering of Light. Unfortunately, she already has other plans for Sunday dinner.

I also ran into Michael I.* in the dealers' room. Plus a friend from Twitter. Busy place, that room.

*We ended up buying copies of the same book from Larry Smith.

341: Congratulations Dr Wolfe, Dr Fiancé, and Happy Silly Hat Day.

My daughter and I just watched, at her suggestion, My Neighbor Tortoro. It's pure magic.

Being a father has good days, and better days, and today was one of them.

David Harmon #344: Or Christoper Smart's wonderful phrase "The cherub cat is a term of the angel tiger"

Cassy B. #325: My sister and her family play a version of the slug-bug game (although they mostly just call 'em and don't seem to do a lot of slugging) that includes a variation. "Slug-bug!" is reserved for a genuine original VW Beetle (1938-2003); if they see the modern imitation Beetle (1997-2011), they instead call out "Ug-bug" where the "Ug" stands in for "ugly".

#359: There are moments in Totoro that are . . . sublime. Uncanny, wondorous, magical.

I am waiting for the Blu-Ray of Spirited Away, which doesn't have anything as breathtakingly uncanny as the bus stop scene but is still a joy.

Totoro is quite possibly the best children's movie ever. And the most violent thing that happens in it is that someone trips over a tree root.

Yay Ireland.

Australia, we're directing concerned glances in your general direction from across the Tasman.

Stefan Jones @ 362: There are moments in Totoro that are . . . sublime. Uncanny, wondorous, magical.

Yes, exactly. I am not a moviegoer, but I would watch a movie like that every day of my life.

Tom Whitmore @ 363 Totoro is quite possibly the best children's movie ever. And the most violent thing that happens in it is that someone trips over a tree root.

And kids argue, and fear for their mom's life. There's just exactly enough of that to be faithful to the life of kids without being dark. But I have to differ a bit with you: I think it might be the best movie ever, period, at least by some measures. I know there are others. But it's only appropriate that he made a movie called Spirited Away, because that's how I felt.

I saw two things in it that I love, though not so much as this: Rugrats and Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends. The creators of both those must have gone to school on this guy's studio's work. They're very different, of course, but the faces of the Rugrats--I especially saw Angelica in Setsuki--have so much of this in them, as does the depiction of kids' worlds.

And the sensibility of Foster's--the idea of a home like that, and the matter-of-factness of it. The pacing is quite different, of course, and there's slapstick--the first episode I saw had poor Wilt run nearly to death--but it's a fundamentally kind (if not always gentle) show. And whenever I've visualized Mr. Herriman, I see him holding an umbrella. Now I think I know why.

John A. Arkansawyer @365: And I would say that the kids arguing, and fearing for their mother's life, are less violent than the tripping over a tree root. It's a very suspenseful film, because of those issues (and the lost child issue, and the question of what Growing Up actually looks like) -- but it's not violent.

I gave a copy to my brother when his twins were 4. It turns out to be a film that adults can watch almost as often as 4 year olds want to watch it.

When I watch cartoons these days I'll occasionally see Miyazaki's influence. He really raised the bar.

It doesn't come anywhere near Studio Ghibli in terms of character design and overall quality, but I quite enjoyed "Over the Garden Wall." Scary at times, employing a sort of Colonial New England Uncanny. Definitely for older kids.

One of the things I've liked about the Miyazaki films is the importance tied to a good work ethic. You see a lot of this in Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Spirited Away.

My DVD of Spirited Away got scratched, so I've ordered the Blu-Ray. It's scheduled to arrive on June 16.

I need to rewatch Mononoke. I have the Blu-Ray. Just need to nerve myself up. Found it rather overwhelming.

Since moving to the UK I have been introduced to "pub cricket". You get points by counting the number of legs implied by the pub name (e.g. The White Horse = 4 legs; The Duke of Wellington = 2 legs, etc.). When you encounter a pub with no legs (e.g. The Queen's Head), it's the next person's turn, and so on until the end of the journey. The friend who introduced me to the game likes to propose The Herd of Millipedes as the best possible pub to pass.

The game also lends itself to rules lawyering: Is it actually a pub? Do closed pubs count? What if the pub name doesn't specify numbers (e.g. The Fox and Hounds, The Coach and Horses)? If it's The X's Arms, do you get to count the legs in the heraldic device?

Interesting possible double-post failure mode. I was commenting in the nomination-procedure thread and previewing heavily. When I finally posted I got:

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

Too many comments have been submitted from you in a short period of time. Please try again in a short while.

Please correct the error in the form below, then press POST to post your comment.

But I checked in a fresh window, and the comment had in fact been posted. Maybe I clicked POST twice without realizing, or my browser stuttered, or there's a small bug in the backend. Anyway, interesting.

thomas @364: Yay Ireland indeed. Next, hopefully, a bit more sanity in women's rights to abortion,

I do not believe that rights should be subjected to popular vote. That being said, the Irish have definitely come down on the side of civilisation once more.

Open threadiness: a heads up for gamers.

I needed cheering up after the election and decided to treat myself to some dice games. I ordered them from Infinity Games UK; this was on the Sunday after the election. The following day I got an e-mail to say they'd been dispatched. Fine so far.

Things then go like this:

Wednesday I e-mail to enquire when to expect the games. They e-mail back to say the dispatch e-mail was sent in error and apologise. I reply, fine, we all make mistakes, please send them out now.

I wait a week. Nothing happens.

Following Wednesday I e-mail again enquiring about my order. No reply.

Thursday I gather all my spoons and try ringing them. I get a recorded message. It's a land line, and it's 3.25 pm. I therefore e-mail them again. Still nothing.

Friday By now I am getting really worried. I try ringing again (same landline, 2.05 pm) and get the recorded message again. I e-mail to explain that I really need to know what is happening with this order, and I don't want to have to seek a refund via PayPal because I want the games I ordered, but if I don't get them then I'll be left with no choice.

Less than ten minutes later, they e-mail back, apologising profusely, to tell me they'll send out the games first class immediately. They explain that I couldn't get through on the phone because it wasn't charged (????!!!).

Saturday (today) - games arrive, I'm a happy mongoose.

---

Now, reading between the lines here, there are an awful lot of products out of stock on that site, and I'm pretty sure it's a one-man business. I suspect that a) the business is doing badly, and b) as a result of this, the owner may be suffering from anxiety. The business has always had excellent reviews in the past, but I know very well from my own experience that anxiety can cause panic, avoidant behaviour, and outright self-sabotage.

So, maybe... if you're short of spoons, avoid; but if you've got plenty of spoons, consider seeking him out? Your call. I don't think I can deal with him again, because otherwise it's going to be the Anxiety Tango and I can't cope with any more of that. But I wouldn't like his business to fail, all the same.

Open threadiness. On a plate comic on entitlement. Via Elizabeth Moon's sff.net newsgroup.

Fragano Ledgister @373: I do not believe that rights should be subjected to popular vote. Pretty much what my husband said, and I agree. Apparently, however, in Ireland a referendum is required to make a change to the constitution, so...

On car games: one we used that depends on traffic density and who you've got playing is to make words containing the three licence plate letters, in the given order (though not necessarily contiguous)

Shorter words beat longer ones, and contiguous letters win for words of the same length: eg, given UPD, 'unpod' would lose to 'updog'.

Reminder: Balticon Gathering of Light tonight (Sunday), meeting at 6:30 in the lobby of the Hunt Valley Inn.

I'm having a lot of trouble with the hotel wifi, so I may not be able to check back for updates.

Back in the jolly days before vanity plates, I recall that Mom would make use of the letter portions of plates as part of her quest for communication on the road. If a car had an LZ prefix, for instance, she might say "Come on, Lizzie, it's not gonna get any greener." If the other car was an LU-, she might say "What do you want me to do, Lulu? Bow you across?"

I've inherited this desire for communication (albeit imperfect communication, as the occupants of other cars don't hear me any more than they heard Mom), but had to tone it down. Some passengers develop unfounded ideas from it regarding my emotional state, when all I'm doing is keeping the lines open.

OtterB @375: Just went and read than. Sums it up nicely.

My kids are surprisingly calm and amazing travelers—as in, I started out by giving them toys and books to play with, but stopped bothering once they didn't pay attention to them. On the ten-hour trip to Grandma's house.

Mind you, they do have complaints from time to time, but for kids who are seven and five years old, being able to take a trip without constant issues is a blessing. I will note that I don't have electronic devices going, and now I have a justification... since the seven-year-old has developed carsickness since being moved to the back row so as to make room for the baby. So sorry, can't give you the iPad lest you throw up on it. (Hooray for Dramamine, I have to say. Expensive but worth it.)

We've done the "collect the states" license plate game. It depends on the time of year, but it's common to be able to get half the states and two Canadian provinces just traveling up the West Coast.

Re Gathering of Light tonight at Balticon: I have to bail. Sorry to miss it.

OtterB (382): Sorry to hear that. Thanks for letting us know. Another time, perhaps.

The Gathering of Light went well. We had eight people: me, Ginger and her partner, Michael I, Andrew Plotkin, Nancy Lebovitz, Dan Layman-Kennedy, and Jon Singer. Elise sent her regrets; she already had dinner plans for this evening by the time she heard about the GoL.

Conversation ranged from how to catch cats and horses, to how to feed sheep without getting mobbed, to Ukrainian politics, to social media, to proofreading and the importance of the serial comma, to the Hugos (and I'm probably missing a few things). A few puns were perpetrated. All in all, a very Fluorospherean evening.

Restaurant recommendation for those in and near Berkeley: Nino's Pizzeria and Brazilian Restaurant, on MLK a block and a half north of University (half a block south of Hearst). Chicken croquettes with catupiry - yum!

Re: Miyazaki: My Neighbour Totoro is one of my favourite films of all time, but I have a problem. I imprinted on the dubbed translation from the Fox video days.

While the Disney one is perfectly acceptable as dubs go (unlike the ones for Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso - watch those with dubbing and subtitles on together and you'll see why I consider them subtitle-only), it rings "wrong" to the part of me seeking the comforting core of the film. A favourite song sung just out of tune.

I feel like I desperately need the out of print Fox DVD version, as I only have it on VHS, and have only minor access to a VCR. I suppose at some point I'll have to yield and go Disney, even though I will always, in a handful of scenes, be mouthing a different set of words.

(I have a much weaker version of the same issue with Nausicaa even with subtitles, because the fansub I had for years is not just different, it's objectively superior. But it doesn't cut to the heart the same way.)

Lenora Rose: At least one public library near me has a VHS to DVD recorder; perhaps one near you does as well, so you can convert your Fox VHS copy? It won't be as high-def as a straight-to-DVD copy likely would be, but it would have the "right" words.

B. Durbin @381: Hooray for Dramamine, I have to say. Expensive but worth it.

When I was little, ginger snaps were a traditional snack whenever we went to the drive-in movies. It was only years later that I deduced that this evolved from the practice of having them on hand as a paliative against car-sickness. (Which was, apparently, a Thing at some point. I don't remember it, so I don't know if it was me pre-memory, or my five-years-older brother.)

Oddly, with a very few, very particular exceptions, I don't have trouble with motion sickness. What does happen if (when flying, frex) turbulance occurs, is that my eyes roll up in my head and I become overpoweringly sleepy. Apparently my brain parses that kind of motion as "rocking." Which is not un-useful.

Referencing back to the gender discussion in Hugos III (which seems to have died out): Becoming Chaz elaborates many of the points covered in that thread.

One thing that struck me: as we have more people crossing the gender spectrum physically, I predict we'll begin to get a much better grip on what falls where in the innate/acquired–biological/cultural space.

P J Evans @ 385 : Good to know. My Amazing Fiance and I have walked past them for years, and always been a bit perplexed by them as a restaurant (they’re never remotely full).

Lenora Rose @ 386 : I’m very familiar with the problem of the Two Dubs of My Neighbor Totoro - my brother and I imprinted on the Fox dub at ages 7 and 4 respectively, and the Disney dub is just wrong. As I recall, tracking down the Fox dub on DVD is somewhere between difficult and impossible, since relatively few were made.

I have now met Elliott Mason, Diatryma, and Xopher Half-Tongue in the Real World at Wiscon. I have also run into a few people that I knew from west coast cons, and met many fine people for the first time. I'm finding it a splendid con. Madison has changed dramatically since I was a student here in the 80s, and is well worth a visit.

I noticed Patrick's "This Happened" sidelight about John Scalzi's lovely book deal. My hearty congratulations to both Tor and Scalzi.
(It is thoroughly petty of me, but I'm a wee bit gleeful at the gnashing of teeth this probably produces among some individuals.)

I have now met Elliott Mason, Diatryma, and Xopher Half-Tongue in the Real World at Wiscon. I have also run into a few people that I knew from west coast cons, and met many fine people for the first time. I'm finding it a splendid con. Madison has changed dramatically since I was a student here in the 80s, and is well worth a visit.

I noticed Patrick's "This Happened" sidelight about John Scalzi's lovely book deal. My hearty congratulations to both Tor and Scalzi.
(It is thoroughly petty of me, but I'm a wee bit gleeful at the gnashing of teeth this probably produces among some individuals.)

I got the server error. I opened another tab, looked at the front page, and my name wasn't there. Navigated to the page, and my post wasn't there. Refreshed the 2nd tab -- wasn't there. Then I refreshed the tab where the error was displayed, and got the double post.
Should one wait 5 minutes or so, and only then refresh the page with the error? Or is the refresh actually doing the double post?

Janet: It's my recent experience that it's the refresh itself that does the double post. But I could be wrong.

I was tickled to see the "Things I won't work with" particles, as I've followed Derek Lowe's writing for years. If you haven't followed it, I urge you to do so (now that the gogogarden redirect has been fixed).

In the whole series, my favorite is still "do not be omitting the stirring" from 2011.

janetl @ 381: (It is thoroughly petty of me, but I'm a wee bit gleeful at the gnashing of teeth this probably produces among some individuals.)

That's one of the first things I thought of when I saw that.

Given what some of us have endured because of those individuals' gaming of the rules, I don't feel the least bit guilty for that slice of schadenfreude pie to finish off the celebration.

(And very grateful I am to the people doing the Puppy reviews. It helps a lot when, after the first few paragraphs, I'm left asking, "Am I crazy? Am I crazy?")

390
If you're lucky, Mario will be there - big middle-aged guy with a beard - my sister met him when she went to work at the precision-optics place, where he worked on the stuff for Galileo. (Which is still reporting back.)

: Jacque : # 389

"...One thing that struck me: as we have more people crossing the gender spectrum physically, I predict we'll begin to get a much better grip on what falls where in the innate/acquired–biological/cultural space..."

If that sort of thing were to keep happening, I have this amusing image of all the JCW and VD "types" attempting to find a frame of reference for their contrary assumptions to argue from.

I imagine them all frantic, as they start scouring used bookstores for copies of Chip Delany's work, for a refresh in Remedial Reality.

janetl (393): It's my understanding that the Server Error means that a comment got stuck in the gears somewhere and, depending on precisely where, the next comment from the same person might (or might not) shake it loose. Something to do with page rebuilds, IIRC.

Some fine fine Internet^W industry commentary on the Scalzi deal from Cheryl Morgan: The Wages of Sin (reshared from Facebook)
Wiscon members will enjoy the highly accurate depiction of your recent con experience.

Coffee and cats warning: do not be drinking anything or have any easily startled creatures in your lap before reading.

Clifton @ 400: That picture of a bath is completely fabricated. Wiscon only had one hot tub of man tears.

Lenora Rose, 386

First, regarding your preference for the Nausicaa fansub: there is a OCR program you can use to extract the subtitles from any fansub or DVD. It needs a little babysitting with edge cases, but if you can fill it in, it will fix it, and spit out a file with the correct text and timings. (I don't remember it's name, but google helped me last time.) It's then possible to sync it with a ripped DVD on playback in a free program called VLC.(Just point VLC at the right folder and it will display the subs in that folder! Fun!) I'm not sure what would be involved in re-authoring a new copy of the DVD with the new subtitles.

Secondly, let me suggest a technological solution to the problem of the Fox dub of Totoro. Record the audio track from the VHS tape to a computer. Once you have the audio track, there are a number of ways to extract the video from the DVD and splice in the audio you recorded. You can then burn a new DVD with the good quality video and the audio track you desire.

Yes, there are a lot of steps, and some technology details. There are forums with people who would love to help, or at least offer suggestions. If you are still interested, I will spell out the details in the following paragraph:

You'll need an RCA (male, stereo) cable to a mini plug (male, looks like a headphone plug). Hook the audio out from the VCR to one end, and attach the other end to the audio input on a laptop. Install the free, open source, audio program "Audacity" in order to record the audio track. (You may have to mess with the sound input control panel on your laptop. Ask for advice from people who are into pc computer gaming. The forums on Ars Technica are actually pretty helpful, though if you can find the right on Stack Exchange, it might work faster.) Once you have the audio track, then you will need to decode (rip) the DVD into it's component audio and video files. This is easy, with a program called DVD Shrink. (Try the doom9 forums for tips on DVD shrink. Handbrake will also work, but may make it very difficult to get back to a DVD if that's your final output format. Great for ipads, though.) Find the folder with the audio files for the DVD, and load them into Audacity as a second audio track, parallel to the first one. Zoom in carefully to the beginning of the audio tracks, and add or subtract as much silence as you need in order to make the Fox dub start at the same time as the Disney dub. When you think you have it right, save your work as a new file just to be sure, and go to the "export" menu and try to export the audio for the now fixed Fox dub to the same format (probably WAV, though you should check). Find the directory the Disney dub ended up in when the DVD was ripped, and replace it with the Fox dub. Reopen DVD shrink, and try hitting "re author" to make a new DVD file, called an iso. Once you have your iso, you can burn a new DVD with your combined old dub and new video.

I apologize for the wall of text, and for the suggestion that you might want to start such a specialized, detailed, and potentially lengthy process. I am nerdy about this area, but I recognize that this might not be your cup of tea. Certainly, it is not the best method. You might be better off asking friends if they have a DVD copy of the Fox dub, and see if they can make you one. It would certainly be simpler.

Oh, I forgot to mention - this might be interesting to everyone. The playback program VLC, will synch subtitle files with anything it plays back. Moreover, it will play back DVDs, so you don't even need to rip a DVD in order to play it with different subs. (Possibly it will synch an alternative audio file too, but I've never tried.)

It is free and open source, which means the UI leave something to be desired. On the other hand, you can skip past unskippable menus, *glares at Disney*. It's the only thing I use to watch DVDs on my laptop.

Belated: Baltimore fluoro-dinner was very nice. Although I was at the wrong end of the table for learning about sheep management.

Thanks all.

(Now I am home and my primary Mac has booted up with disk errors. Fie.)

Fragano Ledgister @ 373: I believe rights should be gained by any means necessary.

The fetish of "no direct voting on rights" has killed at least two local non-discrimination ordinances, one in my old town Fayetteville, Arkansas, and another in Springfield, Missouri.

In both cases, local activists worked through the city council to get good ordinances passed. The other side then challenged them by referendum and won very narrow victories.

By pushing the ordinances through the councils rather than through the initiative process, the activists gave up the, well, initiative to the other side. The other side, not the activists, determined the timing of the public vote. They had the advantage of appealing to the tradition of direct democracy. And they had the advantage which accrues to "vote yes for no."

Those add up in a close race.

I understand the theory behind "no direct votes on rights" and have some sympathy for it. I also don't believe legislative bodies, courts, and executives should determine those questions. They are questions of simple right and wrong, of justice and decency, that transcend those bodies. They should never be in question. But they are in question. Pretending otherwise leads to defeat.

If there's going to be an election no matter what you do, I believe in winning it however you must.

(I'd also rather trust the worst twenty-two percent of the population than the worst twenty-two percent of the Supreme Court, but that's another story.)

I am surprised, but find it convenient, that Making Light as a whole has not added more than 1000 comments since the last time I checked (Thursday morning, before leaving to attend WisCon).

More when I've caught up. :->

There are reports on Twitter that Tanith Lee has passed on.

Jon Meltzer... Yeah. I just found out thru Pat Cadigan's facebook page. Cancer, apparently. On Sunday.

Fragano/John:

Re whether rights should be subject to vote.

It seems to me that this just pushes the question back from "should this be allowed?" to "is this a right?"

At least in a US context, everyone who makes a decision about what will and won't be done by the government and the law comes down to politics and elections. We can decide whether to recognize gay marriages in court (by permanent appointed politicians, and who gets to appoint them is a major issue in elections) or in the legislature (by elected politicians) or in a popular vote, but ultimately it all comes down to what the public will support.

Also, this looks a lot less like an issue of principle than an issue of tactics, to me. Gay marriage is more popular among elites than the broader population, so courts are more likely to allow gay marriage than legislatures, and legislatures are more likely than direct votes. But I'd expect it to work the opposite on, say, drug legalization / decriminalization.

Andrew Plotkin (404): The sheep management bit was pre-dinner, when you were asleep(?) on the other side of the lobby. Ginger told a couple of anecdotes about dealing with sheep and rams.

I'm glad you could make it.

Can we talk about birds? I want to talk about birds.

This weekend I found myself on the bank of the Kansas River (aka the Kaw) which, incidentally, is higher than I've seen it in many years.

I'd just IDed a phoebe when I noticed a hawk sitting in a nearby walnut tree. It was just a few meters away, so I had a wonderful view of the hawk and the grackles who were harassing it.

The hawk was impervious to the little birds' efforts. I saw one bold grackle bounce off the hawk's head, without any effect. I knew something was up when the hawk stopped sitting on one foot and focused on a particular spot in the branches below it. It bobbed its head back and forth, the way birds do when they are calculating the precise distance to a target.

Then it leaped into the branches. I couldn't see what happened, but there were a lot of enraged bird noises and when the hawk reappeared, it had a bird in its claws. It flew to a new perch and began plucking its dinner.

Now, I'd be confident that what I saw was a red-tailed hawk except that 1) it was awfully small 2) it had bars on its dusky, decidedly non-red tail 3) it was eating a bird. Red-tails will eat birds, or so the internet insists, but it's not a behavior that I associate with them.

The hawk could have been a juvenile male, which would explain its size and its stripeyness. Red-tails do tend to hunt from perches. If it was a juvenile, then it gets full marks for hunting technique, with extra credit for being literally unflappable in the presence of angry grackles.

411
It's possible it was a Cooper's hawk. They eat birds, and they spend a lot of time in trees.

It could have been a juvenile Cooper's Hawk, I suppose. Adults tend to be gray rather than brown. At the time I was hoping to prove that it was a red-shouldered hawk.

Just a short note before I go back to try to catch up from 4 days offline. There was no flooding in our immediate area, but our power was out for about 12 hours. We are fine, just completely worn out from ComicPalooza.

Bird...I found a juvenile great tit in our side yard yesterday. Looked juuuuust short of being able to actually fly, so maybe it tried and failed. I watched it cheep back and forth with its parents, watched them swoop down and feed it, and wondered what to do.

Being unable to find the nest anywhere in range, I'm afraid I let the birds handle the situation. It was still in the side yard this morning, but I can't see it now. It could be under one of the clumps of cress, but its parents aren't about any more.

I don't know if a cat (or raptor*) got it, or if it flew off, or if it hippety-hopped somewhere more welcoming than our pavement-and-cress side yard.

I couldn't take it inside if I'd wanted to -- Martin's allergic to fur and feathers -- and I didn't know what constitutes a better refuge for a juvenile tit, so I didn't want to move it (the parents were finding it by sound; they would have found it again).

What does one do in those circumstances?

----
* I know we have raptors that take birds, because I saw it happen, right over the street I was cycling down, on my commute home last month. And I've seen more than one acrobatic chase that didn't lead to a kill.

@abi A lot of birds go through a stage where they're partially flighted and being fed by their parents. As long as the parents are around and the fledgeling isn't hurt or in *immediate* danger (e.g. sitting in the road), it's best to leave it alone.

If you do have to pick one up, wear gloves (to keep your mammal germs off of it, and its poo off of you) and stick it in the nearest tree or shrub.

The Cornell Bird Lab has more advice: On orphaned birds.

abi @415, I agree with Sarah - if it was sufficiently feathered that you could ID it, it's probably a fledgling and is safe to be out of the nest. If it wasn't in a road or actively being stalked by a predator, leaving it alone was the right thing to do.

I've always found this to be a good guide (sent to me by wildlife biologist sister, who knows her apples. And baby birds): If you find a baby songbird out of the nest.

HLN: Local woman has just come from her midterm exam, during which she wrote a long, detailed, thoughtful essay responding to the argument in an article which, upon post-exam perusal of the course readings, was not actually the article the exam question was asking about.

Local woman is consoling herself that at least she spelled everything mostly right.

No serious flooding where I was either (although plenty of water splashing around) and I don't think I even lost power. The storms made the trip back home from Dallas more interesting than it might have been, although nowhere near the equal of the time I encountered thundersleet.

I was in Dallas to compete in the district finals for the Grand National Teams, a bridge event, in flight B. (Second-to-lowest bracket, below Flight A and the Superflight.) My team reached the final round of the knockouts, but lost. The winners pretty much outplayed us start to finish, so I can't even say we were robbed.

abi: In the case where the parents have gone missing, are there any local wild animal rescues you could contact for advice?

Elliott Mason @332: "...squishiness of species..." I'd love to but could you ping me about it like maybe Tuesday if I haven't done it by then?

It's Tuesday: ping! ping! ping!

A friend I trust about wildlife told me last week that birds have about a day of adolescence where they look scruffy but can fly. It makes sense to me that the fledgeling stage, where the parents are still feeding the offspring, would be similarly short.

Some nice shepherd-type dogs are turning up on Petfinder searches, but dang . . . some of them, I'd have to change their names. Which seems disrespectful, you know?

WRT to the Texas rains - an estimated 162 billion gallons of water fell on Harris County last night. Really.

Fortunately, we were safe at home. I did stay up to 3AM watching news reports.

B. Durbin, #381: Seconding your enthusiasm for Dramamine. I had horrible carsickness on long trips as a kid, and it was a blessing to both me and my parents. Somewhere along the line I outgrew that tendency, but I still have occasional issues with airsickness on a rough flight, so I keep some in my travel bag.

Jacque, #389: The YouTube video requires signing in to view due to adult content. But it's available from Amazon for $4.99.

SamChevre, #395: I've been known to describe "Things I Won't Work With" as "Steve, Don't Eat It!" for chemists.

Re rights and voting... Sadly, this is one of those "in theory, theory and practice are the same" situations. Theoretically, there are such things as absolute rights. In practice, rights are whatever you can convince enough people to believe they are; this is amply demonstrated by the number and variety of things which have or have not been considered "rights" in various times and places throughout history. And even when you can get people to agree that thus-and-so is an absolute right, there are not lacking situations where one must resolve the issue of "when absolute rights conflict, whose absolute right is more absolute?", and those situations tend to be resolved in a way that is monotonously predictable.

Rights are social constructs, and as such, it is inevitable (though unfortunate) that they will often have to be voted on. My own right to vote in such situations was itself once voted on.

Steve C., #424: That doesn't surprise me. We were under more-or-less continuous waves of thunderstorms for at least 6 hours straight, with levels varying from "rain" to "you could wash your hair in this" to "damn, who turned on the hose?"

Em #418: LOL at the green section!

Steve C #424: Yikes. Pity they can't ship some of it to California....

Sharing Tanith Lee's epitaph, posted on tanith-lee.com:
19/9/1947 - 24/5/2015
"Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told – on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others – there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change – passing on the fire like a torch – forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all."
- Tanith Lee

I keep tearing up everytime I reread this.

Regarding Patrick's sidebar on "* Are we living in an era of transformative technological change? Maybe not.":

I usually like Krugman, but here he's essentially saying "if this is so transformative, how come we aren't all rich yet?" Which is simply a non sequitur: There's been plenty of social change, occasionally rippling into politics. What there hasn't been is some magical reallocation of resources to the public. Yes, huge amounts of value are being created, but those are being harvested by an assortment of companies. Indeed, the economics of computer and software production favor big capital¹, and so the industry has concentrated its wealth into large companies, at the same time as global changes have also concentrated wealth among "them that has". That's why the economy is staggering.

¹ Free software isn't that much of an exception -- there are enough drawbacks to relying on it that most people do need or want commercial software as well. And its value fades into the background, so it doesn't show up as exonomic growth.

David Harmon @ 425 -

I agree, I think the next 20 years, technologically speaking, will make the previous 20 look like it was standing still. This doesn't necessarily translate into economic utopia because that kind of thing can't really exist. I think we're going to see the the less developed countries advance at an astonishing rate because that's where the (now) cheap labor is and the where the young people are.

It will be an Asian and African century.

I enjoyed this:

"No one cares about your jetpack: on optimism in futurism"

http://madelineashby.com/?p=1809

America’s problem is not that it needs more jetpacks. Jetpacks are not innovation... ...Imagine a Segway that could kill you and set your house on fire. That’s what a jetpack is.

...
In the end, the lacklustre performance of Tomorrowland at the box office has nothing to do with whether optimism is alive or dead. It has to do with changing demographics among moviegoers who know how to spot an Ayn Rand bedtime story when they see one. There are whole generations of moviegoers for whom jetpacks don’t mean shit, whose first memories of NASA are the Challenger disaster. And you know what? Those same generations believe in driverless cars, solar energy, smart cities, AR contacts, and vat-grown meat. They saw the election of America’s first black president, and they witnessed a wave of violence against young black men. They don’t want the depiction of an “optimistic” future. They want a future where their concerns are taken seriously and humanely, with compassion and intelligence and validation. And that’s way harder than optimism.

I just had another episode of Head Meets Brick Wall:

Comic Con Panel on Women in Early Comics has only men on it, and one of them opined that "girls get bored with comics easily."

If you do have to pick one up, wear gloves (to keep your mammal germs off of it, and its poo off of you) and stick it in the nearest tree or shrub.

Once again, Making Light gives you child care advice you can use.

Me #428: Come to think of it, an elaboration on the economic value of free software:

When value is genuinely available to all, it becomes invisible, especially to elites and pundits -- a "new normal" that's taken for granted instead of celebrated.

Never mind Krugman's talking watch -- how many checks have you written lately? When was the last time you needed to find a pay phone, and make sure you had enough change for it? Music, movies, publishing -- the big studios still dominate the production, but they've lost their oligopoly. If you want to put out your own record, movie, book, game, you can do it -- tougher than signing up with the big guys, but still, doable. And that free software itself may often lack the polish of commercial software, but it lets people run a modern office or organization on a shoestring.

Open Thready: I have just discovered the existence of IDIC medallions. I'd like to have one of them. A casual google produced a decent EBay lineup, plus some polished but oddly-sketchy sites, so they're clearly around. (Tip for websites: Do not embed the search terms in your site copy. Uncanny valley much?)

I thought I'd check here to collect recs for decent sites where I could buy it.

I think Krugman's column echoes a discussion that's been going on for a decade or two about why the massive improvements in technology we keep seeing in our lives don't show up as massive improvements in GDP.

One pattern I've seen a lot with these innovations is cutting out of middlemen. Laser printers and decent word processing software and PCs mean you don't really seem to need so many secretaries. (Though there's a lot that a good secretary does that has nothing to do with typing or dictation.) Accounting software doesn't eliminate the need for accountants at the high end, but it does let you get away with fewer bookkeepers. Middle management has famously been downsized away, probably partly from technological changes. Record and video stores are gone or going away, and the same looks to be happening to most bookstores. A lot of physical stores are being replaced, at least in part, by online shopping. And so on.

When you cut out the middleman, you eliminate his salary and all he'd been spending from economic statistics. This should be offset by the extra money available to the company, but I could imagine the multiplier effect from corporate spending being different (and lower) than from individual spending. But I really don't know if this can account for what's going on.

Another possibility is that better computer support has made it easier to move a lot of income off the books, in ways that make it harder to tax and incidentally, make it harder to measure in GDP.

It's an interestng question.

ajay @432: this parent is falling about laughing.

Especially because TimeHop reminded me that yesterday several years ago (2009) I was retweeting from a Twitter game called #parentingtips someone started, including such gems of advice as:

@MsClara: By giving my children FOOD, I can grow bigger, stronger children than my competitors. Try feeding yours & marvel!

and

@FenlandGent: #parentingtip Prepare your kids for the inevitable by occasionally killing their pets
(ashamed of myself a little, but I lol'ed)

Stefan Jones @#423, when I was fostering I had a policy of changing the name of any dog who had been abused. I wanted to be able to call them without making them flinch.

Of course, all my pets seem to end up with a name, a nickname, and an epithet (e.g. Sarah, Sarah Bear, Big Moose), all of which they recognize and respond to. We also had cartoon voices for all of our dogs (4 at the time) and the Aussie mix recognized the voices and would look at whichever dog the humans were "speaking for".

David Harmon @ #428, I'm about as good with economics as I am with sports (not at all), but my reaction to that piece was "Productivity my ass. Why the hell should we all work harder to make a few rich assholes richer?" Plus the fact that a lot of time, money and effort has to go into maintaning the new tech, teaching people to use it, debugging, etc. etc.

Lila, Stefan, in re Dog names and changing them: We renamed both our dogs, because I tested to see if they alerted to their "old" names, and they didn't.

If they didn't know the phonemes meant "ME!", I see no reason I can't pick a different set of phonemes I prefer, to train them that it means that. :->

Our dogs came named "Buttons" (as in and-Mindy) and "Dino". Sigh.

albatross, #435: Don't forget that when you cut out all those middle managers, their salaries do not go back into the economy in any way; they go straight into the pockets of the people at the top of the company, and there they stay. There is effectively no compensatory spending at all by corporations.

Elliott, #436: I might find that second one funnier if I hadn't known someone whose father did exactly that. She grew up on a farm, and whenever she got especially fond of one of the barn cats or tried to make a bond with one of the kittens, he'd have it put down.

@418 Oh, Bird and Moon is the absolute best.

David Harmon @ 428
I usually like Krugman, but here he's essentially saying "if this is so transformative, how come we aren't all rich yet?" Which is simply a non sequitur: There's been plenty of social change...

I also usually like Krugman and was equally disappointed by the "Why hasn't change made us rich?" tone of the column. If we look back 20 years, I think the rapid progress of technology hasn't translated into money because the change mostly has been involved in putting people out of work as opposed to giving them work. A robot that replaces the manual labor of 50 people with 2 skilled tech-workers isn't going to magically make those 48 people rich.

On the "Transformative" aspects of change: the majority of us still get up in the morning, drive to work, do a job, drive home, have dinner, watch some TV, and go to bed. The transformative aspects of our technology can be seen as being mostly on the edges. Booking a trip is easier. Cars are safer. I have better medical care. Looking up information is faster. We haven't eliminated the need for cars; we still look up information; I still go to a hospital when I get sick. There's been a lot of social change, but I don't know how much of that is driven by technology shifts. (I'm aware that it can be argued that social change is strongly technology-supported; I'm just not completely swayed by those arguments yet.)

Don't get me wrong; I'm super happy living in the future. There are times when I freak out over the ability to have a casual real-time chat with my friend who lives in India using a tiny device that lives in my pocket. But for developed countries, I'm not sure we've seen a truly transformative thing happen yet. Developing countries probably have or will have in the next twenty years. Developed countries are going to -- sometime in the next twenty to fifty, but I don't think it's going to be the kind of change that makes us all rich. I think it's going to be the kind of change that puts us all out of work and makes us actually rethink how money and society really function.

Stefan Jones @ 430
I enjoyed this:

"No one cares about your jetpack: on optimism in futurism"...

Am I the only one who assumed that the only reason Disney made Tomorrowland was because they really wanted an excuse to revamp the Tomorrowland section of their theme parks? As long as the movie breaks even, I figured Disney doesn't care if the movie makes money because that's not why they made the movie. Making money is a bonus.

Now, I do wonder if Tomorrowland is wrestling with the issues discussed in the link. Are visitors to Disney skipping Tomorrowland? If they are, is it because Tomorrowland needs a refresh (it did when I was there) or because they aren't buying into a Shiny New Future? And if so, is this because they are, unlike Krugman, aware that the future is full of robots, unemployment lines, and climate change wrecking our homes?

With regards to changing technology and the visible effects thereof, I admit I'm not much of an economist; I've got a decent grasp of the intro-to basic theory, but don't lay claim to more!

That said, in non-economic terms, I was having a discussion with someone a generation older than I am a while back, and when he was my age, The Future lay in new transportation methods: jetpacks, rockets, flying cars, etc. I came to the conclusion that what actually happened was that technology was used to reduce the need for any transportation method at all. Not eliminate it, granted, but there are a lot of things swiftly becoming redundant.

I work for a company in a different country, in the opposite corner of my continent, and I don't need motorized transportation to get to work; my workstation is in the same set of rooms as my residence, and I'm able-bodied and can therefore walk to it without any motorized assistance. I'm not familiar enough with motorized mobility aids to comment on how much they've improved with any actual authority, but things like the scooters I've seen at cons seem to be pretty handy, with limitations resulting chiefly from space considerations and the lack of ability to fly up staircases; I'm not sure how long they've been around, though.

Other friends who do occasionally work in physical offices telecommute on a regular basis. Business travel - with some exceptions*, actually travelling is unnecessary. You can have a meeting pretty well via telepresence; even the meeting "look" is possible, given the rooms dedicated to that purpose with a semi-elliptical conference table and a wall that's a screen.

Someone else mentioned online shopping; I no longer need to travel to go to a lot of shops. Instead, an efficient (and THERE is something we've improved on transport-wise) van travels the most efficient route to deliver goods to me and a lot of other people.

The end result for me is that when I do use transportation technology, it's generally for pleasure; to go visit people, or to engage in an activity (guiding, theatre, choir, to a museum).

The transportation technology we have made strides in has tended towards doing the same thing, better. The bus I ride into town uses biodiesel. I was looking at car purchases to replace my current rustbucket, and my dad made the very salient point that there are no truly bad cars being made with an eye to being sold where we are; the top end is still pretty much tops, but the bottom's been raised significantly. The cheapest car on the market, the Hyundai Accent, is a pretty good car.

Economically, with the caveat from the beginning - that kind of efficiency's not really all that great. You sell less fuel. You sell fewer cars, because they last longer. (I could be wrong, though.)

*Thinking of my dad, who is an aeronautical engineer who goes to the manufacturing plants periodically to actually hold and assess the quality of the parts being manufactured.

Paraphrasing Warren Ellis:

"Where's my jetpack!?!?"

"I don't know. Let me check the little glass box in my pocket that has access to all the world's knowledge."

albatross @435 a discussion that's been going on for a decade or two about why the massive improvements in technology we keep seeing in our lives don't show up as massive improvements in GDP. and
cyllan @441 If we look back 20 years, I think the rapid progress of technology hasn't translated into money because the change mostly has been involved in putting people out of work as opposed to giving them work.

From what I've read, the winners in financial benefit so far from technology improvement are small businesses and entrepeneurs in the developing world who now have cell phones to reach customers, check prices, etc., when it used to take years and many $bribes to get a landline installed.

It's playing out differently there than it is in more developed countries.

435
When you cut out the middleman, you eliminate his salary and all he'd been spending from economic statistics. This should be offset by the extra money available to the company

That money is going to pay the CEOs. Which Krugman knows and is not saying, because it's so obvious to many of us.

Open Threadiness: The History of Crayons.

Problem #1: CEO pay isn't all that big a share of corporate revenue[1]. In general, CEOs get massively overpaid because they're in a good position to negotiate a big salary (and that's the sort of thing a CEO is going to be good at!), but this is a symptom, not the disease.

Problem #2: If the wealth benefits are flowing to CEOs, or to executives, or to the companies themselves, or to their stockholders, it still won't stay there. Some of what they get, they'll spend (which creates demand in the economy--that's what the spending multipliers in Keynesian economics are about), and some they'll invest or save (which makes capital available for other businesses).

If cutting those middle managers made the company more efficient, then the whole system should have more wealth in it at the end--the company either pays its other employees more (maybe mostly going to top management), or returns more for its shareholders, or cuts its prices, or expands its operations. And any of those should be reflected in more economic activity.

One possibility is that we're seeing a lot of economic activity that used to be paid for and now is free--like pirating music or spending your spare time surfing the web rather than going to the mall. But it seems kind-of hard to imagine that this explains most of the lack of better economic growth correlated with better technology.

[1] This is sort-of parallel to discussions about the deficit where people talk about the need to cut welfare or farm subsidies or foreign aid to balance the budget. The problem is, none of those things is a very big fraction of the budget, so cutting them has a pretty negligible impact on the budget.

I just finished reading "Economics: The User's Guide" by Ha-Joon Chang. He mentions that all the hand-wringing about "the decline of manufacturing" (in the US, the UK, and somewhat in Europe) is based on "constant dollar" comparisons of the amount of economic activity in the manufacturing sector over time. If you instead look at "constant price" comparisons over time, it turns out that we're still manufacturing nearly as much as we ever did, we're just doing it a lot more cheaply.

One of the themes of the book is that choice of economic theory is a political choice; there is no one "objective" way of analyzing economic activity.

Em @290, Michael I @329 - having seen the Flash finale the answer is obviously aneengvir onynapr. Jr unq n jrqqvat rneyvre va gur rcvfbqr, fb gurer zhfg or n qrngu.

Zber frevbhfyl, nygubhtu gur gvzr geniry vf fhecevfvatyl pburerag, guvf ovg qbrfa'g znxr frafr. Znlor Rqqvr pbhyq unir qrpvqrq gb ergerng vagb gur jvyqrearff naq orpbzr n urezvg, jvgu gur veba jvyy erdhverq gb znxr guvf n yvsr ybat ibj. Ur jnyxf bhg gur qbbe naq Erirefr Synfu fybjf naq snqrf yrnivat Oneel naq gur erfg bs gur grnz whfg xvaq bs chmmyrq. Phg gb Rqqvr va eborf ba n zbhagnva... fbzr bofpher zlfgvpny QP punenpgre gncf uvz ba gur fubhyqre... Snqr gb Oynpx...

Lbh xabj V jnf orvat fvyyl, ohg gung pbhyq unir jbexrq.

I had a long response here for albatross, 447, and Jeremy Leader, 448, but I got distracted by the article "The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us" by Nick Hanauer. It's pretty cool.

Now that it takes very few people, and very little energy to make stuff to buy, it's not clear that it's worth very much. Meanwhile, stuff that can not be made more efficient is really expensive by comparison. It's cheap to buy a car built by robots. It's expensive to hire a plumber. It's really expensive to go to a University.

Craig R @431: What makes it worse is that Trina Robbins, one of the foremost historians of women in comics, was a guest of the convention. Trina is also a long-time fan (she was a staff cartoonist for Terry Carr's fmz Innuendo back in the 60s), and a fascinating speaker -- don't miss hearing her if you get a chance.

450
People forget just how much can't be done by machines. (I used to read maps, and I also did QC. Not machine-replaceable.)

447
Possibly - but when CEOs are getting 7 or 8-figure paychecks from companies that aren't making profits, it's a problem. And when the money is being spent on them, regardless of profitability, and they only stay a year or three, and leave with 8 or 9 figure checks ('golden parachutes'), that's a big problem. That money isn't going to people who are productive in any way that benefits the companies.

PJ:

I'd say it's a small problem--like the fleas on a dog, they're sucking up resources, but not a huge fraction of available resources. By contrast, the sometimes perverse incentives CEO compensation packages have can do real damage, because they can lead the CEO to run the company into the ground in order to max out his compensation. This is more like the fleas leading the dog to scratch and chew till he has an open infected wound. And more generally, I think the ability of top management to help themselves to a huge share of the pie is a symptom of a lot that's going wrong in our society.

But I don't think any of these things can explain the productivity paradox.

ALbatross #454 - it seems there's a major issue with productivity in the UK actually falling, and nobody is quite sure why. I have a list of suggestions myself, but it seems rather complicated.
For starters, many UK companies are now competing on a global stage, and as we have seen with the USA, operations are shifted overseas as fast as management and owners can see a profit in it. And I am not convinced that there is anything like the needed amount of simple real investment in the UK (hint- buying expensive property is not the sort of investment I mean).
Another issue is the lack of money in the economy, as the government mandated austerity sucks the blood out of it.

A note to Mary Aileen: I did not immediately realize that the Fibonacci pillow-quilt I bought at Balticon was yours. (Why I thought there would be *two* Mary Aileens at Balticon... never mind.)

Anyway, it's nice! I bought it as a gift for someone who is mathematically minded, and she thought it was great. So thank you.

Andrew Plotkin (456): You're welcome! I'm glad it went to a good home.

Hmm. does this shake loose a lost post?

Lenora Rose @ #458

Apparently not; it's either taking tea with the gnomes or has been impounded by the NSA.

Open threadiness: FOAAS (Fuck Off As A Service): a modern, RESTful, scaleable solution to the common issue of telling people to fuck off.

Lenora Rose @458:

I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the comment of my community that pingeth, saying, Publish me, my shepherd, my gnome, my goblin, my moderator: for my text is filled with interest, and my links with the charms of the net.

I have put off my pointy cap; how shall I put it on? I have washed my instruments of moderation; how shall I defile them?

My commenter's (view all by) was in my sight, and my heart was stirred by the words therein.

I rose up to read her comment; and my cup dripped with tea, and my saucer with fragrant Radch tea, upon the keys of the board.

I opened the back end for the comment; but it was not to be found, and was gone: my soul failed when I saw the moderation list: I sought it, but I could not find it; I searched for it, but it did not appear.

The wyverns that fly about the chrome and steel tower found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the sentient vines that sing upon the walls took away my coif from me.

I charge you, O members of the Fluorosphere, if ye find that comment, that ye quote it, for I am sick with curiosity.

Which is to say, no, it's not to be found.

Idumea, you are a treasure.

An international treasure, no less.

(As for the missing post: this moose blames the NSA.)

Idumea Arbacoochee, Gardener of Threads @461: The Thread of Threads, which is Idumea's.

Awesome!

albatross, #447: The problem with this is your #2, which continues to be a cornerstone of free-market argument even though it is demonstrably not happening, and has not been happening for at least a decade. That money is being siphoned off at the top and squirreled away; very little of it flows back into the economy at all, at any level.

In order to increase money circulation in an economy structured the way ours has come to be, you have to pump it in at the bottom, where people will actually DO something with it.

#447 ::: albatross

Perhaps the problem isn't just the CEO-- there might be enough over-paid top administrators that it adds up.

Or maybe the problem is the stockholders--not personally, as they're mostly fine folks, but as a class who live off other peoples' labor--who get the lion's share of the profits.

Lee # 465 -

This is the point that most people who are anti-public assistance ("they're all lazy bums"), anti-ACA ("why should my tax dollars pay for someone else's health cAARE!") and anti-unemployment insurance ("they're all lazy bums, and using my tax dollars") miss when they use so-called "entitlement" programs as the cause for the poor economy.

If somebody doesn't have money they can't spend it into the economy.

If somebody doesn't have monies for groceries past the bare-bones minimum they don't spend it.
If they don't spend it there's no economic incentive for the grocery store of the supermarket variety to exist, never mind either hiring more workers or upping the wage.
If those workers don't have the money, they're not going to buy that car.
If they don't buy that car the service industry devoted to that car's purchase and upkeep (let's keep the pollution/resources of creating/maintaining/using the car separate for, OK?) is impacted (gas stations, service/repair shops, financing companies, yada, yada)

In a similar vein, the overwhelming majority of people who get unemployment compensation are not keeping that money out of the economy: they are going to buy the aforeto mentioned groceries, paying the rent or mortgage,the electric bill that is currently due or pay the rent. With the added fillip that, in reality, the salary or hourly wage the now-recipient of the UI check has also been paying the premiums, based on the fact the amount of salary offered has the employer factoring an unacknowledged holdback about paying the insurance premiums.

It's not a "tricle down economy," it's trickle-up

Some of the biggest stockholders are mutual funds, indexed or managed, which are the cornerstone of 401K funds. Pensions (those that are left) also invest heavily in equities.

Steve C @ 469: It used to be "widows and orphans". Now it's "retirees and their 401Ks".

I look on my 401k as a frenemy: It's money for me (good) which ought to be going into Social Security or something like it (which would be good, if it were, but it ain't, so it's bad) and which serves to make working people feel their interests the same as the interessts of those who profit by a system in which the money flows up and the crumbs trickle down (bad, real bad).

Someday I need to read that Karl Marx guy. I understand he's got something to say about this.

The real issue about the stock market is so many companies being focused on stock PRICE.

If they were focused on being able to give regular, steady dividends to their long-term shareholders, that's a strategy that's known to build companies. But managing to the daily price quote (or even quarterly) is deeply destructive of company value.

What does this all mean? Nothing in particular, really, except to remind us that every powerful group in the world is intertwined in a global meganexus of money and influence, compared with which our individual hopes and dreams are like the smallest ladybug being blown by a gust of prairie wind.

Something else of interest here from Slate: An astounding, one-of-a-kind trove of stories and drawings reveals what life was like for young men growing up in rural 19th-century America

Is there an issue with a large group of workers saving and fewer (former) workers spending their savings?

Although the baby boomers in the US are heading into the classical retirement years, some of them are trying very hard to remain employed and saving. But others are forced into high levels of medical spending. I don't have a good picture of how the numbers play out.

A Very Specific Kind Of Knowledge Is Contained In Making Light question:

When you quote something out of context to create the exact opposite meaning, is there a more specific phrase for that?

I have a whole planter of strawberries coming along nicely in the backyard.

My husband has had one ripe berry off it. My daughter has had two.

My BEAGLE has also had two, not quite ripe when he plucked them. Clearly I need to put the planter further off the ground ...

Sandy B @475, um, "Being An Asshole"? Sorry, I don't have a more specific term of art; perhaps someone else here does....

Childhood worldbuilding in the 1890's: The Nelson Brothers' Archive.

AKICML - I'm thinking of getting a Network Attached Storage disk to be accessible and shared with both my Mac and my wife's Windows machines. Can anybody recommend one and any pointers on setting it up. My usual Google-Fu didn't serve me too well.

Economically, I tend to agree with the vast majority of people above me: If you want the money to circulate, give it to the people who will, out of necessity, spend it really fast.

In related news, I feel very Piketty-ish when I consider that the middle class used to have a typical wealth of around $100,000 (mostly houses) and now they start with around $30,000 of college debt just to break even. And starting salaries for college grads have not gone up , inflation-adjusted, since 1991. They've gone down.

If you're annoyed with Marvel for slighting Black Widow (and female characters in general) in their licensed merchandise, you may be interested in this T-shirt.

(Disclosure: This seller is one of our friends, and we print the shirts for him.)

For those of you who like the Plant Identification Game and don't mind Facebook, I have a public post there with pics of my latest mystery.

tl;dr: It's a plant with white star-shaped six-petalled flowers, each about half-dollar sized in old money, apparently sprouting just as flowers on a stem with no leaves at all (yet; probably some will come later in the season).

More from Slate: Science Fiction Is For Slackers -- which actually is looking at SF layabouts... alas, it doesn't mention Heinlein's "Lazy Boy", which I would have considered a mandatory namecheck.

And yet another (I may be behind the curve on this one): Google Map's attempt to crowdsource map updates seems to have backfired, badly. Aside from outright pranks (many racist), we have this:

Maps automatically uses forums and discussions to make inferences. Based on how people talk about certain places or how often a phrase and a place name show up together

Edit fail: "racist racist" should have been "racist cracks".

304
Sorry for taking so long, but I didn't see this until this week, and had to crunch numbers. AFAICT, the mileage I'm getting is non-seasonal - it likes going out on highways, though; gets much better mileage then.

HLN: Austin resident discovers that last year's freak weather that flooded the house wasn't so freakish as anticipated, and is now living with seventeen industrial fans, three giant dehumidifiers, and no lights for at least a week. "At least the cats don't mind much," she said grimly in the desert-like heat of her house, while the dog terror-drooled on her for sixteen hours straight. "Aside from the one who now refuses to come inside unless it's raining. Been doing a lot of that, lately, too. Rain, I mean. Lots of rain. And thunder."

She was later found staring grimly at the furniture shoved into the middle of the living room muttering about not having wanted to sleep in her own bed, anyway, the couch is just fine for a week, at least that's up a few inches if the waters rise again.

Trying again -- I meant to get this to the Open Thread but ended up on the wrong one...

I found this on File 770, and I'm definitely waiting for more from Kyra:

Kyra on May 28, 2015 at 6:04 pm said:

Turning and turning in the widening blog
The puppy cannot hear the puppeteer;
Things fall apart; the Hugos cannot hold;
Mere doggerel is loosed upon the fans,
The canine tide is loosed, and in Spokane
The ceremony of awards is drowned;
The fest lacks all conviction, while the trolls
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some aggravation is at hand;
Surely the Slated Hugos are at hand.
The Slated Hugos! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image of a nominee story
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert prose;
A text with turgid body and an end wholly bland,
A phrase blank and meaningless about guns,
Is moving its dull verbs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant reviewers’ words.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That sixteen nominees in fiction slots
Were read like nightmares in my shaking Kindle,
And what rough book, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Sasquan for its award?

re 482: Looks to me like Ornithogalum umbellatum, AKA star of Bethlehem (along with every other species in the genus).

Indeed, so it appears.

A horrible invasive, though somewhat pretty. Luckily, the area where it's growing is entirely hemmed in by concrete on all sides (and doesn't want to grow a lot of other things), so I think I'll leave it for now. It goes on the list of "flowers Beka is allowed to pick at will," which will please her.

C. Wingate #489: Your link is borked, but we can look it up.

Idumea @461: pure delight. :-)

Idumea Arbacoochee, Gardener of Threads @461: That was such a wonderful response I both feel badly for not trying to reply sooner* and that my lost post was relatively mundane, not any work of art.

kimiko @402, Benjamin Wolfe @ 390, Cally Soukup @ 387: Thanks for the info. It's unfortunate that a sraightforward answer like "find it used" should be so out of reach. Cally: I can certainly look into that; I'm not so much of a videophile that the lower quality would bother me, though Miyazaki's visuals might deserve better. Kimiko: The Nausicaa translation hasn't the emotional investment, so I'll probably let it be. I actually like your suggestion for Totoro, and my husband, who used to do fansubbing and video editing, has the chops and may have the tools. Alas, maybe somewhere after "please finish our taxes' and "please Please PLEASE finish reading that manuscript."

(there was a paragraph to someone else about something else, but it has escaped my mind as well as vanished wherever the comment vanished.)

* I've mostly been reading of the internet whilst a baby either nurses or naps on my lap, with my keyboard either out of range behind the nursing pillow (upstairs) or a wireless keyboard is balanced in a non-optimal place and I type one-handed (downstairs). My husband, more bothered by the slowness and increased typos than I actually am, has offered to take dictation....

HLN: Local Man's car failed to start this morning. Local Garage reported that it will need as a minimum a new head gasket, and if anything more is required the total cost may be more than the car is worth. Further updates as the situation develops.

When questioned, Local Man was heard to wonder why Heisenberg Compensators haven't been invented yet.

ajay @ 187: "But back in the day when windmills and watermills were cutting-edge, they definitely were not symbols of low-cost appropriate technology putting power and agency into the hands of the ordinary person. They were a major capital investment, there was only one of them around your area, and the miller was a powerful man in the region - and a major source of income for the local lord, who took his rakeoff of every sack of grain brought to be ground."

My impression is that mill technology straddles the transition between that mode of production and what came after: the concentration of production not locally but regionally and globally, and the shift from the miller serving the lord to the lord serving the miller, so to speak. This map of the Zaan district, from the link in the OP, shows the shift: a whole district of windmills, presumably grinding more grain and cutting more boards than just the local economy demanded. That concentration of production and wealth is what allowed the merchant class to free themselves of feudal obligations: first buying a degree of autonomy, then funding their campaigns to domesticate the aristocracy. No small investment though: you are right about that.

An article in today's Washington Post about John Scalzi. It might be of some interest to folks here.

Last night, Turner Classic Movies showed "Doctor Who and the Daleks".
They described it as timey-whimey.

If you haven't yet read Philip Sandifer's commentary on that film, Serge, I recommend it. And the rest of Tardis Eruditorum, of course, including some of the commenters.

Elliott Mason @ 498... Thanks for the link. Fans usually don't speak of the movie in favorable terms, so this makes me look more forward to watching it off my DVR.

Mr. Sandifer in general is very good at recontextualizing things that other people had strong negative emotional reactions to.

The entire Eruditorum project (available also in ebook format per-Doctor, revised and expanded but without the comments) is a chronological rewatch series with deep dives, and side-trips to deal with other things that came out at particular points in the history of Who, or things that shaped how Who became what it was (that might have been obvious to, say, fans watching it live off the air in 1969 but invisible to us today).

sez sandy b. @475:

When you quote something out of context to create the exact opposite meaning, is there a more specific phrase for that?

Open threadiness: Are there any lending libraries out there other than state/county run libraries, where I could check out electronic books for free or low cost?

I find myself unable to afford to buy ebooks at the moment. I am visually impaired and reading print books has become an almost impossible challenge. It certainly takes the fun out of reading when you develop a headache after a few pages ... ebooks, I can enlarge, play with the contrast, and equally importantly, squish the text into a skinny block that doesn't cause eye strain to scan.

I was recently excited to find out that Arizona does have a state-wide catalog of electronic books. I was very shortly thrown back into a funk when I discovered that the speculative fiction offerings in this library seem to number under two dozen titles, and all but two books are by Asimov, Bradbury, or Stephen King. Meaning, I've read all of them already.

I really miss being able to read. I read my share of fanfic, but it's not the same as curling up with a good novel ...

Re: Count of books in the state's electronic lending library -- eh, looks like there's more there than I thought, but they're not categorized correctly and the search function is broken (it consistently turns up zero books even when I search for authors I know are in the catalog.) There still appears to be a rather sparse selection, however.

Better options?

Cygnet: Even in good systems, the availability and variety of ebooks is crappy. The Chicago Public Library system (of which I am a borrowing member) is really, really scanty on anything I'm interested in reading, and when I do find something I usually have a multiweek 'wait' for my 'copy' -- because the publishers have apparently decided that ebooks wear out after a few (I think 9?) borrowings, so the library needs to buy a new one when they "wear it out".

They track how many total copies (licenses) they have in the system, and that's how many can be checked out simultaneously. For many, many books this number is 1, even in a system as large as CPL.

Also, keeping track of this stuff is annoyingly difficult, so they outsource to a company. For most systems, this company is Overdrive, which has its own UI issues and the like.

Cygnet @502,503: If you have a Kindle device (or I think if you run the Kindle app on your non-Kindle device) and have Amazon Prime, there's the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, which claims to have 800,000 titles available. I'm not sure if Amazon Prime meets your requirement of "low cost", although it includes an ever-changing list of other benefits, so it might be worth the cost to you.

For old out-of-copyright works, there's always Project Gutenberg. I think several of the e-book vendors also offer free books from project Gutenberg through their stores (I've been slowly working my way through such a free copy of "Moby Dick" from Amazon).

While googling around, I discovered that the Internet Archive claims to have over 8 million books, (including Project Gutenberg), but I haven't yet figured out how to navigate their interface. They mention a 500,000 volume "modern" collection for "users with print disabilities".

I'd recommend the Los Angeles City Library, but I think you have to be a California resident to get a card.

Elliot @ 504 -- Ah. I wonder how many times a hardback can be read before it falls apart? More than nine, I bet. Wonder what they charge for a "license" and how the cost-per-reading breaks down?

Arizona's whole system has 396 fiction novels in it, based on a quick estimate (11 pages, 36 books per page) and very few are newer. There were a handful of YA paranormal novels that might have interested me, but they're the latest book in the series, and the older books in the series were not available.

Not many books were checked out, likely because the selection is so poor.

Cygnet: You might try Open Library which skews old but not so badly as Project Gutenberg (that is, you can sometimes find books written in this century).

Re: Library restrictions on ebooks: It's not so bad as it once was (we can get Penguin ebooks at last) but it's still pretty mean. Simultaneous checkouts is always limited to one with books from the Big Five publishers; it's only HarperCollins that times out books at 23 checkouts. Publishers seem to believe that every library book checked out is a lost sale. I have been encouraging people who disapprove of this policy to contact the top-level publishers directly, as no one else seems to have any power over the decision.

Jeremy @ 503 -- That is a good thought. I live out in the boonies and mail order a fair amount of stuff anyway for my business. I've been using a vendor on eBay for office and shipping supplies, but she's ticked me off three times consecutively and it's time to look for a new source. I'll have to see if Amazon has what I need.

$99 is a huge sum for me, but over a year period, that breaks down to close to the same cost as Netflix, which I do pay for. Amazon has a pretty good selection of free videos, so ... hmmm.

Folks who want to read fairly recent SF for free online might want to check out the Free Speculative Fiction online directory. It features more short fiction than novels, and searching and browsing is somewhat limited, but you can discover a variety of work online from authors you've heard of and authors you haven't. (And it's neither a slushpile site or a bootleg site; the editor checks that linked stories have appropriate permissions for posting, and are either from SFWA-qualified venues or authors whose publication credits would qualify for SFWA.)

I'm not a frequent visitor, but the editor seems to update it fairly regularly; I see dozens of new titles added this past month.