The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Sylvia:

JESR--you probably already know this, but if you know whom you want to support in the WA caucus, you don't actually have to stay the whole time. You can show up, sign in registering your support for your candidate, and go home. Once you've signed in, your vote will be counted in the assignment of delegates (unless your candidate has too few votes to get any delegates) whether you're there for the full hour and a half or the first thirty seconds.

(If anyone is looking for more info about how the WA caucus is run, there's a slightly cutesy but informative guide here:

http://fusewashington.org/about/163/caucus )

Some day we will all sit together in Powell's and wonder how one could endure being anywhere else.

Jupiter @ 52: Indeed--I too am in the liberal arts and clearly need more practice in defining my terms with precision. (I don't quite remember the last time I saw a novel with an equation for a chapter heading either [I'm guessing there are probably some in Illuminatus...], though I did learn Fermat's Last Theorem from Tom Stoppard.)

Seconding the request for good science book recs.

Tony Zbaraschuk at #10: The observations you report in your first two paragraphs are no doubt accurate, but they do not provide evidence for or against any of the three assertions you make in the third.

Well, you'd better go catch it.

I'm surprised by how casually some commenters are comparing MP3 filesharing to writing and posting fanfic (for free, that is--obviously, to attempt to profit from your copyright violations like the writer who inspired this thread is not kosher and is very very dumb).

Fan fiction, fan art, etc. are, whatever you think of their merits, additional material in an already existing (sometimes copyrighted) fictional universe. Fanfic is based on existing material created by someone else; pirated files are existing material created by someone else. If you download a song for free, you may be doing that instead of paying for the album, but if you read or write a story about Jar-Jar Binks and Lieutenant Mary Sue saving the universe from bad novelists or whatever, you're not doing that to save yourself the price of a ticket to the movie. (In fact, you've probably shelled out for a good deal of Star Wars merchandise by the time you start thinking about writing your Jar-Jar/Mary Sue opus.)

I do think that distinction is worth making, even if some find fanfic objectionable for various reasons nonetheless.

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