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

albatross@89:

Just look at the sex roles in 1950s era SF for an example of that. You could have interesting and smart and capable women (think of Penny in Double Star), but the underlying assumptions about sex roles were as invisible to the writer and most readers, I think, as the assumptions about computers (or their lack).

I recently read The Demolished Man for the first time and was bludgeoned by a 22nd century that had blithely accepted telepathy and interplanetary travel, but still had Freudian psychoanalysis, stark gender roles and a massive crime solving supercomputer that ran on punch cards. I'm still not entirely sure what a knife-pistol that resembles a flower is supposed to look like. Is it a magnum with a bayonet and orchid scope? A six-shooter/Ginsu/daisy? A long lost Salvador Dali sculpture? Whatever it is, it shoots weaponized jello.

As an aside, I came to reading Jane Austens' novels in my mid-30s, as an SF fan. And I perceive myself to use the same basic world-building, suspension-of-disbelief, acceptance-of-weird-assumptions processes reading her books as I do reading SF.

Now you can do this twice as much, with the Zombies and Sea Monster versions.

I'm really enjoying Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. They went to eleven on this one, not just tacking in sea monsters but altering the world and the characters to fit the changes, while still keeping the story intact. It's lots of fun.

Or "topsy turvey" stories about an "alien" culture which is essential human, but with one societal relationship reversed.

I see this as more a failure of literary mechanics than anything else. The writers of said parable are forgetting that Martians aren't Martians, they're manifestations of an abstract concept. The failure happens when you just add a rubber forehead to communists or Arabs and expect that to sustain you through a story arc.

Who put all the Know Nothings in charge of our culture? I know, I know, no one will say. Bah.

Ended up with 1200 words for the day and a rough idea of where the first 5K will take me. Mysterious woman+mysterious comet=a promising start.

I'm using NaNoWriMo as an excuse to jump start my next novel. I'm traveling end of the month and fully expect this next book to be pushing 80K, so making the 50K goal seems unlikely but a month's solid work can get me to that sweet spot just past the first act where the Big Picture gets a little more in focus.

As of day 1: 500 words. Looking for 1000 by days end.

Doug K @13:

Erik @6, I've noticed the same Rule of Condo Naming - Whispering Pines, when the trees were clearcut; The Corners at Crystal Lakes (I actually lived there) built over the old spring-fed swimming holes; und so depressingly weiter. Most peculiar.

I live in an area called Hawthorn Farms. Guess what it used to be. The Max line runs through there and in one spot, while riding the train, you can see an old derelict farmhouse. Past another stop is a narrow road where an old general store sits. It's like a ghost of the past slipping into the present.

Trying to monetize and control something called freecycle is rich but that, sadly, has become the American way.

Serge@97:

Won't happen. People will think twice about secession and all that, once they realize how much this'd hurt them in the wallet. That's what happened with Québec's stupid Independence obsession.

Yes, but the Quebecois never dreamed up the teabag movement. There's no real end to the lengths some of my fellow country-folk will go just to prove a point. The opt-outers aren't rational actors (they're threatening to opt out of health care!) and I suspect there's a fair to middling overlap between the opt-outers and the south-will-rise-again crowd.

David Harmon@89:
I suspect Albatross is more worried about a coup by our own forces. That's not quite as unthinkable as it was before ShrubCo's corruption took hold, but I'm not that paranoid. Yet.

Clearly I'm not that paranoid either. Though now that you mention a homegrown, minority party occupation, yeah. That's not gonna be fun. Especially since the direction such a thing would come from would be the crowd who fantasies about violently overthrowing the legitimate government, all under the pretense of patriotism, liberty and teabagging for all. That crew wouldn't hesitate to use our new no frills interrogation techniques and would do so gleefully in many cases.

albatross@66:

I suspect an occupied USA would be much as you describe: pockets of resistance rendered futile by our own well-honed dirty tricks being used against us. The big however here though is depending on who it is that's doing the occupying.

The occupying force would have to be big, either China, Russia or a coalition of one of the above along with the EU and Canada. If it's a coalition force of Europeans and Canadians, I suspect we'll see less use of our own nefarious torture tech but still some notable uses. If it's China all alone or some neo-Soviet style Russian force, a hell of a lot more of our shiny new torture techniques will be deployed against us.

I know this comes off as horribly racist but it's a fair assessment based on the history of these various nations. The Chinese love to oppress occupied people and the Russians have a colorful history of creative interrogation practices. Not that several European nations don't, but they've been less likely to use them in the past 60 years or so. The Russians like poisoning their own people with Polonium, just for fun and profit.

Frankly, a joint British-Canadian occupation would probably do the US some good. We'd learn how to queue correctly and it'll probably be the only we we get decent health care reform.

Rainy and a bit chilly, with nice morning fog over the pumpkin patches. I'm enjoying the Pacific Northwest far more than soggy, moist Georgia.

C. Wingate @ 10:
The point is that the nomination, when it was made, wasn't based on any track record at all beyond a few weeks of presidency.

Obama didn't emerge from a Sontaran clone tank in mid October. He did have a rather notable career going back a few years. also, as has been noted elsewhere, the Nobel Prize isn't a life time achievement award. It's a recognition that a person in a position to do good deserves support in their causes. Makes sense to award a peace-minded president early on, so he can go on to disappoint us grandly in in high style, rather than waiting to see what he fails to accomplish first.

Constance @ 42:

Then I guess it's a good thing he won the Peace prize and not for economics.

I'm in agreement, mostly. He could do much better than he has on the economic issues. But. Given the utter mess he inherited, and the progress he's already made in the short time he's been in office, this is more than just a nice gesture of recognition. It's the international community saying that they got his back for the big job ahead of him. Going in to negotiations with Iran and figuring out the best way to go about settling Afghanistan, it's nice to know that you have friends, rather than wondering if the rest of the world is going to sit on the sidelines, or hinder your attempts at progress.

Has it really been 5 years already since I started using Gmail? My goodness. Alas, I'm no longer special enough to get in on Wave as I was with Gmail. I guess they're bitter I switched to Wordpress.

Looking forward to using Wave as well. should make those tedious, collaborative academic papers less tedious.

There are also the Patriot Guard Riders, a gang of burly bikers who go to the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and have taken to positioning themselves between the Westboro crew and the mourners so they can have a moment of peace.

The whole Bioport thing sounds fairly outdated. It's not 1986 anymore, why not just go for the wireless upgrade? People could interface without even touching. Your nervous system could extend beyond your skin and with the right sort of biofeedback stimulation, the entire physical world could be like one big polymorphous genital.

Then we'd all be like Saint Theresa, wandering around in an ecstatic haze.

I lean towards Baseball rules: three strikes and you're out. If on first exposure, someone flips out and starts trolling, they have two more opportunities or occasions to offer up different facets of themselves, in case their first impression happened on a bad day. if on a second exposure, they are more even handed and this is repeated on their third go-round, it can be assumed that at least on occasion, they may trip over some latent bullying tendency but on the whole, are trying to be civil. But if they are trollish and obtuse three times running, they get added to the mental blacklist (which can be amended if they later prove in some fashion t hey have reformed their tendencies).

Most people who end up on the troll list though tend to prove repeatedly that they belong there (Michele Malkin, for example). Oddly, some people who were just fine, if a little rough around the edges descend to trolldom over a period of years and require closer observation (i.e. Christopher Hitchens).

Today is also the 232nd anniversary of the battle of Brandywine, where, in 1777, Casimir Pulaski charged the British army and saved the life of George Washington, thus ensuring that we would have him around long enough to help found the nation and become our first president.

Anandakos@42: Statistically Democrats do the dynastic thing more frequently than do Republicans.

I'd like to see these statistics, since it isn't Chelsea Clinton who got a big fat media job based solely on the inertia created by having a father and grandfather who were both president of the United States. And what's Amy Carter doing these days?

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