Locus is reporting Forry's death, with a promise of an obit tomorrow.
Locus is absolutely a sufficiently reliable source for Wikipedia's citation standards, but I have absolutely no patience with edit wars, and I notice that Laurie's edits have already been reverted (she cited Robin Bailey on sff.net).
...aaaand now he says it has been confirmed. RIP.
Over on Twitter, Bruce Sterling is reporting that he has heard that Barrington Bayley has died, and is seeking confirmation.
Google News is silent so far. Does anyone know?
Here's hoping she can reacquire home-hood in short order, if not shorter order. And thanks for the Tweet; goodness knows when I would have found out about this otherwise.
[ObSheesh: Sheesh! The things some people do to draw folks from far and wide back into the comments at Making Light!]
Watching the chaos progressing around the globe from east to west as stock markets tanked one by one while Wall Street remained closed for MLK, I realized that I either had to rewrite the ending of "The Nine Billion Names of God," or turn once again to my favorite well of inspiration, all things related (however tangentially) to "To His Coy Mistress," namely "You, Alan Greenspan":
And here face down upon your desk
Watching through the waiting night
You feel the coming of a test
The gathered rising of a blight
You feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of loss and woe
Upon the world's markets the vast
And ever climbing shadows grow
So first in Tokyo the breeze
Carries now the scent of change
The Nikkei sinks down to its knees
Buried beneath a mountain range
And now in Korea the state
Of markets sunk in deep despair
Slumps slowly as the whispered fate
Of recession hangs in the air
And Hong Kong too begins to fall,
The gains of these last years soon gone
And through all Asia the pall
Of evening deepens and steals on
It deepens, too, in Mumbai's street
Where watchful eyes mark the decline
The shuffling of nervous feet
Marks the mocking march of time
And later still in Frankfurt, then
in Paris comes the dreadful blow
As to the west the eyes of Men
Turn, fearful, seeing sands run low
And London, last to feel the weight
Of failure through the far-flung lands;
Crushed downwards, it too meets its fate
Beneath the Invisible Hand
Comes now the cold light on the sea...
And you, facing the night so long,
Await, with dreadful certainty
The market opening at dawn...
Steve Burst? All die. O the embarrassment. I shall ritually mangle my own last name now in penance.
Teresa @21: Ray, that's you and Steve Brust both starting new weblogs, so best of luck and we'll put you in the list.
Ah. Me and Steve Burst both? So, no pressure at all then.
:-)
PS - I actually went to post this early enough that it wouldn't have needed the back-pointer, but our internets was havin' none of it, and then there was the football, and then my dad called to tell me that I was officially the only Ray Radlein in the world now (as far as we or Google can tell), as his brother had passed away up Chicagowards (Palatine or Des Plaines? How can I not keep these things straight?) last night.
Which, well, it is the very whale, isn't it? Albeit a smallish one.
At any rate, thanks for the kind links; now I really have to get cracking on that Torchwood review.
Ah, crap. One major problem with only occurring here once every third blue moon is that I have so much verbiage to spill as a result that I wind up with enough URLs to trigger the "delayed gratification" filter here when I post.
So let that serve as notice that there is a long thingie of text from me lurking in the cache somewhere.
Keep watching the skies!
(That way I can sneak up behind you and steal your wallet)
Is it worth pointing out that many felt the whole invention of "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" was itself part of a capitalistic ploy to sell IDIC-themed trinkets, or was that part of the point being made here? It's still early morning in the America of my mind right now, so my synapses might still be in bed.
That said: "Hi, all!" I was just validating links for my Blog Glob, and saw that the lights were on (even if mine might not be), so I figured I'd do one of my periodic brief random reappearances.
Things are still what they are for me; our current cat count is nine (oldest, still, Aurora, at 15; youngest, Mercury, at 1.5), and current family count the same as before. After the slow-motion crash-and-smolder that characterized the whimpery end of the perhaps presumptuously-named group blog I found myself in charge of, I finally decided to get back up on the rocking-horse, and opened my own new blog, because I certainly can't fail any worse on my own than I already did as part of a team.
I began by moving over all of my old SFBlog posts; but copying them and re-checking and re-formatting the old links is exactly the type of thorough, detail-oriented work that really is medically proven to make my brain switch off and my body break down, so I stalled out on that several months ago, somewhere back in March of 2005. Coming to the realization that, if I waited to move over all of the old archives before posting any new material, there would never be any new material, I decided to throw confetti to the winds and plunge back in with all-new material here in 2008 (as a partial validation of that approach, I have found myself with the renewed enthusiasm to get me through the end of April 2005 now in my archive move).
If I can browbeat my brain into coughing up some serviceable thoughts on the subject, I intend to post a review of "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," the first episode of season two of Torchwood, which has already aired in the UK (and in my living room), but won't hit BBC America until next Saturday (short, non-spoiler version: "Yummy").
What else? Let's see: My monitor has decided that "GB" is just as good a display format as "RGB," so I won't be posting any pictures to Flickr until a new one appears on my doorstep (I already gave James Marsters the complexion of an Oompah-Loompah once when using an unreliable monitor to prep my photos when posting from Dragon*Con; that's quite enough of that for me, thank you). I finally got Fedora 8 installed and running on my computer, as a replacement for Fedora 7, which never did achieve the second half of that combination when I installed it. Oh, and I have successfully delayed cleaning up my computer room long enough that the local drought has caused all of the nearby divertable rivers to dry up. Hah! Take that, heroic chores!
Oh, and as part of my "Don't Call It a Comeback" blogging tour, I managed to get not one, but two different "Recommended" diaries on Daily Kos, out of the three that I've written since ending my nearly three year long diary drought there. As I have been known to say: Woo, woo.
Marilee: I wanted to mention that I responded to your "Where the heck have you been?" earlier today, but my comment is apparently trapped in moderation Limbo at the moment; presumably I miscounted the number of hyperlinks it included (I could swear I only used seven). So anyway, I imagine that it will appear eventually (I used to be able to see it by doing a "view all by" on myself, but right now all that accomplishes is an SQL error page).
Nicole @901: Does he include some euphemism for goetse behind words I'm too naive to parse correctly, or something?
Perhaps Burntsauce has some misconception about the nature of the "gob" being smacked in my comment.
Garrett @897: congratulations. You've written some of the most offensive content ever seen in a deletion discussion. *rolls eyes*
I have to assume that Burntsauce was referring to my characterization of deleting a perfectly valid article as "vandalism." If that's not it, then I really have no freakin' clue.
Marilee @865: Ray Radlein, where the heck have you been?!
Right here, in the same place.
Almost literally: I make it past the end of our driveway only once or twice a month (remove medical and veterinary visits from that list, and it may be less than once a month on average).
I have just made my Saving Throw vs. Data Dump, and so will spare you the full rundown on My Life and Hard Times. These days, most of my functional internet presence is on Daily Kos, although substaintial traces of me can also be found at Flickr.
A few years ago, a friend invited me to join his group blog, which suited me as I was deathly afraid that if I started my own blog, my health would lead me to disappoint people by being unable to keep up with it; by joining a group blog, I felt reassured that there would be less (self-inflicted) pressure on me to carry the load, as there would be other people contributing.
Which is how, some months later, I wound up in charge of the blog.
Needless to say, I drove it straight into a ditch, as contributions from the other participants all waned over following months at the same time as I myself did; my last post (regarding the vital topic of Lesbian Dalek Bondage Porn) was on January 6 of last year (Will Frank, who also comments here from time to time, soldiered bravely on with a couple of further posts over the next few months).
Eventually, the original owner, who still held the domain name it had been using, let us know he was pulling the plug; undaunted, I moved everything back to Blogspot for hosting, and planned a major relaunch late last year — just in time for Blogger to lock me (and everyone else) out of our own blog as a side-effect of their "upgrade." My best guess as to what happened is that despite the fact that he was no longer a part of it at all, Blogger still associated the blog with its original owner; so when everything got reset in the upgrade, he was the only one who could open the door to let us all back in to the blog. However, since he had moved on long before, he did not have a Blogger "2.0" logon. I submitted a support ticket to Blogger, mentioning that I (the blog's "owner") and all of the other editors were now locked out of our own blog; several months later, they got back to me with a reply, saying, basically, "Hey, that's too bad — you really should get the owner to let you back in!"
(For what it's worth, I think that he may have finally gotten himself a Blogger 2.0 login, because from looking at the blog just now, it seems like Blogger thinks he's associated with it again: so theoretically, I could e-mail him and get him to unlock the doors, although the only real point in that by now would be to retrieve a couple of never-posted drafts I had sitting around)
Anyway, a few months ago, I decided that it was time to do what was, at the time, the only thing I could do, and set up my own blog, and manually move all of my old posts over to it (if for no other reason than to have them somewhere with internally consistent links). I figured that once I had the entire archive moved over, I could start making new posts, liberated by the notion that I couldn't fail any worse individually than I had already failed as part of a collective.
So far, I only managed to relocat my own blog posts up through March of 2005 before bogging down again: Copying over giant chunks of HTML from the old site, combing through them to make the internal links consistent, tagging them, and re-posting them under the correct old date and time stamps on the new site is the exact type of careful, detail-oriented work that my brain is just plain unwilling and incapable of doing in significant doses these years. I've almost decided to go ahead and start posting new stuff when the fancy strikes without waiting to move the archives over; my big fear is that, knowing me, once I do that the archives are likely to remain unmoved.
On the other hand, knowing me, the archives are likely to remain unmoved even if I don't start posting new material.
Wow. I sure am glad I made that Saving Throw vs. Data Dump. That's me — master of the pithy one-line reply.
@53: Now, I might not have been much of a projective telepath, but you'd think I'd've gotten something for all those hours and hours of standing there thinking, with all the force and drama of an adolescent in the grips of those opera-sized emotions adolescents have, "Please come and take me away. I don't belong here. Please come and take me away."
But no one wants to hang around with angsty emo teenagers except, you know, other angsty emo teenagers (not even — heck, maybe especially not — former angsty emo teenagers like myself); so unless the aliens were also dramatic adolescents who thought that Earth sucked, they'd probably fly the other direction, fast. And if they were of the opinion that Earth sucked, they probably wouldn't be hanging around here, on account of their fancy interstellar spacecraft and all.
So your target audience was probably limited to bored alien kids whose parental units were stuck on Earth as zoologists or whatever, and who had their learner's permits but weren't allowed to leave the solar system.
...And speaking of RASFF (and archived memories), to bring everything back full-circle, that's where I remember the Error Correcting Modem, the Stud Finder, and the Universal Remote Control from. I think I recall TNH, PNH, myself, Michael Weholt, and Loren MacGregor at least in that discussion (Gary, too, I imagine).
And if my personal archive of RASFF hadn't been severely diminished by the sudden evaporation of my C: drive last Christmas, I'd be easily able to grab exact cites.
@855: Embarrassingly, I think the only other flashbulb memory I have is of when Princess Diana died.
Heh. I should probably have access to a pretty solid record of what I was doing and thinking at that time because I think I was reading and posting to RASFF through the whole thing (as well as scifi.com — didn't it break during the Hugo Awards ceremony? I seem to recall it coming up during the live online chat coverage* of the ceremony).
Google is the new checksum for everybody's memories.**
* I was, of course, logged in as Deathmaster5; and who could blame me for that?
** In the future, I suppose it will be Twitter; but I'm not l33t enough for Twitter yet, given that 90% of my entires would be "Whhuuu? I'm, uh, awake, sort of. I think."
Elf Sternberg? Christ.
Wikipedia is a public park, with different areas given over to different botanical and horticultural enthusiasts; and unless your Gardening Club is big enough and determined enough to defend its turf, there's not much point doing anything more than picking up the odd piece of litter on the sidewalk, because otherwise someone, at some time, is bound to run their lawn mower right through your patch of ground, or decide that the plants which you were carefully nurturing are really just weeds after all.
And that is why the vast majority of my last several hundred edits have been to articles on women's soccer: First off, there is lots of work to be done there; but, more importantly, information within the ambit of the soccer "community" has enough protection that I can be relatively certain that the article I create today about Homare Sawa will still be there in six months when I go looking to add something to it.
Yeah, but he should have used "Keep watching the skies!" as his end-tease.
I find myself considering the possibilities inherent in electing a Pope who has all of JPII's doctrinal hardheadedness, with none of JPII's personal charm or charisma. JPII was able to charm people around the world faaster than he could piss off people who were already Catholics; I seriously doubt that B-16 (if only there had been one more Benedict previously, he could have had an appropriately martial handle) will be able to do likewise.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 9 |
| 2007 | 9 |
| 2005 | 59 |
| 2004 | 28 |
| 2003 | 13 |
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