I pride myself on being a civil person. I try very hard to treat people fairly and with kindness of spirit, to be reasonable and helpful, and to conduct my interactions -- including those with people not as vested in being civil as I -- in a manner I can later look back on and feel like I retained my high ground no matter how pressed. I don't always succeed at this (I am, in my defense, in IT) but I do try.
Now, many years ago I had a friend (a Vietnam vet, which may or may not explain the next few sentences) who had a prodigious talent for swearing. Among other things, this friend didn't like New York, and on a road trip with him once he started swearing when we crossed the state line and didn't stop until we'd crossed back out on the far side. And, as best as I could tell, he never repeated himself. Most of those swears went straight through my impressionable young brain and lodged themselves directly in my subconscious. I cannot, even with effort of will, make myself recall more than one or two of them, but when I get really really REALLY mad, one will percolate to the surface of my mind like an elder god summoned forth from the dark places, and it will pass from my lips unbidden, and inevitably I will be as shocked by it as whoever I happened to have spoken it to. Then it disappears again back to the murk, and within minutes I won't be able to say exactly what it was that I said, except that it seemed to work exceedingly well in its purpose.
The only time more than one of these words surfaced at the same time was at a Home Depot, and I think a solid dozen made their way from my lips to the ears of that store's Manager, and he twitched. Visibly twitched, like someone had smacked his soul upside the head with a verbal 2x4 with a rusty nail sticking out of it.
And, dammit, he deserved it.
One thing I've definitely been noticing lately is that the various wingnuts that've made it onto televised interviews all manage to work in references to Hitler and Nazis, though what the connection is supposed to be is absolutely unclear.
Honestly I think the media need to start considering Godwin's Law (and corollaries) as also very valid measures of when to end any given interview and call the interviewee "loser".
This makes me unbearably sad. )-:
I only met him very briefly at Worldcon in '06, but it was a memorable and entertaining encounter, and I'd looked forward to running into him again someday.
My deepest sympathies to his family, friends, and everyone who were blessed to know him better.
Paula @82: Well, okay. Myself, I work at work and write at home, so my tools are my own to choose. You seem very attached to your dissatisfaction, so I will cease trying to convince you to part ways with it.
Paula @70 -- one of the nice things about RTFs is that Word opens, edits, and saves them just fine with minimal hassle and w/o constantly trying to convince you to save them back as .doc
Seriously, unless you have a use for the change tracking feature, I recommend just switching over.
Paul @66: Yeah, I haven't ever had any problems with RTF, and use it fairly exclusively.
The use of Scrivener is my choice. I like it as a tool for organising my usually disorganised notes and early drafts but editors don't care.
I use a Wiki for my notes. But then, I tend to generate an unbelievable quantity of world-building and character detail, so the cross-referencing ability of the Wiki comes in very handy. Also, it's great cat-vacuuming when my writing is stalled, as in, "My characters are all sitting around staring at the floor and refusing to talk to me, so instead I think I'll open up the Wiki and work out the details of the political structure of this alien race that gets mentioned in passing in one paragraph of the WIP..." Never know when that's going to come in handy later (-:
Paula #52, all the markets that I've run across that take actual attachments for electronic submission (as opposed to having online forms you cut&paste your text into) allow you to submit .rtf instead of .doc, which eliminates a fair bit of the inconsistent formatting problem. (I'm willing to believe there are markets that exclusively require .doc, but I haven't noticed any.)
There are other issues as well with .doc, in particular Word's fondness for keeping track of changes made to the document -- if you're keen-eyed, you'll notice that your .doc file gets bigger every time you save it, even if you're taking out large chunks of material. I had a vendor send me a quote as a .doc, and I used the change-tracking feature to discover he'd quoted the same item to another institution only a few weeks previously for significantly less money. I called him up and said, "Hey, I heard you'd sold this to Other Institute for $x" and he was flabbergasted that I'd heard that (and obviously somewhat dismayed) and offered me the lower price as well. Saved me close to $1K, and I don't think he ever did figure out how I came by that info. So my advice is never, ever, send anyone anything in .doc format. RTF strips out that crap, makes your file smaller, and avoids potential gaffes. Obviously you run less risks with fiction than for commercial quotes (or political press releases) but it's still a good habit to get into.
AFDD@23, I'd be happy to mail you stamps.
Personally I don't have any great preference between electronic and paper submissions. Electronic is easier and a whole lot cheaper, but also has to navigate unknown spam filters before reaching its destination. I've had more than one story (and more than one response) go missing that way. OTOH printing out a story and holding the paper in my hands has a very satisfying feel to it, and there's a sense of accomplishment in that moment when you hand it across the counter to the postal person. Except then you have to hand them money, too. So, meh, I'm happy to send stuff either way without complaint.
random, unrelated link (because I thought it was really interesting, and something I was totally unaware of): Chicago Gang Cards
"Every city has its own gang history, part of Chicago's are Gang cards, most prominent in the 70's and early 80's, back in the day when a gang was more of a neighborhood crew then what it is today."
KiethS @932: Ooooh, I missed that! Will have to go back and look. I'm assuming that part of the range of sound that's generated has to do with the rods being struck on the ground?
Totally off on a random tangent (that's what open threads are for, right?): Musical Tesla Coils
I'd never seen that poem. Man, but I miss him. I wish I'd had the chance to meet him just once and tell him how much his words inspired and awed me.
w00t!
After all, can one expect that such websites truly care for any given person enough to spend their entire time, energy, and money in the pursuit of “protecting†you?
Why yes, yes I do. And thanks to you all for it (-:
IIRC there was a huge pissing contest between MA and NH about that parking lot. As I heard the story, one of the mall anchor stores (JC Penney?) originally had one small corner over the line, and MA was insisting that store had to charge MA sales tax. Instead, they removed that corner of the store. Then followed some stupidity about who had to patrol the MA side of the parking lot, and for a while no one would do it and cars were getting broken into constantly. Yadda yadda and so forth. I don't know how it was eventually settled, but it doesn't seem to be an issue any more.
But yeah, nice quiet little mall.
(sorry, I seem to be chatty today)
One of the worst jobs I ever had was for a dot-com here in Massachusetts back when my oldest daughter was very young. She caught pneumonia at about a year old and I was home with her for a week, and even though I'd never used any sick time before then my a*hole boss called me at home every day and shouted "everyone here hates you!" before hanging up on me. Really. And he's still working there. (I, of course, am NOT.)
That's a huge part of the problem: there are people in positions of authority out there who regard anyone who uses sick-time as weak, lazy, or just plain lying, as if no one ever actually really gets sick.
Lee #350: It's someone I generally get along well with at work, except for this one issue. She knows how I feel and I know how she feels and we generally try to avoid pushing each other's buttons on it, but I don't think she thinks of that every time she offers to babysit (which is in and of itself a very nice gesture). In fairness, I always make a point of inviting her along every time I'm heading off to the flu shot clinic, even though I know it means the lecture for me.
She's a nice, well-intentioned person who just seems really gullible for any mass hysteria of this type. She also won't eat *any* refined sugar, which I wouldn't care about except she keeps volunteering to bake for office birthday parties. If you eat one of her cupcakes you walk around for the rest of the day feeling like you've got a cinder block in your guts. )-:
Once again I am reminded why Jim is my hero.
The area I live in, while great in many ways, is also chock full of anti-vaccination nuts. I watched a friend of mine's one month old son nearly die of whooping cough that he caught from an older, intentionally unvaccinated child several years back, and I didn't need to click on the "this is what it sounds like" link to remember very vividly the sound of the poor little boy coughing until he'd entirely emptied his lungs of air and then had to struggle to draw in the next breath.
I have a coworker who is similarly not vaccinating her kids, and who keeps offering to come over with her kids and babysit my nine month old twins. And as much as I could use an escape from the house, I just can't do it. She gives me her "lecture" every year when I get the flu shot, and it's both tedious in the extreme and offensive to boot.
OTOH, my nephew has severe health problems and there are a few vaccines that there is a family history of severe reaction to; what keeps him and other kids who can't be fully vaccinated safe is other parents being responsible and vaccinating kids who can be. What these people don't understand is that they are not only gambling with their own children's lives, but with the lives of other people's children too.
When I was a kid, my parents' house was infested with shrews. A few years ago, to my astonishment and delight, I had a small population of treefrogs take up residence in my own house for the winter.
Actually, I've enjoyed the 25 things meme on Facebook because it's told me things about an awful lot of people, most of which had nothing to do with the facts themselves. In particular: who is actually interesting (vs. sadly tedious), and which of my friends are actually capable of counting sequentially from 1 to 25 without skipping or repeating numbers (not all of them, it seems.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 20 |
| 2008 | 29 |
| 2007 | 35 |
| 2006 | 40 |
| 2005 | 20 |
| 2004 | 14 |
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