The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Eileen Gunn:

Well, gee! I haven't even got the cards in the mail yet to the Chinese. Happy birthday, all 1,330,100,002 of you! Especially you two.

Thank you, Patrick.

Evan @ 18: Thanks, Evan. The Alexrod text made my ocpywriting fingers itchy. Maybe he wrote it himself....

I suppose it's a good sign that this gov't is sometimes a tad clueless when it comes to writing effective propaganda.

OMG, Eric. Thank you.

PNH: Hope you caught up to the others eventually, or that you're adjusting to your new life on the polder.

How cool, PNH & TNH! Congrats on the anniversary, FWIW. John and I just celebrated our own 30th anniversary -- a bit more personal and hippydippy than a wedding anniversary, but whatever....

Isn't 30 years both an impossibly long and an incredibly short time?

Have a wonderful time in Amsterdam and Rome and all the points in between.

OMG, PNH, thank you for reminding me about Eleanor Bron. (Does that mean I'm a 17?)

Whose babe this is, I think I know
His balls are in the village though
He will not seize my astrolabe
Or toll his knells on my batteau

[...]

I asked John D. Berry: "Is this worth doing?" He replied "It might be worth your doing. I'm going to bed."

Seems like a good idea....

And of course most Mac users would just laugh if a Windows system message appeared on their screens.

That's Windows-specific advice, of course. Reportedly, this malware will download to Macs, but will not run, so you can just delete it.

I am one of the people who encountered a virus on the Locus site. It was probably a spyware called "XP Antivirus 2008/2009." (This is new and particularly nasty trickware that tries to get you to download itself by popping up a message that looks like a Windows system message, telling you your computer is infected with a virus, and you need to download a fix. More here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/malware-removal/remove-antivirus-xp-2008 .)

DO NOT CLICK ANYWHERE ON THE "SYSTEM MESSAGE" TO CLOSE IT.

Specifically: DO NOT CLICK ON THE "CANCEL" BUTTON IN THE MESSAGE and DO NOT CLICK ON THE X-BOX IN THE UPPER RIGHT-HAND CORNER. (It's a trick: why would they let you cancel it? The cancel button installs it.)

Here's what to do:

1. Hit Cntrl-alt-del to bring up the Windows task manager.
2. Find your browser in the task list (such as firefox.exe or iexplore.exe).
3. Select the browser and click the "End Process" button.
4. Make sure there is not another instance of your browser running. If there is, close that too. Do this until the message disappears. DO NOT CLICK THE MESSAGE.
5. Download and run Anti-Malware from www.malwarebytes.com, as Jim McD. suggests.


Thanks to Jim Bailey, Jeffry Dwight, and Chuck Rothman's excellent advice about this virus in the SFWA Forum on SFF.net, I avoided downloading it, but it took me five hours of running A/V and anti-malware programs to be sure of that.

Good luck! If an advertising server is spreading this virus, you could encounter it anywhere.

I think this act of protest is seen as a silly gesture by many people in the US, whether they agree with it or not: a harmless gesture of contempt. But gestures of contempt are neither silly or harmless in some other parts of the world: they are taken very seriously.

Mr. Zaidi risked, at the least, his career and his physical well-being, not to mention his personal freedom, in order to register a protest aimed, I am sure, not only at President Bush and the US government, but at P.M. Al-Maliki and the Iraqi government. It wasn't a prank: it was statement.

At the core of this kind of statement is the thought that individual moral judgments matter and world opinion matters. It is clear that the Bush administration views that position with contempt. I am not going to hold my breath waiting for President Bush to intervene for Mr. Zaidi's welfare: he has washed his hands of the matter.

I was going to say "They all slept with Gram Parsons," but never mind.

This news made me very happy.

Thanks for the links to his SF comments. I consider the SF-reader category a false karass, but it is always a pleasure to find someone who can talk intelligently about SF. That's a much smaller group.

Thanks for doing this, Marilee. I hope all our bits add up to a byte. Hugs to Scraps and Velma.

John and I send Scraps and Velma both our love and encouragement.

Eileen & John

Janet@19:

Judging by the crowds at 8:30 pm in our down-the-block kid-friendly restaurant, a lot of parents on Capitol Hill delayed dinner time to watch the debate. Isn't Ms. A. getting to the wise old political age of five?

I watched the debate in a sports-bar in Seattle, filled to the brim with (at a guess) mostly-middle-class liberals, with a median age of about 30, but ranging from 6 months to mid-60s.

People were being serious, without a lot of back-chat, but a lot of McCain's statements drew surprised laughs, especially when they were inappropriate responses to direct questions: the bracelet story, the "when I was captured by the Viet Cong" bit, the multiple Miss Congenialities, etc. The biggest reaction, however, came when he explained how proud he was of cutting a government contract for Boeing. The whole room exploded with jeers, prompting a 9-year-old at our table to ask what the eruption was about. "He just said he put a lot of people out of work," his mother explained.

Glad to hear this, Teresa! Happy arteries to you! Trails, too, of course.

Eileen

Whoa, Teresa! Like everyone else in the known universe, I'm glad to hear you're all right, and I'd prefer you not do it again.

Best,

Eileen

The Rovians are trying to put Obama into a position in which he cannot avoid doing the wrong thing: either he responds to Spiro T. Agnew-style attacks from a v.p. candidate who has shown no substance so far on genuine issues -- in which case he both looks like an angry black man and participates in the content-free sparring match -- or he continues to discuss the very serious issues that could tear this country apart over the next few years -- in which case he looks like a guy who can’t push back.

I sure hope the American people are smarter than the Rovians think they are, and smarter than that subset of the media that would rather talk about mudwrestling than the future of the planet.

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