Julia Jones @ 81: Who's publishing poly romance? That really caught my eye.
Julia Jones @ 81: Who's publishing poly romance? That really caught my eye.
Mary Aileen @ 95: I was just at a lecture by a public health scholar, one of the deans at my university; one of his emphases was "In American society, we focus so much on people who beat the odds, rather than on recognizing what those odds are and changing them."
In short, if the new report is actually correct (about which I withhold all judgment till I've had the chance to go out and read the research), you're in the place of someone who has beaten the odds. The problem with applying that narrative to a society is that we always, individually, think we will be the ones to beat the odds, but if that were the case for everyone who thought so, statistics would be remarkably different. I know, small consolation. The tough thing about any decision made on behalf of a society or a policy is that it's always wrong - for someone. The goal is to be wrong for as few people as possible.
Ack! I don't know Scraps, but send support from the lurker section.
From what I've heard, yeast extract isn't actually a source of monosodium glutamate but rather of free glutamic acid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamic_acid_(flavor)
Which may cause problems for people with sensitivities (YMMV) but is also naturally present in a fair number of things - more information at and branching off from the article.
I never had a major problem with MSG, but got to requesting that it be left out of my food ("bu yao wei jing") when I lived in China, since too much of the stuff seemed to make the food taste like wet dog.
There is a food cart in Portland that serves vegetarian poutine - cheese curds and fries and non-meat-based brown gravy.
I was so thrilled when I found it. See, I'm half Canadian, and having never tried this national dish was a source of disappointment to me. Well, now I can have it whenever I like, ten blocks from my house. A bit too salty to become a staple, but hey.
I choose you, Boniface!
(Brilliant.)
Power and Social Responsibility
What kinds of responsibility does power carry with it? Is there a moral nature to possessing power, and does it always involve leadership and authority? Does absolute power corrupt absolutely?
Ariane Emory
Antryg Windrose
Obi-Wan Kenobi*
Brandon Corey
The Doctor
Well, this panel was interesting for sure. I guess you could say Brandon Corey was the "I don't know why I'm on this panel" guy: he kept protesting that we might better ask one of his brothers, except that he kept getting caught out making interesting and highly cryptic remarks on the philosophies of the other panelists. Something about the auspices of true power and the seeds of aesthetic truth and the nature of reality underlying reality, to which morals were apparently irrelevant.
I'd have to say his input definitely added something, although when Kenobi would try to re-direct the conversation during one of his monologues, he got steamed and would sit there giving others the stink-eye while muttering about what would come to be in his universe.
Antryg Windrose and the Doctor got along like old chums. They pretty much took over the panel for large sections of it. Kenobi (who kept his comments concise, dignified and sort of fortune cookie-sounding) should have stopped them but I think he approved of them too much. I liked one of Antryg's remarks; it was a lot to chew on -- something to the effect that power did not corrupt morality, rather, that morals corrupted the essence of power, and wasn't it wonderful that they did!
Anyway, it was a great remark and really well-placed -- Sera Emory was making a point that was clearly one of those things that was kind of wrong, deep down, just so perfectly entrenched in reason that it would be impossible to argue with. She'd say something ethically dodgy that was phrased in such a way that it was clearly apparent to all reasonable people, but Antryg kept knocking her points down by being totally unreasonable (yet charmingly right.)
The Doctor -- the young one with the tan overcoat and the sneakers -- backed Antryg up most of the time (in between looking at him like he was seeing something familiar*) but I also caught him wistfully listening to Brandon Corey and at one point sort of nodding his head when the guy said something to the effect of wouldn't it be better if someone with brains ran the universe?
Food for thought, but I hope they don't get too hungry. This panel was a real powerhouse, pun intended. I saw Sera Emory walking up to Mr. Corey afterwards, no doubt to discuss more on the subject -- at least, I think it was him; caught the flash of red hair bobbing off into the crowd.
I already recommend the Illuminatus! Trilogy as a self-help book, so let's see...
For those dealing with anxiety about the modern world, I should think a read of The Doomsday Book should put things in perspective.
And of course the Chronicles of Amber for anyone seeking help with their dysfunctional family.
For low self-esteem, I'd have to recommend Deep Secret.
Or for anyone simply in need of empowerment in the face of the world's darkness, Diane Duane's So You Want to Be A Wizard sets forth great principles to live by.
And there I go taking the question seriously now! Except for the Zelazny rec, which is probably not the world's best dysfunctional family handbook.
Careful with those hand sanitizers. Some of them use antibiotic chemicals as their active ingredients, which allow microbes to breed selectively (they've been implicated in the spread of hospital infections like MRSA.) Alcohol-based is a better bet. Soap and water is probably even better than that.
Leva @ 95: Crowded conditions (and the reduction of them in most of the modern US, compared to 1918) are very much on my mind. I posted upthread about the army barracks effect. Now I'm wishing I hadn't returned that book to the library just now, so I could examine the sections about the spread patterns more thoroughly. I believe there was a war fundraiser parade involved in one city which was shortly after most thoroughly devastated.
I'm very glad I read the John M. Barry book mentioned, a few weeks ago, as it happens. Not only is it one of the most amazing history books I've ever read, it also assuages my fears somewhat about this outbreak. A huge factor in the virulence and spread of the 1918 flu pandemic was the Great War; military camps in the US were so overcrowded that against even the public health advice of the day, they had three shifts of soldiers rotating in through the same bunks without even time to change the sheets in between. Lethal strains could pass easily; carriers didn't have to get very far to infect the next set of victims.
Thanks for mentioning the book; more people should hear of it and more people should read it, not least because it's such an incredibly engaging piece of work - as someone who normally prefers fiction to history, just on the merits of writing style.
Mind, I'm also grateful to live in a world where the agencies in charge of public health are declaring this a public health emergency and taking measures accordingly. Updated knowledge and rapid action on a societal scale are why I don't expect this to tip over into something like 1918.
I see I'm not the only one with a birthday in this season. No wonder people keep telling me I'm dangerous...
KeithS @ 44: I lived there for eight months and sympathize greatly. Learned a bit of spoken Mandarin, but almost no written (I could recognize the name of my town, some names of other towns, some ingredients on packaged food, the characters for "attention" or "caution" which appeared on a lot of signs, and a few others, but that wasn't much.)
The inability to read and the inability to converse affected me in different ways. Being Chinese-illiterate made it hard for me to find my way around independently, although additionally, many of the surrounding systems assume people always come in groups, which had a similar effect. I got used to being very prepared - when I wanted something that couldn't be conveyed simply, I'd look up the word for it and painstakingly copy it down off a computer screen. Being unable to speak to very many people on a fluent level was far more isolating in the long run; for written communication, I had the Internet, and used it copiously.
Words fail me. Pity they didn’t fail him first.
On the other hand, there was definitely some fail involving him and words.
Lee @ 14: That assumes that any publishable work in that sample will not be sent to other solid agents who haven't participated in the Twitter show-and-tell. I'm not the kind of writer who would take enough personal offense over an informal "what not to do" seminar to hurt my own chances of publication over it, but I don't think that being more easily offended makes a writer necessarily less able than they already are to tell the difference between a good opportunity and a scam.
Good work does go to vanity presses to die sometimes, and it sucks, but it usually happens when writers aren't sufficiently connected or informed to have even heard of agent blogs and other Internet advantages which we enjoy - which is sad; or are so bullheaded as to have found the information and rejected it, taking the quick satisfaction of a printed book over any chance at real publication. Which is also sad, but harder to do anything about.
Yay! A writing thread!
Amid stories of authors planning to boycott the agents who took part in the first Queryfail
Less slushpile for the rest.
I feel like tacky-yet-educational gossip actually does serve a purpose, though it's a somewhat dysfunctional activity. As a sometime teacher, I am morally obligated to hate ratemyprofessors dot com, out of a sense of academic solidarity - and yet, I feel like I know a lot more of what to expect from the courses I'm going to take this summer because of the information people have posted there. The Internet would be less infuriating without its lawless places, but also less useful.
As others have said, I think this is entirely on purpose. I'm almost surprised that this is a minority opinion, but I suppose we have seen enough unintentional badfic to create ambiguity in our minds... There always seems to me a difference between bad poetry written unintentionally, and bad poetry written by good writers. (Atlanta Nights is another obvious example of the kind - and in fact that was what first brought me to ML.) We know where the top is, and we leap over it with self-conscious zeal.
By the way: Lighthill @ 66, you give great glee.
Caveat to the otherwise spot-on recommendations of Lee and Ginger: Make sure all the data is saved to the SIM card first (or save the data to a computer, if you have the data cable to do that with.) Phones will often save numbers, etc, to the phone memory by default, in which case you'll have to re-save them to the SIM card. It can be tedious, or less so, depending on whether your particular model of phone has a shortcut to copy all numbers or requires each to be done individually.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 30 |
| 2006 | 1 |
Total: 31 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by A.J. Luxton:
Show all comments by A.J. Luxton.