The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mike Kozlowski:

Patrick: I'm not saying it's necessarily a great social model, and I suspect that there's a lot they could do to make it better from a contributor's perspective. But from the perspective of someone who types "wp whatever" in their URL bar, it's an amazingly helpful and invaluable tool, and you don't have to get involved as a contributor, so can ignore all the contentious politics.

The open source software comparison is in that if you just download Firefox or Ubuntu or whatever, it'll seem like a relatively smooth and useful piece of software -- but if you hang around the parts where people are actually writing it, you'll see tons of controversies and bitchfests and whatever else.

Yeah, Wikipedia would be better off if they could get more (good) people to contribute (good) edits; but as it stands now, it's still useful, so I guess they have enough good people making enough good edits.

There's a lot of sausage-making in Wikipedia, sure, but I still find it the most useful site on the web for looking up information, easily beating out the increasingly-worthless Google.

If Wikipedia is doomed because there are a bunch of officious assholes involved in it, then every open-source software project ever is also doomed. Also just about every other product of human endeavor, if we account for the officious assholes being invisible to the public.

As traditional at this time of year, I now feel insanely disconnected from the genre, as I haven't even heard of two of the novel nominees (never mind the short fiction).

Blindsight and Eifelheim -- worth reading, or inexplicably popular?

So what's the "small press" distinction you're making with Night Shade? Just that they're more ambitious than most small presses, or something else?

JDM: So... the short tail?

Well, damn it, it IS pornography. And the sooner we get people to call a spade a spade and admit that the biggest consumers of porn in the U.S. are middle-aged women, the sooner we can get these silly moralizing brigades to go away.

It would be totally sweet if these really did turn into discussions, and little online communities ended up evolving on book discussions, complete with all the online community stuff -- off-topic personal discussion, inter-group flamewars ("Those idiots over at Stephen King's The Cell are at it again..."), cons/meetups, participants getting married, etc.

Teresa: I'm definitely not used to manual typewriters, but computer keyboards work even if you still have the previous key depressed, so that's probably what I was doing.

I used a basic Selectric in my typing classes (in the early '90s, so you can tell that the ol' school district was highly up-to-date on their tech), and I thought it was just about the worst typing device I'd ever used. It was slow enough that I could miss letters when typing, as the keys would refuse to press if it was still processing the last key; it hummed and jumped around in this disturbing way that suggested it might electrocute you if it felt like it; and, worst, it had that anti-ergonomic sharp edge on the keyboard that took five years off my wrists.

But then, I've never cared for the high-pressure, high-click IBM style computer keyboards, either. Give me a scissor-switch notebook-style keyboard any day, the kind that lets your fingers glide lightly over the keyboard.

Your "light" page (/makinglight/content.html) has no styling at all now.

I don't know if this will help you at all, but I'm doing a style-switch thing on my booklog, and the Javascript for it is at:

http://www.klio.org/weblog/styleswitcher.js

I remember reading that ALA article, and some of the code in mine is the same as theirs, but I ended up significantly changing parts of it, so apparently, their code didn't work for me, either.

Wikipedia thinks the same thing.

(And actually, so did I, until I realized I was thinking of Joanna Russ. Who I hope actually does count as New Wave?)

Man, talk about the best of all worlds. You get money for being the victim of libel, AND the libel is vanity-press published, so nobody's actually even seen it.

I would be very dubious about not working with $5 million in the bank, if I were relatively young.

The general rule of thumb for withdrawal from savings in retirement is 4% a year, and that's a number that's supposed to draw down your principal over your expected lifespan. A principal-preserving number is going to less than that.

If you figure 3%, you're looking at $150K a year, which is certainly a pretty nice household income (somewhere around the top 5% of US households), but is still in the range where you'll want to fly coach instead of first-class, never mind a private jet.

Plus, it's just risky -- if another Great Depression comes along, and your $5 million becomes $1 million, and you really don't want to try living on $30K a year (aside: Yes, I know it's very possible, and many people do -- but a wealthy person living a life of indolence would presumably not be pleased with it), you're scrod. You've got no recent work experience, no useful skills, and are besides completely unused to professional life.

But if you let that money sit, get a job, and live off your income for 15 years -- now you've got $12 million sitting around, 15 fewer years to spend it, and a lot more catastrophe buffer. You can be pulling out $400K or so a year, and be down around $75K a year if the Depressiony bit happens (not to mention with a better resume, if you do have to go back to work).

And yes, of COURSE this is all ridiculous money to basically everyone (myself included). All I'm saying is, it takes more-than-ridiculous money to really feel good about not working, if you ask me.

That said, if you really HATE your job, instead of finding it mostly satisfying but occasionally aggravating, thresholds are probably lower...

Why are people blaming Outlook and Windows? This has nothing to do with Outlook (it uses its own SMTP engine), and -- as far as I can tell -- doesn't exploit any Windows vulnerabilities. It appears to require people to run attachments from email -- attachments, incidentally, that Outlook 2003 won't even allow you to run (as it blocks .pif attachments).

From what I'm seeing, it'd be virtually impossible for a person running modern Microsoft software to be infected without really trying.

It's not an observation original with me, but it's worth noting that rel="nofollow" solves Google's problem (spam links making search results less useful), but not bloggers' problems (spam comments making comment sections less readable and/or time taken to clean up comment spam).

I've been using nofollow for a while now, and haven't noticed any decrease in the amount of comment spam I get.

Teresa and PJ: Yes, that's true, and that's the downside of this. But the upside is, it replaces stupid patchwork local laws with rational, universal national laws.

(Just because conservatives aren't REALLY in favor of states' rights doesn't mean I'm not really opposed to them.)

I am (I suppose) in favor of better labelling laws; but it strikes me as a much better idea to have them at the federal level than at individual levels. This is the sort of area where local regulation doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Not to take anything away from Spin, which really is great, but I thought The Chronoliths was just as good (or maybe a very small titch less good).

I think the class issue here is precisely that the nanny is a (nascent) member of her employer's class. If she were clearly and obviously a member of the lower class, their relationship would be well-defined; but since she's a potential peer of her employer, the employer is torn between treating her as a domestic servant and as a friend, and ends up botching the job entirely.

(Random unrelated question: Just how much money do you have to make before a nanny starts being in the realm of possibilities? I'm not exactly poor, but I don't know anyone who has a nanny, and can't imagine affording one myself. They always sound like a luxury of the European nobility, not people with jobs.)

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