The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John Scalzi:

Show all comments by John Scalzi.

Posted on entry Flash of insight: swift, blinding, pointless ::: August 30, 2009, 07:56 AM:
On the feast days, we will eat not but Pez and drink not but Kool-Aid.
Posted on entry In Brooklyn, about a mile south of us ::: June 14, 2009, 04:14 PM:
"Lutheran Halal Cafe" is the name of my next band.
Posted on entry An Appeal to Heaven ::: May 28, 2009, 05:33 PM:
"He uses a local installation NOT wordpress.com"

Michelle:

"He uses a local installation NOT wordpress.com"

Not anymore. I DID use a local installation but eventually began having significant load issues, at which point I was invited by the folks at Wordpress.com to join their VIP program, which happened in October 2008.

It should be noted the load issues were an artifact of hosting the blog/database on a shared server; I was considering getting a dedicated server, but the Wordpress VIP program offered some significant advantages for me.
Posted on entry Butterfly wings ::: January 30, 2009, 09:29 PM:
I sent PNH a link to an essay I wrote.
Posted on entry Smulp ::: October 16, 2008, 11:24 PM:
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I ate the plums in the icebox you were probably saving for breakfast. And then I joined the Army.
Posted on entry Darn, these gnats are hard to swallow. Please pass the camels. ::: July 12, 2008, 12:54 AM:
All of this could have been avoided if William Sanders had remembered the essential rule of e-mail, which is never send anything in e-mail that you don't want spread out all over the Internet. Because everything gets out on the Internet. We've all had the Internet for a decade and a half now (and some folks even longer); this shouldn't be news.

Also, I solve the e-mail copyright issue by asserting that every e-mail sent to me personally, and all the content therein, become my property upon receipt. Easy.
Posted on entry Things that ought to be obvious ::: June 30, 2008, 10:57 PM:
heresiarch@147:

"The important distinction is whether or not it is a for-profit business, and I am pretty sure that it is."

Why is it an "important distinction"? People keep suggesting that this matters somehow. I'm not seeing it.
Posted on entry Things that ought to be obvious ::: June 30, 2008, 09:05 PM:
David Bilek @ 119:

"Boing Boing is incorporated. That's a pretty good sign it isn't a personal site, isn't it?"

No, not actually. I've got an LLC too; if I run my personal site through it for business reasons, it doesn't make it less of a personal site.

Ah, I see you saw my discussion about it on Metafilter, to which you comment:

"If that's the case, fine, then I'll grant you it is a personal site and say I think we're perfectly free to call out extremely poor judgment on high profile sites of that sort which make a habit of injecting themselves into the public discourse as Boing Boing does."

That is of course fine, but then we're back to our host's original point, to wit: "Believing that public utilities ought to be accountable to the public does not make one into a public utility, no matter how hard anyone tries to spin it that way."

Which is to say that you're perfectly free to bitch, but they're not obliged to listen, or care.
Posted on entry Things that ought to be obvious ::: June 30, 2008, 08:31 PM:
David Bilek @ 113:

I'm not aware of the Internet law that says that because one has more than one blog, that only one is allowed to be personal. Please point out that law to me.

In the meantime, know that our host here has both this blog (which is, technically speaking, a group blog which accepts ads, just like Boing Boing) and a LiveJournal. Will you argue that because PNH has a LiveJournal, that Making Light is now not a personal blog for him?

Likewise: I have my personal site, and a LiveJournal, and a Blogger site, and a Vox site (not to mention a MySpace and a Facebook account). Please inform me which of these is to be designated my "personal" site, since you seem to know these things.

"But that's immaterial"

Funny, you didn't seem to think so just a few posts ago.
Posted on entry Things that ought to be obvious ::: June 30, 2008, 08:02 PM:
David Bilek @ 78:

"I think the for-profit nature of BB changes matters and makes Patrick's objection to this level of scrutiny for a 'personal site' moot."

Bah. I could very easily put ads on my personal site and make it for profit. It wouldn't make it any less of a personal site, because the person who runs it and controls it and has say over what goes up on it is me, personally.

In other words, "personal" is not synonymous with "amateur."
Posted on entry Be careful what you ask for ::: May 13, 2008, 08:40 AM:
In the words of the Pet Shop Boys:

What have I done to deserve this?
Posted on entry Don't Miss the Deadline ::: April 09, 2008, 10:43 PM:
Mary Dell @3:

Oh, I only need one vote to make it count. It's a good vote, you see.
Posted on entry Don't Miss the Deadline ::: April 09, 2008, 07:47 PM:
Mailed mine weeks ago. And had it weighed at the post office.
Posted on entry Pity the Times ::: April 04, 2008, 04:53 PM:
Re: the actual idea of the imprint:

How is not offering advances and not allowing bookstores to return
books any different when it's HarperCollins and not PublishAmerica?
Posted on entry RFC (Request For Clue) ::: February 11, 2008, 09:46 AM:
Your raw log files should have the specific URL at StumbleUpon that is directing traffic your way; you can follow it back from there (this is what I do when I get stumbled).

StumbleUpon is a bit weird. I get several thousand visits from there each month, and yet I'm not quite sure how it works, either. Its not as transparent as Digg or FARK, in terms of how it works. I suspect Underpants Gnomes are involved in some way.
Posted on entry SFWA: The Suicide Note ::: December 02, 2007, 08:50 PM:
Greg London:

"But Cory Doctorow isn't an SFWA member"

Uhhh, he's not?

Pretty sure he is.

The problem was not that Cory didn't have an internal channel, it's that he'd specifically told SFWA not to represent themselves as his agents in any way, and also that Cory mistrusts Andrew Burt, for reasons that are fairly obvious by this point.

In any event, as noted by others here, Cory had some excellent reasons to respond both quickly and publicly.
Posted on entry SFWA: The Suicide Note ::: December 01, 2007, 12:00 AM:
The thing with the money borrowed from SFWA is done and over and Burt paid it back, and I'm pretty sure SFWA got a receipt. There's not much value in grinding it over again.
Posted on entry SFWA: The Suicide Note ::: November 30, 2007, 12:16 PM:
Chris Gerrib@37:

Well, you may recall that I did run for president last year, not to mention I just chaired a committee that among other things required me to do hours of mind-sloggingly collating of SFWA member votes while I was allegedly on a vacation. I'm not adverse to being engaged, and I don't think I need to be prodded about the virtue of making an effort.

That said, next year I have three books I need to work on, not to mention a slate of shorter work and quite a bit of other work not relating to fiction, and I would have to see whether I have the actual bandwidth to be a competent and engaged SFWA president on top of that work.

Which is to say, I will decide when it's appropriate for me to make a decision. Until then, I don't think it's wise for anyone to assume I'll be in the running for SFWA president next year.
Posted on entry SFWA: The Suicide Note ::: November 30, 2007, 12:07 PM:
Chris Gerrib@34:

"Although Burt obviously wanted to be back on the committee, a quick glance at the vote of the board (8 to 1) suggests that his vote was not critical."

I think this overlooks the fact that Burt, as a member of the board, was active in discussions and was almost certainly actively lobbying his board members to be on the new committee; we don't know what the vote would have been had he recused himself from both the deliberations and the voting.

I personally feel this conflict of interest should be of considerable concern for SFWAns.
Posted on entry SFWA: The Suicide Note ::: November 30, 2007, 11:52 AM:
Jonathan Crowe@15:

"It's a bureaucratic argument, something I'd expect in a civil service whose inept employees are too hard to get rid of: we can't change our people (i.e., fire the fuckups), so we'll change our process (i.e., make it harder for the fuckups to fuck up)."

I tend to view it like that old Samsonite commercial in which the suitcases were savaged by a gorilla, sending the signal that if they can stand up to this, they can stand up to anything. In other words, a solid vote of confidence for the process. Since I was one of the people who handed over a blueprint for the process, I suppose I should be flattered.

James D. Macdonald@26:

"A better plan would be for Scalzi to put his name in for Prez before the nomination deadline, so he doesn't have to start a write-in campaign after half the voters have already returned their ballots."

This assumes I plan to run next year. Rumor has it, I have books to write.

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