The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Anne KG Murphy:

abi: you don't need to have a whole language in common. Sure, it helps if you can write a lovely description of your product in the language of your target consumer, but the pictures speak for themselves, so mostly you need just the terminology of commerce, e.g. price, size, and other descriptors that affect the product specifications and the transaction.

Or, alternatively, someone who can mediate for you in that language.

I agree with regard to 9. but I would also note that a shop needn't have their own computer to do this. I don't know how things are in India but the American practice of individual ownership is not in place everywhere. Some people have learned how to share. And whole nations have connected through Sattelite uplinks without ever getting strung with wires.

... his recent ordeal only recently over.

That says it all, really (and yet, there's so much in there, it's amazing). Thank you for a smile to start my morning.

Glen, I appreciate your comments. I've used quite a lot of Gaffer's tape in stage work and will never forget the first time I used Duck Tape (TM) and was horribly disappointed at the horrible quality of the tape - it wouldn't tear cleanly, it wouldn't come off cleanly and it was just all-around horrible to work with compared to nice quality gaffer's tape.

______________________________________________

Is it twisted of me to react to this thread with the thought that the nice high-paying computer engineering job I just got will allow me to afford to continue my copyediting habit?

I will be taking the role of Buffy in a Rocky-style cast version of the musical episode of Buffy at Penguicon this year. I doubt my shoulder, which I injured in February, will be in good enough shape to do the flips, but we'll do much of the choreography. I do find myself wondering if the person playing Giles will actually end up throwing anything at me onstage.

Hopefully not sea urchins...

The only thing I’d add is that in the summer you should have a little tube of that zinc-and-petroleum-jelly ointment they use to keep babies from getting diaper rash. It’s very effective protection against the kind of chafing that’ll peel your skin so raw that you can’t bear to walk.

There's also a product called Body Glide that you can get in most track and fitness stores. Runners use it. If you're facing walking or running long distances or in warm weather or whatever might cause you to chafe in bad places, I highly recommend it. I first heard of it in a newsletter about the apalachian trail in an article about a girl who hiked the trail in a skirt.

Interesting letter on voting irregularities over at
http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=87&t=34711

I think one would have to prove that Bush or the Republican party was involved to overturn the results though. I'm not sure.

The deadline for voters overseas to get their ballots in is November 12. The clerks can probably delay reporting results until then.

Now I know I'm weird. I never for a moment wondered how to pronounce Dzur. :P

Or perhaps I'm just mentally aligned with Brust somehow.

Lord knows there are other authors whose terms and names I have never heard in my head the way they intended them. Anne McCaffrey's Menolly is one example.

I was not that impressed by The Phoenix Guards or Five Hundred Years After, which I read when they came out, and I have never been one to eagerly antici ...pate the release of books in a series [and I was busy for a few years getting a Master's degree], so I've recently been catching up on my Brust reading.

Having been delighted by both The Sun, the Moon, and The Stars and Freedom & Necessity, I dove into The Paths of the Dead and truly enjoyed it also. I don't know if Steven's writing has changed or if my sensibilities have. a bit of both, I suspect. I'm glad to know the other volumes of the book are available, or at least on the verge of being so.

We will have Steven as our toastmaster at ConFusion in 2005, which just tickles me pink.

I'll chime in with sympathies and parrot other people's comments that this thread left me much relieved after reading the title of the LJ feed, amd also more aware of how lucky I am to have a copy of the second edition.

I continue not to know if there's anything useful I can do when I find typos in books. Especially when they are books by people I'm fond of, I don't want to hurt their feelings by saying "On the bottom of page 213 of the first paperback edition, 'dropping' is spelled with three 'p's, on page 305 one character's name is substituted for that of another character in the scene, and there are 14 other jarring typos." I mean, that just feels mean if there's nothing they can do to change it. And if I can just as productively write to their editor I'd rather skip pointing issues out to the author.

I like how Donald Knuth actually offers a reward for reporting errata in his Art of Computer Science Series - not only does it offer possible monetary advantage and a signed letter from him to put on your wall, it also gives the average reader a productive path of action when an error is identified. And it encourages early careful reading, since only the first report of the error is rewarded.

Speaking of our dear administration, read this:

The administration quarantines dissent (re-posted from The American Conservative)

re: reading, yes, I see pictures. this leads to complications when someone asks me if I've seen a movie that was based on the book. checking for pictures in my head is not a dependable determination.

Swift away the old year passes
May the New Year come with peace

May the child be educated,
May the anger be abated
And the righteous vindicated -
Let the wars and troubles cease

On we turn to greet tomorrow
Though it bring both joy and sorrow
We'll try not to trouble borrow
Knowing life is just a lease

Swift away the old year passes
May the New Year come in peace



--Anne

I lost a few weeks of work in the middle of my master's thesis due to a drive crash. we were later able to recover most everything, though not in the heirarchical information organizational structure it had been in, since we only had a floppy drive to work through in DOS until the operating system was reinstalled. (and that lost most of the file names by truncating them to 8 chars, all in caps. Sigh*)

I'm glad to hear the tip jar has covered the cost of new and backup drives. Hopefully new drive number 2 will work out better.

hmm.. that blockquote didn't quite turn out right. just to be clear, all of the last three paragraphs of my last post are quoting Lapham.

The political cynicism part of this thread reminded me that there is a particularly good Editorial by Lewis Lapham In the current issue of Harpers Magazine. (Unfortunately you can only get last month's issue online, so I can't link to it, but I'll quote it in part.) He's responding to letters, and says that he takes from the mail "a feeling of encouragement and hope because I think the letters prove a point opposite to the one their authors intend."

The humor and energy of the prose give lie to the professions of cynicism and despair, and I'm left with the thought that maybe it's possible to upgrade the concern for the country's state of well-being from a luxory to a necessity. For the last twenty-odd years, ever since Ronald Reagan first opened his window on the White House lawn to discover that once again it was "morning in America," the merchants of the country's upscale socioeconomic opinion have been reminding their clientele that politics no longer matter. ... the financial markets ... made all the decisions of any consequence or size; politicians handed around the party hats and hired the mariachi band.

...

The media's extravagant cross-promotions of the synthetic debate sedate their audiences with the drug of boredom and so encourage a general retreat into what the late Walter Karp understood to be "the corrupting consolation of cynicism." Karp employed the phrase to describe the attitude of mind adopted by a generation of American intellectuals responding to the Wilson administration's harsh suppression of free speech during World War I. Finding themselves suffocated by a climate of opinion in which dissent was disloyal and disloyalty a crime, a good many independent-minded and once outspoken citizens acquired the habit of looking at the national political scene from the point of view of spectators at a tenement fire or a train wreck. As compensation for their loss of a public voice, they retreated to a library or a lawn party to comfort themselves with private and literary expressions of anger and disgust.

The attitude is one that I've encountered often enough in myself to know that it leads nowhere except to the sucking of stale and bitter lemons, to know also that it is the cynical politician's most precious asset and truest friend. Yes, say the gentlemen in power, exactly right, the world is a truly terrible place, overflowing with venal bankers and bearded terrorists, and you, my dear fellow, you are so sensitive and smart that it would be a crime to squander your talent in the sewer of politics ...

Ben wrote: "My takeaway is that politics is a dirty game... that just happens to affect our day to day lives more often than it ought. ::frown::"

Which reminds me of a letter I received in the mail the other day. It was from the American Friends Service Committee, and it was the best political initiative letter (in terms of being straightforward and believable, yet inspiring at the same time) that I've seen recently. It was about aiming to re-introduce honesty into American politics.

The example of dishonesty they started with was the US' backing out of some 30 international treaties and agreements under this administration, including Nuclear testing/nonproliferation, Childrens rights, Kyoto, The International Court, and a bunch of others. They argued that we as a country have given up on the idea that we have any say in our own government, so now when our government breaks treaties and backs away from institutions we helped define, dramatically changing our international diplomatic position for the worse, we shrug our shoulders and say "politics is a dirty game. What can you do?"

Sometimes it seems like the problem isn't that politics affects our lives more often than it ought... it's that our lives affect politics less often than they ought.

The AFSC is a group with a long history. they approached the Nazis and asked for permission to help Jews emigrate, and got it. THey saved thousands of lives. Who knows, maybe they can make a difference now in American politics. I don't really believe it, but I want to.

Comment statistics for Anne KG Murphy on the Making Light blog

Total: 25 comments. View all these comments on a single page.