The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by pookel:

Another Lithuanian connection here. My paternal grandfather's parents met in the Red Army during the Russian revolution of 1917 (they were both medics), then left Russia after he was born. He grew up in Memel, Lithuania, which is now known as Klaipeda. They lived there until the schools kicked all the Jews out, then moved to Latvia for a year, then fled Europe in December 1939 ahead of Hitler.

My great-grandparents, when they were trying to leave, had a chance to buy plane tickets to Sweden, but they didn't have their travel papers in order. My grandfather, then 17, convinced them to buy the tickets anyway and sort the paperwork out later. They did, the paperwork went through, and that's why that branch of the family made it out alive. Most of his cousins, aunts, uncles, etc., weren't so lucky. Years later, after they were all settled in America and living comfortably, my great-grandparents gave my grandfather $10,000 to thank him for saving all their lives.

In other branches of the family, I have an 18th-century immigrant, five Civil War soldiers, some slaveholders, a Presbyterian minister who adopted all the unwanted babies that got dumped on his doorstep, both white and black, and another Presbyterian minister who was such an abusive tyrant that all his kids became atheists, but unfortunately I don't know a lot of details about those.

For those who commented on the Russian movie Night Watch, I'd like to point out that it was released in 2004 in Russia and so it's possible to have seen it already. IMHO, it's as good as the trailer suggests, although the visual style can be a bit exhausting. It's not the kind of thing you'd want to watch if you had a headache coming on.

I've been told that Lulu's books are superior in quality to those of CafePress. I haven't seen either myself, though. I do know that Lulu allows you to restrict access to your book so it is not publicly available. This year, they're offering one free book (with free shipping) to any NaNoWriMo winner, and they're promoting it as a way to get a free bound proof of your draft without "publishing" the novel. To me, this speaks highly of their honesty; there's no sales pitch claiming that you'll be successful if you publish through them, and they acknowledge that most people will want to publish with a traditional publisher instead. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume that getting one bound copy of your first draft isn't something real publishers will care about later.)

Also, anyone who won NaNo, or who knows someone who won NaNo and isn't planning to use the offer, could use this to test the quality of Lulu books. They're not going to check the content of submitted books, as far as I know, so you could use it for a family cookbook, poetry collection, whatever.

I don't suppose any kind soul has calculated a smaller version of this recipe and would care to share? If not, I suppose I'll do it myself one of these days (and put it in my "things to try when I'm not pregnant" file).

Also, I should probably know this, but are we talking about fresh whole cherries, fresh pitted cherries, canned cherries, maraschino cherries, or what?

Good God, the entire point of the poster is to show (a) that we DID know what was going on, and (b) that we chose NOT to act upon this knowledge.

I believe that was Teresa's point.

But images still retain their power. How many people would still support the war if they saw pictures like these? Warning! The pictures at the link are very disturbing. They're not for the faint of heart (myself included).

Do you think there aren't images just as horrible from the Allied firebombing of Dresden? War inflicts a terrible toll on civilian populations, and it always has. People who support the war in Iraq aren't so naive that they don't understand that. If you want to convince them not to support the war, you have to convince them that the war's long-term goals are misguided; you can't just show them some bloody corpses and expect them to change their minds.

I wish I had an insightful comment, but mostly this reminds me of my Mulder/Krycek days and makes me want to go back and read it all again.

That, and I'm reminded of how impressed I was when I discovered how professional much of the slash-writing community is. I don't mean talent, I mean beta-reading, rewriting, editing, rating systems, and the mostly well-written and clean copy that resulted from the system. Unfortunately, I don't think those standards have carried over to the teenage girls posting Harry/Draco fic on fanfiction.net, but at least the X-Files fandom tended to produce high-quality writing.

As long as we're identifying stories, I have one. I've asked it many places and haven't gotten a solution; I don't think I've asked here, but sincere apologies if I have.

The story probably appeared in Omni magazine in the late 1980s. It featured a scientist who sends his consciousness back in time and takes over Hitler's body while he's a young man in Vienna. After he tortures Hitler for a while, Hitler gets control of the body back, and his sense that the invading mind is Jewish provokes the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the scientist is trapped in Hitler's mind and has to watch the whole thing.

Less important, but as long as I'm on the subject, there are two others from Omni. One was about a woman whose sister grows enormously big and diffuse and eventually disappears. And another about a guy with a friend who goes by Buddha, who gives himself a sex change, and there seemed to be a lot of drug use involved.

I don't know anymore if these were good stories or if they just made a strong impression on my young mind. I was reading this stuff when I was 10-12 and it was fascinating at the time.

Apologies for OT comment, but ...

Does anyone else have trouble with long threads (as in the current open thread) refusing to display in entirety? I find that after it hits a certain length, which seems to be around 350 posts, the whole thread will seem to load and then suddenly disappear, so that I can't scroll past the original page. It will cut off in the middle of whatever comment is at the bottom of the first page. If I hit "stop" while it's in the middle of loading, then I get to see however many comments had loaded by that point, but I have to time it very carefully to get any of the comments near the bottom. I have the same problem in Opera and IE on Win2000 and IE on Mac.

I would comment in the open thread, except that, well, I can't see the bottom of the thread anymore because of this problem.

Kimberly:

A question: We read Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents together, over the summer, and Dylan loved it so much he was sad when it was over! We are now wondering which Pratchett to spin him toward next. Thoughts? Best Pratchett, Maurice aside, for ten-year-old boy?

I'd highly recommend the Johnny Maxwell books, although they don't have quite the same tone as Amazing Maurice, which is darker and more fantastical. The Johnny books are more typically teen-boy-adventure stuff. I thought they were great, though, and I read them for the first time as a 25-year-old woman.

TChem:

Any ideas for boundary-expanding yet age-appropriate work that can be had at a reasonably well-stocked comic book store?

Bone and Usagi Yojimbo have both been mentioned (er, by me), but they'd be appropriate for her age and easy to find. No dogs, but Usagi has an entertaining pet lizard. And the female characters are not bad, albeit secondary. My husband also recommends the graphic novel version of Stardust, but we couldn't think of anything else. There is some mention of sex in Stardust, and one somewhat suggestive drawing. It's probably OK unless her parents are picky.

I've compiled your recommendations and those of my LJ friends list here if it would be of use to anyone to have them all in the same place.

I have no excuse for needing this list, with my first child not due until April, but there have been such wonderful recommendations here that I'm going to keep a copy for myself just because.

I notice Jeff Smith's Bone is on the list, which I'll second, and if she does enjoy graphic novels, I'd add Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series. They feature an anthropomorphic rabbit samurai in 17th-century Japan and are generally historically and culturally accurate, as well as entertaining. They're not manga; Sakai is an American of Japanese descent, and they're written in English. There's some violence, so you might want to check them for appropriateness first, but I think they'd be OK.

My husband stopped by while I was writing this and wants me to add:

Clive Barker's The Thief of Always; Abarat
William Goldman's The Princess Bride

The Thief of Always is the favorite book of both my sisters-in-law, since my husband got them to read it when they were kids.

However, if you're doing the same thing in a typeset line, each inserted hyphen is marked with little caret, ^, just below but infracting the baseline of the type. If there are no other corrections on that line, what you'd mark in the margin would be the equals sign with the caret under it and the ligs above and to either side of it. Outward from this would be four slants, ////, meaning "do it four times," and beyond that would be a circled PE, EA, or AA, to show who gets charged for that correction.

If I ever needed a reminder that copyeditors and copy editors are not the same thing, this was it. I used to want to make the transition from newspapers to books someday, but the more I hear about book copyeditors, the less appealing the job sounds.

Is the SF Chron in need of a new copy editor? (or am I merely confused about the duties of a CE?)

In defense of my profession, I'd like to point out that on an average day, I edit at least 10,000 words of copy in addition to designing and paginating at least one major feature front and several inside pages and writing the headlines for all those stories. I miss things like the mistake mentioned above on a regular basis, despite being good at what I do. I would hope they'd be less flooded with copy at a large paper like the Chronicle, but you never know. (Note also that newspaper copy editors not only fix typos, but are expected to rewrite copy for style, grammar and clarity.)

*delurking*

Re: "Shadowmancer" - A good friend of mine tried to read this and found it horribly propagandistic and heavy-handed, and couldn't even finish it. (She's a Christian, too - raised Mormon, sort of unorthodox now, but still basically a believer.)

I'd recommend Bujold's "Spirit Ring" for fantasy with a Christian angle, personally, although the sorts of people who are opposed to Harry Potter might not be much happier about a book in which the Catholic Church sponsors holy magic against the forces of evil.

*relurking*

Delurking again, afraid this might become a habit.

Re: Judging books by their covers. I like modern literary novels, both the more popular, Oprah's Book Club type of books and the more obscure and very "literary" books.

My mom goes to library book sales a lot. She has a very bad memory for names. I told her, "Forget who wrote it, just get me any book that is in trade paperback format with a matte finish, not glossy, or glossy is OK if it looks really artistic, but not if it looks too mainstream." I'm rarely disappointed in those choices.

Books of a similar style and genre get marketed in similar ways, and I don't think it makes me shallow to recognize that and to look for what I think I'll like.

I'd like to hesitantly de-lurk to address the subject of neurochemical disorders (and, by the way, I've been following this thread since the beginning and find it fascinating). As a newspaper copy editor, I've had the opportunity to see many of the letters we get from readers. It's not really equivalent to reading a slushpile, as our acceptance rate is astronomically higher (probably over 50 percent), but I believe there are some similiarities.

If the neurochemical-disordered authors Teresa is talking about are anything like the mentally unbalanced letter writers I've seen, it's not a case of her making fun of authors who use bad grammar or sound a little odd. There is a real, distinctive difference in the way people with certain disorders write (I suspect it's schizophrenia, but I'm no expert).

After seven years of working at newspapers, I can glance at a letter and tell in an instant if it's one of those. If it's about the government watching the person through their microwave, if it consistently uses inappropriate long words that sound like other long words but are completely wrong for the context, if its margins are full of diagrams that are obviously meaningful to the writer but not to us, if the subject matter changes with every sentence without the writer seeming to be aware of it, and if it conveys a general attitude of extreme, irrational paranoia, it's probably one of those letters. Sometimes it's even more obvious, as when the envelope has writing all over it in what seems to be blood (yes, we got one of those once).

We get letters from people with strange personalities, or who aren't very good at grammar or word choice, or who hold extreme views, which are still not in the "mental disorder" category. And when I talk about our letter-writers with mental disorders, I don't mean the guy who thinks that, for example, environmentalists support al-Qaida; that's just an unusual viewpoint. I mean the letters with the strange symbols and the black helicopters and the writing in blood on the envelope. You see enough like that, you learn to pick them out quickly.

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