The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lisa Spangenberg:

I already do the overwhelming majority of my work on screen and online.

Technical and scholarly presses are increasingly using Microsoft Word's "tracking" feature in editorial processes.

I use it because they pay me to use it, but I loathe Microsoft Word's tracking.

My question: are mainstream publishers using tracking?

I want Claris Emailer back, under Leopard.

And if I can't have that, I want traditional full-fledged completely functional Eudora back, under Leopard.

will shetterly@

Civil union for non-aristocrats goes back to Sumerian tablets, wherein the exchange of salt and beer for a spouse established the contract.

Marriage as a Christian sacrament though is not even a thousand years old; it's marriage as something other than civil that's "new." In other words, you're asking the wrong question.

If we look at the language around marriage--spouse, wedding, etc.--it's very clear that marriage is at its heart a civil contract. And exchange of goods--my child and his/her offspring, for your goods/land.

Chang@45

I use this word only for very special people.

Ralph Nader is an absolutely arrogant, irrelevant, egotistical cunt.

I don't, speaking as a philologist and a woman, see cunt as any more acceptable than Uncle Tom.

Think about it; Nader is using a term that is so offensive that the first association, the only association it has, is racist. Only someone perceived as black can be an Uncle Tom. Possession of a cunt means, among other things, that one is female--and it's reserved for "special people," as if it's the worst thing you can call Nader.

I am currently in this exact hell.

I've called twice, and gone through the drill, and yet--I still got billed.

Twice.

It would be pretty easy to write that as a Perl module for MT Teresa . . .

Interesting opinion piece from Gloia Steinem in the New York Times.

Nah, there's no cross platform issue with Airports.

it's way easier to set up, 'specially on a Mac. I travel with one--PNH and TNH, that's what you used at VP.

Get an Airport Express if you'll have less than ten users simultaneously; you can take with you when you travel, and use it to stream music to your stereo wirelessly, and share USB printers.

Anything with server farms or routers in Santa Monica is going to be spotty; that does include some Time Warner routers and it includes My Space and Geo Cities and yes, Google farms as well. Electricity was off for several hours last night, and is still not predictable.

Santa Monica. Rain, hard wind, more rain, and no electricity . . .

There's a plan for a virtual reunion of VPX that's been proposed in the VPX room on AbsoluteWrite.com/forums (using Yahoo messenger) this coming Friday evening at 6 pm on the West coast, which would be 9 pm on the East coast.

Robert Jordan got the fact that medieval lit was funny, and often funny in odd and quirky ways. He understood the bizarre but funny aspects of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a way that surprisingly few people do.

I suspect that that his success enabled Tor to take a risk with authors that might not have had quite as much of a chance if Robert Jordan's books hadn't been so very very popular, making less likely to be wildly popular books still possible to publish.


He will be missed.

I wrote a sort of rant regarding suggestions for Neo Pagan scholarship here; it's useful in terms of what authors should know if they are writing about ancient Celtic peoples, history, or myths.

Anything on the ancient or medieval Celts by someone who can't read Latin and at least either Old Irish or medieval Welsh; ditto on Vikings for Old Norse.

Anything published by Llewellyn.

Anything by Miranda Green needs to be thoroughly double-checked.

Anything, at all, by Gimbutas.

Wone is alive and well in Scots/Lallans.

Anyone else going to NASFIC?

Teresa, they're lucky to have you.

That's a group dynamic that is particularly painful and harmful and serves to maintain the status quo very effectively. You can always dismiss the problem someone's trying to draw attention to by attacking the person instead (including criticizing how the person brought up the problem). If the person wears out and goes away, no more problem.

And sometimes the person is less than rational, unwilling to listen to alternate views, and creates a hostile environment. The community as a whole benefits when, as TNH has just demonstrated, the irrational and uncharitable element is excised, as one does with a cancerous growth.

#910 ::: Greg London in # 910 wrote:

The "Male Privilege" list is neither focusing on higher level principles of equality, nor focusing on specific instances of inequality. It takes specific instances of discrimination and builds them up into a wide brushstroke painting of everything men do wrong.

It does nothing of the kind; male privilege is about the ways males in North America (and likely elsewhere) are automatically awarded privileges by socio-cultural assumptions, standards and mores, by virtue of being visibly XY sexed. It has nothing to do with those men's personal behavior, beliefs or desires.

Compare this to something like MLK's I have a Dream speech. Read it. All of it, it's rather short.

No. Seriously. Go read it right now.

Yes, do. King is specifically addressing men; he really means it when he said "brothers." He is not inclusive of women. He was, in fact, rather dismissive about women of any race. His language is not inclusive -- and when he wants to be inclusive, he does include "sisters," primarily when he's addressing home life and children.

Cat fights are notorious not for viciousness, but for sound and fury signifying nothing. Check a dictionary, if you don't believe me. Or a porn site -- there's also a fairly prominent sexual subtext surrounding cat fights, of both feline or human varieties.

Moreover, there's no time for a cat fight or a martial art, in my neighborhood; they'll just shoot you. It's no skin off their nose. Just you know, taking care of business.

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