I perform it regularly. It's ideal for me, since I have asthma which tends to mess with my singing.

On a more serious and not unrelated note, who's read Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter?

I have, but not recently. (It may be somewhere in one of my boxes.)

I was in a classical sheet music store (this one, actually) earlier this month and they actually had the score for 4'33" in stock. (Yes, I looked at it. Yes, it's what you'd expect.)

I saw a Youtube death-metal drummer perform it in about 2 and a half minutes. Yeah, that's fast. He had a camera on his foot so you could tell he wasn't cheating.

What I actually came in to open threadify: I don't know if "The Devil Came Up To Boston" has been mentioned here. Contains language, both NSFW and Bostoncentric. Made me laugh a lot.

#1: Gödel, Escher, Bach is an old favourite that I've reread several times. I'm fond of Hofstadter's other books too, especially Metamagical Themas. But somehow I haven't got around to the autobiography.

Found it. Also includes the failed attempts.

Jeremy Preacher OT186@912 & Skwid OT186@927: Noted.

Fluorospherians at the con: You can reach me at Gjb bar mreb qnfu guerr gjb svir qnfu sbhe svir gjb bar

Ladies and gentlemen: Cage Against The Machine

_GEB:EGB_ was one of my great formative influences as a young geek.

I read Hofstadter's most recent book, on analogies (_Surfaces and Essences_). It was boring. I don't *think* that's because I'm an old geek now.

Tracking in the roguelike discussion from http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/015330.html#1452916:

Dave Harmon: "There were certainly arcade and computer-graphical dungeon crawls before that, but Rogue introduced the business of using a text screen to do it with much less graphics capacity needed. That made it much more practical for terminal-based timesharing systems"

The reason I bring up "Beneath Apple Manor" as a possible contender is that it had the same resolution as a terminal screen, and had to deal with the same design issues. (And was real-time.)

BAM had a 40x20 grid to display its map, and just 16 possible options for each grid cell. (I said 40x40 in my last post, but the screen shot shows that it was using 1x2 pixel blocks for cells, so half the vertical resolution that I thought.) The display wasn't ASCII, but "grey block:floor, brown block:door, blue block:player" requires the same mindset from the player. And from the designer -- the map can only differentiate "wall", "floor", "monster", "treasure" rather than showing fine object distinctions.

I submit that this is Close Enough.

(As a technical note, the Apple's lo-res screen was a remapping of the text screen. If you'd flipped the graphics bit off, with no code changes, BAM would have *become* an ASCII roguelike! Albeit with unconventional character choices: "@" for wall, etc.)

...End of genre nattering. If you get me started on Zork, I'll *really* go on for a while.

"...and was *not* real-time", duh, my mistake.

Sandy B. @4, thanks for this; I'm a fan of Dropkick Murphy and it made me giggle. Literally. At my desk at work. (Fortunately, nobody noticed the earbud in my ear; definitely NOT work-safe lyrics). Toy Dolls does a pretty good "The Devil Went Down To Scunthorpe."

(I always thought the devil won, in the original song; Johnny was good, mind you, but the devil kicked butt...)

Today is also the birthday of the FG. Tonight we -- myself, the FG, her daughter, and son-in-law -- commit mayhem upon various aquatic species, along with copious quantities of beverages.

Tomorrow night we shall watch cheesy 80s Sci-Fi movies with friends, and on Saturday we venture forth to shop for a new car.

I haven't read GEB in a long time, though I enjoyed it when I did.

Andrew Plotkin @9, I'm sorry to hear that. I bought Surfaces and Essences because I thought it sounded interesting (the ways people think fascinate me) and it's on my TBR pile. I guess we'll see if I have the same reaction.

I remember liking GEB but it's been a long time.

I read GEB back, oh, it must have been thirty, thirty-five years ago. I probably should re-read it...

Reposted from OT186: Isn't Zork where the "Maze of twisty little passages, all [alike|different]" comes from?

I remember one trap in that game where you ended up in a room with no exit and nothing there but a pail. You were effectively dead at this point, but stuck in the TWP until you typed "kick bucket," at which point you died.

I still treasure the New Yorker cartoon where a conductor tells the audience, "In memory of John Cage, we will now have 4 minutes and 33 seconds of noise."

(Not exact quotation; most of my stuff is in storage, so I can't check details.)

I started reading GEB many years ago, only to discover that a chunk of 50 or 100 pages or so was missing out of the middle of my copy of the book, replaced with a duplicate of a similar sized chunk of the preceding pages.

It always struck me as some sort of meta-commentary on the book by a mischievous universe, but someday I'll acquire a complete copy and finish reading it.

Mongoose: Yes, I was a big Godel, Escher, Bach:... fan way way back in the late 70s. (I still am, as long as I don't mistake Hofstadter as actually talking about Zen in anything he says about "mu", for example.) I haven't read anything he's written very recently. If you really liked GEB:EGB, another book I greatly enjoyed from the same period is Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's partly philosophy, partly road trip, partly a memoir of going insane at the U. of Chicago, and of life post-recovery... and it does get pretty deep into thinking about the process of thinking and of life itself.

~~~

Xopher: The "kick bucket" situation, that you are probably remembering from Zork, but not remembering quite right. "Kick bucket" indeed dies, but if you don't do that you could always walk back out of that room, and you can move onward from it once you recognize the situation and how to exploit it. My son and I played through all 3 Zork games this past year, so they're still fairly fresh in my memory.

On the other hand, the two mazes, "Maze of twisty little passages, all [alike|different]", come from the original Adventure, aka Colossal Caverns, aka "Advent" if you were running it on a machine with a maximum of 6 or 8 character for command names like the ones I first played it on.

I first encountered it on the IBM 3xx mainframe at the U. of Chigago Library Systems Group, and a year later when I was back in college, on the U. of Chicago's TOPS 20 minicomputer. I last played it... a couple weeks ago, I think. I felt the impulse to fire it up for old times sake; didn't make any maps or start seriously accumulating treasure, just explored a bit.

The 'maze of twisty little passages, all alike', and 'the maze of little twisty passages, all different', predate Zork, they come from Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure.

I helped type in the source code once, in my high school computer lab, so that we could play.

A discussion of 'plants to please not put in your yard' from my local nature museum takes a Cthulhian turn as they post example photos of some absolutely horribly over-cultivated instances. Funny and short.

In regard to Advent (Colossal Cave Adventure, but I knew it as Advent), there is a car I've seen in my neighborhood with the license plate "PLOVER", and my husband swears he's seen a car on his commute with "XYZZY" on the tag.

We do use the "maze of twisty passages all alike" as a throw-away line. Not so much the "Twisty maze of passages, all different"...

I never made it all the way through (although remember it takes the bird to kill the snake). Perhaps I'll download it and try again.

The first game that really sucked me in was Ultima 3 (Exodus). I played others before that, of course, but I was obsessed with beating Ultima.

Andrew Plotkin #10: From your description, I'd tag that as a "primitive ancestor" to roguelikes. The other side of the point to ASCII graphics was that even without "real" graphics, you did have a few dozen different glyphs, allowing you to distinguish among various items, features, and threats.

Re: GEB: That was one of the few books of the time where I stalled part-way through; a year or so later I came back and read through it completely. Definitely a geek rite of passage, not to mention mind-expanding.

Elliott, the Green Wizard Coneflower looks like it probably has a facehugger inside. Don't get too close.

Xopher@17:

"Zork"

No, the slightly older (1976) "Adventure" or "Colossal Cave" program, written in FORTRAN on a PDP/10. I first came across it in Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine", a formative influence (along with GEB:EGB) in high school when they came out. I first played it in the PR1MOS version in 12th grade. I think I still have a printout of the 700-line FORTRAN version at my mother's house from that work-study internship.

That's the one with magic words like xyzzy and plugh.

I officially know that the MoTLPA[A|D] is from Adventure, a game I played but had forgotten.

Therefore there is no further need to inform me of this fact.

Donald Knuth translated Adventure into a Literate Programming idiom and the result is available as a PDF. Highly interesting read, even if you don't program in C.

http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

26
I was allowed to read the source code (in Fortran, as you say), but only after I'd gotten all the way through.
Plugh.

If you want to play Zork, here it is.

(BTW, I loved me my Infocom games.)

But Zork *is* the one with "It's dark. You might get eaten by a grue", right?

abi @OT186 #905: thank you.

Lee @OT186 #907: I agree! All mine... :) :) :)

Elliot Mason, #22: I think the odd plants look pretty neat. Of course, I'm not the one who has to take care of the garden.
They had someone perform 4"33" in a "freshman exploration" class many eons back. I recall thinking it was a pretentious joke, but then much of that class was a pretentious joke.
There is an xkcd about that piece, but I don't recall title or date.

If a lot of people respond the same way to something, you can probably assume that they were each composing their answers for a while, having seen the initial thing, and didn't realize that 6 others were saying the same thing. Each of us thought we were the only one saying it. Unfortunately, the result looks like a pile-on.

Jim, I started playing it and unfortunately it has a direction bug. Found a couple of points where going north repeatedly toggles between two places, and if you say "go south" it says "there is a wall there." The first time it happened I assumed I fell down a hole, but I think it's just a bug.

@35: For Adventure, something like that could be intentional, but I'm not 100% sure about Zork. The idea, I think, is that a passage that starts off going north could wind up anywhere (in that particular case, I guess it's a U shape that enters both rooms from the north?)

It does, of course, make it more difficult to map... which is probably intended.

This sort of thing is much harder to do in a game with graphics (even the primitive graphics of Rogue), because the geometry of your game world is in some sense imposed by the attempt to display it.

Although you can still do some tricks with geometries that only locally resemble Euclidean spaces... "world maps" that are technically toroids were pretty common at one point, for example, and some may still be in use.

Yeah, too confusing to be fun.

"It does, of course, make it more difficult to map... which is probably intended."

Certainly.

The twisty nature of passages (even outside the so-named "maze" areas) was unquestionably set up by Crowther in Adventure to reflect his caving experience. Underground passages *are* twisty, after all. (And the above-ground forest, where you start, is at least a place where one might get lost.)

It's less clear how well this was understood by the MIT hackers who created Zork. They would have appreciated the puzzle-quality of the map, but I think they were riffing off Adventure's style rather than a first-hand knowledge of how caves worked.

"Although you can still do some tricks with geometries that only locally resemble Euclidean spaces..."

I saw an experimental roguelike that was built in hyperbolic (negative-curvature) space. Web-search for "HyperRogue II". Very unnerving; you can get lost on "flat" ground...

I think if you go east, then go west, you should end up where you were before. Or at least notice the passage curving. If you were there physically you could go back. I think it's just buggy; if they did it this way on purpose I hate them.

More evidence: they have places that are specifically noted as impossible to navigate from. I don't think they intended the whole map to be that way.

Xopher @ 40: They did it that way on purpose. Sorry.

Here's a relatively spoiler free map that might help.

Cage's heirs may sue for unauthorized performances of his best piece, but it's not altogether original in concept (I think his idea that the piece consisted of whatever noise the pianist couldn't prevent was original).

I put a copy of the one-page score in my flickr page, where its pictorial qualities can be appreciated.

Schulhoff died of TB while imprisoned by the Nazis in WW2. His music rans from romantic to Dada, from very Gershwinesque piano jazz to a wonderfully bombastic choral setting of bits of The Communist Manifesto. I've been listening to a lot of his music recently, and will pick up more as opportunity permits.

Zork's maze was trickier because it had a thief who would pick up the objects you left around to mark your position in the maze. ("Oh, look, someone left a perfectly good rusty dagger lying here.")

Text adventures are an entirely different experience than Rogue-like games. Apples and kumquats.

The first text-based adventure I ever played -- well, tried to play -- after having heard about Zork and such for years from my parents, was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was about 11. I'd not read the HHGttG books at all.

It made no sense and I kept getting killed before I could figure out what I was supposed to do -- kind of like the Myst problem, only long before Myst existed.

Then I played Leather Goddesses of Phobos (at about the same age) and a-freaking-dored it. Highly recommend.

As if the maze weren't difficult enough because the directions mean nothing.

It just bounced me out to the beginning and I landed right in the maze as soon as I went down. I hardly have anything to mark, and of course it won't let me start over when I want to.

The first game I got for my PC was ADVENTURE.

I bought some of the ZORK games as well, but I don't think I ever solved them back in the day. When I started setting up home Linux systems I was able to get the "original" ZORK (which combines Zork I and some of Zork II) and finished it with some help.

The mazes . . . well, you just have to be persistent. It isn't fun to map them out, but it can be done.

#21 ::: Steve Downey :::

"I helped type in the source code once, in my high school computer lab, so that we could play."

But doesn't that mean one big spoiler, you know how it ends because you typed it?

41
I mapped it as text: each place's name, the ten directions available, and where they went. Magic words got another line.
At least that way I wasn't trying to draw a picture of something that was convoluted.

43
Worse than that, Stefan.
I watched someone playing Zork, once. They were in the Troll Room when the thief wandered through.
'Kill troll with sword.'
'You aren't carrying one.'
It might be one of the shortest games on record.

Xopher@39, etc:

I grieve for your confusion and your hatred of my forebears.

"I think if you go east, then go west, you should end up where you were before. Or at least notice the passage curving."

For what it's worth, genre conventions evolved quickly. Infocom's designers were mostly in agreement with you by 1983, I'd say.

The idea that you shouldn't get completely screwed over (put into a hopeless situation) by sheer bad luck took a little longer.

The idea that you shouldn't get completely screwed over by a mistake that you couldn't have known was a mistake until much later in the game... didn't develop until the 90s. (Everyone brings up Hitchhiker's dog at this point, although that case is actually more complicated than is obvious.)

Wheeee!! Fun with liquids in microgravity!

Xopher @ #17

There's a Richard Cory text adventure game that's only slightly longer than that.

The episodes of I've Got a Secret posted on Youtube are a maze of twisty passages, all different, but this one has "Water Walk", which I like better than "4'33"."

Sorry, that one had John Cale, not John Cage. A maze of twisty passages, like I said. Here's Cage.

I love GEB.

Douglas Hofstadter and I had an interchange in 1973? 1974? several years before that came out.

He'd written a column for Scientific American about Pat, Sandy, Mel, etc. in various activities where gender was deliberately confusing (though IIRC heterosexually monogamous).

I hand-wrote him a two-page letter of facts about myself and recent activities, asking him to guess my sex (term of use in those days). SA wrote me that they'd forwarded it to him and it might be a while before I heard back, which astonished me, as I'd assumed their entire staff was elbow-to-elbow in cramped rooms in Manhattan like The New Yorker.

When he replied, he said he'd spoilered himself by flipping immediately to the signature (this was pre-sticky notes or I'd have used one), but gamely speculated about me based on use of language and tone. He was fairly sure I'd had an upscale education in a private academy in Europe, probably Switzerland, which my Nebraska teachers got a kick out of.

He also sent me a copy of ZPG, with encouragement to think seriously about what we were doing to our planet.

I toyed with "I wish I could tell you that this changed my mind, but I was firmly there beforehand" as I'd bought my own copy when it had come out a few months before. I was afraid that he'd want his copy back. The hugely benevolent genie that had come out of that lamp so overwhelmed me that I chickened out, a poor return for his kindness and a regret still with me.

I'm confused by the time line, as apparently he didn't take over Martin Gardner's column until the 80s. Maybe he'd done a guest stint?

Sandy B. @ 6 -

And the drummer did it barefoot.

Have never heard of this one

I'm sorry to "hear" that Muzak never picked it up. It's certainly more interesting than most of what they pipe into mindless places.

I read GEB the summer when I was fourteen, and admired it greatly. Although I still think it a great pity that the index entry for "self-reference" did not contain the number of the page that entry was on. I did notice at least one actual joke in the index, however.

Metamagical Themas introduced me to the Prisoner's Dilemma, and eventually to Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, which is a cornerstone of my personal ideas about ethics. So (to paraphrase Hofstadter himself in re Chopin) I can't imagine who I would be if I hadn't encountered his work.

GEB included among its Escher works Castrovalva and I have always wondered whether the writer of the Doctor Who episode with that title was consciously influenced by Hofstadter.

Although I still think it a great pity that the index entry for "self-reference" did not contain the number of the page that entry was on.

That's because it's a member of the set whose members are not members of themselves. You see—

[gunshot]

Argggh. Ack. Crumple crumple. Slump.

Way back in the days when my family got its first computer (a Vic 20!), one of my older siblings put up a small poster of Snoopy and Woodstock in front of a scaled repeating drawing that had the caption "Help! I'm trapped in an infinite loop!" Since we're talking about old computer games and meta-references, it sprung to mind.

... Actually, I think that poster's still there. That corner of the house hasn't been used for much since the computer moved to the phone line.

I had almost forgotten, back in the late '80s, one of my co-workers wrote a textbook about semantic databases which was partly inspired by GEB. The book alternated between typical technical chapters, and chapters of discussions by Socrates, the Tortoise, et al about the nature of truth, what it means for an object to belong to a class, when it's appropriate to use IS-A versus HAS-A relationships, and similar topics. I think it also contained a cookie recipe, though I can't remember how he tied that to the ostensible subject of the book.

One more time, the list for the Gathering of Light :

1. GlendaP
2. Lee
3. Serge Broom
4. Lin Daniel
5. and guest
6. Christopher Davis
7. Michael I
8. iamnothing
9. David Goldfarb
10. Skwid
11. and wife
12. and guest
13. Fragano Ledgister
14. and Gail
15. KeithS
16. CHip
17. Paula Helm Murray
18. Tom Whitmore (beginning only)

Maybe:
- Jeremy Preacher (likely)
- Bill Stewart

Meet at 6:15th the voodoo boards.

You can reach me at Gjb bar mreb qnfu guerr gjb svir qnfu sbhe svir gjb bar, or on the voodoo board I'm the only Glenda under PF. Or I'll be checking in here several times during the day.

Xopher Halftongue @ 60: Bravo!

(I particularly enjoyed the post-shot sound effects)

B. Durbin @61: My first computer was a Vic 20! Of course, if I'd been able to articulate what I really wanted it for I would have held out for a BBC Micro (I really wanted a word processor, not a "type in the lines of programs for simple games and discover they have errors in so you can't actually play the games even when you've typed in all the lines of code" machine).

Open-threadiness, ROT-13'd for extreme grossness. All I'll say is that the protagonists in this story are a cat and a slug, and it's probably not what you imagine. Don't decipher if you're eating or about to eat, OK?

Zl png vf n uvtuyl-fgehat perngher naq pbafrdhragyl guebjf hc n ybg. Lrfgreqnl V znantrq gb trg ure bhg bs gur ubhfr orsber fur qvq vg, naq fur guerj hc whfg bhgfvqr gur onpx qbbe.

Guvf zbeavat V ybbxrq bhg naq fnj n fyht ba gbc bs vg, nccneragyl rngvat vg. Gur cvyr jnf fheebhaqrq ol fyht genvyf. Vg frrzf gung gur png unq hajvggvatyl cebivqrq Fyht Gnxr-Njnl.

Abg jung V arrqrq whfg orsber oernxsnfg.

Mongoose @65

Gosh. If I'd known that when I still lived in a house with a garden, I might have been able to save my vegetable patch that way.

Mongoose @ #1:

I have, in both English and the Swedish translation (the latter is recommended for the bonus (written by the translator) dialogue between A and T, discussing why T is T and not the obvious S in the Swedish translation; but only if you actually can read Swedish).

The writer of the Doctor Who episode Castrovalva was Douglas Adams, so yes, he probably had read GEB

Ingvar @ 67: I can't, but I have a sister who can. I'll mention it next time I speak to her.

BBC news is reporting that Seamus Heaney has died.

Ginger: I'm curious; are you by any chance the Ginger mentioned in the OIE list of reference labs regarding a certain bacterial disease, or is that another Ginger?

Mongoose @1: I red GEB when I was, um, 17 or 18? It made a lasting impact, especially the gentle introduction to first order predicate calculus.

Charlie @ 72: I'd have been a couple of years older than that when I first read it. It had a similar effect on me, accompanied by a tendency to plonk it in front of anyone I remotely thought might appreciate it and exclaim "This is amazing - you need to read it!" for about the next six months.

Having said that, I think I like Le Ton Beau de Marot even better.

I probably never would have picked GEB:EGB up if I hadn't started attending Indiana University about the time it came out. It was all over the campus bookstores. As a long-time Escher fan, I was intrigued, and I've worked my way through it three times now, getting more out of it every time.

dcb @ 71: Is it in a hamster?

dcb@71: Ah, no -- that appears to be an entirely different Ginger!

I have written a joke!

Q: What do you call an overloaded bus, full of MBAs, driven off a cliff and into the ocean?

A: Cost-effective.

Ginger @76: Thought it was probably a different Ginger, but also thought I might as well ask! Actually, looking at what I wrote on this topic a little while ago, I see they don't even tend to inoculate poor hamsters with it (mice and guinea pigs were used, but nowadays thankfully almost never).

John A Aransawyer @ 77: Substitute "city bankers" for "MBAs" and it would be even more cost-effective!

Kevin Marks @68: The writer of the Doctor Who episode Castrovalva was Douglas Adams, so yes, he probably had read GEB.

Shortly before seeing Castrovalva, I had watched The Island of Lost Souls (the 1932 version of The Island of Doctor Moreau with Charles Laughton). There is a shot towards the end of Castrovalva where The Master is overwhelmed by the people of his creation turning on him, which to my eye recalled a similar scene where Moreau's creations turn on him. Wonder if Douglas Adams had a hand in that touch.

Mongoose #65, Pendrift #66:

Rats. I'd hoped it was a case of vairagvat Fyht Naq Fanvy Qrngu, n cebqhpg bapr nyy gbb cbchyne va FS Onl Nern tneqraf.

I tried learning the guitar adaptation of the Cage but was stopped cold by a particularly gnarly passage aroung 2'37". It may be manageable in DADGAD, though.

You know, Cage wasn't just being silly. He was scripting what was later called Performance Art, where the pianist's and audience's expectations and discomfort with not meeting them/having them met were themselves part of the purpose of the work.

I knew someone in college who performed it as part of a class (she was a piano major IIRC); she said the hardest part was the section where she was required to turn her head and look out at the audience—which she had never done before. She had never looked at an audience that wasn't applauding (being a pianist rather than an actor).

That said, it's mostly silly, and I'm not actually objecting to anything said here. But ISTM that it's worth mentioning the real artistic intent of the piece, whether you think it's a success at that intention or not.

And btw some of his Prepared Piano pieces are absolutley wonderful. Once he goes aleatory I lose interest, but that wasn't the only thing he did.

dcb 64: (I particularly enjoyed the post-shot sound effects)

Got them from my late ex David, who I believe was quoting from The Goon Show. That was definitely the source of this bit of dialogue:

"You're not going to do anything silly with that gun, are you?"
"Yes, I'm afraid I am." *kazoo tootles*

Mongoose 65: V xabj n ubhfrubyq gung pbhyq znlor hfr fbzr crg fyhtf, onfrq ba gung.

While we're on the subject of text adventure games, I commend to you ULTRA BUSINESS TYCOON III, an extraordinary in-browser experience:

Burgundy carpet. Monogrammed wallpaper. Spotless windows frame the sprawling cityscape. The Embezzlertron is behind your desk.

The Control Room entrance is behind your secret bookshelf.

The exit is outside your office and down the elevator.

(And so on.)

When and where for dinner?

re 22: There was a phase sometime back when alien life form plants were fashionable introductions. OTOH, see this old comment and contemplate the future of the illustrated plant in commerce.

re 42: I suspect it is impossible to copyright the audio portion of Cage's work because there is a rule about how a certain number of bars are required to claim ownership of a theme. Zero bars will not do.

It's the score that's copyright, IIUC, and it's a set of instructions.

Cage: I was perusing the library at the University one day and found an interesting Cage piece. It was a rhapsody for 7 AM radios. The instrumentation consisted of one line for each instrument, with a time and a frequency to start at, and a line showing how to move the dial, how long, and what frequency to end at.

I'm not sure, like Leroy Anderson's iconic "Typewriter", that you could perform it any more without specialized (read: ancient) equipment. Are there any radios made any more that don't have discrete frequency dials?

Also: story. Now this is "report of a report of a friend of a friend who was there" story but even if it is fiction. I believe I heard about it in the Monastery, if not Another Place.

The scene: a graduate music recital in their university theatre. The candidate comes out in her beautiful gown, approaches the piano, sets the score out, and prepares to play 4'33".

This being what it is, everybody in the audience knows the piece intimately. This being what it is, there are practise rooms ringing the back halls of the theatre. This being an unpaid performance, the practise rooms are not out of use.

The performer starts playing the work - and all you can hear is longcomplicatedpassageendinginmistakeFUCK! samecomplicatedpassageendinginsamemistakeBUGGER! samecomplicatedpassageendinginsamemistakeDAMN!
...

Cage would have been proud.

John A.: Hey, my partner is a bus driver. It may be cost-effective, but only for military/Jed Lacey values of that word.

E. Liddell: Oh, I love ADOM (on computers that don't confuse green and grey). Need to get back to that. I wonder if my tablet's terminak app or DOSBOX app would run it...

Nethack gets a lot easier and a lot more fun with a few spoilers - especially the cheat sheet I picked up elsenet (can't find it now) that had a list of every level (so you could put down what's there to remember where that _ or shop is, for instance) and every thing-you-can-do-to-yourself, so you can check them off or get them if you want them and don't (and remember you don't have petrification resistance at an appropriate time, for instance). Not sure it doesn't get less fun with more spoilers.

Mycroft @ 87: How do you think the bus got overloaded in the first place? The bus driver was an MBA.

Mycroft @ 87: tangentially related, I have my own concert story relating to a work by a living composer. Since he is still, as far as I know, living, I had perhaps better not mention him or the name of his piece for fear of causing acute embarrassment.

I have briefly mentioned in a previous comment a friend who is a star tenor. Mainly he sings baroque and early music, but his repertoire stretches from the ninth century to the present day; he's got one of those very light, agile voices which is perfect for Purcell or brilliant for Britten, depending on which you happen to prefer. This particular currently-living composer is a huge fan of his, and so he wrote #InsanelyDifficultPiece with him in mind for the tenor role. #IDP also has two soprano roles, which are not quite as bad as the tenor role but still, I have to say, pretty hairy.

I personally prefer the early stuff, but Star Tenor sounded uncharacteristically worried about this piece in his e-mails, so I thought it would be a good idea to turn up and support him at the premier if I could. Thankfully I was able to do so. The first half of the concert consisted of more familiar stuff (I think there was some Vaughan Williams, but I don't recall what else), and then this piece was going to take up the whole of the second half.

I had a quick chat with Star Tenor during the interval, and then, obviously, went back to my seat when the interval was due to end. Star Tenor positioned himself at the back of the church ready to walk down the nave with the two sopranos and start singing.

The interval didn't end. Something was wrong.

After a few minutes, I looked back at Star Tenor. He was still smiling like a true professional, but I know him well enough to know that's not where to look to see if anything's wrong. You look at his hands. He's a cyclist, and what do cyclists do in an emergency? They grip the brakes. Yup, his hands were clenched. Something was badly wrong.

The audience was starting to get a bit restless. Finally, one of the organisers made the embarrassed announcement that the concert would resume shortly... when they had found the sopranos.

Ah.

The sopranos were duly located, and all three of them marched down the nave to their doom, er, I mean to sing to us. To be fair, they did it extremely well, although Star Tenor spent some time explaining to me afterwards that in fact he couldn't sing it exactly as it had been written, or he would have damaged his voice. When he says that kind of thing, it's wise to believe him. To this day I'm convinced that one of the sops had taken fright and locked herself in the loo, and the other one had stood outside and tried to coax her out.

Note to composer: writing for voices is not like writing for most instruments. Honest.

Yes, mostly you can't damage an instrument just by writing things that can be written in conventional music notation.

A lot of modern composers prefer early-music singers, btw. This is because they've finally realized that vibrato was a bad idea from the beginning! (OK, no, but I prefer styles that don't use it.)

Xopher @ 90: also, it's really interesting to notice how much modern classical music seems to be rooted directly in mediaeval music, apparently missing out everything in between. This isn't the case for all modern music, obviously, but it's striking how often I come across a modern piece with a sound-world that seems to have been lifted straight out of somewhere around the thirteenth century.

Xopher @82: When I was a kid, my father told me about a composition by Cage that required a number of radios tuned to different broadcast stations, to provide a background of random noise for the rest of the instruments. At the first performance, the President was giving a speech, which was carried by all stations, making for a very different effect.

I remembered the story as happening during an FDR fireside chat, but looking at the dates on Wikipedia, that seems very unlikely. I suspect the piece was probably Imaginary Landscapes #4, premiered in April 1951, when Truman was president.

When I first heard the story, I was young enough that presidents who served between my father's birth and mine were all interchangeable in my mind.

Gathering of Light

We're meeting by the voodoo boards for 6:15 departure.

If you miss us at the voodoo boards, we're going to El Mirador, 722 South St. Mary's. Hint: exit out the back of the convention center and cut diagonally right across Hemisfair Park.

Re: Gathering of Light. *sigh* wish I could be there. Maybe next year. Have fun!

Mongoose, I think people are realizing what was abandoned when vibrato came in, and even worse, when equal temperament came in (much later than most people think). If you sing straight-tone music (Renaissance motets, barbershop) with vibrato, it doesn't sound right (because the harmonics don't develop correctly). This is why, much as I loved the Flirtations, their rendition of "Lida Rose" was hollow and lifeless. Do-wop is a vibrato style.

Also, the virtue of a capella vocals is that well-trained singers will naturally drop into natural harmonic tuning (approximately "just intonation") if they're not continually corrected by an equal-temperament instrument. This makes the chords tune properly, and that's why it can sound like four voices are singing in eight or more parts (with no "harmonic singing" involved).

Jeremy, I think Stockhausen did one of those too. He also had one where each performer was in a separate room, soundproofed so they couldn't hear each other, playing I-can't-remember-what but probably not conventional scored music, and all recorded.

Xopher @95: The next con we're both at we haaaaave to sing something together. :->

I have no vibrato, and cannot turn it on when I wish to use it, because my Choir Nun indoctrinated me firmly since the age of 5 that (caution: factually incorrect statement follows) "Vibrato is the sign of a lazy voice." I haven't the foggiest idea where in one's neck muscles vibrato is kept; when I try to induce it it sounds as embarrassing as people trying to fake a yodel by just changing pitches quickly.

Many of the things she trained into me as spinal reflexes I am very glad, as an adult vocalist, to have; that one, not so much. Especially since there are a lot of styles that sound REALLY STUPID when sung straight-up with my Choir Diction and no vibrato at all, as if it were an Ave Maria or something.

Through dint of months of concentrated practice, I can now emulate a Torch-Song style well enough to have it be recognized that that's what I'm doing, but it in no way substitutes for the Proper Thing performed by an Actual Torch Singer who can perform the idiom correctly. Etc. And leave out anything Tracy Chapman ever wrote, much as I love it, because OH MY BOB my vocal cords are too white (or in operatic-voice terms, too pale) for that.

Xopher @ 95: I hesitated about saying this because I felt it might uniquely identify Star Tenor, but then it occurred to me that anyone who could identify him from this probably also knows him well enough to work out who he is from 89, so I'll say it.

Star Tenor has the sort of perfect pitch that is astonishing even by the standards of professional musicians, and he is an acknowledged expert on mediaeval micro-tunings. He used to work with a small ensemble before he was sufficiently well known to get a lot of solo work; they specialised in mediaeval music, and what they'd do would be to take a piece they wanted to sing, thrash out different tuning until they found the best one, and then ask ST to sing them a chromatic scale in that tuning so that they could all pitch. And he would.

I'm not sure what this group does now they no longer have him, but they still manage the mediaeval tunings. It does, as you say, make all the difference.

O my gods Elliott, I had no idea. That would be so fantastic! Maybe we can sing my "Lux Laeva Tenebrae," which is a Gregorian-like setting of (more or less) abi's translation of "Light is the left hand of darkness..." (more or less because I liked the word 'tenebrae' better than 'obscuritatis' for singing purposes; abi helped me with the cases). I set the Litania Contra Timorem too ("Timendum non est mihi...") too, but that's harder.

WisCon?

If you want me to sing something off sheet music you have to sing me my part; I have good orientation but am not paper-trained.

I should also 'book you', since that's sort of my Stupid Fan Trick -- I have a kind of cabaret version of Talis Kimberley's X-Libris that people like to use me to haze their friends with. :-> It's not nearly as suitable to my underlying vocal pipes as more floaty-harmonic music is (I have a voice made for singing backup) but I make it up in schtick.

Certainly WisCon if not before.

Oh, for those potentially interested, the massive multi-continental filk vocal-harmony band I'm in, Lady Mondegreen, has a retrospective 10-year DVD now (with a lot of purely sound recordings as well) with performances and interviews and such. All profits from it go towards paying for plane tickets so we can rehearse in person instead of remotely. :-> Contact me off-list (rot13: 2ryyf2grrf ng tznvy.pbz ) if you Must Have One; initial print-run was something like 100 discs, of which I have no idea how many are left.

Sorry to break into the fascinating music discussion with my silly pseudo-filkish earworm, but I've had these two lines stuck in my head for days now:

A pair o' ducks, a pair o' ducks,
A most ingenious pair o' ducks

This is presumably from the theme song to These Mad Scientists Are Quackers. Or possibly it's an excerpt from Pair o' Ducks Lost.

More seriously, I first encountered 4'33" at a high school summer program, specially arranged for two pianists. I think they had a page turner, too.

I introduced my son to 4'33" yesterday afternoon, via the YouTube speed-metal performance, followed by appropriate explanation.

He immediately wanted to know if he could play it for his 30 minutes of piano practice, and I had to tell him no. However, he did get to perform it for my wife's colleague who was over visiting; she had never heard of it (neither had my wife, to my surprise) so everyone got a big kick out of it.

Scientific study showing poverty has a measurable effect on cognitive abilities (but that ability rebounds when the situation improves).

"The results showed that people wrestling with the mental strain of poverty suffered a drop of as much as 13 points in their IQ — roughly the same found in people subjected to a night with no sleep."

Washington Post article here (probable subscription wall)

Abstract from Science here

Gnomed. Not sure why. You could have some of the cherry tomatoes that are ripening faster than we can eat them.

re 86: The score is to some degree a proxy for the work: i.e., you can't just listen to a performance and transcribe it into sheet music, or even an excerpt if it be long enough. However there is a lower limit on how long such a excerpt can be and still be so protected, because for instance as a rule any given measure appears in some out-of-copyright piece somewhere.

#88 John A Arkansawyer: True - although I still must disagree(*). I have dealt with enough Manglement (especially Suits trained in "Management is a Skill; it can be done independently of what's being managed") to know that there's no way in hell (**) any one of *them* would accept driving *that*. If it's not made in Maranello or Stuttgart or Munich, find a flunky.

They also will gripe about the cost of the service-trained driver, and will insist on using their own - but it will be some quality control person crosstrained into a Class-2, because QC is "overhead" and not really work anyway. Probably undertrained, which is why the unscheduled flight.

But we do know why it's overbooked - they have 45 people for this trip, and there's a 48-passenger bus; you're not gouging us any more for the 72-. (Note: school buses are sized "three-to-a-seat", as they would be for 6-year-olds).

* I hope it's clear I'm riffing off of the joke and not *actually* criticizing. John, WELL DONE. If it's not clear, I'll shut up now.

** actually, there probably is - after this bus goes off the cliff, the passengers' punishment will be...to drive a bus full of ex-bus drivers)

Argh, sorry. Too many reviews made it too likely I was a bot. We have applesauce; the bridge game Monday had bags of cooking apples from the Director's neighbour's lawn...

Mycroft W #87: I'm not sure, like Leroy Anderson's iconic "Typewriter", that you could perform it any more without specialized (read: ancient) equipment. Are there any radios made any more that don't have discrete frequency dials?

I'm not familiar with the current market, but I would be surprised if you couldn't find radios on the “very cheap” end of things with continuous tuning.

On the other hand, it would be trivial to put together a software-defined radio which would perform the entire piece, given hardware capable of receiving the AM broadcast band (total cost around $40-$100, which might even be cheaper than the eight* radios) and a computer. I could do that right now if I were inclined to write some code to follow Cage's directions. It might be a little lacking in visual spectacle, though.

(I got into SDR as a hobby when I thought about how (having no radio or TV) I had no access to conventional emergency information broadcasts, but disliked the idea of buying a single-purpose device that would be mostly unused; getting low-end SDR receiver hardware (~$20) makes it into something tinkerable by a programmer like me, and indeed I have tinkered.)

* My very sketchy research says the piece is titled Radio Music, and has eight parts, not seven. Unless it's the one with twelve.

Mongoose, I have absolutely no idea who you're talking about, but I want to buy his entire catalogue. I can be reached at gknaar ng znp qbg pbz; would you mind dropping me a line?

HLN, from the Department of Whiskey, Tango, & Foxtrot: Local woman accomplishes follow-up mammogram, which involves sensations not dissimilar to someone wearing cowboy boots grinding their heel into woman's right nipple. Woman successfully completes experience without becoming verbally abusive toward Imaging Tech, but remarks, "I've never before in my life felt such a strong impulse to punch someone in the teeth." Upon reflection, woman ponders, "Is it wrong of me to fantasize about prophylactic double-mastectomy? I mean, it's not like I have any use for the damn things, anyway."

Further contemplations of "Are you freakin' kidding me?" come when woman pauses at hospital cafeteria for lunch. A serviceable salad bar is available, although, while local woman lauds the hospital providing fresh vegetables from its on-site garden, she has never before encountered uncomfortable Scoville counts in—"You're joking, right?"—salad greens. But the crowning feature of the available cuisine was the entree: chicken-fried steak, with available sides of french fries, mac-and-cheese, and—wait for it—deep-fried mozerella.

The only sense woman can make of this arrangement is that the Food Services Department is getting kick-backs from Cardiology.

Jacque, sounds horrible. I don't understand why they can't make mammograms that don't hurt.

As for the cafeteria, that's quite a piece of WTFery there. Do you know what the greens were?

The only think I can think of wrt the State Fair food is that the cafeteria isn't mostly for the patients, but for their stressed-out friends and relatives, who need comfort food.

Or, of course, they're getting kickbacks from Cardiology.

Jacque (110): Is it wrong of me to fantasize about prophylactic double-mastectomy?

In a word, no.

At one point, if certain test results had come back differently, it would have been a good idea for me to get a prophylactic double mastectectomy. I didn't want the other bad consequences, but the double mastectomy would have been a nice compensation. I almost didn't know what results to wish for. (I was in fact relieved by getting favorable results.)

110/112
One of my aunts had a double mastectomy because of cysts. (Her husband said he didn't marry her for her breasts.)

Back around 1978 or thereabouts, there was a spot on the FM dial where three stations came in at once. I used to listen to it.

So, this morning at the tobacconist, there was a gorgeous green moth clinging to the doorframe. After consulting the inestimable What's That Bug?, I've now identified it as a Pandora Sphinx Moth.

RE hospital food:

Boing Boing recently posted an article about the subject.

I recently read an article about the mixed success that national healthy school lunch programs were having, and how a few schools were dropping out. Why? Kids simply weren't interested in whole grain bread, fruit, and vegetables, and cafeterias were losing money.

As Xopher notes, the comfort food in the hospital cafeteria might be for visitors.

Probably for linking to an image-sharing site. Want some Ovaltine?

I remember an episode of Chicago Hope, in which a woman came to the hospital requesting a prophylactic mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA gene. One particular doctor, female, was supportive; another, male, was against performing the surgery. The two doctors were dating at the time, I think. The line I recall, still, so clearly to this day? When, during an argument over whether or not to do the surgery, the male doctor says to the female one: "She might as well have her head cut off!"

I don't remember the rest of the ep; I didn't normally watch the show (it might have been on at my Aunt's house). That scene still remains perfectly clear in my mind. Because apparently, if I don't have breasts, I should just be decapitated.

(I suppose I can hope the male doctor realised that he was an unmitigated ass, saw the worth in women as human beings, and apologised most deeply and profoundly. Maybe he did. I had no interest in watching it.)

Kevin Marks @ #68: Castrovalva was written by Christopher H. Bidmead, not Douglas Adams.

(Snark) You can at least partly tell by the bits where the plot dissolves into incoherence and the other bits that take far too long to get anywhere.

I liked Castrovalva and the stories preceding it at one point. Rewatching them caused a severe case of Suck Fairy visitage. The story in my memory makes far better sense.

I can still watch the Douglas Adams episodes (City of Death especially) happily.

I've been fortunate in that none of my mammograms have been painful. The imaging center I go to has padding on the screening equipment. Is that what makes the difference, I wonder?

If we're starting a Making Light choir, I'd like to join, if you'll have me! I can sight-read decently if one starts me off on the right note, and get it very nearly right after a few sing-throughs - a few more and I'll be right. (Hi, Elliott! I don't know if you remember me - we met at Chicon, and had a really lovely long conversation at the pizza party. I'm Em from Montreal who had blue hair at the time.)

At this rate we'll be doing Spem in Alium at LonCon!*

*No, we won't.†
†Won't we?**
**No, we won't. SiA is a FORTY-voice motet and none too easy in any of its parts. Xopher is exaggerating. Besides, he's not going to LonCon.‡
‡Oh. Guess not then. Darn that Xopher!

It IS a science-fiction convention, we could always just clone ourselves.

Alternately, obtain a time-machine and loop back to the beginning of the piece. I'm sure someone could run down the road to the Beeb offices and borrow a TARDIS.

I just got off the phone with my aunt. She'd had trouble logging onto AOL. Because she'd just moved she didn't have her list of helpful numbers handy, so she searched for "aol technical support."

And got a phony technical support line. A chap with an Indian accent talked her into granting access via a remote desktop.

On top of whatever malware they installed, the guy had the gall to tell me aunt that she needed to buy an extended warranty. Fortunately she hesitated and gave me a call instead.

So.

Tell your elderly and/or unsophisticated relatives about this scam, and if you can look up the legitimate technical support lines for their Internet provided, computer manufacturer, and so on.

(Also . . . I've had one of these frauds CALL me, say he was from Windows, and ask me to give him access. I asked him if his mother knew what he was doing and whether she would be proud of him.)

That's how you do it when you only have four to eight people. You do ten layers of overdub. But each person has to learn ten parts.

And as I said, they're not easy. No two of the 40 voices move in parallel fifths or octaves, and they kinda jump around a lot to make that work. So it's kind of chaotic.

Stefan Jones @124: If I have the time, I string along any "Windows support" people who call me with variations on "Which PC? I've got three running at the moment", or "Nope, can't see a "Start" button on the screen. There's this penguin..."

Anyone else got any others?

Xopher @111: Do you know what the greens were?

Well, as far as I could tell, they appeared to just be innocent little mixed baby greens. When I voiced this puzzlement to the sonogram tech, she commented that others had commented on the same experience. I also noticed it with the simple tomato-and-white-onion salsa which didn't, so far as I could ascertain, have any kind of sauce or dressing on it. I dunno. Maybe it was some sort of ubiquitous high-test contaminant that was otherwise oderless, colorless, and flavorless. I was able to pick out edible lunch-like matter, so I didn't go hungry. But as I've commented elsewhere, I respond very poorly to hot spice, especially when presented unexpectedly, and really especially when it turns up in stuff that I've carefully chosen for blandness.

So I was already in a fine fettle when it came time for the mammogram. Pondering the latter further, I think I'm going to take the topic over to the DFD thread, because I'm finding that on top of the (entirely unacceptible, in my not-in-the-least humble opinion) not inconsiderable pain (The tech said, "Yes, it will be 'quite uncomfortable'." What she should have said was, "Yes, it's going to hurt. A lot. Oh yeah, and: in my haste to get this experience over with, I'm just going to torque it down, concentrated on the most sensitive area, all at once, for maximum effect.") (I'm still quite sore.), I'm finding that I'm having a big triggery traumatic reaction. Plus rage. Did I mention rage?

Mary Aileen @112: At one point, if certain test results had come back differently, it would have been a good idea for me to get a prophylactic double mastectectomy. I didn't want the other bad consequences

Are you comfortable saying more about this? Would they have been consequences of the mastectomy? Or something parallel?

P J Evans @113: One of my aunts had a double mastectomy because of cysts. (Her husband said he didn't marry her for her breasts.)

One of my ongoing issues (and one of the triggers brought up by this experience) is that dealing with my breasts has always been an issue for me during physical intimacy.

I absolutely hate hate HATE having my nipples touched. It makes me want to puke. I wouldn't let my first couple of boyfriends touch my breasts at all. My most recent one (geez—twenty years ago now? ::bleak::) got away with it, but only by being extreamly careful. I never did get to where I could enjoy it. Having no breasts would actually significantly enhance my experience of sex.

Stefan Jones @116: As Xopher notes, the comfort food in the hospital cafeteria might be for visitors.

I speculated about that, too. But by my count, at least three quarters of the clientele were staff. And, srsly: artereosclerosis on the hoof as the only entre option? Now, I concede, it's possible they are extra constrained because their real cafeteria is under construction, and what they've got now is basically a commandeered classroom outfitted with a half-dozen caterer's dishes. But: wow. I'm all about Teh Fried Carbs, but even I was revolted by that stuff.

Cheryl @118: Chicago Hope ... "She might as well have her head cut off!"

I don't remember that episode specifically (unless it's the one where they managed to sneak in a scene with full-frontal female nudity cleverly disguised as "awe-inspiring reconstruction"), but I can well believe it. I wonder if Grey's Anatomy has taken a swing at it?

A coworker boggled to me a week or two ago about Angelina Jolie, and the only reaction I could muster was burning envy.

Teka Lynn @120: I've been fortunate in that none of my mammograms have been painful.

Well, up until now, my mammograms have been, at worst, Very Annoying. This one, though: I'm frankly mind-blown. And I don't think padding would have helped. Evidently there's very dense tissue, right up under the nipple in my right breast. The first two or three (remember, this is a follow-up, after having gone through a standard two-angles-per a couple of weeks ago), were painful. Then she pulled out the next one which, if memory serves, was roughly the diameter of a tea-cup. I think she made me do two with that one. The last one, though: it was literally the size of the heel on a cowboy boot. Planted square on THE MOST SENSITIVE part of the nipple. After she had basically taken the boob and spread it out like biscuit dough with her fingers. And then torqued it down, clamp CLAMP. Then with the hand-turned fine tuning. "Okay now! Hold perfectly still! Don't even breathe!" I was clenching my fists and my teeth, and I wonder if maybe I don't now have some glimmering of what guys go through when they take one in the nuts.

Then she went away to consult with the radiologist. Which took, like, a while. Then she came back, "We're going to do another few images." She went about setting me up, and it got worse and worse and—"Stop. STOP!" I pushed her away and backed out of the aparatus. That's the worst of it. Feeling like you're being given no choice in all this.

I just about walked out at that point. "Do you ever have people just burst into tears?" "Well, we get a variety of reactions. Some women just push through because they want to be sure they're okay."

She really wasn't particularly sympathetic in all this. I stood there and ground my teeth for several minutes, just managing to keep my temper. "Okay," I finally said. "You get one more."

Wow. Even thinking about this makes me want to scream in rage and punch someone in the face.

The irony is that the tech who did my standard mammo coupla weeks ago commented, after I'd expressed appreciation of her willingness to back off when I yelped, "Well, the way I figure it, even if we don't get an optimal image, it's worth going easy because, if the woman has an experience that makes her never come back, I haven't served her health, have I?"

At this point, I'm afraid that that's exactly where I'm at. It occurred to me belatedly that if I'd taken some [of that drug that sounds like a doll riding a tram] before going down, the experience might actually have been somewhat tolerable. But I frankly didn't expect it to be anything like that bad. Breast cancer risk or no, I'm just not sure I'd be willing to do that again. Not least because it just doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to ask.

And the upshot of the whole thing was that I came out clean. Yay. :-|

Fruit smoothy and some nice tea?

Jacque @ 110: ouch, and oh dear.

Perhaps they get their salad greens from McDonald's? I once travelled a fairly significant distance north with my (then) lodger, and we stopped for something to eat on the way. I am a vegetarian, but lodger was not, and lodger was driving. We ended up in McDonald's, a place where I wouldn't normally set foot. To be fair to lodger, he did look round for somewhere more suitable, but there weren't that many places to eat that we could find close to that stretch of road at that time.

So lodger ordered Standard Lodger Food, which McDonald's do in profusion, and I looked at the menu and saw that they were offering two types of salad - chicken or, I think, bacon. And I looked at the counter, and saw that the salad base was pre-made and they added chicken or whatever the other stuff was to it, according to what the customer ordered.

"Ah," I thought innocently, "this should be simple enough." So I asked them for a salad without additions. Yes, please, just a salad. No, thank you, no chicken, no bacon-or-whatever. Vegetarian. Thank you.

You have no idea how much this confused them. First of all they said I had to have one of the two types of meat. I replied that in that case I wasn't ordering at all, because I was, as I'd just explained, vegetarian. How hard could it be to give me some salad without adding anything extra to it? They looked at one another, looked at me, looked at one another again, shook their heads and sucked in their breath.

I stood there and gave them The Look until one of them - I kid you not - went and rang up some managerial bod to find out if it was OK just to give me a salad. It was, thankfully, otherwise I'd have been asking them to hand me the phone so I could speak to Managerial Bod myself. Fine, sorted, and no, thanks, I don't want any dressing, yes, I'm quite sure about that, I absolutely hate vinegar and can detect it in homeopathic quantities, and NO, THANK YOU, NO KETCHUP EITHER, THAT HAS VINEGAR IN IT TOO.

And when I did finally get my just-a-salad, it was not only expensive for what it was, it was also the worst salad I've ever eaten.

Jacque #127: You would be entirely justified in filing a formal complaint with the hospital, against that radiology tech. As the other, competent tech noted, doctors and hospitals are paying attention these days, and there is no excuse for that sort of callousness in a medical setting.

Mongoose #129: "Have it your way" is the slogan of The Other Leading Brand, Burger King.

MickeyD... well, over the years they've pulled enough screwed up crap that mostly when I've been tempted to go in there, there's been something fresh in my mind. (One ongoing issue: as I recall, their Ronald McDonald House is an explicitly if not aggressively Christian charity. Not a good selling point for a Jewish ex-Pagan atheist.)

Jacque, 127: Mixed baby greens frequently include arugula/rocket, which can be extremely spicy. I once had some that made my mouth go numb--it felt very similar to clove oil. Mustard greens are also sometimes included. It sounds like you got a batch that had been insufficiently shuffled.

I'm sorry about the mammogram. That shouldn't have happened. Filing a complaint sounds like a good idea, especially since you're still bruised.

@131, @129: I refuse to eat food-like products from McD's.

Read a newspaper article about a decade ago, in passing: a motorway in Wales had been closed for a few hours due to an overturned truck. The truck in question was transporting ingredients to a MacDonald's burger factory. What stuck in my mind was that the motorway was closed because a lorry laden with 20 tons of cow udders had shed its load.

Cow udders. "100% pure beef". Yeah, right.

(The technical term for that stuff is "pet food". It's not fit for human consumption because (a) use of antibiotics and other medication to deal with sore/inflamed teats, and (b) hazard of accumulated fat-soluble pesticides, hormones, and other pharmacologically active substances. Which, incidentally, is also why I only drink milk from organically farmed cows.)

Jacque @ #127: I have a sister who's had breast cancer. I've had a lot of mammograms.

What you experienced was unprofessional behavior and warrants both a report to the hospital and a request to your doctor that s/he send you somewhere else.

It might be worth asking around to your friends whether any of them have had particularly good experiences. Facilities vary and so do individual mammogram techs, and some of them are AMAZINGLY good at what they do, both the dealing-with-people bit and the getting-a-good-image-with-the-least-possible-pain bit.

Good luck, and you have my sincere sympathy for the horrid experience.

Jacque (127): Parallel. I was being tested for the BRCA gene mutation--negative, thankfully. Positive results would have meant a much higher cancer risk not only for myself but potentially for other family members as well.

Jacque #110, Stefan J #116:

I believe I've mentioned here the time I was in hospital after gall-bladder surgery, with low-fat diet on my orders. First meal (after the Cream of Wheat, which makes me gag under any and all circumstances) was a bunch of ham, oozing fat. Under a heavy dome that I could barely lift. With condiments and implements packed in heavy can't-really-tear-it plastic. The only thing I could both lift and eat was an apple. The mealiest, most tasteless apple I have ever encountered, and I've met more than a few in my school lunches.

So it's no surprise to me.

Em @121: Making Light choir? Sounds like fun! Where do I sign up?

re 129: Recently I went through the McDonald's drive-thru and, having decided I wanted some fries with my std. two hamburgers, I proceeded to order what is now #2 (two cheeseburgers) with no cheese. And indeed, I got two rounds of patty/ketchup/mustard/pickle/onions/bun, but no cheese, each wrapped in a yellow cheeseburger wrapper and carefully tagged to show that they lacked cheese.

re 131: Dave, I don't see any evidence that RMDH is anything but secular, in spite of heavy local support by churches.

Last Wednesday, on the way home from Italy, I had a four hour layover in Dulles.

I didn't want to pay for a meal on the plane, so I took advantage of a Wendy's near the gate:

http://pic.twitter.com/P646aGKoAJ

I won't say that turned me off of fast food burgers forever, but . . . . nghhh.
* * *
McDonald's has one thing going for it:

Coffee.

Good basic coffee, and pretty good enhanced coffee drinks, at a good price.

Xopher @111 didn't understand why mammograms often hurt. As pointed out upthread, there are some techs who are more humane than the one Jacque encountered, but by their very nature, mammograms range from 'unpleasant' to very painful. Normal breast tissue is quite chunky, though there is variation both between individuals and throughout a life. Cancer presents as ... a lump. In the lumpy beef-stew-like waterballoon that was already chunky.

What you're supposed to do before you're old enough to need mammograms is a monthly 'self-exam,' where you spread the tissue out as flat against your ribs as you can manage (with one hand straight over your head to stretch things), and use your fingertips to do a texture survey to see if everything seems the same as last time or if any lumps are doing new lumpinesses. Mine are so very chunky to start with that even attempting a self-exam sends me into anxiety hyperventilation because WHAT IF IT's ALL CANCER? So I don't do them. I let my gyn do it at my checkups and when she asks about my self-exam routine I'm honest -- it's so chunky I can't map it and hold the map in my head for a whole month so it wouldn't do any good anyway.

Luckily, tumor tissue is more opaque to imaging than normal breast chunks ... but normal breast chunks are fairly opaque, and you might get the lump in the middle of one, so the mammographer has to flatten it out as much as possible between the two plates of the imager to try to get a really good view of whether we're dealing with a normal chunk or a cancer lump.

This was never going to be fun.

The small-breasted have different extreme-non-fun than the large-breasted do, but it's not fun for anyone. At all. At best it's uncomfortable and very cold. At worst? Jacque got a really, really bad one.

I've not had one yet; I'm not looking forward to it.

I do, of course, intend a (cosmetic) bilateral radical mastectomy without later implant-bearing reconstruction at some point in my future, which will make my cancer self-exams much simpler through the serendipitous removal of most of my natural chunks. However, given my tendency towards massive keloid scarring, I'll have to memorize where my surgery scar-tissue is and be careful to feel past/behind it. So much a problem I'd RATHER have.

(Safety note: if you still have even traces of a cancer-prone organ, you need to get it regularly checked for cancer, folks!)

Stefan Jones @116 said: I recently read an article about the mixed success that national healthy school lunch programs were having, and how a few schools were dropping out. Why? Kids simply weren't interested in whole grain bread, fruit, and vegetables, and cafeterias were losing money.

It's a little more complicated than that, at least in Chicago. Because the national guidelines have an absolute cap on carb amounts, the actual as-implemented lunches are often .5-.66 of an actual lunch by calories and filling-ness, so even if the kid orders and enjoys the lunch, they're really hungry afterwards. Add in that a large component of the lunch may include massive quantities of something the kid is unfamiliar with or dislikes (like a green salad that's about 1/3 made of green pepper slices) as a mandatory part of the meal ... and you're starting to grasp the problem.

Even in more affluent white-dominated high-performing schools, parents are starting to send a lunch along so their kid (a) doesn't faint at soccer practice, (b) doesn't blow all their pocket money on Doritos the instant they get out of school, and (c) has nutritious food they can actually eat, in enough quantity to fill them up.

It's kind of a failure. The schools that've opted out (and are now paying more for food, since that's the tradeoff) are still trying to offer more fresh fruit/veg options and actual real cooked meals in quantities and varieties their students will eat, like slow-cooked flank steak with collards and sweet potatoes with additional veg and fruit, or a main course that comes with a yogurt cup AND a large serving of fruit, whereas the federal guidelines in that case mandated offering it with only one of those (despite that both doesn't put them over the total-calories limit).

The particular fruit/veg the school ends up with out of the federal program is often a random mixed assortment of WTFery and not necessarily easy to turn into something any of US would eat, even leaving out 2nd graders.

140
The classic instructions on preparing for a mammogram are here (click the title for the full exercise). Xopher, you might appreciate them: they capture the experience.

Large, somewhat chunky here. Uncomfortable to unpleasant, and the tech makes a big difference. (One place I went, it was outfitted like a living room, and the tech was very good.) Also, the self-exams don't work very well, which they've finally figured out.

@127 Jacque

Since you said the first mammo wasn't so bad, it was the follow-up that was so painful, maybe you can ask for a breast ultrasound if you ever need a follow up again?

@133 Charlie Stross

Which, incidentally, is also why I only drink milk from organically farmed cows.

That stuff is illegal is Canada, so I happily drink milk/eat dairy while at home.

When in the US, I will only buy organic dairy.

McDibbler's. Made from genuine parts of cow.

Ad: McDonalds sub-thread:

Although I appreciate that Charlie Stross's point @133 is mostly about safety rather than taste, a bit of googling around turns up quite a few recipes (or references to them) for cows udders (as well as the collateral information that the Turkish winter drink 'sahlep' used to be available in Britain in the eighteenth century under the name 'saloop'). So they've clearly been regarded as food for people at some point.

Self-taught sheep-herding rabbit I strongly recommend turning the sound off.

The rabbit even does the thing of controlling the sheep with a firm stare.

And I read a couple of pages of comments to the speed metal 4:33, and they were funny and charming. At youtube. This is a miracle.

Re breast cancer screening, this blog entry at The Pump Handle (public health blog) about dense breasts and cancer risk was the first I had heard of a connection - as someone who is also told "dense breasts" at screenings.

http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphandle/2012/08/07/dense-breasts-are-not-just-an-interesting-attribute-wish-id-known-the-cancer-risk/

I don't know how to make a clickable link, but I recommend reading it (and the comments discuss options other than mammograms, which is also interesting given that options are not typically pushed in the USA)

New season apples for the Duty Gnome?

C. Wingate #138: There may have been some local, or perhaps not-so-local, "problems" in my youth. Googling around, I find that currently, they have an official policy against proselytization at their events. However, I also found this article about an originally-Jewish RMHC executive being proselytized for 10 years, and eventually converted, by a fellow executive there. (He eventually ended up working for Billy Graham's ministry, which is where the article is from.)

Amendment to my #149: On closer inspection, that policy appears to be specifically for the Delaware instance of RMDH. I don't know about the national group.

Zen Pencils: Bill Watterson. As a comment says, "epicness overload".

Mycroft @ 106: I appreciate any help in tuning up a good joke, including yours!

Charlie Stross @ #133: Which, incidentally, is also why I only drink milk from organically farmed cows.

Cheryl @ #144: That stuff is illegal is Canada, so I happily drink milk/eat dairy while at home.

When in the US, I will only buy organic dairy.

Organic milk/dairy is available in Canada (or at least my subsection of it). Are you thinking of unpasteurised milk? I know it's illegal here.

Carol @154: I believe Cheryl means the bovine growth hormones fed to cows in the US to "improve" lactation. That stuff is illegal virtually everywhere else in the developed world.

Re: RMDH and proselytizing:

First I'd heard of it. The local one is less than a mile from where I live and is a favorite charity for our community; we have had Neighborhood Association meetings in their community room in the colder months, they do an annual 5K night run around the neighborhood, and an acquaintance is their director for development.

No religious overtones whatever; I've not seen any godly mentions anywhere in the lit or in the iconography. Any religious associations would be different here in any case; the Children's Hospital that RMDH is right across the parking lot from is run by the Catholic Daughters of Charity as part of a corporation that runs a number of local hospitals under contract to a local county-wide health district. You want religion, you get it in the hospital chapel.

Re mammograms and their surroundings:

Once, any number of years ago, I went to a new mammogram provider, who was located in a beyond lovingly restored Victorian house in the campus area. (It's entirely irrelevant that I knew way too much about the previous history of the building.)

Serious cognitive dissonance--lots of hushed tones, reproduction Victorian furniture, fancy wallpaper with fancier borders. If they could have hung antimacassars and fringe off the X-ray machines, they would have.

That place made me incredibly nervous, sort of "What are they trying to hide?" or "What are they trying to distract me from?" I swear I'd much rather have the ordinary medical environment, and I was delighted the next year when I ended up someplace else.

I am, BTW, not sure that you can get ultrasound right off the bat; I didn't get it except as a clarifying tool for a followup whose X-ray was rather ambiguous. (The six-month follow-up to *that* was all ultrasound because they knew whatever it was wouldn't show on X-ray.)

Nancy Lebovitz @147: Self-taught sheep-herding rabbit

OMG, that's hilarious! I love it when one of the sheep stamps his foot angrily—and still backs up when challenged. By someone 10% her size. The only disadvantage he seems to have is that the sheep is faster than he is at a full run. But he's sure got no shortage of chutzpah.

TexAnne @132: Mixed baby greens frequently include arugula/rocket, which can be extremely spicy. I once had some that made my mouth go numb--it felt very similar to clove oil. Mustard greens are also sometimes included.

Ah! Yes, that would explain it. It would never in a million years occur to me to include mustard greens in mixed babies (because I just don't think that way) but that makes perfect sense.

It sounds like you got a batch that had been insufficiently shuffled.

I think it was shuffled as much as it could be shuffled. Was just insufficiently dilute. (Should have tripled down on the iceberg.)

Various: Maybe I'm too credulous. I had taken the tech's word for it that what she put me through was innevitable, given what was required. But, given the consensus here...maybe not. At the very least, maybe it's worth dropping a note to the department head.

joann @136: So it's no surprise to me.

Well, given that the badness of hospital food is legendary, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. But this is Boulder, so maybe I was deluding myself that our hospital would be slightly ahead of the curve on this...? Fortunately, I'm content to let my take away be a snort and a hearty eye-roll.

Elliott Mason @140: I do, of course, intend a (cosmetic) bilateral radical mastectomy without later implant-bearing reconstruction at some point in my future, which will make my cancer self-exams much simpler through the serendipitous removal of most of my natural chunks.

I think I'm going to start researching this. I'm assuming it wouldn't be covered by insurance (although the fact that apparently, in my case, a case could be made for therapeutic breast reduction might be a mitigating factor), so doubtless $NN,000. Which means, in practical terms, it's not an option.

I made comments to that effect to the ultrasound tech, and she commented that no surgeon would ever do that. I wonder. I wonder what difference it would make if I put it in the frame of sex-reassignment. The catch there, of course, is that, IFUC, sex reassignment typically involves years of non-surgical prep. Which would be silly, because I don't actually mind being female—except for the completely absurd secondary sexual characteristics, and all the associated medical crap.

Cheryl @143: Since you said the first mammo wasn't so bad, it was the follow-up that was so painful, maybe you can ask for a breast ultrasound if you ever need a follow up again?

I actually did that this time after the first couple of not-completely excruciating follow-up images. She said that the ultrasound could only be used to confirm the absence of a tumor. I'm not entirely sure I believe her, but there you go. (26 hours later, I'm still sore.)

Cheryl @144: Which, incidentally, is also why I only drink milk from organically farmed cows." That stuff is illegal is Canada

Really? I wonder if there's a confusion with raw milk (i.e., unpasteurized) is highly illegal in the US, too, (due to high danger of bacterial infestations and such). But organic milk? A quick Google of [canada organic milk standards] turns up a long string of references.

Mea @148: dense-breasts...cancer-risk

See? I obviously need a double mastectomy! Right? Right??

I don't know how to make a clickable link

You don't have to. Just use this widget here.

From the comments: "There are also suggestions that women who have large breasts are at higher risk"

Charlie @ #155: Ah, okay, that makes sense. I'm sorry for misreading your comment, Cheryl!

Harry Payne @ 126

There's this penguin..."

I just tell the tech support people, "Pretend I'm using Windows and I'll make the necessary adjustments."

Dave Harmon @ 131

their Ronald McDonald House is an explicitly if not aggressively Christian charity.

I've done a fair bit of work at RMDH (in a West Coast state) and never seen anything like religious iconography. And they do very good work with children and families.

The Zork Discussion

For those who haven't heard it, please note this lovely tune by MC Frontalot, all about being eaten by a grue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Jacque @159: 'Chest surgery' of the sort I'm in the market for can be had from various reputable US-based providers for retail prices between about $4,000 and $18,000, depending on your initial physiology, where they're based, and the individual surgeon's practice. Yes, that's an enormous range. I'm sorry. :-> A lot of the surgeons who do boob jobs for ciswomen (in both directions, though the embiggening is more widely advertised) also do trans chest contouring, so you can windowshop on some websites for that kind of surgeon if you want.

For obvious reasons I'm really hoping that by the time it becomes something I am actually seeking to schedule, the ACA will have forced insurance companies to admit that 'being transsexual' is not a preexisting condition that justifies refusing a medically-recommended treatment. Because wow would I rather have my insurance cover it ... but if I have to save up/go into debt, well, that's how it goes I guess.

The biggest modifier on cost based on your physiology is how much excess skin is going to be involved, which relates to starting breast size. The cutoff is somewhere in mid-B, ish, depending. Smaller than *handwave* they can do it through a small incision and minimally invasively; larger than it (and wow, am I not even a borderline case, being somewhere in the 38DD range) they (rot13ed in case some people find it gory) onfvpnyyl arrq gb erzbir zbfg bs gur rkprff fxva nf jryy nf gur gvffhr haqre, fb gurl phg n pvepyr nebhaq gur avccyr (naq yrnir vg nggnpurq gb bgure guvatf yvxr areirf gung tb fgenvtug onpx sebz vg) naq phg qbjajneqf sebz gurer gb jurer lbhe fxva vf npghnyyl fgvyy nggnpurq gb lbhe evopntr, gura erzbir gur oernfg vgfrys naq arngyl svg nf zhpu fxva nf vf arrqrq gb pbire gur erznvavat purfg, gura chg gur avccyr va na nrfgurgvpnyyl-pubfra cbfvgvba naq fgvgpu vg nyy qbja arngyl. If you have the bigger-breasts surgery variant, there will be an 'inverted-t' scar under the 'pec' contour, with a longish horizontal one and a short vertical going from it to the nipple.

Ideally, if you're doing it why I'm doing it, you go on testosterone for a while first so they can see how your furriness is going to come in; if you do it before you see where it'll be hairy you can end up with some rather hilariously-shaped chest-hair patches. Whereas if you know where it's going to fur you can take that into account to both make the final chest aesthetically pleasing and use the fur to try to mask the scars.

Some after pictures for the curious or interested.

Elliott Mason, one of my cousins had a reduction and reshaping at 20 and describes her scars as her anchors. She still has the scars a decade later, but it's better than having the original breasts.

I often forget to do breast self-exams officially, but I do keep an eye or a hand on them. I used to freak out because I could feel a hard lump, but it turned out that was my ribs.

Jacque @159: thank you. I've bookmarked the widget and will try it next time.

More generally on aggressive pre-emptive actions - not for me, but they should be covered by insurance.

I think that stress is real, and medically justifies varied responses to the same risk factors. That is the one big place where I part ways with kaiser-hospital style risk based medicine - not everything is a uniform checklist because our responses vary. So insurance should support different risk response profiles, as long as it reasonable from a medical point of view, and stress reduction is real and important.

That said, I kinda expect to get cancer because both my grandma and mom got it, but they both survived (and no BRAC gene) so I don't stress too much, dense breasts and all.

Because dense breasts= 4 times cancer risk isn't the same as 4 times aggressive cancer risk. Some cancers are not as big a deal. But I haven't dived into the med literature to figure out if I have false peace of mind.

Although this discussion is reminding me that I need to make some screening appointments myself. I'd rather have dental work done ( which is also on the agenda).

Ok, I need to go watch some sheep herding bunny action.

The World's End was hilarious and well done.

elise 137: Em @121: Making Light choir? Sounds like fun! Where do I sign up?

Probably in the OT in operation whenever we're coming up on a con a bunch of us will actually be at. I may organize it depending on spoons.

We will NOT be singing Spem in Alium.

Stefan 139: I didn't want to pay for a meal on the plane

I bring sandwiches from home when possible. Less possible on the way back, of course, unless I've been visiting my mom (who keeps wanting me to take yogurt, which TSA will confiscate).

Elliott 140: That's AWFUL. Sounds like research into making mammograms less unpleasant would save women's lives.

Men don't go for their prostate exams like they should, but those don't HURT.

P J 142: Yeah, I get the idea. Awful.

I understand that AAB men who are obese are at increased risk of breast cancer. Thinking about my current shape, and these mammogram stories, makes me want to eat nothing but celery for the rest of my life. Which wouldn't be long if I ate nothing but celery.

Stefan just tweeted me this: a matryomin ensemble plays a boogie version of Ode to Joy. A matryomin, in case you don't know (I certainly didn't) is...well, watch.

Yeah. Wired as theremins. No kidding.

I'd say "only in Japan" (which produces like 72% of the world's total supply of weirdness) but someone would tell me that ACTUALLY the matryomin was invented in Russia (which would make sense, because both the matryoshka and the theremin are from there) and that there are ensembles all over the world (or some such), so meh.

Anyway, it's really cool! They don't seem to miss the lack of volume control, which kind of limits it as a solo instrument, but it works fine here.

Thanks again, Stefan, for a touch of the Whiskey Tango ACTUAL Foxtrot, which, as you know, I needed.

More whimsy, though merely of the fun celebration variety: A wedding party setting out from a park, preceded by a bagpiper on a unicycle: video of pedaling wedding party (on flickr)

I was distracted from reading on my front porch by the uncharacteristic look of people heading past—local cyclists are not usually that dressed up. When I heard a blast of bagpipes from the park, I knew I should investigate.

Xopher: Breast cancer seems to scale most linearly with female-hormone (estrogen and progesterone especially) exposure. AAB women tend to have more female-hormone exposure than men; therefore, more breast cancer. Obese men have more estrogen in their systems because of the hormonal effects (or co-occurrences) of certain kinds of obesity. Breastfeeding, especially extended lactation, lowers your risk in part because it suppresses periods (== hormonal cycles), as does pregnancy for the same reason. Trans men on hormones still have higher risks than cismen who do not transition, even after radical mastectomy, because they've undergone (especially in these days of prevalent late-life transition) more hormonal cycles. Trans women on hormones are more prone to breast cancer than cis men. Etc.

The breast-tissue cells seem to have something happen to them when they're exposed to hormones (especially but not limited to cyclical cones) that can trigger the cancer switch, as it were. Vanishingly small chances each time, but the more coin-flips you get the less likely it is they'll all come up "no". Or it might be cumulative, metaphorically putting marbles in a very large pickle jar until it fills.

But of course, it's in the middle of a really muddy biological complicated system, so nothing's as simple as a binary effect.

Prostate and testicular cancers are encouraged (as it were) by exposure to testosterone, as well; trans men don't get prostate or testicular cancer if they don't have those organs, of course, but hormone-treated trans women seem (on average) to be less prone to them than hormonally modified cis men.

(Man, I'm infodumpy today -- sorry if it's derailing)

Nope. They were invented by a Japanese thereminist.

Elliott, I appreciate all that information, actually. As someone who's had a cancer for which I had no known risk factors,* and another condition (avascular necrosis) for which I also lacked risk factors,† I'm still going to be paranoid. But I do thank you for the information.

If it takes cancer fear to make me lose weight (which will be a good thing for my health in many, many ways), I think I'll wallow in cancer fear.

*Never smoked, never drank heavily
†Never smoked, never drank heavily, never deep-sea dived

For a moment, I took Xopher's "nope" in #170 to be a response to Elliott's apology for derailing at the end of #169. That was...slightly disorienting.

(Elliott, that's very interesting. More geeky facts! In an open thread! How could that *possibly* be derailing?)

Xopher (171): Don't you just hate beating medical odds in the wrong direction?

Re: Ronald McDonald House, I may well be wrong (or at least 20+ years out of date) about them. (Which, however, does not make me noticeably more eager to eat their food.)

Jacque #159: I had taken the tech's word for it that what she put me through was inevitable, given what was required.

The pain might well have been inevitable; the attitude certainly was not.

I made comments to that effect to the ultrasound tech, and she commented that no surgeon would ever do that.

Nor the ignorance. Leave aside for the moment that a technician is making sweeping pronouncements about medical practice. In 2013, a mammogram tech should certainly be aware of the actual options.

Harry Payne #126, Alex R. #161: "Making the necessary adjustments" doesn't work too well when they're walking me through a program I haven't used since Windows 98. More to the point, I've often had mentioning Linux throw a customer-support drone into brainlock: they just keep repeating "we don't support Linux", and never mind that "they" are an ISP. I generally have to escalate at least one tech level. Makes me wish that Shibboleet was for real.

in the "WIN!" column for today:

My child is using her toy (but useful) brush-and-dustpan to sweep up the drifts of dusty doghair from the edges of our steps.

She works for candy -- and I have no shame. :->

Mary Aileen 172: Yeah, I should have refreshed before posting that. I know you weren't actually complaining, but sorry anyway.

Ibid. 173: You know it! It's also why I find the fact that my type of cancer usually doesn't recur less than reassuring. I also hit 1/44,000 odds back in the 80s, and nearly died as a result. So I'm that character from Li'l Abner with the black storm cloud over his head all the time.

Men don't go for their prostate exams like they should, but those don't HURT.

Some men report that they do. This came up in a men's issues group where someone asked, would you let a female doctor do your prostate exam? More than one man voiced a preference for a female because she would likely have smaller fingers.

Re: the matroyomin - a couple of weeks ago I became obsessed with the matroyomin version of the traditional Russian folk tune, Ochi Tchornye. It was possibly the strangest thing I'd ever seen. I believe I may have attained a brief period of enlightenment after several viewings. It went from completely random and nonsensical to oddly calming.

Count me in for the Making Light choir. I've got a torchy, legit belt, but I also do a great straight tone and can blend with just about anyone. I only have relative pitch, but I can sight read.

I guess I was speaking out of Gay Male Privilege.

(Not.)

I would NOT want a woman to do my prostate exam, for the same reason I think men should be barred from being gynecologists.

Xopher: Do you think it's wrong for a gay man to act as a gynecologist? How about a gay man being a lesbian's gyn? Do the sexual interests of the patient impinge, those of the doctor, or both?

179
Xopher, speaking as a female, I've had three gynecologists, and two of them were male. It's not a big problem.

Xopher: I would NOT want a woman to do my prostate exam,

Suit yourself..

... for the same reason I think men should be barred from being gynecologists.

...but I'm glad you're not my gatekeeper.

I haven't really thought about it in too much detail, Elliott, never having needed a gynecologist myself. But I was only semi-serious to begin with, as I hope was clear.

The issue (to the extent it's at all real) is "knowing how this feels from having the body type that feels it" (so AAB men would be disqualified by reason of not having vaginas, cervices, and uteri—if I were serious about this, which I'm mostly not) rather than sexuality. I hadn't actually considered that. Any doctor of any gender (or none) could potentially be attracted to any patient of any gender (or none). We expect and deserve self-control on the part of doctors of all kinds.

My reservations as far as having a woman do my prostate exam involve a silly phobia about long nails (would a doctor have long nails, Xopher? don't be ridiculous) and a less-silly phobia about my reaction to having my prostate poked. I have never had that certain reaction in the presence of a woman (well, there was one Eostar ritual, but there were men there too), and I would find it terribly humiliating (and vaguely guilt-inducing, like I'd have to explain that I wasn't harassing her or something).

I'm freaking myself out here. It's not that I don't think a woman can be a perfectly good proctologist; it's a disturbing identity thing for me. I can't explain further because I'm getting nauseous thinking about it.

Lila, as am I! Don't want to gatekeep for anyone, and as I've said (after you posted) I was mostly kidding.

These "mostlys" are because I've heard a LOT of women complain about stupid male gynecologists "diving from across the room with a metal speculum that they kept in the freezer on purpose" which I know is an exaggeration, and that was 35 years ago and all. So the serious part is "I should think cis women and trans men would have an advantage in gynecology, since they're familiar with the equipment from having it themselves." But trans women and cis men should be able to learn about it.

I'm sorry I even made that offhand silly remark. It was probably thoughtless, and now I'm having to explain all kinds of stuff, and probably look like a total idiot and maybe am one.

To be clear: I apologize for my offensive remarks about men gynecologists and women proctologists. While I intended them humorously, I didn't make that clear and they were thoughtless anyway. I'm sorry and I won't do it again.

Xopher: all the **hugs** in the universe, and I'm so sorry I (indirectly?) made you feel nauseous. I was curious about exploring the edges of the parameter of the sensation you reported, but, um, we can totally be done now. :->

re 167: And in one of those outbursts of awesomely weird awesome that is Youtube's specialty, I give you Caravan.

Well, I obviously need to work on my communication skills.

Charlie is correct @155: it is illegal to give BGH and/or antibiotics to dairy cows in Canada (unless of course the cow is sick and needs antibiotics, in which case she is pulled from the line until her milk tests clear).

Organic dairy, produce, meat, coffee, chocolate, etc. etc. is perfectly legal and widely available in Canada.

I spent a few summers working at dairy farms when I was a teen. If never have to clean another udder again I will be ecstatic. Even so, I still prefer that to working on the sheep farm.

Went and had a long nap. Woke up thinking, "Why the hell don't they use novacaine? I mean, the dentists worked this one out, like, a hundred years ago?"

Elliott Mason @162: between about $4,000 and $18,000

The lower end of that range is not un-contemplatable. And the higher end is actually lower than I would have expected.

The biggest modifier on cost based on your physiology is how much excess skin is going to be involved, which relates to starting breast size.

I would definitely be on the upper end of that range. I wonder how much difference it makes if one is not invested in keeping one's nipples. Quite a lot, I would expect. ("Yes, let's shell out thousands of dollars to preserve the nipple and the associated neurology." "Um, why? Since, you know, having the nipples in the first place is, like, a major part of the problem...?")

I imagine that tatooed-on nipples would be entirely sufficient for my purposes, and mostly then only to avoid freaking out random bystanders. Although a chest without nipples would look a bit weird.

you go on testosterone for a while first so they can see how your furriness is going to come in

This would be one advantage for me: I'm perfectly content with my fur occurring in its current configuration. :-)

Some after pictures for the curious or interested.

Yes. Please. That.

And I speculate that sex-reassignment chest surgery would set one up for a lot less of the post-mast side effects resulting form faulty lymph drainage.

Hm. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, Elliott; this seems much more reasonable now.

Mea @164: this discussion is reminding me that I need to make some screening appointments myself. I'd rather have dental work done

Boy, howdy, and no kidding. This mammo was much worse than my last root canal. I think it might actually have been worse than having my wisdom teeth removed. At least they give you drugs for that.

Xopher Halftongue @166: I understand that AAB men who are obese are at increased risk of breast cancer. Thinking about my current shape, and these mammogram stories, makes me want to eat nothing but celery for the rest of my life. Which wouldn't be long if I ate nothing but celery.

I'm wondering if this whole experience will provide some actual, effective, motivation for me to lose some weight. I could drop a good twenty-five pounds and still be quite sufficiently upholstered.

Question: what means "AAB?"

Elliott Mason @169: (Man, I'm infodumpy today -- sorry if it's derailing)

Please, no. Very helpful and interesting.

Elliott Mason @175: She works for candy -- and I have no shame. :->

Awwwwww....!! (Ah, for a way to stave off the day when she realizes what she's doing is "work," and not "play.")

Xopher Halftongue @184: These "mostlys" are because I've heard a LOT of women complain about stupid male gynecologists "diving from across the room with a metal speculum that they kept in the freezer on purpose" which I know is an exaggeration, and that was 35 years ago and all.

Actually, IME, my main issue with male gyns is less about empathy wrt the plumbing than it is about the power dynamic. The Godlike, All-Knowing Doctor + Male In A Patriarchal Society + Man In A Position Of Authority Over A Woman = Seriously Bad News. Age (and thus social generation) of the doctor in question is also a major factor.

I can concede the theoretical possibility of a good male gyn. But I also recognize a deep prejudice in myself. And largely based on personal experience.

It was probably thoughtless, and now I'm having to explain all kinds of stuff, and probably look like a total idiot and maybe am one.

There, there, luv. Sexual dynamic in medicine, with the associated power dynamic, is a real Thing, and is worth dragging into consciousness and talking about. Just look at your conclusion of your @183.

Re #163: Yes, "anchor" is a decent description for the shape of breast-reduction scars. Mine were livid purple for the first few years; these days even the under-boob ones are basically skin colored, though a wee bit dark, and the ones around the nipple and from the nipple down are all but invisible.

I'm a little larger than I was immediately after the surgery, but much more aesthetically shaped even so. I lost a little sensation, but I will totally trade that for the first time I folded my arms over my chest and wasn't hitting myself in the chin with my wrists...

Xopher, there isn't as much sensation in that area of a physically-female body as you would think. (Real sensitivity tends to be at the ends rather than in the middle.)
Fortunately, these days, speculums (speculi? specula?) come in plastic, which isn't quite so cold - but a good OB-GYN will have them at least at room temp! (Note that that isn't related to the gender of the doctor.)

AAB means Assigned At Birth.

The first time I had a prostate exam, I told my doctor that I could see why gay men enjoyed anal sex. The sensation didn't appeal to me, but I could understand why it would appeal to someone else.

Which reminds me...

A man went to his doctor for a physical exam. They went through the various things done in a physical, and then it was time for the prostate exam. The patient bent over the table and the doctor proceed with the exam.

After a moment, the doctor said, "Well, I can already tell you that you're going to have to stop masturbating."

The patient said, "Why?"

The doctor replied, "Because it's making me nervous."

I'm okay with a male gynecologist as long as he understands that my coping strategy in that sort of uncomfortable situation is to declare myself Hostess of the Examining Room and do my best to put him at ease. I've had one male gynecologist who hada female chaperone in the room and she made me really nervous-- she looked disapproving and I thought if I seemed too at ease she would think me a harlot. My most recent exam had two in the room, one female and 'a little old school' as another staffer said, and one male who we brainstormed about it terms of what shit to give him when he walked in the room. I much prefer the latter.

Among those I've talked to, most people who go to gynecologists seem not to mind doctors who lack the anatomy; the theory is that they've extra-careful because they don't want to screw it up.

Jacque 189: It wasn't so much the power dynamic as the idea of getting an erection in front of a woman that I found disturbing, and still do.

Spokane won 2015's bid. Meanwhile, our masquerade presentation won "most humorous".

Congratulations, Serge!

I'm sorry; I've forgotten what your presentation was to be, assuming you mentioned it. Can you describe it for me?

Xopher, your unease with the notion of visiting a female proctologist seems entirely reasonable to me as an individual thing.

However, about male gynecologists: the absolute WORST, most abrupt, dismissive, and unsympathetic GYN I've ever had was female. I was 19, and having a punch biopsy for a mild cervical dysplasia, and it was while I was at college, so not my regular doctor. She would not tell me what steps she was taking as she took them, she'd just say "and now you'll feel a little pressure" or "a slight pinch." Slight pinch it was NOT, and her post-biopsy pain control suggestion was "have a margarita," when I was close to tears.

The kindest, most considerate GYN I've ever had - leaving out the amazing pediatric GYN I dealt with from age 14-17 - was a man, and one very near retirement, at that. He LISTENED to his patients. When I explained that I really didn't want to take Provera to regulate my cycles, he said "Actually, I don't prescribe that one any more. So many women told me how much they hated its mood effects that I took one cycle of it, to see - and it's now OFF my list. There are alternatives that won't be that awful." Bless him.

I have had good female GYNs and bad male ones - but it hasn't correlated with gender.

OK, which film had appearances by Thora Hird and Lionel Jeffries, and included in the credits thanks to the British Interplanetary Society?

Doctors, in general, are a heterogeneous lot. I had a GP for many years who was extremely good at what she did, but had an annoying tendency to talk down to everyone which I'm pretty sure was based on the area we were in ("this is a very poor area, therefore everyone in it must be poorly educated and probably also stupid", although I don't suppose she ever consciously articulated that to herself).

I eventually managed to move out to an area which was one step up (for which read "the drug dealers don't work openly, and you won't normally get any trouble if you're walking around the neighbourhood during the day"), and there I found an even better doctor. He was particularly good with mental illness, which was lucky for me as I used to get depression (and still do sometimes suffer from anxiety), but the thing I especially liked and still do like about him is that he's absolutely on the ball when it comes to pitching his explanations. He will rapidly assess not only how bright his patient is, but also how much medical terminology they're likely to know, and explains accordingly.

However, doctors have so much stuff they need to know that not even a really good doctor is always going to be on top of all of it, and this explains how this medical paragon managed to miss my asthma. (He kept assuming I must be right that I kept getting chest infections; it wasn't an unreasonable assumption. I was coughing horribly.) It wasn't until I had to see another doctor in his absence that it was finally picked up. The other doctor is not such a great listener and empathiser, but he's absolute mustard at anything respiratory.

On the other hand, the worst medical professional I have ever had to see was a locum at the same practice who treated me when I injured my arm in an accident. He was technically highly competent, and he packed me off to a physio who turned out to be very helpful, but nonetheless he pulled the arm about with absolutely no regard for the amount of pain he was causing. His attitude appeared to be "ah, this is an arm, it is not working right at the moment, therefore we must get it repaired" - no consideration at all for the fact that there was someone in quite a lot of pain attached to the said faulty arm.

A little rambly. Sorry. Anyway, the point of all this is that I haven't seen any obvious correlation between doctors' attitudes and their gender.

Xopher, I'm sorry for getting snippy; you unwittingly hit one of my personal buttons (other people restricting my access to health care), which is emphatically My Problem, Not Yours.

Having read your posts lo these many years, I know perfectly well that you're not about that sort of thing. And I respect your right to choose whatever professional treats you with competence and courtesy and induces the least possible anxiety, especially given how fraught your medical history is!

In my own case, the only doctor I've ever felt uncomfortable with for gender/sex related reasons was an opthalmologist. He kept making flirtatious comments about my eye color and putting his hand on my knee. (Apparently middle-aged women are supposed to be flattered by this kind of crap?) Needless to say, I would not under any circumstances go back to him. (Alas, no witnesses.)

in the course of attempting an apology to Xopher.

Congratulations Serge!

Congratulations Serge and company!

Congratulations, Serge. I saw it and the award was well-deserved.

Jacque: Glossary note. AAB == Assigned At Birth, one way of referring to people's sex or gender. It's the one dealt to them upon entering the world, by other people.

For probably understandable reasons, some people object to terminology like "genetic sex" (Really? You've been tested?), "real girl/boy", "womyn-born-womyn", or "physiological sex". Talking about someone's assigned sex or their AAB is one way of trying to get at things one wants to talk about while admitting that the assignment being talked about is imposed from above and possibly incorrect from the individual's point of view -- though often powerful in terms of how the parents choose to socialize the child, etc.

To add to the data on doctors - the best gynecologists I've had have been the two female nurse practitioners. The worst was probably the pediatrician who did not tell me before the appointment that there I was going to have my first pelvic. He may have told my mother, so maybe that was her fault for not preparing me. I also had a good exam by a female internist who was my GP at the time. Her specialty was gynecologic endocrinology and I'm sad she's either no longer practicing, or only practicing a few hours a week these days.

The worst doctor I've ever had was my male endocrinologist, who gave me conflicting, even bullshit info, never stopped haranguing me for being fat (he was treating me for Hashimoto's and PCOS) and even offered a fraudulent diabetes Dx so my insurance would cover a fancy new injectible that was "like a lap band in a box!" to keep me from eating. (that drug now shows up on the class-action lawyer commercials). He was also the endo for a friend I had with Thyroid cancer, and he gave her nothing but misinformation about the chemo and his office staff were completely incompetent, meaning that she did not request the right number of days off, and she wound up not qualifying for some disability pay. The second worst doctor I had was the female GP who, before any exam took place, asked if I wanted a lap band.

While you might think that female doctors are better able to handle lady issues with empathy, sometimes they base all things on their own experience, which may be mild. I have had nothing but problems with my Special Lady Times since the very beginning, and I was told repeatedly by the school nurse that cramps aren't "that bad", I guess because her periods never gave her any problems, that meant my being doubled over in pain was just an affectation. Sounds like Jacque's awful Mammogram tech was of that ilk.

Dumb question (in that I'd feel dumb if I didn't ask it): Hugos are tonight, right? Is there going to be a web simulcast this year? The official site is utterly unhelpful.

Thanks, Cally, Michael I, Mary Aileen and GlendaP... Our presentation was about red shirts, to the music of "Dumb Ways to Die". I was the red shirt who'd made a pass at the girlfriend of a Vulcan male going thru Pon'far,thus my showing up on stage carrying a Vulcan axe in one hand, and the other hand keeping my entrails from completely spilling out.

The worst gynecologist I had was the one who told me the best way to get rid of my endometriosis and associated menstrual pain was to get pregnant. (Well, it DID work, but I had to go through a few more years of unpleasantness before we were ready to have a kid!)

The most amusing one was a younger man (maybe 35 or so) who seemed slightly embarrassed by the matter-of-fact attitudes my daughter and I had about birth control and sexual preference...

I'm very happy with my current female gyno, who is quite good about communicating with me and giving me enough information and time to make decisions.

I have some Romulan ale for our hosts.

I've had any number of doctors performing pap smears, but I only remember three: the one I had in college (male), and my last two (female).

The male one, beloved by the nurses, was fairly good; patients could relax a bit more because the nurses always provided really gaudy knit or crocheted cozies for the stirrups so you wouldn't freeze your feet.

The next-to-last doer-of-paps, female, who I ended up being stuck with for several years, otherwise good at her job, had the worst pap technique ever--you could (pardon the TMI) feel things scraping. Actively painful. Now I understand that the usual bad-pap complaints have more to do with dilation rather than actual acquisition of specimen, so this must have been just ... special. I got to where I really dreaded the exam.

My current doctor, also female, of twelve or so years standing, I can't even feel anything. Now that's *good*.

211
I never got cozies on the stirrups. but I did get one who had scenic posters tacked to the ceiling.

The NSA has pretty good phone staff.

Really-- they gave the man decent advice and bailed out from being trolled quickly and with dignity. Still, pretty funny.

Congratulations, Serge!

Rikibeth 197: Yeah, those kinds of stories are why I don't actually seriously advocate a sex bar for those specialties. That GYN sounds like an amazing person and an excellent doctor.

Lila 200: Thank you, Lila, I appreciate that.

Elliott 205: "womyn-born-womyn"

Another vocabulary note: anyone who uses (as opposed to mentions) the quoted phrase to refer to real individuals can be safely assumed to be a TERF.*

*Elliott knows this means Trans*-Excluding Radical Feminist.

Thanks, Xopher... I missed some of my cues, but we still managed to get a big laugh from the audience.

I've been Summoned to have my first pap smear, and I am terrified. Haven't booked the appointment yet.
It's not the discomfort that scares me, or not primarily. I don't want it to hurt, but if it does, I'll probably be able to manage it.
What scares me is the gender problems. If I go for a pap smear I am officially, firmly and unarguably female. I am in the box labelled Girl, being treated like a girl in case I have girl-specific problems. My physical dysphoria is mild, but only when I can ignore the female coding of my anatomy. Gynecology codes me female. I have the fear.

216
It codes you as physically female - they're not checking your mental gender. (My experience: slight physical discomfort, but otherwise it's pretty impersonal. If you're lucky, you get people you can joke with.)

I've had a female GP perform a prostate exam, FWIW. Don't see any reason why she'd be worse at detecting prostate cancer than a male GP would be. (It's also not the most unpleasant medical procedure I've ever been through.)

On the other hand, I'm not so sure the numbers support the idea that all men should be screened regularly for prostate cancer, either via the PSA test or via digital rectal exam. Prostate cancer is extremely common and usually slow growing, and is sometimes best left untreated. As I understand it (as a non-expert but as someone who has a prostate and is interested in quantitative reasoning) there isn't much evidence that early detection prolongs life or improves quality of life. May be different for some people depending on specific risk factors, of course.

Matt 218: Don't see any reason why [a female GP]'d be worse at detecting prostate cancer than a male GP would be.

I entirely agree, and as I said, that was absolutely not the point for me.

I agree with the rest of your comment.

John and I painted our the outside of our whole garage today, despite kid non-napping. It was stressful and took longer than it would have if we'd had a childcare solution, but it was doable.

Though the second coat is going to have to either be tomorrow or after dark, given the timing. :->

Two lines have just occurred to me regarding the various awful smear experiences recorded here:

My cavity, my cavity, she's scraping round my cavity,
I don't know if it's clumsiness or out-and-out depravity...

This may get expanded in the morning, but right now I am going to bed. Sympathy to all who have gone through medical yuck, which appears to be almost everyone.

Duckbunny, I'm afraid I have no advice to offer that passes the five-second rule*. It's a sucky situation, and I hope taking care of your body doesn't mean hurting the rest of you.

*If I can think of it in five seconds, so can you.

Speaking of the 2015 WorldCon, Spokane is less than two hours' drive from Moscow. If you go there to protest the anti-LGBT laws, try not to be there when the sun blows up.

Maybe that link was wonky.

Elliott@207

There's a link on the LonestarCon home page to the Ustream livebroadcast (www.ustream.tv/hugo-awards). The ceremony is scheduled to start at 8 pm San Antonio time (9 pm Eastern).

P J Evans @191: there isn't as much sensation in that area of a physically-female body as you would think. (Real sensitivity tends to be at the ends rather than in the middle.)

The kinesthetic sensations interior of the skin tends to be more pressure than tactile (which is why I managed to let one lover gnaw a hole in the wall of my vulva with his fingernail, without realizing it.)

I did, however, have one doctor for a while who managed to apply the speculum in a remarkably uncomfortable fashion. I don't know whether she had managed to pinch skin, or stretch it, or what the hell, but I spent the entire exam with the sensation of the right side of my vulva on the brink of tearing. These days, I would probably have made her reseat it, but since I was getting a colposcopy, the speculum was in some respects the least of my worries.

John A Arkansawyer @192: AAB means Assigned At Birth.

Oh. Right. I even knew that. Something about the context of weight made that slip my mind. Thanks.

Xopher Halftongue @194: It wasn't so much the power dynamic as the idea of getting an erection in front of a woman that I found disturbing, and still do.

Huh. Interesting. And here I am confronted with an experience for which I have absolutely no appropriate referents. (It's good to be reminded that even though we work to be compassionate and empathetic, there are experiences which we are simply unequipped to understand.) Thank you for sharing that.

Rikibeth @197: So many women told me how much they hated its mood effects that I took one cycle of it, to see - and it's now OFF my list.

Wow. That move, righ there, earned him a place in heaven, IMHO.

Janet Brennan Croft @209: The worst gynecologist I had was the one who told me the best way to get rid of my endometriosis and associated menstrual pain was to get pregnant. (Well, it DID work, but I had to go through a few more years of unpleasantness before we were ready to have a kid!)

0.o Wife of a friend who gave birth to their first last year underwent something like a year of therapy and surgery prior to getting pregnant, to deal with the endometriosis. I don't know anything like enough to render an opinion, but your gyn's opinion sounds way off, to me.

P J Evans @212: I never got cozies on the stirrups.

My current doc's office uses raggedy old athletic socks on the stirrups. My biggest problem with them is that it's impossible to get them into the right angle, so I always wind up with my feet perched kinda sideways on the rim.

Heh. Which reminds me: I also got a bone density test on Friday. An entirely unremarkable experience (thank Ghu!), but I did find myself giggling at the little triangle exclamation point sticker on the overhead bit; presumably to remind one not to whack one's head when sitting up. Also, having my feet strapped to the triangle majigger to get them into the right position was an odd sensation. Especially on the right, since that foot tends to splay outward. The tech was very forgiving of the low comedy I was compelled to offer in response.

duckbunny @216: Depending on availability and your tolerances/preferences, the discomfort can be dealt with somewhat preemptively by taking a dose of something like (rot13ed for the gnome's sake) genznqby an hour or so ahead of time.

As to the physical dysphoria around the girl parts, if your gyn is worth anything, it would be worth bringing this up during the consultation. Maybe make an agreement with him/her that, in the interests of your long-term health, the two of you together treat this business with the fantasy that, as a favor, you are bringing in a friend's body for the the check-up, because the friend is off [at an important job interview / performing in a concert / whatever fantasy particularly delights you] and can't be there herself. In your place, I might even be inclined to call the gyn ahead of time and pre-arrange this role-play. How your gyn reacts to the idea will tell you a lot about how clued-in they are around gender issues, generally.

Michael I @225: Do you know if it's started yet? All I'm seeing in the frame is the Hugo Rocket, and the chat says that we lost the feed.

Shades of last year...?

Okay: "worldcon: be right back."

Technology is so cool, when it works....

Duckbunny, I can't tell you how to feel about or understand yourself: but does it help you that, from your description, this stranger codes you as a man with some female parts?

Again, I don't know whether this idea is of any use, but perhaps there is a way for your female parts to have been meant to interact with your male ones in some way that is not threatening or unhealthy, maybe there's a way to be friendly to those parts, even if they got stuck so awkwardly on to a male person?

226
Mine usually managed not to do that (and I never had any problems with colposcopy, even the time I spent a couple of hours as a paid guinea-pig for a teaching clinic with six doctors).

It's in the middle of the Campbell right now (despite it being 3min before 9Central, which was when it was said to start)

duckbunny, Planned Parenthood will perform Pap smears, and they have three boxes for gender on their form: male, female, and other. They will still give you a Pap smear if you tick "Other." Perhaps that might help?

Duckbunny - I've had a variety of doctors (and physician assistants) over the years, and never had a pap smear be particularly uncomfortable. I didn't have a gender concern about it, but from a purely physical perspective, you don't need to worry. In a discussion like this, I think it's human nature for the people who've had the bad, outlier, experiences to speak up. The mundane just doesn't seem worth mentioning.

Hugo-Ceremony-as-performance-art question -- is the big fuzzy glasses'd guy in colorful t-shirt and dark blazer the Designated Hugger? Perhaps I should recognize him but I don't.

Patrick won best editor, long form. Yay!

Warning to the gnomes: incoming traffic ...

Jacque 226: (It's good to be reminded that even though we work to be compassionate and empathetic, there are experiences which we are simply unequipped to understand.)

I run into this all the time with women's and trans* issues.

Nancy 234: What, again? :-) Um...I mean, congratulations, Patrick!

Since we're talking Hugos, here's this year's base design. It looks suitably heavy and I hope none of the winners dropped theirs.

The best part about Patrick winning the Hugo this year is that TERESA WAS THERE! Finally! Excellent!

No doubt for undue enthusiasm about Teresa having actually been there when Patrick won his Hugo this time. Which is worth being enthusiastic about. Here, gnomes, want a Nut Goody?

[Actually, for three spaces in a row. The gnomes were so pleased by the news that we're foregoing snacks this time. -- Rowoil Cuex, Duty Gnome]

Congratulations to Patrick on winning the Hugo for Best Editor, Long Form.

Is it just me, or with the bronze base, could this year's Hugo award double as a defensive weapon? Also, if anyone is carrying them on board a plane (rather than checking or shipping), expect some really weird looks at security. Big chunks of irregular metal look weird on x-ray.

Congratulations, Patrick!

And congratulations, Teresa, for being there to kvell.

Congratulations, Serge and Patrick!

Randall Munroe brings another gut-punch..

Duckbunny @216: Reasons like yours are why many people with female reproductive systems who do not identify as female don't get those body parts checked as frequently as they should, and are at higher risk for problems with said body parts. If you haven't already done so, I'd suggest locating a trans-friendly gynecologist; even if you don't identify as male, doctors who are used to treating folks with cervices who don't identify as female are likely to be generally sympathetic to your needs. (You may be able to find a provider via WPATH.org, or by contacting a local-to-you organization.)

Benjamin Wolfe @240: Chicon warned the TSA that (##) of awards that looked like this ____ were going to be leaving Chicago after Labor Day Weekend, probably a lot on planes, here's an example in its travel case to x-ray to see what it looks like.

Because even just the rocket is kind of alarming-looking to them. All winners were also provided a slip of paper with recommended talking-to-the-TSA wording to use, if flying out. (Something along the lines of, "I won an award last weekend, it's in my carry-on, it's a rocket and a base-that-looks-like ...")

I was under the impression that this wisdom had been passed on to the LoneStarCon team; it's a good idea for all future US-based concoms, methinks.

Possibly of historical interest: because of stream breakdown, the only portion of Patrick's speech (or, in fact, anything since the end of Stanley Schmidt's) that went out live to those of us non-present-in-person was him raising it and saying "And I won this one with Teresa here to watch!" or whatever his actual wording was. And then the stream broke again.

If the concom has the footage archived it would be nice if nominees could choose to post their speeches or something.

Elliot @220, with regard to painting the garage, if you got caught in the thunderstorm last night, you'll want to wait at least a couple of days (three is better) before you put on the next coat.

I know this because I was out with friends last night, and we were talking about coming over today and painting their newly-purchased outdoor shed, and our waiter overheard us. Turns out he'd been a painter in a previous life (also a casino dealer for ten years; not a young man, he), and he strongly advised waiting three days after rain before painting outside surfaces...

(We gave him a really good tip.)

Nothing to do with the ongoing topics, but as this is the Worldcon edition open thread, it seems as good a place as any:

I have a neat idea for badge ribbons to hand out at next year's Worldcon, but no idea where to order such ribbons (so that I can get a cost estimate to find out if it's something I can do) or even what that kind of ribbon is actually called so that I can effectively google it. Where do those ribbons come from? I want to make my own to give away, darnit.

CassyB: We didn't get rain last night; there was some the night before, but everything was sunned-off and very dry before we painted, so we're not worried.

Worst case, we paint it again in 3-5yrs (which Beka will be in favor of; as she said the instant she saw it partly painted, "But I don't even LIIIIKE blue it's not my FAVORITE COLOR you should paint the garage PURPLE!!!!eleventy!").

Elliott, 250: I find myself strongly in agreement with your child. Purple is and has always been the best color in the world. I can think of no better color to paint something you'll see every day.

Which leads me to ask why so few cars are purple.

In fact, I'd love to know why car colours congregate so heavily in certain parts of the spectrum. I don't know if other countries are different, but here in the UK the main colour ranges for cars appear to be blues; greyscale (generally the lighter end, ie white and silver); reds; and to a certain extent greens. Yellows, russets and purples are relatively uncommon. Beige had a vogue for a while among elderly gentlemen in particular, but I hardly ever see them now. Orange seems to have gone out with the Citroen 2CV, pink you see once in a blue moon, and I don't think I've ever seen a full-on brown, though you'd think it would be quite a practical colour.

Personally, if I were both able and obliged to drive, I'd have a car I could pick out anywhere. A nice bright Kelly green would be ideal; that's a shade you don't tend to see!

Mongoose #252:

No offense to the color preferences of you and TexAnne, but my longterm and ongoing attempts to classify and therefore predict driving behavior have suggested mightily that drivers of purple cars are more likely to exhibit totally random behavior than the rest of the driving population. Dunno why, but they are.

Mongoose #252: At least in the US, there are strong fashion trends, both for the mass of cars and for the "rebels" who go for something different. The "mass" colors will be selected among fairly muted colors: As you note the darker blues or greens going to black, grays and silver, and white (though white has that cleaning issue).

Really eye-catching¹ colors tend to be someone showing off or "compensating", as in the classic bright-red sportscar or "Pink Cadillac". Just now, I suspect not as many people are in the mood for that.

Other colors can come from more general fashions of the time; for example, back in the 70's, you got a lot of avocado and some harvest-gold cars.

¹ Googling around indicates that the etymology doesn't support me, but a while ago I conceived a connection between the two meanings of 'tacky'. On the one hand, it means something that's physically sticky, that catches hold of your hand. On the other, it's something that does the same to your attention....

Egg salad sandwiches, anyone?

Mongoose (252): You'd love my new car. I named it Kermit because it's a very bright green.

Around here, the vast majority of cars are monochrome. Light gray/silver* is the most common, followed by black and dark gray, then white. Those account for at least 3/4 of the cars on the local roads. Most of the actual colors are very dark, with navy blue and burgundy both fairly popular. I am starting to see more brightish colors around this year: royal blue is picking up and I'm seeing copper for the first time. And there's always been a smattering of bright red.

*which completely disappears in rain or fog, particularly since Long Island drivers don't like to turn their headlights on in the rain. Grump.

Addendum to my #255: I wanted a bright color for visibility reasons, but green was not my first choice. I really wanted royal blue and wouldn't have minded waiting, but the dealer offered to knock another $1000 off the price if I took one of the cars they had on the lot. So I went with the green.

Elliott Mason @ 246: I applaud Chicon for providing a sample to x-ray before a couple of dozen of them wandered their way through security checkpoints; I'd hope that made the experience less unpleasant for awardees heading home. One of my labmates has had fun carrying on scientific apparatus - we often use chinrests during visual perception experiments, since we like to keep the distance between the subject's eyes and the stimulus constant - it turns out that our more portable chinrests look really strange on x-ray. They're a chin cup (boring, radiotransparent, plastic) and a couple pieces of relatively thick pipe (very much radio-opaque) that telescope so we can adjust height. The latter component looks like things that Are Not Allowed on board an aircraft. Labmate got on his flight successfully, but did have to explain the device.

Charlie Stross got a nice shout-out in today's edition of Doug Muder's invaluable Weekly Sift

My car is red. I had wanted the bright turquoise ("blue raspberry") one, but the dealer only had it in the "sport" model and I just wanted the base. Red was my second choice and I'm actually pretty happy with it. If it had come in purple, I would have waited or found another dealership that participated in the Costco plan.

Many people out here seem to have silver, grey, beige or white cars, which in addition to being harder to see in the fog, look remarkably similar in parking lots. If I had infinite money that I was require to spend on stupid things, I'd get that purple/green iridescent paint and have it done in a dragonscale pattern.

I like my nice bright shiny metallic green Eclipse. I thought about a nice bright shiny metallic grey car, but the last person I met who had one said she'd been hit five times in her Z3. Low-slung and pavement-colored--not a great combination.

Our car is bright red - the only choices we had were bringt red, plain white or costs-a-lot-extra, so we went with the red - at least it's visible. They didn't offer green paint anyway. :-(

I really don't understand why so many cars nowadays are silver-grey. As others have already said, a colour better designed to make your car invisible as the light level falls, I really can't imagine.

If I'd bought a Honda Fit instead (liked the car, *hated* the dealership), I would have gone for the "blue raspberry" (i.e., turquoise). The Fit *does* come in purple, but it's very dark. And they replaced the royal blue with navy this year.

re: silver/white cars

Those of us who live where the summers get hot know the appeal of cars with reflective shells - far less load on the A/C (it's almost unbearable not to have or use it). My first car (bought for me in Nebraska) was black with a red interior. I couldn't even touch interior surfaces until the A/C had run close to fifteen minutes, meanwhile standing outside in the sun.

Heating isn't a problem in the winter regardless of color as the engine produces plenty.

Were I designing vehicles, I'd default silver or white with a broad band of metallic color on the sides that wrapped up across the top of the doors.

Also, if the motor is running, the lights are on. IIRC this is mandatory in Norway.

@263 Carol Kimball
Also, if the motor is running, the lights are on. IIRC this is mandatory in Norway

Daytime running headlights are mandatory in Canada.

My Mazda is 'Phantom Blue Mica', which was not my first choice, but is a nice kind of teal.

I pretty much think of myself as a boy with statistically unusual anatomy for a person of my gender. Generally that works for me. Sex is fine, because I only sleep with people who know I'm a boy, so they know they're touching a boy's anatomy, so it doesn't matter that it's an uncommon shape. Menstruating is rough, but a lot less so since I got a cup instead of pads. It's the difference between "My body is uncontrollably doing a girl-thing" and "I am a cool cyborg".

It is very lovely to find people being sympathetic and helpful about my need to draw fine distinctions. Expressions of gratitude!

Nice to know the California Milk Processor Board has a sideline in Opium flavor. Note: this sucker is long.

They're also responsible for this example of short sexist fairy tale assholeiness and most annoying use of neither/nor, which annoys me more than I would have thought possible from the description.

Em at #249 badge ribbons.
I can't help you but I am reminded of something funny I saw once.
I worked a trade show during my temping days, and the customer (a big national association of something) bought EVERY COLOR OF badge ribbon, apparently just because they could. I swear there must have been exactly 256 of them and they must have corresponded exactly to the Microsoft palette. There was a spreadsheet saying which particular subgroup of the panelists were entitled to which one.

Oh, it just gets better and better: the Internet Archive doesn't have a working version that I can find, but a web search for "everythingidoiswrong.org" gives an even juicier example of "What the hell?" I wonder how much this boosts milk prices...

Given the recen discussion, I think a bunch of folks here will appreciate 11 Things Guys Take For Granted.

Em @249: Googling for "badge ribbons" got me stuff - but all UK based. Just tried again in Firefox and:

Badge Ribbons

Marco ribbons

Try those? The second one certainly offers blank ribbons, and the first offers custom printing.

R.I.P. Frederik Pohl.

Damn. But . . . hell of a good run, man.

I'm not sure why. I was noting the passing of Frederik Pohl.

Some formatting thing I guess.

A quick Google on images shows that most British police cars are white, with various high-contrast patterns of hi-vis paint added. These days, one or two rows of blue and yellow squared down the side, and the usual orange/yellow diagonal stripe pattern across the rear which a lot of emergency and maintenance vehicles use.

Pohl was blogging as of three days ago:

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/

I hope Elizabeth Anne Hull continues the work on his revised autobiography.

*Sigh*

We know the ending now. A familiar one. But what a story.

Dave Bell @ #272:

Swedish police cars now have a Battenberg stripe (yes, really, they call the alternating squares after the dessert) instead of the former "thin blue stripes" or (going far-enough back) the rather stark quartering in black and white. Mostly because the Battenberg is more visible than either of the other.

I don't think the next "small" Swedish police car will be a Saab, though (they used to have quite a few Saab 900s with the engine and drive-train out of Saab 9000s in them, the latter car is quite a few hundred kilos heavier, so the police 900s were, shall we say, quick).

#266 ::: Bruce E. Durocher II

I'm not usually into "so bad it's good", but that was remarkable-- and more so that it's apparently a real ad in some sense rather than simply a humorous piece.

It might be an argument for keeping government out of advertising except that it's managed to strike the youtube commentariat silent.

Dave Harmon @244: Man, you ain't kidding. Whoah. Yeah.

I recommend that xkcd comic to the gnomes, too. Gets ya right in the feels, it does.

And would the gnomes like some lovely deep-fried pumpkin pie with cinnamon ice cream from the Minnesota State Fair?

elise: cinnamon ice cream was made to go over blueberry cobbler. Trust me on this.

HLN: Area neutrois observes fingernail moonrise and gets a lesson in relative visual effects.
I was up pre-predawn as usual, made sure that Jupiter was in its proper place, and then recalled that a thin crescent should be along sometime. I waited, and after a while noticed something so dim and ghostly perched on the horizon I was not entirely sure it was there; it was almost like a little barely-seen cloud against the black. But I kept an eye on it--and then I understood, as light burst forth and the crescent appeared seemingly all at once. I had been looking at the part lit only by earthlight, and as soon as the sunlit part was in sight, it overwhelmed that--unlike some evenings when the earthlight is stronger. I guess it's because that happens in the winter when that light comes from Antarctica, but now it's from the Southern Ocean, or Africa, or something. I'm not sure, this can get confusing. But it sure shows us how context determines not just the seeming value, hue or saturation of something, but sometimes whether we can make it out at all.
Over 27-odd years, I've watched the sun, moon and various planets pop out of the trees on the hill, and marveled at the variation in just where it happens. Not to mention how beautiful it is. Now I am being priced out of this place and am on the waiting list for a subsidized one. I figure there's a 25% chance of it facing east. Let's hope for the best.
Oh, and congratulations, Patrick.

Unless there's a backlog, this is Frederik Pohl's last blog post:

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2013/09/an-interesting-statistic/

Discomforting the comfortable to the end.

Lila @277: One of the local ice-cream companies has a cardamom/vanilla ice cream that I tried recently. It was clearly needing to go over something, rather than just being eaten by itself. Peach cobbler, perhaps?

Just looked at the LoneStarCon logo. It's flashing me. The star is flash… huh? Balloons dropping from the ceiling, confetti, a banner…

Oh, I get it now. "CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MILLIONTH PERSON TO NOTICE THAT."

I believe that Worldcon takes nice pictures of all the Hugo winners. Do these get posted online, and does anyone know the link? I'm not seeing one on LoneStarCon's Hugo page, nor on http://www.thehugoawards.org/.

Our garage is blue because:

- We decided on white trim and saturated wall expanses.

- It needed to not clash horrendously with any of the vegetative greens at that end of the yard, the orange of the daylily blossoms that sproing up RIGHT IN FRONT OF THAT WALL in the summer, or the neighbor's house.

- both John and I like blue. In fact, in sorting through our available paint-chips to do the choosing, we kept gravitating to ... the two paint chips containing most of the blue shades we painted our LAST house. Confirming we really do like those colors a lot.

- we agreed it should be a strongly visible color (not pastel), not too grey, but not dark dark or too saturated (so as to read dark). So speaking practically, darkness 4 on any of the 6-shades-that-vary-by-how-much-lamp-black color chips we had.

- Of the chips on hand (limited only to Dutch Boy colors), we didn't really like any of the greens or purples on offer; some were good but too grey, others were good except kind of way too pink to be staring at for years, etc. And all the greens that didn't look pre-grimed for our convenience were kind of extra neon, which is not what we were looking for.

- We wanted to pick the garage color with a sort of aim to eventually repainting all the TRIM on the house in a darker/more saturated version of the same/a coordinating color, so we were now looking for PAIRS of colors we liked ...

So blue. As it happens. John strongly prefers blues and greys; I prefer purples and blues, like greys all right (as long as not depressing) and also like a lot of other colors.

Red was tough because we wanted to coordinate trim-color, and most of the reds we liked for trim turned either peachy or pinky when lightened towards 'garage' versions. Also, there really aren't a lot of good red or orange options in the currently trendy colors that both John and I like; we're Christmassy/ruby/oxblood/certain maroon prefer-ers, and those are not 'now' reds.

Yellow was a possibility, but again the rub was coordinating with house trim, as if the hot/saturated end of the chip that the trim would be was a color we liked, the lighter shades dropped to baby's-nursery pastels really fast, and we were not into that. Orange was even worse, as most of the oranges turned peachy or pinkish when lightened, or else were way too pumpkinny. Or too brown. Orange is tough when it comes to what John and I like to look at. Best to avoid it as fraught entirely.

There were a couple of purples that I liked and John could have lived with on the trim, but their paler counterpart shades were just wrong. And we're painting the garage FIRST, so ...

So, well, blue. As it turns out, a nice sunny robin's-eggy kind of blue that on the chip was lighter than I wanted, but on the garage is just exactly right. In twilight it makes that entire end of the yard glow and turns on all my happy places. Two notches on the paint chip darker is a nice vibrant medium blue, not 'dark' exactly but far from 'light', neither too tealy nor too navy-ish.

(Our car is beige, because that's the color of the used car on the lot that had the features we wanted -- specifically Honda Naples Gold Metallic. Which is almost precisely the same color as Toyota's Driftwood Pearl, because my in-laws' Prius is Driftwood Pearl, and if it's parked directly next to our car you can just about tell in good direct sunlight that our car is faintly yellower)

As far as I can tell from just driving, i.e. this is anecdotal evidence, entirely unreliable; every third car in California is a silver-grey Toyota. MY car is a silver-grey Toyota. Makes it tough when you forget where you parked your car in the Target lot. I do have a sticker on the rear bumper which helps distinguish it from its multitude of cousins. Had I purchased it new, I would have chosen a different color, but it was 3 years old when I got it.

duckbunny & lorax: If you haven't already done so, I'd suggest locating a trans-friendly gynecologist; even if you don't identify as male, doctors who are used to treating folks with cervices who don't identify as female are likely to be generally sympathetic to your needs.

I'm keeping a close eye on this conversation because, despite the fact that I'm not generally opposed to the idea of being female (once I dispensed with the most troublesome bit), the idea of causing my upper thorax to become more male-like has increasing appeal for me.

Googling the phrase [boulder trans doctor] turns up Boulder Valley Women's Health, which also serves trans folks, and offered up an article in the local paper.

Melissa Marsh, OASOS program coordinator ... said the services offered beyond hormone therapy at Women's Health are particularly helpful because reproductive health issues can be some of the most difficult to address for transgender people.

"If they're going in for gynecological services, they're going to have to talk about the fact that they identify as male and they need a Pap smear. That's so awkward," Marsh said. "I can't even tell you how much joy the fact that they offer so many services brings me."

So there are providers out there who are clued-in. (I'm kind of surprised they're so thin-on-the-ground in Boulder.)

Further to 282 ::: Stefan Jones @282: There's a link from there: "Farewell..." It reads:

"Frederik Pohl
Nov. 26, 1919—Sept. 2, 2013

We’re saddened to tell his friends and readers that Fred went to the hospital in respiratory distress this morning and died this afternoon.

Please stay tuned. We’re teary and shell-shocked right now, but we’ll have more news soon. And Fred left a thick file of things he wanted to tell you, so we’ll likely keep posting for a while."

So it looks like there will be a few more posts yet.

duckbunny: Seconding the recommendation to see someone who is comfortable with trans* patients and gender dysphoria. There are medical professionals out there who fit the bill, it can just be hard to find them. You can also interview doctors before you let them do any sort of exam - a good doctor should be willing to sit down with you, if briefly, to make sure that you and they are a good fit. Good luck with your search.

Mark Liberman of the Language Log posts an extensive quote about the futility of teaching composition style.

It neatly sums up for me something I have mused about for a long time: that all the "writing advice" blogs on the Internet are teaching you to hate writing.

k8, 290: Interviewing doctors is a good idea, but most US insurance won't pay for the visit if you don't have a specific thing you're going in for. Probably most people have some niggling little thing they can claim--mine is asthma maintenance.

Open-threadiness and pre-emptive gnome-feeding here; this is my famous casserole recipe. It is what I mainly live on at the moment, since I am not a mongoose of means, but there are much, much worse things one could be living on. I thought I'd share it.

You will need the following:
Some chickpeas. The quantity is fungible; I use enough to cover the bottom of a large saucepan before they're soaked. If you find you have too many, you can always turn the rest into hummus.
Some onions. The canon is two large ones, but adjust according to the size of your onions. I had to use four today.
Some mushrooms. Chestnut or portabella mushrooms are ideal (we're going for umami here), but white ones will do. You'll want about six or seven large ones, or equivalent.
Some carrots. I buy mine in 750g bags and use the whole bag. That's a little over a pound and a half, for Americans.
Some celery. One regular head, two if they're small.
Some parsnips. Like the onions, either two large or adjust for size.
Some flat-leaf parsley. (I use a lot; it really does give it zing. You can buy it here in 100g packets, and, yes, I do use the whole lot.)
Some oil suitable for frying.
Some cumin and coriander. These are important; do not be tempted to omit them. You don't taste them in the finished article, but I guarantee you will know if they are not there.
Some stock cubes, of your choice.
Some tomato purée.
Some nut butter (I use cashew; peanut butter would also work, but avoid sweetened varieties).
Some Marmite or other yeast extract.
Some rosemary (optional).
Some black pepper.
Some salt.
A really big saucepan suitable for frying, with lid; a knife and chopping board; a wooden spoon; and, unless you're feeding the multitude, a large container in which you can store it in the fridge.

---

Soak the chickpeas in water overnight. In the morning, drain, rinse, put in clean salted water, bring to the boil and simmer for 1 hour. Drain and set aside.

Peel and chop the onions. Go and do something else for a few minutes until your eyes stop watering. Wipe the mushrooms, chop those too, and add them to the onions. Heat some oil in the large pan and fry everything until it is soft, stirring occasionally. While you are doing this, start preparing the carrots; top and tail them, then slice into rounds.

When the onions and mushrooms are soft, add ground cumin and coriander to the pot and fry for about half a minute. If you use pre-ground spices, I recommend two heaped teaspoonfuls of each; if you grind them yourself, they'll be fresher and you shouldn't need so much. Then add 1 litre (about 2 pints) of cold water and stir. By the time the water is boiling, you should have finished preparing the carrots, so throw them in.

This is a good point to add the other flavourings. Exact quantities will depend at least partly on how salty everything is (and I still end up adding salt, because I have low blood pressure and therefore need more than most people in order not to feel randomly faint); as a guide, I use two stock cubes, about a tablespoonful of tomato purée, a heavily heaped teaspoonful each of the Marmite and cashew nut butter, and a good shake of rosemary (maybe 2-3 teaspoonfuls). If you have difficulty getting yeast extract, you're basically looking for something quite salty with a "dark" savoury taste, so you could use soy sauce or miso, or a combination of the two. If you're not vegetarian, anchovy paste would also be a reasonable substitute.

While everything's simmering, chop the celery. Add it to the pan, bring it to the boil again, put the lid on and simmer it some more. Now chop the parsnips; I chop them into rounds and then further chop the larger pieces, so that there aren't huge awkward chunks which can be a nuisance in a modestly sized bowl. Put those into the pan, give it a bit of a stir, bring back to the boil, replace the lid, simmer again. At this point you might want to go and sit down for a few minutes and check your e-mail or whatever.

Now chop the parsley. Check the pan every now and again to see if everything is cooked. When it is, add the parsley, the chickpeas, and maybe about a teaspoonful or two of ground black pepper, according to taste. (I used to use peppercorns, but it is the absolute devil to fish them all out again afterwards and life is too short.) Cook for just long enough to wilt the parsley.

Eat and enjoy. This recipe makes enough to provide about 9-10 main-meal-sized portions for one mongoose of moderate appetite; since most other people eat more than I do, I'll go with "serves 8".

#291 : Marek

Based on that post Richard Lanham's Style: An Anti-Textbook seems to be one long strawman fallacy.

Current car: Toyota Matrix, silver. I was buying used; the choice was between that and a black one. I don't know what-all colors are available in new Matrixes (Matrices?). I know how unpleasant a black car can be on a sunny day, and iirc their were some other differences in features in the silver car's favor.

I name my cars. The Matrix is Silver. Why, yes, I do sometimes exclaim "Hiyo Silver, away!" at the beginning of a trip.

The previous car, for 15 years, was a Cayman Green Ford Escort wagon. In their heyday Escort wagons were among the most common cars around. I once walked out of Krogers and asked myself "Which of the 6 Cayman Green Escort wagons that I see is mine?"

So, yeah, not really looking for distinctive cars when I shop. Looking for sturdy little workhorses that will haul a load to Pennsic and run economically for a long time.

Open threadiness:

This post on the F-secure blog describes the kind of malware tools routinely sold to police and governments. Obviously, there is nothing at all that prevents these same tools being used by private criminals, nor is there anything inherent in the tools to prevent their use for illegal or evil purposes. The surveillance tools can't know whether they're being used to gather information to prosecute a murderer or to pre-emptively arrest the ringleaders of a political protest.

When I was little, my mother had a bright yellow car; it was simple to locate in any parking lot. Then she got a Ford Taurus station wagon in silver, I think the first year Tauruses were available. I got very, very good at remembering where we had parked, because if I didn't we could wander all over trying to find the one silver Taurus among the masses.

Currently I have one black car and one white one, the white one specifically because The Boy DID NOT WANT another dark car with a dark interior, and we were at the dealership one day for other reasons and they had a white car, with a standard transmission, from the previous model year, during a sale. It was kind of meant to be.

Mycroft W @87: Never tried it on a tablet, but ADOM's a pretty basic application--I don't see why it shouldn't run if the terminal software is at all decent. I killed a bunch of (mostly) Trollish Elementalists over the weekend, just for the heck of it.

As for Nethack, I think my problem with it is that it builds a complex world by shoehorning special cases together (as opposed to what Dwarf Fortress does, which is create a complex world with internal consistency that adds up to interesting emergent behaviour). It just doesn't feel right, and I don't go back to it or Slash'Em nearly as often as I do other roguelikes. I'd rather play Omega, even, with its bizarre-and-flaky inventory and combat systems.

@car subthread: There are times when I really miss my old mint-green Taurus (the one we could never get matching touch-up paint for--the similar colour from GM was visibly too dark, at least to me). I think they only offered that colour for a year or two before it vanished from the market, and it was easy to spot in a parking lot. My current car is beige, alas, but then I didn't pay for it (it was my late grandmother's).

@surgery subthread: I identify as agender, but happen to have female plumbing, and some of this is hitting rather close to home. :(

For the first time, likely because I don't post very often. I have some dried apricots . . . ?

Or, more accurately, my first gnoming notice was gnomed.

We currently have one beige Toyota Corolla (bought new, can't remember why we picked that color), one white Camry hybrid (only Camry hybrid available at the time we bought it), and one white Corolla (bought used, that was what was available).

If I were buying a car now and could pick my color, I'd go for something bright. Yellow or red, by preference, although a bright blue (not navy) would be okay too. But in the negotiation process with the rest of the household, I suspect I will never get one like this.

Cascade of error messages while composing a post.

O beloved gnomes, should those fragments slam at you, please gently delete them. I have SPORTea by the gallon(s).

duckbunny @266: Menstruating is rough

I can only image the brain-splodey my mother would have suffered, had she seen the Snoopy-dance I did after my hysterectomy.

Bruce E. Durocher II @267 & 269 One wonders if the CEO's video game designer wannabe offspring talked hir into loaning out the company's PR department.... The production quality is about on a par with some of the lamer fan productions I've seen.

Dave Harmon @270: 11 Things Guys Take For Granted

Well, 10 of those are things I summarily opted out of, and the eleventh is one I'm seriously considering. But the price of that is that the only men outside of fandom who show any interest in me at all tend to be drunken vagrants.

Angiportus @281: neutrois

Not a coinage I'd encountered before, but I like it. I presume it would be pronounced "new-traw?"

made sure that Jupiter was in its proper place

Which begs the question: what would you have done if it wasn't? (Sorry, sorry! I'm in a very...um...state, this morning.)

All: I can't tell you all how grateful I am for the support and reinforcement you've given me wrt my mammotic adventures. And, interestingly, this discussion, and in particular, the contributions of the non-standardly-gendered folks, have...well, potentially opened a door to me I hadn't even realized was there.

One of the reasons I tend to be shaped like a potato is that, whenever I think about Getting In Shape, the Shape in question rather...mismatches the options I have available to me. I often see someone on TV who tickles the, "Wow, I'd love to have a physique like that!" Invariably, that person is a man. (The latest example is T. J. Thyne* on Bones.)

And then the thought process goes like this: "Oh, yeah, I'd love to be built like that—oh," when I remember the two litre-sized bags of suet that hang off my chest. Which means it that can't happen, no matter how much work I put into getting in shape. Net result: I'm shaped like a potato.

Last night, though, thinking through this whole weekened, and the conversation on this thread...maybe I can. Or at least, get close enough to have a shot.

Wow. Thank you, guys.

—

* And, just to be clear, I did five years of Tae Kwon Do, and there was a guy in my dojo who was built very much like that, so I do have a concept of how much work goes into building a frame like that. When one is young. Ghu knows what it would take to get there at my age.

Powerful story here (with permission):
The Eggs of 113.

The first (immediate) resonances are with Ursula K. LeGuin's The Diary of the Rose, as the two are almost bookends. One of the patients' visualizations of a guy as a "hairy pancake" has been floating up in odd moments for decades. There's a third short story whose title/writer I can't call up, about a fellow whose belief structure manifests poisonous snakes. The professional he consults (who wrote the story) doesn't believe him until he brings in a dead one. No known morphology, no differentiated internal organs, and teeth like a dog's. It may be the one ur fvgf ba va uvf ongu that does him in. He's found collapsed over his sink, frantically having groped for a bandaid, which might have saved him as he believed them a universal panacea.

I have been intensely visual since earliest consciousness (high functioning Aspie blah blah blah) and have cherished the notion of a process/device that would make what's vividly in my head accessible to whoever's around at my (and only my) wish. Short term, long term, permanent, ephemeral, don't care (that would change immediately were someone to manage one). Sadly, were I able to do it, the safest thing would be to never, ever show it off due to its immediate and enthusiastic adoption by the Thought Police. The worst I can think of is if the method only partly worked, like synthetically-generated hormones almost like the real thing. This brings us back to Mongoose's & LeGuin's Pavlovian devices.

I've been doing passively-assisted deep breathing exercises in 20-30 minute segments for about five years that I realized were indistinguishable from meditation. Since The Eggs of 113, it's not uncommon to feel the gentle weight of a rosewood egg in my palm (interesting which side it shows up in). I know exactly what the carving looks and feels like (a barrette I had in the 70's), both a tactile and visual delight. Recently it's looked solid, though deeply incised, but the weight is somewhat lighter.

Hofstedter's GEB's cover in my edition had a carved cube on its cover (or artistic rendering thereof) with light projected through each way to give G, E, B. If my egg has some openings through to a hollow center, a light shining through might produce lovely patterns - different Islamic arabesques? What if I can direct my consciousness into the center and let the incoming light show tickle over my face? Or the backs of my hands as I turn them to get the visual as well?

Can anyone point me to the Yikes! Snakes! story?

Erik @ 47.
Typing in the source code helped considerably less than you would think. It did give me the vocabulary, and the names of the rooms. But it wasn't quite clear at first how actions happened.

That it was all in FORTRAN didn't help. And that I was just learning how to program.

I was idly looking at a car brochure a couple of years ago (we were shopping for a used car and were in a dealership), and noted that the model (a fairly high-end vehicle) came in 8 colors (shades, rather) - if I recall correctly, they were distributed something like: black, charcoal, thundercloud grey, faintly blue-tinted metallic grey, silver, champagne beige (faintly golden metallic), platinum, and white.

I prefer colors, myself - our two current vehicles are shades of red (one is a nice plummy red, the other is best described as dark cherry), and we have previously owned a red car, a silvery green car, and two blue cars. Plus one in champagne beige, and a white one that my husband owned before we met.

On a completely different note, I have seen various medical practices use different things to cover stirrups, but my favorites were the oven mitts used by one clinic. It seemed very homey.

HLN: Area woman has just made her second batch of tzatziki, and thinks she has the proportions right this time. The first batch wasn't bad, but had too high a yogurt:cucumber ratio and was a little too garlicky (yes, there is such a thing).

Having learned from the first batch, area woman added the yogurt and garlic to the bowl of chopped cucumber slowly, tasting as she went.

Carol Kimball @304: The Eggs of 113.

Wow. ::boggle::

'Minds me of a dream I had when I was in sixth grade. I was wearing a shapeless frock, barefoot, and was in chains. I was being led down a rough stone corridor by a guard in black. At last, I was brought to a heavy oaken door, which was opened. I was led into a warm office, and placed in a big leather chair before a desk, behind which sat some vague "Authority Figure."

"So," Authority Figure asked, kindly. "How is it going?"

I remaind silent, and was eventually taken away.

Long after I'd had that dream, I pondered that, in the emotion-sense of the dream, maybe Authority Figure really was kind, and wanted to help me. But I was to scared even to say anything.

Xopher Halftongue #179: My (white female) physician does my prostate examinations. Are you saying that I should dump her for a male physician?

Before we cut the cord there is some time
to know the places where all choice is plain
and there is neither complete loss or gain
nor any hiding underneath the grime
for anyone. The world is in its prime
we find it easy to remove each stain
nor is it hard to to show or to explain
the value given to each song or chime.
While each one waits to hear just how the day
will be reported by the wisest folk
we will not rush unseeing to remark
upon the rules that bound all work or play
nor those we take to be some kind of joke
that leave us gasping at return of dark.

Fragano: The discussion has moved on considerably from that question.

Jacque #311: Fair enough.

@305 and earlier, a day or more late.

Andrew Plotkin is right that Original Zork took Colossal Cave's tropes and turned a few up to 11, and this was especially true of direction mapping and on purpose. When half of Original Zork became Zork 1 we turned the "North, North" nastiness down quite a bit, although we left a lot in the Maze.

We also tried to avoid "Oops you're dead!" traps and puzzles you had to be able to see the future to solve. We were still working on that when they turned the lights off...

HLN: Local man has electrician install power to the garage he (with good help from his father) built this year. Man notes that having space for storage and work has greatly improved the supply of round tuit, so maybe the entropy which has been affecting his vehicles can be reversed.

(Oh, and car colours: Black 1982 BMW, black 1998 Jaguar. I don't do new cars.)

Roy G Ovrebo -- or new colors? ("They can have any color they like, so long as it's black.")

I've heard that, when the Dalek going around the worldcon crossed paths with writer Seanan McGuire on her scooter, it got out of her way.

Dave Lebling writes .... and I'll just pause here a moment to think "How cool is that?"

A: Very much like the cool of having my favorite fiction authors pop up to comment on their works.

Thanks for stopping in to comment. I'm a huge fan, and I've introduced another generation to the joy - after we finished playing Zork I-III together, my son now wants to write his own text adventures. (It may be a while yet before he has the stick-to-it-iveness.)

@Roy: If you don't mind . . . what did it cost to wire your garage?

I have an electrical panel in my garage (doubles as the ground floor of the house) with a single pair of outlets adjacent.

I'd love to have more outlets ("points" for those across the pond) to plug tools into. I have no idea what this sort of thing runs.

(You could write your answer in text and ROT13 it...)

The other night I found myself hankering for take-out Chinese food. I was kind of in a hurry. I passed on the good-by-pricey and long-wait-time place and . . . sigh . . . went to the Safeway Deli counter.

You know the joke about fast food that has an ingredient that makes you forget how bad it was by the next time you are in the mood for it?

Well that sure as fricking hell won't happen again with Safeway Deli Chinese food. My revulsion over that garbage is now ingrained in every cell of my body.

I just need to decide whether to throw the leftovers away or give them to the dog.

Stefan Jones @318:

I doubt that the price I got in Norwegian Kroner will have any relevance at all to what it'll cost you...

Stefan Jones @319: Safeway pseudo-Chinese? I might recommend a flamethrower. (/snark)

Stefan @ #319:

Don't do it! The RSPCA will have your hide as a wall hanging.

(Not to mention your figgin placed upon a spike.)

@Roy: Hah! Quite true.

I suppose it wouldn't cost me anything to have an estimate done, but I picture myself coughing and blanching and leaning against the wall in shock as the electrician rattles off figures, embarrassing the both of us.

Another SF hazard becomes reality:
The developers of a new building in the City of London have paid almost £1,000 to a businessman whose car partly melted in sunlight reflecting off the building's windows..

The building is also scorching paint on the building across the way. I seem to remember a Larry Niven story....

Fragano @ 310: elegant! I always appreciate a well-turned Petrarchan sonnet.

At the risk of going from the sublime to the ridiculous, CN (the friend whose blog I linked a little while ago in connection with gender issues) repeatedly gets hits via search engines from people who are searching for... something entirely unconnected. So I've just written this for them. Some words are ROT-13'd to avoid alarming the gnomes.

I keep a small blog, the political kind,
and update it whenever there's stuff on my mind;
I link it on Facebook and some people read,
and they may even comment - a pleasure indeed.
But some search through Google and show on the log,
and I'm sure they weren't looking for my kind of blog,
for, though K-engrq sites are abundant and free,
yet the mountains of cbea are elsewhere, don't you see.

They're all very welcome; it's not that I'd gripe,
but I just can't believe half the search terms they type.
I'm sure when they visit they all throw a fit,
for my blog isn't relevant, even a bit,
to their interests erotic (quite specialised, too);
it's not that I mind, but it's not what I do.
Why, you've only to read it; I'm sure you'll agree
that the mountains of cbea are elsewhere, don't you see.

Perhaps, now they're here, they may settle awhile
and read some of my thoughts, if they're keen on my style;
and maybe they'll learn of the things I find strange,
the good that I hope for, the bad that needs change.
They may even roll it around in their head
and blog for themselves when they've gone where it's led,
but somehow I doubt it - for mostly they'll flee,
since the mountains of cbea are elsewhere, don't you see.

O gnomes, there's plenty of that casserole.

(Ironic that I ROT-13'd a couple of words to avoid exactly this!)

Dave Harmon @324: From the article: "The developers say they are trying to rectify the problem which they are blaming on the position of the sun at certain times of day."

When your "problem" is a natural phenomenon that occurs regularly with short intervals and predates your species and the whole planet it evolved on, you really shouldn't try to shift the blame.

Roy G. Ovrebo #326: Indeed. To quote one of our hosts, "the sky isn't evil".

Dave Harmon @ 324: I recall a Clarke story involving na hacbchyne fbppre ers naq n fgnqvhz shyy bs crbcyr jub'q oebhtug zveebef gb fuvar yvtug vagb uvf rlrf.

Clifton @317: Not sure how old your son is, but there are several languages designed for writing "Interactive Fiction." The best known is Inform (see http://www.inform7.com). It has been used by authors as young as 8th grade.

I wrote a short text adventure in Inform: "Radley Manor."

If you have the Inform package, you can download the file and play it:

Source file:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.inf

Compiled file:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5

You play a kid who has batted the gang's prize baseball through the window of an abandoned (?) house.

#324: There is a building on the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores, #600 Oracle Parkway, with a huge concave wall or mirrored windows.

The light is concentrated on a smear, rather than a point, of the parking lot. I can't say if it gets warm in there, but when the sun's angle is right it DOES get very bright. A sort of "epiphany" effect.

Buildings that need to be redesigned after construction:
Disney Hall, the Frank Gehry-designed concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, had to have part of its skin sandblasted: the people living nearby got tired of being blinded by reflected light every day. (I'll let all y'all look it up to see what kind of problems it might cause.)

I recall a not-very-good eatery in which each booth had a light fixed overhead, in a parabolic surround which focused in on a spot on the table, which had become permanently heat-damaged by the time I got there. On the plus side, those who drink coffee could keep it warm by setting it there.
Jacque 303: neutrois, I am not sure how it's pronounced, I read it somewhere. Along with "Left Hand Path", "thing-oriented" and "neuro-atypical", it was...needed. I think "metagender" is a synonym but not 100% sure.
If Jupiter had come up missing I might have told myself the sky was cloudier than it looked and crawled back in bed. Then again, I might have panicked. I've been rediscovering it ever since 1975.

Xopher's Comment over on the Song of the South thread, regarding the Derry Air being the oldest tune in western Europe raised a faint memory with me of ESP, telekinesis, time travel and the flooding of the Mediterranean basin.

If these threads of recollection are correct, then it must be somewhere in Julian May's Many Coloured Land. There may have been some issue with the time signature being incorrect in the modern version?

It was twenty or thirty years ago that I read this trilogy and the books have long gone, but the collective memory of the Fluorosphere is strong! Can anyone confirm/deny my fading recollection?

Braxis #334: There may have been some issue with the time signature being incorrect in the modern version?

For this part, you have probably folded in the history of Greensleeves. IIRC, that was originally an Irish drinking song, and a mistaken time signature (from around the period where they were inventing time signatures) turned it into the haunting melody we know.

TMCL did strongly indicate that the prehistoric "situation"¹ was the origin of the "fairy" mythos., and I faintly remember them recognizing one of the "exotics'" songs. There was a bit of incredulity about the prehistoric stuff being remembered, from the characters themselves... but unbenownst to them there was in fact at least one being who would live through the intervening period.

¹ I originally wrote "mileu", then I remembered that the society of the future end of the timegate was called the Mileu.

Braxis #334: PS: Pretty big for a trilogy -- there were 5 Pleistocene books, and 5 more for the Mileu itself.

Off on a tangent, I remember a panel where Katherine Kurtz claimed blame for the modern proliferation of trilogies, having set the example early with her Deryni series.

Dave H., #115: Wow, that's a pretty and unusual moth! And a good photo of it as well.

However, I was distracted by the ad next to the picture, which was a weight-loss spam ad with the text "Lose 26 pounds in 3.5 weeks" -- and an animated gif showing a cartoon woman in a bikini who appears to be fluctuating, not over 26 pounds' difference, but more like 126 pounds. (26 pounds is something on the order of 1 women's clothing size.) No wonder people have no concept of what any given weight actually LOOKS like. [/grumble]

Cheryl, #118: Grrr... and unfortunately, all too typical. I was looking for the Oatmeal cartoon about that to link it, but I can't find it.

Xopher, #179: FTR, the best and most empathetic gynecologist I've ever encountered was male. He was the only one, male or female, who ever verbally acknowledged that a pelvic exam is uncomfortable and apologized for the necessity.

and @194, that's a perfectly cromulent reason for personal reluctance.

Em, #249: Here's the first source that came up on Googling "badge ribbons custom". There was a whole page of others, if this one doesn't suit.

Mongoose, #252: Many people in the southern US choose white or silver cars because of the heat-reflective aspect*, since it's so hot here for much of the year. Also, people who are heavily invested in a sports team (college or pro) will sometimes go so far as to get a car in one of their team's colors -- maroon is popular around Houston because of all the Texas A&M grads, which means that there are also a lot of maroon cars on the used-car market. And copper/dark orange is more common in TX than in many places because of UT. (Oddly, this doesn't hold up for the brighter orange of the other UT, the one in Knoxville.)

Anne S., #295: A friend of ours also has a silver Toyota Matrix. She named hers "Argent Smith". I haven't had a car that I could choose the color of for well over 20 years -- and while I used to name all my vehicles, somehow I fell out of the habit a while back.

* Also, I refuse to consider cars with vinyl seats any more (cloth only), and I insist on having a stretchy velour cover on the steering wheel, so that I can actually touch it when I first get into the car.

John A., #328: But that was a Harry Purvis yarn, and thereby falls into the category of "tall tales".

Note: I am still playing catch-up from having been entirely offline during Worldcon.

re 337: Do they even make vinyl seats these days? I remember that back in college the car I had, a Fiat 131, had black vinyl seats which utterly delaminated. So my father The Omnicompetent One made new seat covers out of the acres of leftover fabric from the satellite test chambers, said fabric being black velvet. It was wonderfully comfortable, if not exactly in the highest of taste.

Lee #338: Sorry about that, it's a freebie account on an image-hosting site. That sort of thing is why I use AdBlock Plus myself. Alas, I haven't found an equivalent for my iThings. Looking up the moth, I found that the caterpillars are also pretty spectacular (orange with white spots) and eat grape leaves. The latter point suggests that the moth probably wandered in from one of the vineyards outside of town.

Re: car colors, orange cars aren't too common here in C-ville either, despite orange (with blue) being the VSU color.

Lee #338: PS: What's That Bug published my submission. They found my letter "amusing", but looking at other posts, they seem to be much amused lately.

115/341
We had one similar show up on the front porch in Texas - on the red brick wall. We identified ours as a Vine Sphinx (I think it's the same kind as yours), and opted not to tell the people with the vineyard next door.

Thanks for the links for badge ribbons! I was so focussed on thinking that there must be an Official Name for them that I didn't bother googling the obvious. My next character points will be put into the Common Sense skill tree.

There'll be three ways to get 'em in London, all three very easy (though one will require satisfying a pre-existing condition; the other two are much simpler.) I've never had ribbons to hand out before, so I'm kind of pumped about the idea. I hope I get to meet some of you in person to hand them out.

C. Wingate @ 340: That depends. Young Elvis or Old Elvis?

Fragano 309: By no means.

Dave Lebling: Indeed, I was using Inform 7 to help him with a first try (i.e. I was writing most of the code) on his first effort at age 9, a couple years ago, before he lost interest in that project.

I recently worked through most of the Inform 7 manual and many of the examples to get a grip on it. It's very interesting from a software language design perspective, not just IF.

Anyway I think his biggest difficulties are mostly the difficulties bright kids often have with persistence, and especially with his reach exceeding his grasp. (He could probably successfully write something simple, but doesn't want to do something simple.)

Some asshole named John Ringo, who is apparently a writer of some sort, is going around claiming that the only reason Scalzi won the Hugo for Redshirts is that he's been sucking up to the "hasbeen liberal neurotics" who control the Hugo voting.

His phrasing really makes it sound like he's one of the RSHD's lickspittles. Another author to cross off my list, not because his work is necessarily garbage based on that, but because I don't have so much money that I want any of it going to loser dipshits like him.

Probably for cussin'.

@340 C. Wingate
So my father The Omnicompetent One made new seat covers out of the acres of leftover fabric from the satellite test chambers, said fabric being black velvet.

I had forgotten until I saw your post: I once made seat covers for a vintage Mercedes Benz, out of the owner's saved up old denim jeans. I designed them so that the pockets were on the interior sides, so that he could use them to keep his cigarettes and other doodads handy.

Must be 20 years ago now. They turned out kind of cool looking, if I do say so myself.

Sorry. For naming the car make and model, maybe? I have chicken soup...

Both my cars have been pavement-colored, but subtly different pavements. I'd express a preference for brighter colors-- I'm supposed to like them best, after all-- but honestly, the cars I have are the cars I like. Well, consecutively, not concurrently have. Milady Buick was a nice sandy-wet-sidewalk color and Young Miss Dent is a champagne-tinged silver.

Once the car's mine, I grow very attached to it as it is; the name is part of that, but not the necessary part. I couldn't figure out Young Miss Dent's name for weeks, including a day-long trip to Alpha and another back.

My most recent car is Very Dark Blue, largely because the other option was the color I can only think of as Ticket-Me Red.

Loathesome monster Ariel Castro is dead. Killed by another inmate? Suicide? Too soon to tell.

I am wondering what it would take for a society to prevent people like him from turning out like they do. Would it be worse than having people like him around? I suppose the answer depends on how much we know about the human mind in general and personality development in particular.

Re: automobile colors

At the risk of outing myself as a Very Shallow Person, the reason why I currently own an SUV rather than a Prius is paint color. You see, when I decided that my 50th birthday was an appropriate time to replace my 200K-mileage station wagon with something new, I set my heart on a Prius (being a self-respecting Bay Area Liberal Nutcase) but with one reservation: it had to be a Non-Boring Color. Alas, by my interpretation, the only non-boring color that Priuses come in is red. And I was car-shopping during the period of minimum Prius availability (due to excess demand). Evidently it was not possible to obtain a new red Prius anywhere in California or reasonably contiguous states for love or money.

With my heart thus broken, I decided to re-think my entire car buying strategy and start from scratch. At which point, common sense took over and I asked myself "What kind of idiot are you that you think you can fit an entire luxury medieval campsite into a hatchback sedan?" So I tossed my two most awkward need-to-pack items into the back of the station wagon (the 5-octave folk harp and the 6-ft long 15th century bench) and drove to the Honda dealership to ask if I could test-pack an assortment of models.

The Element was the only vehicle either of my awkward items could fit in easily. And among the color options were several Non-Boring Colors. They almost had me settling for Tangerine, but I told the salesman to pretend very very hard that if he couldn't get me kiwi-green that I'd walk out without buying anything at all.

In retrospect, I would not have been happy with a Prius -- even now that I have an actual Serious Commute on those days when I have to drive. I love my Large Box On Wheels ... and I'm so glad I didn't settle for a gray-scale car.

I plan to be at the Worldcon next year.

May I just remind folken than membership rates will increase at the end of September.

Maybe there should be a Making Light badge ribbon. I wonder if there are other blogs with a strong enough sense of community to make the idea useful.

@348: Cue the chorus of "Oh no, John Ringo, no." In eight-part harmony.

Loncon: we live about 60 mins by public transport (suburban train then Docklands Light Railway for those who are interested) from the ExCel. I really really ought to get to this.

Think the last one I got to was Baltimore in 1998 (on my way to a wildlife disease conference in Wisconsin). I turned up in Baltimore without having booked any accommodation, which was unwise, but just after the Help/Info desk person had finished shaking her head and telling me I'd be "very lucky" to find anything, a woman wandered up and said to her that they had one spare place (half a double bed) in a suite the costumers had booked and could she put up an ad about it - timing!

Right, that's on my year planner before I book myself for any ultras on that weekend.

Dave #337 If the late, great Douglas Adams can spread his trilogy over five parts, I'm more than willing to allow lesser authors to do the same .

The Deryni! Another great read from my teenage years. I wonder if they would be worth revisiting now?

Xopher@348

This John Ringo?

Xopher @ 348... So *that* is who David Gerrold meant in his FaceBook comment about authors who piss on another writer's Hugo.

Tracked if down. The time signature memory comes from the author's introduction to a later edition of the Many Coloured Land:

The problem of the atypical meter is ingeniously attacked by Gilchrist, who suggests that Miss Ross might have erroneously transcribed the tune in common (4/4) time rather than the 3/4 or 6/8 rhythm of the majority of old Gaelic songs. If the rhythm is thus changed, and certain prolonged notes shortened, one does indeed get a typical Irish ditty of rather appalling banality. Gilchrist claims to see affinities between the transmogrification and two other songs, 'The Collen Rue' and 'An Beanasal Og'.

Being a musical ignoramus, this means little to me, but it would be interesting to hear the re-timed version and judge it's 'appalling banality' for myself.

I really want to go to LonCon. But I need a job in order to do so. (Well, I need a job anyway, but I've had no success so far trying to find one, what with the economy here being in such a shocking pig's ear and all that.)

Does anyone here know how I might get into ghost-writing? I think people might quite like to read my work as long as it had the name of someone important on it.

Not the hero's threshold, not the headlong quest,
Not the endless journeying to sail into the West;
Instead, the sleepless vigils to keep the peace at night,
To watch upon a mountaintop for beacons set alight--
This too is courage, the patient strength of stone
Guarding Pendragon's sword for all those years alone.

Xopher @348, and here I was thinking that the whole novel slate this year was excellent and award-worthy. Silly me.

I did end up voting for Redshirts, but (no fault of Scalzi's!) it wasn't an easy choice; Throne of the Crescent Moon did wonderful worldbuilding from an unfamiliar cultural perspective; 2312 was a vast sweeping epic done right, and who doesn't like a Bujold romp with biting social commentary just hidden beneath the surface? Heck, I don't normally like horror, but I got sucked into the "Newsfeed" trilogy, too!

I guess that makes me a hasbeen liberal neurotic, huh?

Mongoose #325: Thanks. That's a nice little piece itself.

Xopher #348: As someone who didn't vote for Redshirts, an excellent novel among excellent novels. All I can say is that John Ringo really has a hard time walking with his head up his arsehole.

Xopher @348--For someone who is fairly new as a writer on the SFF scene, Scalzi does very well indeed*. He's also a dig-in-and-get-involved sort, and not many people as new to the field would be likely to not only run for but be elected president of SFWA not just once but twice in a row. He has moved into the place and appears to fit in as if he'd been around for a long time. He's also not afraid to take stands on issues when it might be easier to just STFU.

You also have to be careful about taking him on in a fight; when it comes to making a fool of an opponent, his jujitsu is incomparable.

One can easliy see how others might find this aggravating. (Especially if one's own work tends to run on in a specific niche that might not produce such wide-spread acclaim.) I shouldn't wonder if there are other writers who've been around a while who find themselves watching the Scalzi Phenomenon and gritting their teeth a bit when they smile, but most of them have enough sense to, if not get over themselves, at least keep the soul-destroying envy away frm the bright lights of the intertubes.

*Not an accident. He may be fairly new as a writer in the SFF field, but he has a large amount of professional experience as a writer, including the bits about carefully studying what his client wants and delivering good stuff in a timely manner. He is therefore hitting a lot of readers in the squids, as Elizabeth Bear might say, and when you hit a lot of people in the squids in the right sort of way, your books do well. He knows how to do Good Commercial Stuff, and how to take being edited, and how to engage with an audience and how to to sell himself; these were part of his skill kit before Agent to the Stars went up on his website.

Xopher @ 348: It's not surprising: he and his ilk were a major reason I gafiated from that bar. They've only gotten worse with time; I suspect hardening of the oughteries ("I oughter had this, I oughter had that.."), with a soupçon of deeply bitter frustrated Mittyness. Not too many people know that Himself, although he completed Ranger training, never deployed in a war zone due to a training accident. Frustration in a wanna-be leads to some mighty bad thoughts.

In comparison, Dave Freer, who saw actual combat, never glorifies war and indeed, focuses on the gritty details that make it very un-glorious.

But at least now I know which Author it was who ran afoul of David Gerrold.

Clifton #347: Has the kid seen this strip?
http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/

There's also a nice one there for the "Fail better" riff.

Ginger @ 369... he completed Ranger training

Meanwhile, when we recently adopted dog Ranger, he had already trained himself with walking on three legs. It's funny watching him lift his missing hind leg to mark his territory, and sometime he tries to do it with his other leg then realizes this isn't going to work. (I guess that makes him better trained at urination than some folks.)

Looking at the slate this year, I thought there was a good chance Redshirts would take it -- because it's a Love Letter to Fandom (which often win), and also a really clever, involved metanovel about how we consume stories, with examples drawn from a Thinly Disguised Fandom that almost all the Hugo voters are familiar with (and many love).

Even for people who didn't vote for it in first place, a lot of people probably put it 2nd or 3rd, and Bob's your uncle. Or Scalzi's.

Dave @356

I made a Making Light badge sticker last year in Chicago, but you had to know what it meant to know what it meant, as it were. I think a ribbon is a fine idea.

Heather Rose Jones @355 - One of the things my car has to be able to carry is my tent frame - pieces of wood up to 12' long. Silver had to have a roof rack added. Fortunately the dealership was willing to throw this in to the deal.

David Harmon @ #370, great advice there.

A similar view of the advanced beginner's difficulty, in the realm of martial arts:

"Commonly, students' ability to see their errors and technical failings
increases faster than their ability to correct them. Then the instructor
faces the problem of discouraged students who believe they are actually
getting worse through training rather than better....An analogy that may
help the intermediate student is that of 'carving a cube into a sphere'.
Training is the process of chopping off corners. Initially, the corners are
lage and easy to see--as is progress. Later, each corner cut off reveals
three new corners, albeit smaller ones. This process is endless, and while
an advanced student may appear to others of lesser experience to be a
perfect sphere, the individual is often painfully aware of the many corners
that still need polishing."
--Elmar T. Schmeisser, "The University Dojo" in
_Martial Arts Teachers on Teaching_, Carol A. Wiley, ed.

Julie L. -- I saw what you did...and it's beautiful.

For Miss T, appropos of absolutely nothing: dreaming hamster.

Elliot Mason@233, that would be the indefatigable Chris Garcia, whose Hugo Hugging antics have become something of a tradition in recent years.

I had a great time at the Con this year, even given that I was completely unable to attend any parties or gatherings aside from the GoL, but I do want to send extra thanks to iamnothing and GlendaP for helping to put that together, it was fun! Oh, and a special note to Chip, whom my wife wanted to thank for being such a pleasant seat neighbor during dinner but who was unavailable when we headed out that evening.

My thoughts on this year's con, and notes from the 16 (!) panels that I annotated this year will be available over on my Google+ page at staggered intervals over the next week. Of special note: I have GIFs from the "Chiropractor Please!" panel that often include Teresa laughing uncontrollably in the background! In the normal course of things I would wait to post those until this weekend, but I think I'll go ahead and get them up tonight, instead.

...I wonder what the odds that this mess of a comment will get gnomed are?

As I expected I would be, honestly.

The "Expanse" novels by James SA Corey - aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (the latter a minion of George RR Martin) will be turned into a TV series

I have just had to buy and install my first Cone of Shame on a pet (beagle), and let me tell you, his discomfiture is comedy gold. I do feel sorry for him -- it's genuinely annoying and he has no idea why it's necessary. But his annoyance and inconvenience is so funny!

Is this the Russian version of "but some of my best friends are gay"?

John Ringo is one of the things that prompted me to write some of the fiction that I did, some of which is available at The Spontoon Islands Website. Essentially, why does a competent soldier have to be a right-wing thug? So I came up with a commando-type in the 1930s (in an alternate and furry universe) who has a whole bunch of different motives. I don't think it's that good a story, but compared to Ringo's Ghost, I reckon he's an OK sort of bear.

There a story of him, set in WW2, called Castle of the Wolf where things get a bit supernatural, complete with spear and magic helmet.

I'm tossing around some other ideas for NaNoWriMo. Maybe a descendant in modern London, getting entangled with a Soviet sleeper cell, and rumours of multi-billion dollar fraud in the building for the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Whatever I do, the soldiers won't be like John Ringo's protagonists. I don't think much of his standard corrupt politicians. To me, they're just boring.

Elliott Mason @380--We have done the Cone of Shame on both Simon, The Best Dog in the World (East Nashville division) and on Black-thumbed Jemmy Casey, Pirate Cat of the Cumberland. Simon was woeful and downcast, except when he was using the cone to sweep cats out of his path, or when the edge of the cone got caught on the steps. The cat, however, was in a state of such perfect feline dignity that the collar almost became invisible. Almost.

Elliott @ 380, fidelio @ 383: surprisingly, I've never had to do that in seventeen years of cat ownership, but I have had to administer first aid to felines more than once, and that can get interesting, to say the least. Klinsmann was one of those topologically impossible cats who could wriggle out of any bandage, even the Vetrap ones which are supposed to stay on anything up to and including a galloping horse. (The manufacturers clearly had not tested their product on the sort of cat who appears to be able to liquefy all its bones temporarily while you're not looking.)

And then there was the late, deeply lamented Minsky, a large tabby of outstanding intelligence and gravitas. He once managed to graze his jaw somehow, and I was at rather a loss regarding how to put a surgical dressing on it until I suddenly got the idea that an old pair of nylon tights could be cut down to make a perfect cat-sized balaclava which would hold the dressing in place. The old boy was not best pleased; normally he was pretty good about anything medical, since he genuinely seemed to understand that he was being helped, but this was a serious affront to his dignity. He kept looking at me as if to say, "Oh, stop making such a fuss - it's just a scratch, and you know I heal quickly!"

I knew that, yes. But, as I gravely explained to him, I didn't want to risk him getting it infected and having to go to the vet, which both of us were perfectly well aware he would be even less pleased about. I think he took the point, in the end.

Why "Cone of shame"? Is it because the animal appears ashamed to human eyes when wearing it?

I'm not finding the etymology in a quick google, but here's a TVTropes link with lots of examples in pop culture (Dug the dog in Up actually calls it that on screen) and a hilarious pic-set of animals wearing them and being funny.

Guthrie @385, it's a reference from the animated movie "Up", in which a dog refers to what vets commonly call an Elizabethan Collar (or E-Collar) as the Cone of Shame.

Elliot Mason @372 - Just so. Scalzi wrote an amusing and easy to read novel that referenced a much beloved TV series that is currently being re-made on the big screen and talked about the fandom associated with it in a way that made people reading it feel smart about it*. You can have a problem with that making it best novel, but we don't need to seek outside the work itself to find an explanation for it winning.

* A novel that makes room for people who think TOS is kind of silly as well as those who love it. Or indeed those who feel both.

Ah, thanks. Now I wonder if my friend who used that term today on facebook has actually see the movie or copied the name from somewhwere else?

The terminology preceded the movie; I know I was familiar with it in the 80s (though some families I went to school with called them 'lampshades' instead of cones of shame).

I'm happy about how the Gathering of Light at LoneStarCon 3 turned out and sorry that not everyone could attend. The food at El Mirador, the restaurant that GlendaP picked, was excellent.

Xopher, #348: Ye ghods. He got points from me for a classy response to OH JOHN RINGO NO a few years back, but this looks rather as if the book in question really does represent his personal attitudes about women. CWAA.

Chris, #353: I believe it was the Corvette which at one point had an available color officially named "Hello Officer Red".

CWAA?
Not found on a Google search, and "not defined yet" according to Urban Dictionary.

Christ What An Asshole, posited to be a legit punchline for any Atlantic cartoon.

Russ 360: Yes. Even worse, also the John Ringo Lee links about in #393.

Cheryl 382: No, it's the Russian version of "but he isn't being executed; he is being shot." Speaking differences that make no difference as if they were important. Just to be explicit, Putin is engaging in Soviet-style doubletalk here, because he wants to be a new Stalin. Or maybe worse.

Julie at #364, that was lovely.

The Spontoon thing is mildly puzzling to me. Not for any normal reason, but because around 1979-80, I put a somewhat sarcastic kaption kontest in my D'APAzine, and one of the entries was "Spontoon!" A couple of years later, I used it as the title of an engraving I did showing a ship coming near an island in the middle of nowhere with nothing on it but a big clock. Then, some time after that, I became aware of the Spontoon shared setting.

Can someone tell me when that started? Was it just a coincidence that someone uttered it at me? It was a coincidence that I used it for an island, at least. Th*nks in advance.

Like Fragano @367, Redshirts was not my first choice, but I agree it is an excellent novel among excellent novels. Also, like last year's winner Among Others, it is a novel where ethics matter. Yes it's fun and it's meta, but that's not all it is about. Some critics seem to have missed the messages about love and kindness. Too bad for them.

iamnothing @ 392... Thanks for arranging the Gathering of Light.

John Ringo's (triggery words ROT13d) znpub crqbcuvyr encvfg character in that series isn't just a Gary Stu...he's a Gary Stud.

#395 Elliott Mason

...legit punchline for any Atlantic cartoon.

I thought it was New Yorker cartoons....

@396 Xopher Halftongue

Well, yes. I was being sarcastic. He's certainly using the classic hypocrite's trope. Gay people in Russia are under siege, and his response to criticism is, "but, Tchaikovsky!" Because enjoying the music of a long dead composer means you're not really calling an open season on 10% of your population.

Stefan Jones @124
I've had one of these frauds CALL me, say he was from Windows, and ask me to give him access. I asked him if his mother knew what he was doing and whether she would be proud of him.

*guffaw* Can I share this? With attribution?

Dave Harmon @152

Thanks. Very awesome.
And as it turns out, just in time to post on Book of Face to someone who quoted Edison's "The most certain way to success is always to try just one more time."

Aaaah! The "Chiropractor Please" panel! I forgot all about it. And when I was checking whatever time it was on, I missed it completely. Sigh.

Oh, well, I had a good con anyway: I got to do Kaffeeklatsch with Steven Brust and John Scalzi and Phil Foglio, and I got to see Brandon Sanderson read (having missed no fewer than three signings by him here in Houston) and Jo Walton; to say nothing of the Gathering of Light.

Also I went to the "Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok" concert by Sassafrass and it absolutely blew me away. If "a capella polyphonic music about Norse myth" sounds even slightly appealing, do yourself a favor and check these guys out. (They have a DVD coming out of their performance at Balticon, and I'm planning to buy it -- and nominate it for Best DP Long!)

Lila @375 -- oddly enough, I went to high school with Elmar Schmeisser. He used to borrow six SF books each morning, and hand them back to me at the end of school having read them. He was an odd duck, and I'm actually not surprised to see he's made a Name for himself in martial arts -- more likely that than in playing the bagpipe, which he also did way back then.

Lin@404: Of course.

Kip W @398

A cursory check of the website suggests the Spontoon Islands setting started as a zine in about 1997. So I doubt that there was any connection with your art. There is an admitted influence in the Talespin Disney cartoon series from 1990: somebody wanted to do furries and seaplanes in a "safe" setting. And there is alse Tales of the Gold Monkey: live action from 1982.

Geographically, the Pacific is very different, but the Japanese are still invading China.

Xopher @ 396: I think he wants to be Tsar. In fact, I think he probably is Tsar, in practice. I've been saying for a while now that the wheel in Russia has come full circle.

Mongoose #409: The problem with people who want to be kings, is that unlike them, actual royal lineages have some constraint from tradition, and even a relationship with their subjects. Respecting that is how the British monarchy got to keep most of their stuff, even as they lost most of their power. The wannabes just want the power, but they don't have the roots to support it.

(Checking in from NYC -- I'll flame later (maybe on the DFT) about the last-minute changes that mean I'll be catching lunch with only one of my HS friend instead of a get-together with the whole group.)

Here are pictures of 2013 Hugo winners.

David @ 410: in western countries, yes. In Russia, not quite so much. (Warning: this is likely to turn into a Wall of Text, because Russian history is one of my Things. I'll try to keep it brief.)

The most fundamental difference between Russia and its western neighbours was that all the other countries developed a strong aristocracy very early. These days one doesn't tend to think of an aristocracy as a particularly good thing, but in fact it was a vital step on the way to democracy, because the aristocracy had enough power to keep checks and balances on the monarch. (You've only got to look at the Magna Carta here in England; that could never have happened in Russia.) And once you've got that idea of a number of people who are less powerful as individuals banding together to keep someone with more power in check, it does (unlike money) eventually trickle down the system. OK, we're still dealing with classism in the UK to this day, but if we had never had it, we'd be like Russia, so I consider it the lesser of two evils.

So why didn't this happen in Russia? The main reason was that members of the aristocracy (such as it was) couldn't amass enough resources to develop a significant power base. Partly this was due to the appanage inheritance system, which meant that land was divided equally among any heirs (at least if they were male), which tended to create smaller and smaller subdivisions of land. Also, there was the sheer geography of Russia, which meant that any group of aristocrats who might easily have banded together in a more compact country had difficulty in doing so, either because they were too far apart or because communications were poor (often both). Not only that, but tsars throughout the ages were given to summarily relocating aristocrats who gave any trouble; even if they were given a holding equivalent to the one they previously possessed, they were now too far away to be a nuisance.

The net effect of all this was that Russia had an aristocracy which owed its position to the grace and favour of the tsar of the moment, rather than being solidly established (and this was, at times, reflected in some pretty demeaning rituals of allegiance which the aristocrats were expected to go through). Ivan the Terrible refused to take Elizabeth I of England seriously as a proper monarch, not because she happened to be a woman, but because even at that point in history she did not have the absolute power that he had, and considered as his right. Whereas in the west there was already a well-established idea that the ruler had a responsibility towards his or her subjects, that was completely absent in Russia. Russia was effectively the tsar's personal fiefdom in which he (or sometimes she) could do whatever they happened to fancy. Granted, some tsars were just basically more pleasant and reasonable people than others and didn't actively mistreat their subjects. But you couldn't guarantee that, and, besides, none of them seem to have had a great deal of interest in actively making their subjects' lives any better.

This, as far as I can see, is the model that Mr Putin is going for, right down to the whole "let's pick on some minority in an attempt to unite everyone else" thing. Tsars did that with depressing regularity; the only thing that changed was which minority was being picked on this time.

Does Putin have substantial popular support? My impression is that he is broadly popular in Russia, but I don't know enough to be entitled to an opinion. In particular, I gather the press is quite controlled there, so who knows what the average Russian thinks? (For that matter, the US press isn't explicitly controlled, yet a foreigner would get a hell of a weird image of what most people believed by watching CNN, and an even weirder one by watching most TV shows.)

Is there good data on Putin's popularity in Russia?

albatross @ 413: I don't know, but I can find out easily enough. My best friend is half Russian and stays in touch with a number of relatives who still live there.

He's actually the reason why I know about Russian history. I once asked him why he was so often inclined to be gloomy, and he replied, "I'm Russian. If you had three thousand years of horrible history behind you, you'd be gloomy too!"

While I suspect his gloom is more of an individual than a national characteristic (after all, he has lived in England all his life), I was sufficiently interested to read up on the history to see if it was as horrible as he said. And, oh, wow, was it ever.

Kip, Antonia, #398, #408: Maybe it all came together spontooneously.

Mongoose @ 412 : Russia was effectively the tsar's personal fiefdom in which he (or sometimes she) could do whatever they happened to fancy.

Thanks for that explanation! It gives some background to the impression I've got from reading a few books about Russian conduct in various wars: The army and navy (and indeed the whole country) were just a plaything for the tsar. Play with it, break it and throw it away; order a Fabergé egg when that gets boring.

Mongoose @ 412 re: Tsars
This was my independently-formed take on them, too.

Didn't King Leopold of Belgium think that the Congo was his private preserve? Presumably he treated his resident Belgians differently?

Leo has always seemed an anomaly (perhaps he felt a kinship with the Borgia Pope?*), but I don't know enough to look deeper. Recommended reading, anyone?

*Oops, I was thinking of Alexander VI via the superb Ex Urbe .

Possibly from fussing too much with links.

My best friend is talking to his contacts, and in the meantime I've had some useful and thoughtful input from a friend who is Serbian rather than Russian, but very well up on the situation in Russia. His name is Stefan Račić, I quote him with his permission, and this is unedited. Obviously, English is not his first language, hence the occasional error.

I'd say fairly popular. First, the average Russian of today is economically much more well off than at any point in the past... errr... century or more? Second, the overall repression was much worse during the communist era so, by Russian standards, he's actually quite moderate and reasonable. Of course, there are always people who want to think outside of the box, improve the situation and challenge the norms and, in Russia, those are not precisely tolerated, but still, it is very important not to judge the people themselves too much, especially if we don't know their history and what they've been through. The situation in Russia is not perfect, many people still have a long way to go 'til they become truely open-minded (for lack of better world), but looking at them as "the others", the enemy, someone as less civilized than we are can only make them feel even more alianated and see us as the opposing side. I have seen to many examples of propaganda trying to make Russians into a modern-day Boogey man and I don't think that is the right way to go.

And, at a slight tangent, a friend has just posted a link showing Mr Putin drawing a cat's bottom. As you do. *blink*

He draws even worse than I do. There's hope for me yet!

Mongoose @ #420

As drawings go, that's something of a cat-ass-trophy.

Moose @ 421: that pun is... purrfection.

Carol Kimball @ 417: Didn't King Leopold of Belgium think that the Congo was his private preserve?

I'm no expert on Congo, but as far as I know, it more or less was.

In defense of that cat drawing, I think if you wanted to leave school children with an amusing recollection of your visit, that was genius. You don't have to draw well to do it, it will appeal to children's love of things that are silly (and potentially a little smart-ass, but not excessively so)(and maybe naughty, without being naughty enough to cause a real uproar), and it makes you look like a fun, not such-a-bad guy.

When we look at Putin's PR, a lot of it seems weird, but I suspect among a lot of Russians, it doesn't--just as Mongoose's friend points out--they're going to have a different angle on him. Compared to the long procession of Soviet leaders--old, gray, often ailing through the 1970s and 1980s, the bare-chested guy on horseback, who is also the guy who does martial arts, looks fit and lovely and modern. The man who examines polar bears and tags tigers is interested in wildlife and nature (maybe not enough to really do much about Russian environmental isses, especially when money is involved, but so what else is new?) and is willing to gets hands-on with things instead of sitting at a desk and reading reports and waiting for flunkies (possibly unreliable) to tell him what's going on.

I think he's looked carefully at the efforts at PR by all the other world leaders (and crowned heads) and tried to pick what would work for him in a Russian context. We aren't the crowd he's playing to, and we don't have the issues about our leadership that the Russians do, either.

Antonia @408 - ahh, Tales of the Gold Monkey. I loved that show (and the crush I developed on the lead - hey, I was 14! - probably had something to do with it, as well). If I watched it now.... well, it was a Bellisario production, he did better than most at the time. (Although Stephen Collins isn't what he used to be, sadly.)

Coming out shortly:
http://www.hammerandanvilbooks.com/#!authors/ciya

All I can say is that it isn't a work of political science.

Ursula Vernon has posted an amazing poem.

Also, my daily lowercase-"w"win: the principal of my kid's new school posted in the email newsletter that they wanted volunteers to organize their school library. Play with BOOKS? That they'll let me ALPHABETIZE? Where can I SIGN UP!?!

So I emailed back. And she's excited! And I'm excited! I may get to fondle a whole school-library's*-worth of books! And organize them!

Still fizzing with happy. I love being useful. And I thought the Fluorosphere might be somewhere that others present would understand my squee fully. :->

*possibly a very small school library. Still!

Antonia T. Tiger @408: Thanks for that! I was hoping somebody both helpful and knowledgeable was lurking nearby.

Angiportus @415: urg

Fragano (426): Woo-hoo! Book!

Elliott (428): Yay!

Open thready:

The Toronto School Board issued new guidelines for the accommodation of transgender students this week. One of the guidelines states that students have the right to use the washroom that "best corresponds to the student’s gender identity, regardless of the student’s sex assigned at birth."

It then goes on to say that "students who wish to use pronouns other than the masculine or the feminine (such as ‘zhe’ and ‘hir’) need to be accommodated equally".

So, my first thought was, more or less, "cool! Go TO!" (which, for a Montrealaise, isn't nothing).

Then Doretta Wilson had to go and be ignorant: "This has gone beyond ridiculous… We are men and women, whether or not we are transgendered," Ms. Wilson said. "We identify somehow with one sex or another; we’re not neutered."

Considering her position (executive director of the provincial education policy think tank Society for Quality Education), one can only hope she tries to educate herself before making such statements again.

I'm afraid this is a very long shot, but can anyone ID an old Making Light post for me by the following description? It concerned a review of a romance novel which featured a protagonist who'd lost his/her memory and the ridiculously silly things the protagonist did. In the comment thread of that review, which was not on Making Light, iirc, the author of said novel showed up herself, and gave a gracious and funny response to the review. I know this is extremely vague, but can anyone help?

Dave Empey (432): The book was Carla Cassidy's Pregnesia. It's been mentioned here at least twice:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014133.html#802261
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011997.html#389067

I only found it because I remembered the author's first name. (And her last, but I wasn't sure enough of that to use it as a search term.)

Dangerous quilt successfully repressed.

found via

Woot! Making Light and Mary Eileen rawk! Many thanks.

#218 ::: Matt Austern @218

Having just lost my Wombat to aggressive prostate cancer after an eight year off-and-on battle, I will pass on his recommendation. Get the PSA test. It's an indicator that might give you more warning than no PSA. Until a better test comes along. The thing to watch out for is the panicky doctor who wants to slice and dice just based on a rise in PSA. A rise in PSA says "get more testing, get a second or even third opinion."

Jacque @226
so I always wind up with my feet perched kinda sideways on the rim.

So I'm not the only one that happens to. I had a couple of [jerks] one-off doctors make it seem like I was warped somehow.

PJ Evans @333
And the cooling bills of nearby buildings went thru the roof.

iamnothing @392
I loved the restaurant. The flavors were not the ones I'm used to, and thus were well received. Thank you to you and GlendaP

Fragano Ledgister @426
Yay

Elliott Mason @427
Thank you! I think it was someone here who led me to Digger. Which resulted in my doing a bit of fan-boy at her table at worldcon. And also buying her two part book, Black Dogs. Awesome writer.

Elliott Mason @428
Oh Yes! I remember the day in high school when I found out I could volunteer at the school library and get credit for it!

Mongoose @412: because Russian history is one of my Things.

One is thus moved to enquire what are some of your other Things?

(Wow, I'm short on sleep. Took me three tries to figure out where "other" should go in that sentence....)

I won't offer the gnomes anything right now, as anything I touch comes with a cold virus or three. *achoo* But when I get my sourdough starter going, I can offer sourdough banana bread.

ah. backtracking showed me that my bug of sneezing and clogged head led me to the foul usage of thx with bang. *sigh*

438
I hesitate to suggest a teaspoon of starter to jumpstart your immune system. (It's a fast way to check its sourness.)

Sorry to have missed you all at the Gathering of Light; we had a good friend visiting from Dallas and spent most of our time with her for the first few days.

On the Hugo nominees, I liked Redshirts, and I think Scalzi did a lot of interesting things with it, but I thought Blackout was a stronger novel. Bujold delivered another good novel, of course, with all the attention to detail that I'd expect from mil-sf (:-) as well as the plot and character development that that sub-genre so often ignores. I haven't yet read the two novels that were in too-inconvenient-for-Kindle versions of PDFs. For novelette, I thought Seanan's In Sea-Salt Tears was the best of them, but it really only works if you've read the rest of the series it's set in, while The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi is a standalone story that's definitely Hugo-worthy (as is Cat Valente's Fade to White.) I think I preferred most of the fan art to most of the pro art; there was a much broader range of subjects and media, while most of the pro art was book covers in the same sub-genre.

Has anybody seen a summary of what happened at the business meetings? I got to the preliminary one where some Objections to Consideration got done, but I didn't get to the later meetings to see the conclusion of the surviving proposals.

Elliott @ 428: yay! That is totally squee-worthy.

Cheryl @ 431: someone urgently needs to give this woman a lesson about gender. She certainly isn't speaking for me when she says "we identify somehow with one sex or the other", for a start (and I'm aware I'm not the only one here who doesn't identify with either). Good on the schools, though - that's encouraging.

John @ 434: I suppose they'll want to be putting shorts on Michelangelo's David next?

Jacque @ 437: I have an unfortunate tendency to try to get into All The Things, all at once, but Things on the same sort of level as Russian history include early music, mathematics and renaissance Italian. I translate poetry, for instance this from Dante's Vita Nova. (And yesterday I had the pleasure of being able to help someone translate a short piece of verse from Romanian; he provided the metre and a bog-literal prose translation, and I worked it up into an appropriate piece of English verse. I love doing that so much. It's kind of like literary killer sudoku.)

AKICIML time: My house is an utter and total ruin inside.

I am not a particularly good housekeeper and I've been living here by myself for long enough to have accumulated a metric buttload of mess, and I don't have it together to turn it upside down all at once.

It's a little better than it was last year (thanks to my wonderful wife, from whom I am separated, giving part of it a thorough makeover*), but it is still very messy and not terribly clean.

I had a New Year's resolution not to live in a pig sty, and I'd like to fulfill it. I'd also like to refinance it, and my understanding is you do better in the assessment with a clean house. So there's that, too.

So: How do you fix a house that's both very full and very messy? How do you even start?

(If possible, I'd like to start with the kitchen, so I can do more cooking, but cleaning the whole place is the goal.)

*Yes, she doesn't live here and she still cleaned it up. It was the best birthday gift ever. I told you she was wonderful.

John A Arkansawyer @443

What worked for me (though it is a work in progress, depending on my energy and time) was to find the linchpin on which everything else rests. In my case, it's the kitchen/dining table (which actually resides in the living room, but oh well).

If I can take everything off the table once a day (putting "everything" where it belongs in the process) and wipe it down, then I can work outward from it. Once I have that routine underway, then I add sweeping the floors to the routine, working outward and picking stuff up around the edges. Each day the edges go further.

I can sweep the floor while my tea is steeping, so that helps. I'm not getting up to sweep the floor--I'm just not sitting down for a few minutes after pouring the hot water.

These routines might not help you, but they might give you ideas.

(Speaking of which, it's time to go engage in said routines.)

The other key for me is not to try to change all your habits at once and not to kick myself if the routines get disrupted, but just start over again.

Seeing PNH's particle titled Kim Stanley Robinson on Gene Wolfe, I had the awful feeling that Gene Wolfe had died, and KSR written an obituary.

Phew!

Blackout's problem, when it comes to winning a Hugo, is that it has zombies in it, and is also the third book in a series. Fairly large proportions of the Hugo votership will look at it, go "Horror, ick," and not try (even those who pride themselves on trying to get through everything in the packet). I adored it, personally, on about eighteen different levels, and it's really NOT a 'zombie novel,' it's a post-apocalyptic political thriller with zombies in, but there was no way it was going to get to plurality quickly with that many people just opting out of it.

John @443:

What has worked for me - and I am not someone who is naturally clean and tidy in terms of physical spaces (my computer is frighteningly organized) - was the Unf--- Your Habitat tumbler. It's very good for helping to not get overwhelmed, and the before and after shots people post (along with, usually, how long what they achieved took to achieve) are very good for me in terms of "well, they managed it, I can do it too."

Start by making your bed every day.

John A Arkansawyer @443

Some other good tips on tackling big cleaning projects like this!

Set a timer. Don't try to do too much at once.

Set up three boxes -- keep, think about, and trash. Put the "think about" box in another room for a week and then go through it after you've got all your "keep" stuff rearranged.

Good luck. I've been two years in my new place and it's time for a big purge like this already.

FWIW: Goodwill and recycling make getting rid of stuff psychologically easier.

Cheryl @431: Considering her position (executive director of the provincial education policy think tank Society for Quality Education), one can only hope she tries to educate herself before making such statements again.

One could be tempted to drop Ms. Wilson a note predicting enjoyment of the day Ms. Wilson realizes the incompleteness of her own education. Erm.

John A Arkansawyer @443: So: How do you fix a house that's both very full and very messy? How do you even start?

1. "If you use something, clean it and put it away when you're done. Then clean and put away one other thing."

2. Pay attention to when you're most likely to clutter. For me, it's when I'm (a) tired, (b) late, and/or (c) too impatient to pull my head out of [obsession du jour].

3. "How do you eat an elephant?" "One bite at a time, and ask a lot of friends over to help." Invite bunch of friends / pack of local college kids over over for a cleaning/pizza&beer party.

4. Put four boxes at the door of every room (a) "trash", (b) "lives in a different room", (c) "donate", (d) "make a home for". Whenever your eye falls on an item that snags your attention, either put it away, or put it in one of the boxes. Whenever you leave that room, collect any contents of box (b) and take to appropriate room and put away.

John A Arkansawyer @443:

Move.
I just did what I hope is my final move, six times in four years. Honestly, I don't recommend it, but it does clean things up.

Cleaning up a messy house is very much like moving. Only without having to hire and pay for movers.

I use standard sized boxes, in this case the cubic foot or banker's box. They stack much better than a random assortment of whatever you happen to find. They also hold more than paper boxes, as I've transferred the contents of a paper box to a banker's box and had space left over. I have an assortment of other sizes of box, simply because some stuff won't fit in a banker's box. But even the "other" boxes are of a standard size (1.5 cubic foot movers boxes), and half a dozen "picture/mirror" boxes in different sizes.

>Pack it.
>Inventory it as you pack it. (optional) I found taking pics of the layers and then a pic of the box label to be a fast way to inventory.
>Clear a corner and stack everything in it. I pallet stack (also called cross stacking) things, as that style of stack supports more weight for longer. Pallet stacking works best with standard sized boxes.
>Rinse. Repeat.

If you can identify stuff to get rid of, do so. Otherwise, just pack it. Get it out of the way.

Clean the house. Make repairs. Get yourself refinanced.

Unpack. Slowly. Repack like stuff with like, with a better inventory.

Once all the stuff is packed, and before you unpack, admire the space. Enjoy the space. Wallow in it. When you unpack, keep in mind the marvelousness of those clear spaces, and work to decorate those spaces, not bury them in the clutter all over again.

In this last move, I got all my stuff out of all the storage spaces, garages, back rooms, sheds, and brought it all here. I now have a living room full of boxes. I have one corner that I have worked very very hard to keep in its final "clear" configuration. Whenever I find I'm moving a box into that space "for now", I immediately move it back out. No! This space is to be kept clear. It makes weaving in and around the boxes in the other areas more difficult, but I have *one* space clear dammit, and it will stay that way. I'm about to finish clearing out another area, and the same will happen. It will not have boxes moved into it, even to sort.

If you want a pic of pallet/cross stacking, I'll post a pic of mine.

Is this the thread where medical things were mentioned? (Yes, I know, that's all of them.) Anyway, I believe medical insurance was mentioned, and I just wanted to say that over at Balloon Juice, an expert on medical insurance is putting up a series of informative posts. This is today's:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/09/06/hey-baby-whats-your-network/#more-139696

Hmph. Gnomed. And I don't cook any more. However my sweetie has been making the most delicious apple tarts with our over-abundant apples. Care for some?

Blackout contains an important element, one indeed essential to the plot, which despite being a fairly well-established SF trope I found to be completely and utterly incredible in that setting. It broke my suspension of disbelief. (Which was not broken by the zombie virus, so I dare say it was not unduly fragile.)

If you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, with luck the above is not a spoiler.

Open-threadiness: local mongoose is now feeling rather silly.

Why? Well, you see, this morning an acquaintance on the Book of Face started spewing a lot of vitriol about his compatriots, apparently sparked on this occasion by the way the election's going. (I say "on this occasion" because he does it regularly, on account of being "the idiot who praises, in enthusiastic tone, every century but this and every country but his own".) My first thought was "oh, here we go again", but this was immediately replaced by "wait, he hasn't called them liars yet... please call them liars, I want to see the Epimenides paradox in the wild!". So I posted about this, obviously filtering him off the post and not identifying him, for I am not a cruel mongoose. (We don't have friends in common. He fell out spectacularly with the last one we shared.)

And then up pops my old friend Gaz and totally explodes the Epimenides paradox.

How so? Well, Gaz argues, if Epimenides simply says "I am a liar," that's fine. You have a watertight paradox. But, in fact, Epimenides the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars, and that's where the hole is. He certainly isn't telling the truth, because that would mean he was lying and the paradox would follow. However, he can perfectly reasonably be lying, and we have to deduce he is... provided that we assume that the truth is not "No Cretans are liars", but "Only some Cretans are liars (and, obviously, Epimenides is one of them)".

I am kicking myself very hard, because this should have been so blinking obvious.

@455 Mongoose

Martin Gardner loved this paradox and the related Prisoner's Dilemma, et. al.

Carol @ 456: Martin Gardner was all kinds of wonderful. His books were what got me into recreational mathematics as a small child.

Gaaark, sorry! I forgot to take out the "sees spam", having posted two spam alerts (and a third just now, as it happened; "Harriet Vonarx" is a persistent blighter).

'Well, Gaz argues, if Epimenides simply says "I am a liar," that's fine. You have a watertight paradox.'

That's still open in much the same way -- if Epimenides sometimes lies, and truthfully says so, there's no paradox. Or if the statement is 'I always lie', then someone who sometimes lies can lie and say so.

'This statement is a lie' gets to the root of the paradox, I think.

And the two-guards thing, where one guard is a Truthteller and one is a Liar (in the always-lies sense), is actually a binary-math problem.

Mongoose: since others have covered Epimenides and Martin Garner, I'll just be the one to say "Mikado FTW! (And also I will put in a word for Raymond Smullyan, who's the one who got me into recreational logic.)

And then Epimenides helped Harcourt Fenton Mudd short out a robot.

Arrgh. GARDNER. And sorry for the missing ".

But while Epimenides' statement can perfectly consistently be false, he cannot make it false just by saying it. So if in fact, up to now, Cretans have always told lies (this isn't plausible, of course, but one can construct parallel examples which are), and then Epimenides says 'Cretans are always liars', we still have a paradox - what he says cannot consistently be true, and as a matter of fact, independent of what he says, isn't false.

James @ 459: true. Or then there's the two-part, ouroboros version of the same paradox, which has always been my favourite version:

The sentence below is true.
The sentence above is false.

Lila @ 461/463: I adore G&S in general. And, yes indeed, Raymond Smullyan is also a lot of fun. I discovered him a little later; I think someone bought me a copy of What is the Name of this Book? when I was around 12 or 13. I still have it.

Thank you all for the good advice.

Lin Daniel's advice at #451 (possibly a sign I should burn some books? Hmm...) brought about an epiphany: Most of my stuff--books, records, and CDs, mostly--is still in boxes. I may have too much stuff for this house.

#443, on cleanup:

Here's my accumulated wisdom on how to keep stuff.

• Everything shall have a place where it belongs. It doesn't have to be a sensible, decorative, or convenient place, but it has to be that thing's place.
• If you have more stuff than places to put it, acquire boxes, shelves (depending on how retrievable you want it to be), or maybe even cabinets. All of these increase the number of places available.
• Moving-style boxes are good for long-term storage; small boxes like shipping boxes or the clear plastic ones you can buy are good for collecting small objects that would otherwise spread out widely.
• Shelves are good for stuff you want to get at. Shelves are good for stacking boxes on. Shelves turn useless blank walls into storage space. When in doubt, buy shelves.
• Keep everything off the floor, unless it is in use or furniture. (Boxes count as furniture.) Floor space is your most widely useful and mentally-refreshing free space and should be valued. It is especially helpful for sorting pieces of the remaining mess. Keeping things off the floor also makes it less tedious to keep the floor clean.
• To organize existing mess:
  1. Choose a bounded space: one wall of a room, one set of shelves, one desk.
  2. Clear everything off that space (disposing of definite junk as you go) onto your nice open floor (or other available work surface if appropriate).
  3. Clean the emptied space and removed objects of dust and grime (have a conveniently available vacuum cleaner).
  4. Sort the objects however suits you.
  5. Fill the cleared space with objects which you decide belong there.
  6. Whatever you removed and didn't put back is now a smaller, cleaner, more sorted mess. Put it anywhere but the floor.
  Even if you don't throw anything out, the results will usually be smaller due to being more neatly organized.

The problem with the Epimenides paradox is that it depends on an excluded middle (it demands the statement must be either true or false with no qualification), which may be doable in formal logic, but certainly not in human discourse. And this paradox is only one reason why it's unclear that it's actually doable in formal logic, either.

I always just figured the Cretan who declared all Cretans to be liars was lying about being Cretan in the first place.

Ah, liar-and-truthteller puzzles!

One of my favorites is this: There are three gods, one of whom always lies, one of whom always tells the truth, and one of which sometimes lies and sometimes tells the truth at random.

They will answer any question with "yes" or "no," but they will do so in the language of the gods, which you do not understand.

What is one question you can ask them by which you can determine which is which?

Kevin, #467: Shelves turn useless blank walls into storage space.

So do bookcases. :-)

My problem is that I also have a lot of art, and therefore want a fair amount of "useless blank walls" for the display thereof.

Looking at Patrick's Sidelight "If there's one thing I want to come out of what happened to me, it's for the phrase 'don't feed the trolls' to be scrubbed from the annals of received wisdom," I note that the most recent comment in the associated comment thread (posted circa 10 hours ago) is a borderline-illiterate all-caps rape threat.

I noticed that too. I'm torn between being upset at the comment, and hoping that it will at least prove to some of the commenters above it that the situation really is as bad as she says.

When approaching cleaning and decluttering:

Don't expect perfection from yourself.

I'm . . . inordinately proud of this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/9695742232/

A corner of my study / dining room which is essentially empty! There's a paper recycling bin that moves about, and a dog bowl that's there for the moment. But nothing permanent!

But just above it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/9695742562/in/photostream/

A cluttered sill. There is stuff there that has been there since a day or two after I got the house in December. And I'm still not sure what to do with it. It is mostly ephemera: A postcard, a bumper sticker, a moldering Buck Rogers Big Little book, a State Quarters map album thing.

I suspect that this sill has Child in Omelas like properties. It must be there for the rest of the house to be relatively uncluttered.

The phrase "don't feed the trolls" comes from an earlier time, circa thirty years ago, when everything was gated communities -- AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy -- with one account to a customer, each associated with a credit card, or Usenet (which, then, was a small town where everyone knew everyone).

There, you knew the people. You knew that when Uncle Toby started talking about the Siege of Namur there would be no stopping him, and he would attempt to turn every conversation to the Siege of Namur. Therefore, when Namur came up, if some newbie sought to reply one of the old hands would say, "Don't feet the energy creature."

Then, trolling would be someone stopping by the Windows support forum to say, "Why don't you get a real computer?" The purpose being to derail conversation.

Then, trolling was an attempt to make the conversation in some thread be about the troll, rather than about the topic. What was called a troll then, today we might call a contentious person. Then, ostracism from the community was a real punishment.

Now, threats of physical violence, anonymous harassment from throw-away addresses (one person could have dozens--hundreds--thousands--of sockpuppet accounts), those aren't trolling. Those are crimes. They should be reported as crimes, and treated as crimes. Not ignored.

Meanwhile: on messageboards, strong moderation. If you don't want people covering the walls with graffiti, breaking windows, and mugging tourists, there has to be a cop on the beat.

Lila 461, 463: I knew a Gardnerian Witch once who claimed to be a "Martin Gardnerian." Can't remember that motto, though she also had a button that said "Earl Stanley Gardnerian - Celebrate the Mysteries."

Mongoose 465: My favorite is Russell's demolition of naïve set theory, which involves the set of all sets which are not members of themselves.

http://madelineashby.com/?p=1502

Interesting perspective on Worldcon and how lots of it is not in touch with what young people are doing lately.

A Minecraft joke that seems made for Abi: Flowers in Hell.

Probably for a Reddit link, just to a bit of silliness.

It seems to me that DNFTT is still useful advice, but it's limited in scope. Don't reward asinine attention-seeking behavior with attention, or you're liable to get more of it. That doesn't invalidate the fact that some bad behavior goes far beyond asinine attention seeking behavior, and needs a different response. In meatspace, a nutcase ranting on the street corner, even ranting about vile ideas, should be ignored, whereas a nutcase threatening to rape or murder passers by shoudn't be ignored, he should be arrested.

Jim Macdonald @475: Thank you. I knew there were situations where "do not feed the trolls" was good, applicable advice. And I read the sidelight, and accepted the author's contention that it was not good advice for those in her situation, but I hadn't yet resolved the conflict between those two evaluations of "do not feed the troll". Not all on-line communities are the same, across time and across different groups of participants. I think us old-timers sometimes fall into the trap of thinking all on-line interaction is the same, even though we should know better.

And on preview, Albatross is right; not all bad behavior is trolling.

Xopher: I love it!

re trolling, what Jim said. DNFTT is an appropriate response to concern-trolling and other deraily sorts of things in an open forum or comment thread; it is not at ALL appropriate as a response to abuse or threats directed at an individual.

If there's a parallel situation in the individual realm, it's the annoying (but not abusive or threatening) person who won't stop texting or leaving phone messages. As Gavin DeBecker said, if you finally respond to such a person after x messages, what s/he learns is that the price of getting a response from you is x messages, and round and round it goes.

So I follow the link to UfYH, and what do I find but a commentary on PG13 language on "Welcome to Night Vale"?

MY THREADS ARE COLLIDING HALP

Nicole @480, I've only just discovered "Welcome to Night Vale" and now I'm seeing posts about it everywhere. My life is colliding with people's posts! Halp!

Jim @#470: Is this one of the ones for which the correct question is "If I were to ask [one of the other gods] if se was telling the truth, would se say 'yes'?"

I am old enough to remember when DNFTT was good advice, and to agree with Jim Macdonald that threats of physical violence and rape are criminal offences that need to be reported to the public authorities and dealt with by proper judicial means. Free speech means that people have to be free to speak. That includes being, as Franklin Roosevelt would have put it, free from fear.

Nancy Lebovitz: I'm not usually into "so bad it's good", but that was remarkable-- and more so that it's apparently a real ad in some sense rather than simply a humorous piece.

Oh, they're real all right--if you look at the rest of them (I have a very long bus trip to and from work, so I tend to load up the tablet with stuff from YouTube and watch it along the way) you'll see that they both have a budget and someone behind the scripts that thinks the difference between a hand grenade and PMS is that a hand grenade only goes off when you pull the pin. For some perverse reason I kept thinking of the infamous health pamphlets handed out to UK soldiers in WWII that started "You may have noticed, between your legs..."

Jacque: One wonders if the CEO's video game designer wannabe offspring talked hir into loaning out the company's PR department.... The production quality is about on a par with some of the lamer fan productions I've seen.

Those are the live-action ones. The 3D animated versions have money behind them--and a designer whose esthetics do NOT match mine.

Just got back from The World's End.

I knew I'd love it. I knew it would be over the top. I was not prepared for how over the top it would be - it kept pulling out unexpected tops to go over! - nor for how very much I would love it.

I also saw a trailer for About Time and was squicked the eff right out by the hot mess of banal day-to-day male privilege illustrated as SFnal superpowers and all the consent issues that naturally leads to. I can hope the point is that the main character learns that this is indeed squicky, but I will not be along for the ride, thanks. Ew.

Also, I've kinda had it up to here with the supremacy of the father-son relationship. It's an important relationship, but it is not the only one that matters, Hollywood! Look, Pacific Rim was about a father-daughter relationship - adopted, at that! - and that was cool! Can we please try mother-son relationships, too, and not have them be reviled as "momma's boy" or "oedipal"? Wouldn't that be awesome?

Concerning trolls. I used to frequent the blog of a (male) college teacher who was pretty much a feminist, at least in his words--he helped a lot of readers think better about the gender mess, some parts of it anyway, and attracted a few others good with words. But there were always a few men who thought feminism was all about the wife getting all the money on the divorce, and a few women who thought men were just eeeeeeevil. Those, some of the rest of us managed to keep in check. But then, when he confessed to a very checkered past--including one event that almost got someone killed--it hit the fan. Out of the woodwork came people with nothing better to do than dump on him, and others who were nothing but uncritical sycophants. He didn't get a moderator, and he sure could have used one. He spent more of his time/energy on other writing projects, and what had once been a helpful and interesting site devolved into a wasteland inhabited only by trolls. A moderator could have gotten rid of these without feeding them--maybe. But it didn't happen, and when this fellow turned out to not have mended his ways after all, betraying family and students both, he went down in flames. (I'm not going to name this guy, I don't have the ROT 13 thing but he is notorious now.) A properly moderated, de-trolled blog couldn't have prevented all that, but even so.
These trolls were not purveying threats or being dangerous; they were just being pests, so it was a "do not feed" situation. But I express gratitude to you several who have helped show us the difference--and I hope that the proper authorities can do what a moderator can't, and the true criminals can be halted in their tracks.

Carrie S #485

You're on the right track.

My perception of the breakdown of DNFTT is something like this: