I never expected to see the day when the Prime Minister of my country was involved in pig-fucking allegations (and a dead one at that), but this is apparently the world we live in now:

Pig-gate

My wife's comment about the movie "Wag the Dog" was that maybe they had it backwards - the Clinton sex scandal was being used to cover up how badly the war was going.

But hey, I guess the Conservatives are deciding that if Labour can suddenly have a new party leader, so can they.

Reference back to Open Thread 207

Meanwhile, meet Marvel Comics's newest writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden@4: Oh, that's exciting! I really want to see how that turns out.

Many more details about the 1648 Dutch bond I mentioned last week. I still think it's really cool that there's a 367-year-old financial instrument still paying interest—there's a paragraph about how they balance the requirements of archival storage with the fact that it's a bearer bond that has to be physically presented in the Netherlands—but it's not exactly the impression I had from the previous news pieces. (I had initially pictured someone at Yale suddenly saying, "Hey, I wonder if we can still collect the interest on this?")

Rob Hansen @1, Bill Stewart @2: My initial though was that the story in the Sunday Times about a general threatening a coup if Corbyn got elected had people really rattled.

Oh, and while we're at it, #NotAllOldEtonians. Just saying.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden@4

I somehow managed to miss the announcement from Marvel :) It's great news. Of course just mentioning Brian Stelfreeze in passing is not the best way this article could have been written (as much as Coates is a celebrity writer and this is important news, Stelfreeze is one of the best comics artists working today and he had not done a big visible project for a while - and the fact that the two of them are headlining the new title is actually even better news than having Coates as the writer). I was curious at what Coates can achieve; with Stelfreeze as an artist, that should be awesome :)

pnh@4: To anyone who follows Coates - as I know you do - it was almost inevitable that he would one day write a Marvel comic. I'm sure this will draw puzzled comments from some who see this as him slumming, but the man genuinely loves comics. It's kind of like Sir Ian McKellan appearing in a soap and on stage as the Widow Twankey in a pantomime. He, I'm sure, never saw this as slumming either, but as working with stuff he loves. If you're eminent enough to do so, why not? We should all be so lucky.

Rob Hansen @1, Bill Stewart @2, praisegod barebones @7

'She said to us, as the campfire burned low...

"Of course, you realise they're all still out there? Older, stronger, richer and even more powerful, playing those same ugly twisted games. These days though...these days? Well...We're that pig."

And at that I could not help reach up to feel the bristles of my snout, as I peered out into the twilight suddenly searching for them.'

I'm Icelandic, the old viking history and sagas are very close to my heart.

Seeing my history and culture appropriated by racist idiots makes my blood boil.

Things were far from perfect way back then obviously but it's much more complicated than just rarrr pillage, slaughter and raiding.

Women (as widows) could be heads of households, getting divorces was fairly straight forward, there was an interesting form of early democracy. Lots of poetry and stories and written down "how to adult" manuals with a very high value on travelling and learning. One of my favourite viking women -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aud_the_Deep-Minded

But yeah, the vikings were farmers and fishermen at home and they travelled very far and wide, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

I don't see TNC writing for Marvel Comics as slumming - I see it as him finally getting to do something fun instead of having to be serious all the time. Not that he won't be awesome at it as well, and probably put some fairly deep content in there, but that's part of why it's cool to be able to write for Marvel.

I was struck by something Albatross said back at #629 in the previous thread:

A certain fraction of our conversations (us = the world, not so much us here on ML) are optimized for outrage-amplification and othering. ... There are media platforms that *live* on driving outrage, both new media stuff (think Gawker or Drudge) and old stuff (pretty much every 24 hour cable news channel). At one level, that's just exploiting the bugs in the human brain to make a buck. At another, it's poisoning the whole common atmosphere of our discussions.

Outrage is a stimulant, an adrenaline high that mixes well with long commutes. Alertness goes up, pain goes down, focus sharpens. Discontents get relocated onto targets that aren't you and your life.

Right-wing news media and drive-time talk radio have fed and been fed by this. They also deal in self-pity, which IMO does for the post-adrenaline crash what outrage does on the upswing. The worldview expressed has gotten very unrealistic.

I've been thinking about this in connection with arguments over the Yugos. (You know -- those skiffy awards shaped like Soviet-era cars.) For me, one of the most disturbing things about the Mad Newts and Rapid Newts is their abandonment of the shared, externally verifiable universe. Their rhetoric is built around the emotional needs of the moment. They can shift from one scenario to a conflicting scenario within a single rant, apparently without noticing they've done it.

If their emotional comfort requires them to believe that Yugo outcomes don't reflect the real preferences of free-range individual boaters, or that the comprehensive repudiation of their Menominees in favor of Noah Ward represents some kind of victory, then they believe it, and adjust the rest of the narrative to match.

I'm also disturbed by how much permission they give themselves to hate real people they've arbitrarily identified with their invented and constantly reinvented adversaries.

I don't believe people have always worked this way, and that I'm only just now noticing it.

That is surprising. I would have expected that to be having a negative impact, on account of it being a distraction from the road. I was listening to an interview-podcast during one commute and reacted slowly to a traffic-light change because I was feeling quite indignant about the quality of the interview questions and was pondering the possibility of transcribing it myself so I could look at it as a whole and figure out solid objections (or at least why I was feeling so indignant).

My recent experiences playing an online game have convinced me it's not my cup of tea, but I've begun wondering if among those who do enjoy such things, there might be a market for a game in which you play a 1930s housewife, and the objects are to accumulate social capital while balancing the family budget. One of the regular missions could be Going to the Movies -- this costs you ten cents, but nets you social-interaction points (because you can discuss the latest movies with your neighbours) and once a week, it also nets you dishes, which you can trade to accumulate sets (the trading also garners social-interaction points.)

I've also been trying to imagine how such a game could handle sex without being totally heteronormative -- maybe, within the game, consensual sex would boost your stats and those of your partner, but would carry the risk of Scandal (if same-sex, opposite sex using a condom, or unmarried) or Baby (if opposite sex, no condom.) Unmarried with Baby would carry an especially heavy Scandal penalty, married with baby would be socially ok, but you'd need to rebalance the family finances (and might lose all secondary income, to represent a wife having to quit her job once the first kid comes along.)

Problem is I basically know nothing about game mechanics, so I don't feel up to creating this.

This is excessively brief, since I'm on the T home, but distraction and other attentional phenomena are a major topic of driving research... which, incidentally, is what I'm doing my postdoc on. More, if there's interest, after Yom Kippur.

The Cameron story made me think immediately of this:

[L]egend has it that during one of Lyndon Johnson's congressional campaigns he decided to spread a rumor that his opponent was a pig-fucker. LBJ's campaign manager said, "Lyndon, you know he doesn't do that!" Johnson replied, "I know. I just want to make him deny it."

Teresa, #13: Tengentially related... Science fiction is the literature of ideas. It always has been. The notion that it's nothing but pulpy space opera is external, something said about SF by those who disliked it or didn't consider it "respectable" enough.

Scrabble, #14: It depends a lot on how well you can multi-task. I would have the same issue you do; I once missed a split on the Interstate while listening to an audiobook, and found myself 20 miles down the road in the wrong direction!

@Sarah E: The medium of games encompasses a vastly heterogeneous swathe of works. What you are describing sounds similar to some of the stuff that people are doing with _-management simulators, visual novels, and the like.

Someone who enjoys MMORPGs isn't necessarily going to enjoy the same things as someone who enjoys FPSes, or someone who enjoys parser-based interactive fiction, or someone who enjoys hyperlink-based IF, or someone who enjoys grand strategy games or... etc.

If you would like to try your hand at it, you might be interested in tools like Ren'py and Choicescript, which are geared more toward non-programmers and seem somewhat suited toward your idea. (Twine is especially beginner-friendly, but I am not sure it is an appropriate tool for this; others with more Twine experience might chime in here with corrections.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden @ 13:

I would be hesitant to say that people have not always worked that way (disclaimer: I am not a sociologist or anthropologist, nor do I play one on TV). I believe albatross has correctly identified whatever this is as "exploiting the bugs in the human brain", which means it's been there for a while.

My guess (again, IANASOA) would be that we're running up against human limitations in the ability to keep track of community in a world that isn't getting any smaller, combined with a world where we can choose[1] our communities without as much regard to geography. Whether karass, granfalloon, or something in between, there's something that defines in-group and out-group, even if it's simply that they're not, you know, those people over there.

Given that people have found some truly horrendous excuses to do abominable things to those people over there throughout history, and that many of them haven't always made a whole lot of sense, I'd say that, unfortunately, people have always worked that way. What's different now is the media saturation that lets us marinate in it and exploits us thereby, and the cheap, global communication that makes it easier to pick up a megaphone.

More later, if I can condense some of the mists of thought tickling the back of my brain.

[1] Sometimes consciously, as in deciding that Making Light is a really neat place or nodding along to talk radio in the car, sometimes more unconsciously, as in the background radiation of cultural narratives regarding race and gender.

Sarah E @ 15:

Just about anything can be gamified if done correctly. It's not for nothing that the Sims is one of the largest game franchises in the world, even though it's mostly about managing little people wandering around and interacting with each other. My go-to recommendation for a beginner's guide to what makes a game is Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design.

I'm no admirer of David Cameron - far from it - but the pig story is unverified, reported at (at least) second hand by a former political fixer with a massive chip on his shoulder. I'm not inclined to take it seriously.

If I were really cynical (and I am often tempted), I'd suggest that it was deliberately allowed to appear, not as an attempted character assassination, but as an attempt to demonstrate that Cameron has a character worth assassinating....

Teresa, the link between commute time and adrenaline-addiction talk radio is a fascinating idea!

For people expressing doubt that podcasts or talk radio could work that way, I would suggest that there are different modes of listening, that present very different cognitive loads.

On the one hand, you could listen to something very analytically, maybe even looking for flaws in it, and on the other hand you could listen to something that reinforces what you already know, and asks for much more emotional engagement than intellectual.

Personally, when I had a very long solo commute through heavy traffic, I found that listening to novels-on-CD didn't work very well, because I wanted to be able to remember what had happened and who the characters were, and I had a hard time doing that while navigating and paying attention to the vehicles around me. On the other hand, I can listen to an "alternative music" radio station's morning show, because I connect emotionally with the DJs (I've been listening to some of them off & on for 30 years), and if 5 minutes later I don't remember the details of something they've said, so what.

Scrabble @#19 & KeithS @ #20: I think my problem is that the game I'm envisioning is a management simulator, which is a game genre I don't personally enjoy. Thanks for the link, though.

[Deadlines have me too busy at present to keep up reading all the threads in time to comment in a timely manner, which I regret.]

Cadbury Moose @907/OT 207: Very pleased to hear you're okay now.

Terry Karney @908/OT 207: Oh yes, many times in the days after being told I could start weight bearing, I still found myself swinging along on good leg plus crutches, following the "keep the foot raised" habits of the previous seven weeks.

I do have an Aircast boot, had it since two week post-op* but it hurts me to wear it (I have a problem with allodynia - my body translates constant low grade pressure on my ankle bones or Achilles' tendon into pain) so I will probably try just about anything to avoid wearing that thing again. Thanks you for the pre-warning about heavy luggage, however.

*It didn't hurt any less than the cast, but unlike a cast I could take it off if my leg was elevated and supported. And I had a plate fitted, so it was only for protection, not to hold the bone in place.

David Perry! His translated recipes have provided many moments of gustatory bliss to our SCA shire.

I agree wholeheartedly about the appropriation of the past. I think the best parts of the SCA are about the self-conscious editing of the past we recreate, where we acknowledge that there was a lot more squalor and bigotry than we choose to portray, then set it aside. I've given up on finding anything nearly as balanced in today's media.

Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series is a case in point. The books are the product of years of research and depict ordinary decent people, including a humanist born ahead of his time, trying to do the best they can in the context of their culture and of the civil war that is currently (in the books) ripping their country apart. There's some pretty brutal stuff in there--mobs, murders, depictions of horrific battlefield wounds--but there's plenty of kindness too, with moments of sheer joy. There are also at least two unmistakable miracles.

So of course when they were brought to the screen the plots had to be rewritten to--well, here, have The Pilgrim of Hate:

BOOK: Joyous religious procession to honor local saint. Sunny day, flowers, singing.
MOVIE: Near-riot in the dark with torches and random piles of straw-covered junk to show that it's the Middle Ages.

BOOK: Some of the pilgrims who come to be healed at the saint's altar are probably hypochondriacs or faking it so they can go home with a miracle story, but one kid who arrived with his sister, is clearly disabled with an obvious malformation of his leg. He is healed in the sight of all in an indisputable miracle.
MOVIE: She's not his sister and he's a con man with a taste for whipping up religious riots.

BOOK: Also on pilgrimage is a man wearing a heavy cross on a thin cord, doing penance by traveling from shrine to shrine on foot with a devoted assistant standing by. Actually he's a murderer who thought he was doing his overlord a good turn. He was set this penance by a bishop in lieu of a court trial. The apparently devoted assistant is the pilgrim of hate: he is waiting for him to take the cross off because the moment he does his life is forfeit.
MOVIE: They're brothers and the victim is their father. The assistant is the murderer, a violent religious fanatic (gee I sense a theme) who choked their father with a rosary, a fact discovered when the monks boil down the victim's corpse and pull off the flesh with hooks (WHAT THE EVERLOVING WHAT). The assistant has fooled the penitent into thinking that he, the penitent, is the murderer--that a fight he had with their father just previous to his death actually killed him.

BOOK: Bandits who arrived disguised as pilgrims menace the eponymous pilgrim of hate and the guy with the cross. Saving the murderer's life, the pilgrim of hate realizes that his journey of hatred is a waste and lets the murderer go on his way.
MOVIE: I dunno, just lots of dying and killing.

BOOK: Someone Brother Cadfael loves very much is involved in making sure that all ends as well as it can. He regards this person's presence as a blessing from his personal saint.
MOVIE: Ha! Not a chance.

I don't watch or read much medieval-themed stuff (other than Peters' later Brother Cadfael books) that was made after, say, Ladyhawke, because it's all either awfully pretty or, well, the above.

Jenny Islander @ #25: There are also at least two unmistakable miracles.

It's been a while since I read most of the books in the series, and I only remember having noticed one, which is the one in The Pilgrim of Hate that you mention later in your comment. What's the other one?

Shopping and cognitive load-- this could be gamified at various levels of difficulty.

KeithS @20: The Sims is basically a dollhouse, only with some limited AI adding personalities to your dolls, and missions/high scores as well. I recognized that this was one of the "fun"s I was getting out of playing it after finding out how many people were writing little micro fictions explaining and dramatizing all the randomness that happened in their Sims family's life.

Nancy Lebovitz #27: Oh hell yes -- cognitive load is a dominating factor in my shopping habits. There are stores I actively cringe from because their environment increases my load, either by sensory overload or by product-placement games.

And CL is probably the big reason why I'm currently accumulating a list of "stuff to buy online", but haven't done it yet, because vetting and exploring a new site is always high-load for me, and life over the last few weeks has been keeping medangerously close to my overload threshold.

I just found out, courtesy of Nancy Lebovitz, that I cannot read yellow words on a purple background.

I'm amazed that anyone can.

@Paul A. no. 26: They try the sortes Biblicae and the pages do something that is not physically possible.

@David Harmon no. 29: I keep running into stuff I didn't know was in my local Wal-Mart because my job requires me to walk a lot of aisles that I avoid when shopping. I did one massive "Here's what I need, here's where I think it is, if it's there I'll write down the cost, now GET ME OUTTA HERE" run back when the store opened; now I go through the place as fast as I can on shopping day, purchasing as much as possible elsewhere if the price is better. And it's a small Wal-Mart.

Lizzy L. @30: Interesting. That looks like maroon and gold to me, which is pretty close to what used to be recommended (back in the VGA days) as the optimal reducing-eyestrain combination.

Admittedly, the font sizes ("font", ha ha) were much larger then, because so were the pixels.

RE commute time and talk radio:

My commute is ten minutes. Which may explain my liberal views and why I'm staying with my current employer even though my new assignment is a total sweatshop bummer.

@Sarah E#15: I jotted down notes for a game where you inherit (or win, or discover) a Roadside Attraction, which you are challenged to make money off of. You need to deal with parking, whether to make souvenirs or ran a snack stand, etcetera.

But I don't know the slightest thing about developing for graphical platforms such as tablets and the like.

My apologies-- I read livejournal in my preferred style, which is black on white with purple dividers.

I don't know what the best solution is if you don't have a livejournal account, but Select All (CNRL-A) is more tolerable for me than siderea's color choice.

Wandering around from KeithS #20's link, I stumbled across this amazing thing:

And Then We Held Hands...

This is a non-verbal cooperative game about emotional negotiation/communication. It apparently started as a print-and-play thing, but there is a Kickstarter for a new physical version. There is no question of the game not actually being produced, (it is already fivefold overfunded), but apparently future distribution may be an issue due to its non-typical nature.

Contributing to the Kickstarter gets you a copy of the game (and optionally a music track) at the end of the Kickstarter, which is September 29 (7 days from now).

33
What I remember being recommended was amber (orange-gold) on black, back in the days before Windows and color. I had an amber monitor for several years, and it was fine for my eyes.

About talk radio - how big is the audience really? I suspect that at most 20 million listen regularly to the Limbaugh/Hannity shtick, and the demographics are largely old, white, and diminishing. Is it an influence? Sure. But I don't lose sleep over it.

@Rob Hansen #1: Courage...I'm sure worse things were said about Disraeli. Only not in "polite" company.

OT (in an Open Thread?)

Nancy L: I need a button which says, "wanna buy some yarn".

I've thought about getting into SCA but the problem I run into is twofold: How to cosplay as a medieval Jew? And how to deal with the things people said when I told them what I was trying to do?

I solve both problems by not doing any sort of re-enactment. I wouldn't do well in the past, anyway.

Working-class steampunk, now... that could be interesting. And I'm liking what I'm hearing about solarpunk; with any luck I'll find a buyer for my solarpunk story soon.

Sarah @ #41:

For the first, I have seen it done (back when Nordmark was a barony), but that was someone cosplaying as (well, someone whose persona was) a medieval male Jew, I don't know how severe the differences would be for a female Jew.

For the second, I have no answer.

'Happy Birthday To You' ruled as public domain. Thanks to XKCD for the tip-off.

I grieve for the conflict between reenactment and LARP. In larp circles, it's mainly a cultural distaste and a sense of aggrieved inferiority - those people insist upon in-character underwear and then they talk about the football, how dare they sneer at us. I'm not sure how much actual sneering there is, from the reenactment side, but anecdotally I have encountered that sense that we are just not doing it right. We don't use real weapons, so we aren't strong enough or serious enough and people who shouldn't win (small, female, unfit, untrained) can win fights. Somehow those conversations always focus on the fighting, with a side order of costume authenticity.

They're clearly different hobbies. Larp is focused on the roleplay, on the creation of new stories, and the parts of the hobby I'm involved with have a strong emphasis on maintaining character. One does not talk about the football. One does not make Star Trek jokes. One feels rather awkward mentioning the stirling with which one buys lunch, because "money", unspecified, means rings, crowns and thrones.
Which also means that you can create a setting that does not contain common real-world concepts such as gender-based division of roles, and reasonably require people to go along with that. It's not an instant solution, because sexism is the water we soak in, and we carry it with us into games. It's not easy to remove gender roles from everything you say and do. But it's reasonable to expect you to try.

What I find particularly interesting is how this interacts with the emphasis on remaining in-character. Writing sexism out of the setting means that objections to in-game sexism aren't based on morality, but on something closer to good taste. Dropping character to talk about "men" when you mean "troops" is crass, and we are embarrassed by you. Describing something as "women's chain" is a faux pas, and some nice person will helpfully suggest other terms you might use for light mail.
Most of these helpful people will regard the excluded concepts as undesirable in real life, which is why we'll fight hard to actually get our non-gendered medieval setting. But the setting gives us a trump card. If you're sexist in-game, you are provably doing it wrong.

Jews in the SCA-- positive account in the mainstream press.

Sarah, if you don't mind, what did people say to you?

Sarah @41, peripheral to your comment, but I remember, years ago, a coworker going to Medieval Times, a fake-Medieval banquet house with jousting-as-entertainment.

Him: "I so want to go back to the Middle Ages!"

Me: "No you don't." Explain at length about sanitation, fleas, food scarcity, serfdom, lack of plumbing, etc.

Him: "Oh, I'd be a lord!"

Me: "Danny, you're Jewish."

Him: "So what?"

Me: "There were no Jewish lords." Explain at length about the life of Jews in Middle Ages Europe, including pograms, restrictions, ghettos...

Him: Oh. (Then he spent a little time trying to handwave it away.)

I almost felt sorry about bursting his bubble. But honestly, I was amazed at how utterly clueless he was about the precarious position of Jews in medieval society. Even privileged, high-status Jews, like doctors.

Our local con used to have a nicely outfitted Zouave every year in the costume contest. One year, though, he gave it a fantasy spin by being a Zouave inexplicably transported into our time! He conveyed this by looking about himself in amazement, as the MC helpfully explained the setup.

I expect the SCA has rules against time travelers, and that it's based on past experiences.

Kip @ 47. Time travellers strictly cash.

Kip @47 Time travellers strictly cash.

(Hope this isn't double-posting, as I just received the dreaded Internal Server Error. Or perhaps a non-cash-carrying time traveller.)

As I understand it, the SCA substitutes space for time. People from a range of eras mingle, and if someone's customs don't make sense, it's because they're a far traveler.

I thought some people here might be interested in the EPH calculator and slate simulator web app I put up at https://hugoslatesimulator.herokuapp.com/

Nancy@45: I was going to talk about my friend with the Jewish persona ... and she's actually quoted in that article!

I am greatly pleased.

KiethS @ #20 and Teresa Nielsen Hayden @ 13:

I have to agree with KiethS. Humans have always been capable of Outrage As A Stimulant and of the piling on and topic switching in mid-debate and all of that.

In the past, all of that got tucked under the banner of lynch mobs, posses, vigilante justice, and etc. The speakers and actors also had to live within a mostly fixed community where their past actions were remembered forever by the people around them. "To Kill A Mocking Bird" comes to mind as a good fiction example. It also shows why Outrage As A Stimulant was always short lived. Even in a largely homogeneous group, there are dissenters and outliers and people who feel obligated to say "Wait a minute," and accept the brief but very important role as The Voice Of Sanity And Reason. (or, more importantly, as the voice who yells "Will You Just Shut Up Already!?!")

What has changed and is still continuing to change is how we organize ourselves into communities. I belong to six: residential (I'm a commuter), work, social, familial, fannish, and virtual. There is some Venn-ish overlap in some of the communities, but only some. I've seen Outrage As A Stimulant happen in all of them.

My virtual community is the only place where I see it happen unchecked. It's very easy to "move" from location to location pitching your tent until you find a place and a people among which you want to homestead in a Birds-and-Feathers operational way. I've also seen virtual communities drive off people who tried to be The Voice of Sanity And Reason. Sometimes it was for trollish behavior, other times it was through well-meant dog-piling. In every instance, The Voice Of Sanity And Reason that would have short circuited the feedback loop that drives the Outrage As A Stimulant had no incentive to stay and perform their duties. John Scalzi is perceived by a lot of virtual community residents to be a heavy-hitter among The Voice Of Sanity And Reason cadre. That is why he occasionally posts the "It's not my job to comment on your issues" entry on his blog. People who have failed in curbing their local outrage, want him to wield his Mallet of Loving Correction on their behalf.

On the internet there is no fiscal cost to leaving toxic groups who live on Outrage As A Stimulant. (Or in muting or blocking them as Scalzi does). In addition to the lack of cost, there is also a positive emotional benefit to avoiding the Sturm und Drang involved in whipping up a whole community into Stimulated Outrage.

Nancy, #45: Fascinating link! Thank you for posting it.

Nancy Lebovitz #45: I especially liked: King Cariadoc of the East became arguably the first king in history to declare war against himself, accept the challenge and lose.

Also, Sandy B. #52: If that's "Saarah bint Ishaq", she's local to me! (I live in Charlottesville)

@Nancy Lebovitz no. 50: Yep! The sheer vastness and sensawunda of the medieval and Renaissance world allows for two people to meet across 500 years' difference and treat each other as peculiar foreigners from opposite ends of the Earth.

My homeschoolers are studying the early (that is, Renaissance) Spanish exploration of North America: naming the West Coast after a fictional country in a printed novel on one hand, and on the other spending their own and others' lives in the search for cities of gold from medieval legends in old handwritten manuscripts...

Sarah @41: If you're still interested in poking at the topic, it looks like Eleazar ha-Levi, mentioned in Nancy Lebovitz's link, has written a number of articles on the topic. I'm not sure about the KWHSS stuff, but back issues of Compleat Anachronist and Tournaments Illuminated can be ordered here, and have often been made available online for free SOMEWHERE.

Annie Y. @8: Got art recommendations for Stelfreeze books? I am still enough of a novice to comics fandom (and he's not been in the same corner of Marvel I've been reading, I guess?) that his name rings no bells. I think the household subscription to Marvel Unlimited is still active, so I can go a ways back in the archives without relying on local comics stores' inventories.

(and I just realized that handwritten manuscript is redundant argh)

ANyway, I've been told that at least one SCA war involves real-world rabbis laying out special markers--I forget the proper name--to show that the minimal walking around one is supposed to do on the Sabbath in that branch of Judaism coincides with the boundaries of the event site. IOW, having fun at War is not profaning the Sabbath.

@60 It's my understanding that having fun is never profaning the Sabbath (I'm not exactly traditional, of course).

@ the rest... ok, right now I'm broke and living in a strange city with no job and soon no place to live. SCA is not happening.

But when I was less unsettled, I discussed the topic with friends and got variations on either "There weren't Jews in the relevant places/times" or "Why do you have to be a Jew?" with a side of "Interesting project; too bad there's no records."

Those were people who were inclined to be sympathetic. I then extrapolated those reactions to the people I'd met, the ones who insist on using Nazi symbols because something something Nordic heritage... and I decided that I had better things to do.

Was I wrong? Maybe. Can I go back and change it? No.

Update on "And Then We Held Hands...": The overwhelming response has accounted for their entire first printing. They've ordered a second printing, which they expect to ship at worst by January.

Just lost my cat; still in shock. Jack was at the vet where they were hydrating him before trying to put in a feeding tube, but didn't make it. Cancer. So sudden; he was the middle-aged healthy-looking cat. If it had been the older one, we'd be sad but not shocked.

Sympathies, Bill.

Bill Stewart #63: My condolences. And surprise does make it worse, I've been there.

Bill Stewart, my sympathies.

Bill Stewart -- my sympathies.

Bill, that's awful. Sincere sympathies.

Bill S., #63: My condolences on your loss. It's never easy, and worse when it happens so unexpectedly.

Bill, BTDT -- it never gets easier, and I wasn't ready to let mine go either...

Sympathies.

Bill Stewart, sympathies.

Sympathy, Bill Stewart -- we've lost two cats in the last few years to cancer (large cell lymphoma) and it isn't fun. One of them responded to chemo, the other didn't; the one who didn't, didn't live much more than a week after diagnosis.

Adding to the sympathy wishes.

Re the sidebar item announcing a gated community called Eloi --

I thought the Eloi lived in the Plaza Hotel.

Regarding Jews in the SCA and/or middle ages, I just found out that an old friend of mine is planning on running for crown consort in his kingdom next year. If his Champion wins the tournament, then he will be using his Jewish persona, as there was a medieval nomadic kingdom that (a) had a diarchy, with two kings reigning at once, and (b) was Jewish.

@Sarah no. 61: I think the issue at hand was that to do anything at a major SCA camping event you have to walk, walk, walk.* Privies are this way, potable water is that way, and classes are over yonder. It starts to feel kind of like, well, work.

Sorry people were so offputting! Unfortunately the quality of the local SCA chapter depends in large part on whether the participants like to read or not. If you are interested in getting involved in a low-key, local (=cheap) way, check out the massive archive at florilegium dot org for years of conversations, articles, and primary-source documentation on, well, pretty much anything of interest to the Society. Material on Jewish life is behind the Cultures link. It isn't an encyclopedia, but it is a good jumping-off point.

*Or use a mobility device. Possibly decorated with the kinds of things your persona would have hung on a mobility device if there had been such things in period. Wheelchairs OF THE MONGOL HORDE!

Buddha Buck @75, sounds fascinating! Can you tell us more?

wrw @ 59

He had done a lot of covers through the years and not so many full comics(he did all of the art for the The Demon and Cat Woman in Wednesdays comics a few years ago for example and back in the days he did Domino for Marvel (2003 or thereabouts - the first time I noticed him as an artist was with this series); these days he is working on something for Boom Studio that I do not read). Which is why I am happy to see him getting a project like this one - he is one of those guys I see the name of often but never attached to a big project for long.

PS: See if something here rings a bell.

Annie Y @ 78: Thanks much. That's a lot of DC, and not much recent Marvel, and none of the Vertigo stuff that I've actually read, which explains why I've never heard of him before. His covers look neat, and if he draws Black Panther similarly to how he draws Batman I'm pretty sure I'm on board for the art as well as the writing.

@Bill Stewart: So sorry to hear the news. Been there, last spring, with my dog.

Cassey @77: No ;-)

The nomadic group who his persona is from is the Khazars, and pretty much all I know of them is from the liked Wikipedia article.

Bill: I'm sorry for your loss.

Proposed: That one debate on both the Republican and Democratic side be devoted to having candidates answer the U.S. Citizenship Test Civics Questions. It seems only fair that anyone who is running for President be required to demonstrate the same level of knowledge about our country and its government that we require of people who are applying to become citizens.

Now, let's make it interesting. Do it quiz-show style! Each candidate has a podium with a screen and 4 buttons. The screens show each question and its possible answers in turn, mirrored on a large overhead screen facing the audience. When all candidates have made their choices, the correct answer is highlighted on the screen, and the front of each podium lights up green or red, for a right answer or a wrong one -- with a running score at the top.

Bonus: This can be made to provide a handy checklist against which to compare candidates' later campaign statements. If a candidate answers a question correctly in the debate test but later says something contradictory to it, someone needs to ask why! And if any candidate can't score at least 90% on this test (because I've looked at it, and those are easy questions for the most part), then we should seriously question their qualification to be running at all.

I like that, Lee!

83
Oh yeah!
(If they're missing stuff that they should have learned in eighth grade, the question is why do they not know this?)

The link I gave @83 only gives you 24 questions out of about 100 possible ones. This link goes to a more-comprehensive set.

I went through the citizenship questions when my wife was studying them a couple years back. IIRC, with no prep I got about high 80s of them correct out of the 100. (disregarding snarky answers like "a damn good idea" for the question "What is the rule of law"). She got about 60% correct never having taken any american civics.

Most of them are really not hard, there are some having to do with dates that could get confused, and there are some questions where the answers change with the elections, appointments, and State of the respondent.

I would expect that someone who was running for president should be able to answer them all with a little prep, even under pressure.

The audience of such a debate might learn something.

Jennie Breeden's con taxonomy.

Off too the airport RSN.

I was just informed that my sister passed away last night.

Jeff, <hugs> there are no words.

Jeff, so sorry.

Jeff, I'm so sorry for your loss.

Jeff, I'm sorry for your loss.

@Jeff :-(

((HUGS)) Jeff.

Jeff@90: I'm so sorry.

Jeff, my condolences. I'm sorry for your loss.

Victoria @ 53 (&prev): would people in the past have lived the sort of semi-perpetual outrage that we see now, given the same stimuli? Huck Finn's father is a good example of unthinking outrage from over a century ago, but he was a social extreme. Or has such outrage gradually seeped into mainstream culture? (e.g., is it a habit the current generations picked up in their youth?) Or is it a reflection of increased leisure, such that people have more time to fritter away on stack-blowing?
      I'm reminded of the big fuss a couple of decades ago over the essay "Bowling Alone", which argued that people were not making ]personal networks[ as in the past, to their and society's detriment. If the argument was correct, outrage may have been a somewhat-predictable outcome of online access; I wonder how Putnam looks on the kind of common-view communities that have sprung up on the net? (cf Christopher Anvil's be-careful-what-you-wish-for story "Gadget Versus Trend".)

The article on the SCA is fascinating, even where it adds a layer of error to existing legends[1] rather than just making up its own[2] or using very debatable terms[3].

Jenny @ 76: I think reading isn't the only differentiator -- but certainly baronies/shires can vary widely. (Someone formerly of my area complained that in her new home everyone was focused on awards....)

Lee @ 86: fascinating. I got 96/97 and would have ... issues ... with a teacher who asked the one I missed (on Selective Service) as the answers were badly phrased -- but so were many of the others. (In my mind's ear my mother, who taught U.S. history for 20 years, was indignant about several of them.) I definitely agree on making all the candidates answer the test in public, in real time; it would be fascinating both to expose the candidates' ignorance and/or lies and (perhaps) to make clear to certain parties (see "outrage" up-thread) that all of the candidates are more knowledgeable than their average voter, despite any pretensions to folksiness.
      OTOH, I wonder whether there's any mechanism to make sure that the would-be citizens this test is sprung on get a variety of topics, instead of a random draw that gives them oversize chunks of history or geography. (IMO, none of those questions are as important as the ones about governance now.)

[1] Cariadoc, knowing that a war arrow was used to summon vassal lords, would not have broken it; the story I heard was that it was broken by the originally-challenged king, who didn't know this.

[2] The Midrealm was the 3rd kingdom. This would have been trivial to check.

[3] "taxes".

In #60, Jenny Islander writes parenthetically:

(and I just realized that handwritten manuscript is redundant argh)

Browsing movie descriptions, I just came across Survivor, in which a character

...finds herself framed for crimes she didn't commit and racing to elude assassins while trying to clear her name and stop a large scale terrorist attack set for New Years Eve.

Crimes you didn't commit are the very best kinds of crimes to get framed for.

Anyway, on second thought, is it completely incorrect to refer to a "typewritten manuscript" or a "laser-printed manuscript?"

If so, what is a better term for a typewritten draft of a novel?

If not, then "handwritten manuscript" does convey meaningful information.

Jeff @ 90

I am so sorry for your loss

Jeff,

That's a huge loss to bear. I'm sorry for you.

Wendi Iserman, (probably best known in fandom as a huckster, her business
was Regal Pewter), died yesterday from cancer.

There's information and tributes at
https://www.facebook.com/wendi.iserman?fref=ts. Wendi's wife. Sheila
Iserman, posted some of the last updates.

No funeral is planned, but there will be a gathering of friends-- date to
be announced.

There's more to be said, but I'm remembering Wendi as a remarkably descent
person.

Wendi was assigned male at birth, so you might remember her as Bill Iserman.

Jeff: I'm so sorry.

@60
I believe that "holograph manuscript" is the term for an ms. that is written out by hand, although to my modern sensibilities this has a flickery 3-D sound to it.

Jeff: My condolences.

CHip #99: and [4] conflating two SCA figures. The SCA's first knight was David Bradley (MZB's oldest son).

Bill Higgins @100:

Police departments do frame guilty people: sometimes the police think they know who did it, so they plant evidence, lie on the stand, etc., because their reason for suspecting someone is that the person has a history of similar crimes, and was in the right general area on the 12th, which isn't proof, but "Detective So-and-so saw him leaving the building carrying a box" might convince a jury.

Bill Higgins @100 >> If so, what is a better term for a typewritten draft of a novel?

I have seen the word "typescript". I don't know how widely used it is, or was. Google isn't very helpful because there is a commercial software product by the same name.

Jeff: I'm sorry for your loss.

Target just flunked basic biology. Someone needs to tell them that spiders don't have bones.

Vicki #108: And then you have messes like the O.J. Simpson case. My father (a lawyer) commented that the prosecutor there blew his case by framing a guilty man.

Condolences to Jeff.

Mary Aileen @111: Spiders may not have bones, but they do have a skeleton: an exoskeleton, like other arthropods. And that really does look like a reasonable version (bleached, of course) of the exoskeleton of a spider. On that level, I think they get a pass on that one.

Nowhere on the Target ad do they mention bones.

David Harmon @ #112: And then there's the occasional mystery novel where the murder frames themself, as a double bluff.

CHip @ 99

Would people in the past have lived the sort of semi-perpetual outrage that we see now, given the same stimuli?

I don't know how retrievable the "semi-perpetual" aspect is from the historic record, but take a look at the long history of sermons against a vast array of social behaviors and you'll see a lot of really pointless outrage against in still-familiar categories such as "WTF are kids wearing these days?", slut-shaming, "God hates [insert hated category", and so on. For the casual reader, English sermons of the 16-17th century are probably most accessible. I don't mean to pick on religion as a source of outrage in particular, because most of the concerns weren't anything to do with dogma, but simply reflected the pervasiveness with which religion was used as a basis of social enforcement at the time.

Tom Whitmore (114): The picture looks a lot more reasonable than the actual item. (I saw it in the store first, then looked online.)

Tom (114)/Me (117): Unless you're telling me that spider exoskeletons look like a backbone and ribs, in which case I'm just wrong.

#116 ::: Heather Rose Jones

Very good point.

Jenny Islander @60, Bill Higgins @100, Raskos @105, Bruce H. @109:

The manu in manuscript has gone the same way as the manu in manufacture. In common usage, to my knowledge, there is nothing wrong with a manuscript which is not written by hand.

Thanks, everybody, for the condolences.

Another view of that spider skeleton, showing the ribs(?!?).

Mary Aileen @111, Tom Whitmore @114, Jeremy Leader @122: But you can just see the design meeting at the injection-molded-plastic-novelty company, though.

L: "Hey, Chris."

C: "Hi, Les."

L: "Halloween's coming."

C: "Yeah. Same old, same old. We really need something new to juice sales."

L: "Something scary, but innovative. Not too gross. What's scary? Skeletons, witches, black cats, broken mirrors, tests you haven't studied for, spiders, dental work, mortgages, tombstones, impending unemployment …"

C: "Wait a minute, Les, go back."

L: "Tests you haven't studied for? Kind of hard to get that across in a six inch novelty--"

C: "No, no. Skeletons. AND spiders! A spider skeleton! What's scarier than an effing spider skeleton?"

L: "Chris. I hate to break it to you, but spiders are invertebrates. I remember it distinctly from second-grade science. The part of the spider you can see already IS their skeleton."

C: "No, not the SPIDER's skeleton, a spider MADE of skeleton! Like, Halloween skellingtons. Hey, HR Giger wired together a buttload of chicken bones and painted them black to make the monsters from Alien, we can get the art guys to sculpt together a patchworked necromantic spider made of bones! BOOM, ten percent jump in corner drugstore seasonal aisle sales, here we come."

L: "I feel dirty, man. If you can't rely on your cheap holiday decorations to have at least a basic modicum of biological realism, what has our world even come to?"

C: "Oh, go soak your head. Get a coffee and come back. I need you to help me work out how big we can make the giant inflatable cat and still have it fit between the majority of store shelving units and their ceilings."

True, it's not unlike one of Giger's horrors. And that idea of the discussion at the novelty company is ... disturbingly plausible.

Oh, shpx vg gb uryy, I am so overdue for a career change. I could continue to enjoy a very good salary and benefits and a short commute, but now working in a high-pressure software sweatshop situation on a project I care nothing about.

Is it unrealistic to consider changing to doing something vaguely creative in one's mid 50s?

Especially considering I . . . I don't have a bliss to follow?

Stefan Jones @ 125 -

I hate to say "that depends", but you need to factor in your financial situation, the duration of the project, and other the feelings of those close to you. You're in your prime earning years, so that can affect when you segue into retirement.

OTOH, only you know where the shoe pinches.

Stefan Jones: I'm the wrong person to ask, as I've gone from one low-paying but interesting job to another throughout my life. Deciding early not to have kids made this somewhat possible. Being lucky in the birth lottery helped. And I switched from running a bookstore to massage therapy in my mid-40s; I still keep my hand in with books, though.

One of the best pieces of advice for managing one's life is: be in the process of creating what you want to see in the world. Life is a process, not a result. Results are frequently not what I expected; in the long run, they are usually much more interesting than I thought at the time.

Jeff, Bill, Condolence.

re OJ: If he did it* the evidence is such that it's almost impossible to accept he acted alone. The blood spatter shows that Goldman stood completely still while Brown-Simpson was killed. He also had "restraint wounds"** on his neck.

Reading the autopsy, and comparing what it says of the timeline for what happened against the physical circumstance of the crime scene would require Goldman to have stood stock still for more than a minute, with easy escape to hand, and then not move when the killer came to him.

So yes, it's possible OJ was involved, but not plausible he was the only person who took part in the murders. That, as much as anything else, is why the jury acquitted (and the foreperson of the jury had served a murder trial once before; where the reversed the not-guilty of the other jurors and so that defendant was convicted).

*which I cannot say to either side

** small wounds, from someone holding the point of a knife to his skin

Stefan: I'm sort of with Tom. I've been lucky, in that friends and partners have (with the, unpredictable, help of family on occasion) meant that I have only once been close to truly desperate.

So I've been able to "follow my bliss" (for certain values of bliss). It's not been without cost (both fiscal and emotional), but (assuming you are not at risk of grave disruption) I would say that, if you can afford the risk/can stomach a return to the "grind" which is presently oppressing you, taking the plunge to something which is more likely to be emotionally satisfying is what I'd recommend.

The two complexities I'm facing: My new assignment -- involuntary, take it or walk -- uses none of my existing coding or OS skills or industry experience. No one on my new team knows what I've done; I'm just the new QA guy. It's . . . depersonalizing. I know change is inevitable, but to be in the same office where we made custom computer hardware and operating systems and file systems, and now have nothing left to test but an utterly banal web application . . . sigh?

The other: I'm the well-paid successful sibling who will be the one who Helps Out. I've already lent money, given money for tuition, bought computers.

If I stuck with my current gig for four more years I would be in excellent shape to retire, but I'm not sure what would be left of me after that many years of the Agile Development grind.

(and I'm sorry for whining like this when someone has lost a sibling, and a beloved pet.)

Stefan Jones @131

You never know when a job that you do not seem to like will turn into something unexpectedly good. 10 years ago I started working for my current company as a developer and expected that I will be bored within months - it did not sound that interesting. Fast forward 10 years and I am still working for them, my job description changed a lot (mainly because I volunteered to do some things when noone else wanted and they kinda led to me becoming the person to do the next things that everyone wanted but could not do) and I even ended up in a different country. At the same time my dream job (the one before this one) ended up with me in a nervous breakdown contemplating major change in my career and the job itself ended up badly to say the least. So you never know.

Now I will be the first to admit that I do not have as much life experience as you do and that at some point almost nothing can surprise you but still... Up to you at the end of the day but I'd give the job a chance at least for a while if I was you. Find something else to do outside of work in the meantime... But if it is really bad and you can afford it, start something new - why not - 50 is the new 30, right? :) Good luck whatever you decide to do.

PS: And Agile Development is an invention of the dark forces. I do not care what stats managers keeps showing, it is just too... impersonal for my taste.

Re: the kickoff topic: a while ago I read a fairly dry historical account of the failure of the Viking Greenland colony which asserted that one of the reasons the colony failed was that the Greenlanders where racists who couldn't bring themselves to trade with, let alone integrate with, the Inuit. This isn't at all inconsistent with the idea that Viking culture was fairly accepting as a rule; after all, the Greenland colony was composed mostly of political exiles, and led by an accused murderer (even by the loose standards for homicide at the time).

On the original topic, I was reminded of Rosemary Sutcliff's Blood Feud, which involves Vikings, raids on England, Constantinople (including the Hagia Sophia), Kiev, and intermarriage.

Jeff@90, sorry for your loss.

Wondermark on nostalgia for fauxtopia

The slides from this talk are absolutely fascinating. It's a talk about the advertising ecosystem, ad blockers, and privacy at first, but then segues into some bigger social questions about ceding lots of power over the shape fo the world to silicon valley entrepreneurs. Strongly recommended.

Bill and Jeff: My condolences.

I've been kicking around a poem pastiche for a while, and I think I'm not going to get any furtherer with it; the later verses don't goose my muse the way the start did.

But I figured I might as well share it. Original inspiration here, by Jenny Joseph; an excerpt of her poem "Warning" that is usually called (in excerpted form) "When I Am Old" or similar. It serves as founding inspiration for the Red Hat Society.

----
I was prompted to write this by conversations I've had with well-meaning friends who say things that reveal more about their assumptions about the "proper" ways to do masculinity than any actual universal social truths.

I said to at least one of them, "Yeah, well, if becoming a man means I can never wear sparkly purple shirts again you can keep it." Because that's the kind of queer I am. :->

Anyway. Poem:

When I am an old man, I shall still wear purple
With a shiny red tie that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on bright dyes and sparkly shoes
And knitting yarn, and say I've no interest in football.
I shall break into song when I've a mind
And fuss with my hair and advise youths on clothes
And wave my stick about as I badly pretend to be Gene Kelly.
I shall go out half-naked in the rain
And cultivate flowers in my friends' gardens
And learn to draw.

Terry Karney @129 -- Re: OJ

One of the things that slipped out of the media's attention at the time, was that there were TWO blonde ladies living at that residence, and one of them was a drug addict...

I have always wondered if the addict's pusher sent someone to make an example of her, and as the addict wasn't home at the time, they offed the wrong blonde.

And I also wonder why the prosecution didn't bring the family dog to court, to see his reaction to OJ.

I used to think the bit in Charlotte's Web about leg sections ("Furthermore, each leg of mine has seven sections — the coxa, the trochanter, the femur, the patella, the tibia, the metatarsus, and the tarsus") was just EBW being whimsical using bone names, but apparently they're actually called that.

Helen S: those are indeed the human (and general) mammalian bone names, in order, going down from the hip -- didn't know they used them in spiders as well! Fascinating bit of comparative anatomy to remember. I'm sure in spiders they were named metaphorically....

Stefan Jones @ 131 I'm sorry. I, too, transferred out of necessity to a QA department that neither knew or valued my experience. When I said, "I can do good things for you; I was the manager of X" they said, "But that was years ago."

My advice is to hang on for a few more months, at least, and see if any opportunities open up. After that--I don't know.

Sorry again.

Teresa #13:

Re: widely-held weirdly-counterfactual beliefs

I keep wondering whether the average person (American, media consumer, Republican, whatever) actually has a model of the world that's more out of synch with reality now than in the past. An alternative is that there used to be one (or at least a smaller number of) main worldview that almost everyone more-or-less believed, whereas now, there are multiple different ones. The result is that it's easy for us (not part of the tea party bubble, but part of some other bubble) to see the crazy bits of their worldview, whereas it would have been harder to do if we all lived in the same bubble.

I'm not sure how to tell these apart. I mean, Obama as a secret socialist Muslim doesn't make much sense, but if it were a common belief in my social circle, I wonder if it would seem so silly. And I wonder how weird and counterfactual the common beliefs of Americans in 1950 or 1970 or 1990 were, relative to now.

I don't know how that relates to the SPs and RPs. Aggrieved parties have always been able to spin up a story that made them out to be the good guys, but I don't know if they're worse than the average in that regard. One other difference is that a lot of what is said in these groups is actually recorded, as opposed to earlier times when it was seldom recorded unless it happened to be in a newspaper article and you happened to see it. (Even if it was recorded somewhere, it used to be hard to find those things and share them around, whereas now it's easy.)

Vicki:

Yep. My impression[1] is that a lot of the time when someone gets prosecuted, the police had a good idea of who was probably guily very early on. (For example, a dead ex-wife and her boyfriend has an obvious suspect.) Police departments that frame people are probably often doing it in those situations--we're already pretty sure this guy is guilty, so let's go ahead and beat a confession out of him, or throw down some drugs and say we found them on him, or whatever.

My wife was an alternate juror a couple years ago, which meant that she sat through the trial, but wasn't required to stick around to vote. She suspected that the guy (accused drug dealer) was guilty, but was also nearly certain that the police had planted the evidence. My guess is that this is relatively common in the big world--most of the time, the cops are probably actually sending a guilty person to jail, but often their evidence isn't very good. (Like coerced confessions or bite-mark evidence or shoe-print matches.) Of course, sometimes, they're sending an innocent person to jail, either knowingly or (probably more common) unknowingly. It would be really interesting to have some idea about what fraction of the time that is the case, and how it varies by race, income, and similar stuff.

[1] If someone knows, please correct me--it's not like I'm any kind of expert on this stuff.

Since it's an open thread – here's something I've been doing in my Copious Spare Time: trying to assemble an ebook collecting the fanzine writings of Vince Clarke, that old-time fan (1948-1960) who came back again (1982-1998) and in the latter period was a friend. Work in progress, to be released soon, or so I hope.

http://ansible.uk/misc/vince.html

HLN: The event I'm speaking at is going to be a daylong continuing education course for psychologists.

It's possible one of the people who argued for making it mandatory for psychologists to torture people may show up (as he's local).

Gonna be, regardless, a long day; about 6 hours of platform time. Gonna have to earn that honorarium.

Lori: One of the things the defense didn't bring up (and I can see lots of reasons not to, but this is the court of public opinion): There had been a couple of other, drug related murders, in the area with similar MO.

albatross: Cops come to decisions pretty quickly. More often than not their first guess is correct, because most crimes aren't tht complicated. The problem is (so my research implies to the point of relative certainty) that once they decide on a culprit they focus the investigation on that person. From there confirmation bias takes effect, other leads are ignored, etc..

At which point the railroading of innocent people can be pretty easy, exacerbated by the faith jurors put in cops, married to the practice they get at speaking in court, and the sympathetic treatment they get from prosecutors.

Their polish, married to the lack of polish of defense witnesses has the effect of, often, making defense testimony seem suspect.

Remember the time Kathryn from Sunnyvale and Brad Templeton used a Beam "telepresence robot" to attend Worldcon in London? And wrote a really good account of the experience?

Well, there's news from the Etiquette Frontier, in the form of Jason O. Gilbert's anguished plea:
Dear Apple: Please do not sell an iPhone to the woman who sent a robot to wait in line for her

My pal Josh Hopkins commented, "We live in the future. This writer wants an actual clerk to tell an actual droid 'we don't serve your kind here.'"

Apple crushed Mr. Gilbert's hopes.
Sydney woman buys new Apple iPhone with robot and avoids the rain

@All. Thanks for the thoughts.

I hate to call it PTSD, but . . . it is, really: When hordes of corporate types from HQ descend on the office and have meetings behind closed doors, I get a sour stomach, low-key panic attacks, sleepless nights. That happened yesterday. Nobody fired, but moved around. Sometimes, like me, into odd positions. But none as odd a fit as mine.

The HR director, who saw how forlorn I've been looking, said to hang around at least to the end of the year because interesting things were happening. So I guess I'll have to learn Windows cloud platform stuff to be able to talk to developers. (And I *do* have cake mixes ready for my usual holiday baking blitz.)

I'm so tired of these shenanigans. Thus the appeal of low key self-employment.

Let's see if I can relax before getting back in the rat wheel on Monday.

tracie @ 107: and I left out the debatables, e.g. whether there was an SF author at the first event. (IIRC, Poul Anderson was at the 2nd; I haven't heard that MZB was at the first.)

Heather Rose Jones @ 116: but do sermons reflect the general zeitgeist, or were they paid to thunder and ignored the other 160+ hours of the week? And you mention sermons as social control (from people who were expected to exert it); ISTM that a major element of outrage is people realizing they are not as in control of the world as they think they're entitled to be.

I'm amused at the comments on Agile; one stable friend really likes it, but I remember thinking it was being crammed down our throats -- a special concern in my group since we'd already had to deal with the lack of properly thought-out design (there was this clash with European privacy rules) and since we were spending a fair amount of time fixing everything from said effects to ancient messes(*) , and would have had to suspend fixing (some of it urgent) to participate in Agile sprints. I was laid off before I had to be involved, and was near enough to retirement that I could walk away; I haven't asked any survivors their reactions.

(*) The oldest screwup that I personally found was ~15 years old (in a ~25-year-old company), although it was hidden for ~90% of that time by another screwup that was harmless until it wasn't. Finding it took weeks of rebuilding, which made me very grateful to the people who had worked over our lame adaptation of an off-the-shelf SCCS until it was usable.

I think Agile is useful for mature products that need regular updates.

The product I've been dropped into is *almost* like that. Closing in on deployment.

What I'm *used* to and was good at was more exploratory development. "Hey, we need to make a local advertising overlay system that is 99.9% reliable. Disks are the weak point. Let's make a journaling file system for a redundant cluster of off the shelf servers!"

And they would. And us QA folks would figure out how to test it and torture it.

Or I'd get dropped into testing a data gathering system for a analytics system. But OK because it was linux based and given that I coudl figure things out. (When I had to explain that system to a contractor it took a wall-sized whiteboard.) The team that made that really want me back.

My old department had lots of patent plaques in offices and cubicles. So far mine is the only one I've seen in the new bullpen; nose to the grindstone to maintain Velocity and keep the line on the Burndown charts pointed downwards doesn't encourage thinking and exploration.

Arrgghhhgaaah. I need to forget about this stuff for a few days.

Stephan Jones @#152:
I know how you feel about hesitating to use terms like PTSD about office scenarios, because how dare we compare our experiences with those of people who suffered or risked physical harm, but your description makes me think office-PTSD may be a real thing. A few years back when I worked in a call centre, I had to triple my meds just to face each day, and still I felt stomach pains every time I got off the subway and headed up to my workplace. The only thing worse than the phone calls was the quiet in between, because it could be interrupted at any moment, and knowing that, I couldn't relax or think.

I only got a brief taste of Agile before I retired, and by then I was more of a business analyst, responsible in part for developing specs for application development. My feeling was that when the rubber met the road, you still needed to have clear goals in mind for the software, senior leadership buy-in, and developers who understood more than just language syntax. In other words, pretty much the same as it was 30 years before, only with more documents.

At one point I acidly suggested my own development methodology - JDTFW. Just Do The Fucking Work.

Jenny @25: A little late, I'm afraid, but I'm so glad not to be the only one who hated the TV version of Brother Cadfael (even though I love Derek Jacobi). I didn't last as long as you did either -- only got about 5 or 10 minutes in, and was deeply annoyed when Hugh Berengar showed up as the idiot cop giving Cadfael a hard time. Hugh is my favorite character in the whole series and turning him into Inspector Lestrade with a blond Prince Valiant haircut ruined the whole thing for me. Your description makes me even gladder that I just blew the rest of it off.

Tehanu @157: I'm just grateful that they never got to An Excellent Mystery. There probably would have been a rape or two, maybe a secret abortion or a nice graphically bloody miscarriage...
(/sarcasm)

What really karks me? Most of the books are laid out scene by scene with the dialogue, atmosphere, scenery, setpieces, foreshadowing, and thrilling drama right fricking there. I guess decent people drive too many of the original subplots. Away with them! There must be more angry suspicious ignoramuses, violently reality-challenged religious people, and just plain jerks!

Oh well. Guess I'll try the radio dramas.

@Tehanu: Another one: Morning Glory the book is a sweet romance with psychological drama and a murder mystery woven into it. Two people who are as down as you can be without being completely out meet by happenstance in a small Southern town on the brink of World War II. Some of the townsfolk are ordinary decent folks, some are justifiably suspicious, a few are asses, and two are outright scumbags. The book was turned into a movie with Christopher Reeve in it, but not even Christopher Reeve could save it. All of LaVyrle Spencer's deftly sketched characters are swept away, replaced by broad redneck stereotypes, and the humor and the cute kids are also done away with. I expected a couple of half-dressed drunken lunkheads to rant about "the Woah of Noth'n Agrayshun" while picking out "Dueling Banjos," it's that bad.

Here's a bit from the beginning of the book: She's poor but has a home and a farm of sorts; he's been on the road a long time and his last meal was green apples and sour buttermilk stolen off a farm. She lets him in and cuts a slice of homemade bread. He watches that one slice curl away from the knife as if there were nothing else in the world, and then he realizes that it's for him. That one scene, where this homely, tired, pregnant widow is quietly cutting bread in her shabby kitchen and this desperate hobo has almost realized that she is fixing to give him a chance to prove his worth, is a beautifully described moment of peace after a couple of chapters setting up the couple's miserable backstories. So of course it's not in the movie.

Stefan Jones @154:

First off, get a new job while we still have a boom on. There's zero reason in this economy for you to stay with a tech job you hate.

Speaking as a consultant to many, many startups, Agile is theoretically useful for two things: (1) as a test-and-customer-response-driven methodology which works well with certain kinds of web and mobile applications, and (2) as a countertendency to the ginormously overplanned "waterfall" development which could otherwise take place. When properly used, Agile involves the extremely useful admissions that any successful application is going to be completely rewritten at least twice, so better to get something out there and get feedback on it as fast as possible.

However, in most real-world cases, "Agile" is a euphemism for "we have no real management, planning, or specifications for anything." My favorite quote:

"We don't have unit tests. We're Agile."

As a consultant, I can roll my eyes at these things. As an employee, that's a sign it's quittin' time.

Thursday's Ask A Manager seems a propos to the discussion about office PTSD.

http://www.askamanager.org/2015/09/tell-us-your-straw-that-broke-the-camels-back-moment-with-your-job.html

My nerdy stand-up comedy routine (18-minute video) includes my observation that if you haven't tried Agile, think of it like polyamory: clear your calendar now, there'll be a lot of meetings. (And other related observations.)

Also, whether one feels comfortable calling it PTSD without a formal diagnosis, it is most definitely strong anxiety symptoms.

I've had some relatively positive experiences with Agile (mostly in the form of Scrum) and some fairly negative experiences. The positive experiences were when it was mostly adopted by the team members, where we got to decide how we wanted to do Agile, and we were free to try making changes if we thought it would improve our work. The negative experiences were when it was externally imposed, and run by a "scrum master" who wasn't really part of the team (and only showed up to conduct looong meetings).

Stefan, I agree with Josh that now would be a good time to find a better job, but I also understand how that suggestion might sound like "over-stressed by your job? why not seek out more stress!" The good news is that you have a job, which alleviates some of the job-hunting pressure, and also means employers view you more positively. If you can convince yourself that you're just exploring what's out there, learning about how other companies do things, maybe that can help reduce the stress.

On the other hand, as it sounds like you're the senior QA person on your team, maybe you can get more involved in planning and running the process, which might give you some leverage to adjust things to feel more humane to you. Or, maybe not, in which case it's back to job hunting.

My employer, ZipRecruiter has openings for at least 3 QA positions (manager, analyst, and software engineer in test), as well as for developers. We're in Santa Monica, but we also have quite a few remote developers. I don't know if the QA positions could be remote, I could ask if you're interested (my email is wyrnqre@nyhzav.pnygrpu.rqh).

Josh @134:

Something I read* about the Norse settlements in Greenland described the settlements as fading away in the Little Ice Age. The author said that yes, some of the people went back to Scandinavia, and some died when the crops failed; but some joined Eskimo groups and adopted that language and culture.

If you’re looking at this from a “Europeans settling the wilderness” or “spreading Christianity” perspective, all three of those outcomes look like failure. If you’re looking at it in terms of whether the settlers left descendants in Greenland, or from the viewpoint of a hypothetical 16th-century Eskimo who could have said that one of their grandparents had been of the farming people, it’s a big difference.

Unfortunately it’s been a while, and I don’t remember things like whether there were (successful or otherwise) attempts at trade when the Norse settlements were doing reasonably well. What I remember is that they carried logs from Newfoundland [Markland] to sell to shipbuilders in Iceland. That’s documented, though the documentation just shows “yes, this happens” and leaves open the question of whether there were a lot more shipments than anyone recorded, or whether it was a very occasional event. We do know that Iceland needed the logs.

*I'm not sure, but it might have been in Fritjof Nansen's Farthest North, a history of Arctic exploration, including mapmaking and navigation, by Europeans over the couple of thousand years ending in the early 20th century, when it was written.

Hey, Sumana! (@162). I've never seen you do your comedy schtick, I'll have to catch it one of these cons.

Tehanu @157: I gave the 1977 radio production of A Morbid Taste for Bones a listen at radio echoes dot com just now. It is not as textured as more recent productions, of course, but it is nicely condensed into 86 minutes, none of the main characters or plotlines has been messed with, and the climactic scene is as eerie as it should be. Also the actor who plays Brother Columbanus is crackerjack at mad scenes. Radio Echoes is an ad-supported site that offers downloads of radio dramas "believed to be in the public domain." I don't see anything hinky there. Sound quality is not always the best, though; I had to use headphones.

Thought of the morning: Phenomenology is as phenomenology does.

Jeremy Leader at #164, if your scrum master conducted looong meetings, they were doing agile wrong.

For those who haven't already heard through other avenues, UK fan D.West died on Friday as a result of cancer.

So, there I am, teaching my class in political theory. As I do. And, because I am doing the unit on Thomas Aquinas, I bring in a little bit of comparative religion, that is, I mention a number of monotheisms and their sacred texts. Then a student asks me 'Why do you know that?' (That being the name of the sacred text of the Sikhs, the Granth.)

To say that I was nonplussed would be putting it mildly. Gail said that I should have asked the student why they didn't.

To those of you you with clear skies, have fun watching the eclipse tonight. #CloudsSuck

Allan Beatty @169: yes, that was abundantly clear! I left the company not too much after that.

Clouds are blocking most views of the eclipse from the East Coast to the Mississippi. Better luck west, I hope.

It's cloud-free here, but I have to walk half a block and stand on a street-corner to be tree-free.

Eclipse times for those in MDT:

Begins: Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 6:11 PM
Maximum: Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 8:47 PM
Ends: Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 11:22 PM

Duration: 5 hours, 11 minutes

@152, 155, 163: Maybe we need a different term?

If there's a general phenomenon of stress flashbacks, where being in a similar situation to when you experienced stress before makes you feel stressed again... then it would make sense that trauma, as an especially intense form of stress, would produce the strongest stress flashbacks (i.e. PTSD), but other forms of stress would still produce something that is recognizably similar (though less severe).

chris #177: Learned response?

I forget the proper terminology for various forms of conditioning, but this seems pretty basic, there has to be a standard term for it.

Me @175:

Amazing what a difference a half-hour can make. Near totality -- of cloud cover where the moon is.

So, I'm back in C-ville. The dual Bat Mitzvah went well, exhausting for everyone, but mostly drama-free. My sister did have house problems (leakage, mold) right before the big weekend (scheduled by Finagle, surely). But she managed to field that, and prevent it from interfering with the festivities (aside from some exposed beams during the final brunch.

Eclipse: I've got partial visibility behind moving clouds.

Socked in here in Columbus, not a glimmer of moonlight to be seen.

It never fails -- when there's something I want to see in the sky, the clouds roll right in.

Eclipse update: The clouds have moved out, and I took GF and her son out to look at it. There's a nice healthy chunk of umbra coverage, but not enough to really dim the moon's overall brightness. The "red" of the blood moon was not evident. We are going to go back out every 15 minutes until the kiddo has to go to bed. It looks like 10pm +/- 10 minutes (EDT) should be good viewing.

Cloudless skies over Portland, but it is still very light out.

I'm going to watch a couple of episodes of "Over the Garden Wall" and then take a walk.

I highly recommend watching a couple of episodes of "Over the Garden Wall," even when an eclipse isn't imminent.

Fragano Ledgister @171:

I'm always tempted to quote Bill Bailey (from an episode of Q.I.) for stuff like that. "Welcome to my world of knowing! The wonderful world of looking up things in books!"

Moon hasn't risen here yet; but we'll try again a little later.

Finally came up -- looked appropriately spooky.

Moon is dark blood-red here with very atmospheric (heh) thin clouds scudding across it periodically.

Totality came a little after dusk and was only satisfactory, but now there's a spectacular view of the moon leaving the shadow.

I went to an Agile users group once and didn't know what they were talking about. Seems like such a thick layer of abstraction over the work that you can't tell what the actual work is.

#189: There's a logic behind it all, and with discipline I think it can work, but . . . yeah, there's this whole BS overhead about Story Points and Velocity and sign-offs on Team Agreements.

Right now I think I've swallowed enough of the Kool-Aid to get by, but I'm faced with not knowing a fracking thing about Microsoft web applications, so I don't have a common vocabulary with the developers. I'm asking my manager to recommend lesson plans so can get a grasp of the basics.

#$*$%!! A few months ago I was working with a bunch of guys from the Advanced Research Center to create a big data collection system. I could understand *them,* and I knew how to turn their "concept ware" into something like a deployable product. Now I'm back to feeling like an idiot.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that I can soft-retire at the end of next year. Let's see if I can make it.

Double-decker cloud cover over the place where the moon should be rising. That's the way it usually goes around here.

I caught a little bit near the end. L.A. had intermittent clouds, too.

#152/155 re "office PTSD": My Job From Hell experience wasn't precisely like that, but some of what's been described here resonates. I was only in said job for 6 months, but it was a horribly emotionally-abusive environment, and it soaked up all my reservoir of "cope" -- to the point where I'd get home and trivial shit (a rude telemarketing call, dinner got scorched) would send me into screaming hysterics because I had nothing left to deal with it. In hindsight, once I finally got out, I realized that I'd probably been less than a month away from a full-fledged nervous breakdown.

Stefan, is there anything else you can do in your life that would restore some of the energy this new position is sucking out of you? Can you adjust to thinking of it as a paycheck, drop it mentally back to the level of "day job," and focus your love and attention and creativity somewhere else instead? That might make the situation more bearable for the amount of time you feel that you're stuck with it.

Tehanu, #157: Heh. One of the things that really stuck in my craw about the BBC Cadfael was that they cast a tall, blond actor to play Hugh, who is repeatedly described as both very short and very dark. (Jacobi doesn't look much like Cadfael either, but I put that down to dramatic necessity and wanting a Damn Good Actor.) But the bit that kicked me completely out of the series was "The Sanctuary Sparrow", where they created an entire subplot out of whole cloth, which added nothing to the story and seriously detracted from parts of it. I can usually deal with things being deleted, but adding inferior crap that wasn't in the book was the last straw.

Steve C., #172: We had a good view of the beginning of it on our way back from FenCon. I got at least one decent picture, which will be up in a day or two. We also got to see the fully-red moon very briefly before the clouds rolled in above the rest area just north of Huntsville, and my partner got a truly spectacular picture which, again, will be up in a day or two. I'll come back and post links when they are.

Lee @ 193 - Looking forward to the shots you've taken. Glad you got a chance to observe it.

It was cloudy today, but most of the clouds had blown off except in the east where it mattered. Couldn't see the moon from near home, so we drove to some nearby hills that have a good east view, found an area with a bunch of cars parked by the road, a few people with tripods, who all said the clouds were too thick near the horizon. About when the moon was supposed to come out of totality, it suddenly appeared just over the clouds! Not a great show, but a reasonable one.

The interesting part for me was when about 3/4 of the shadow was gone, but the moon wasn't the shape of a 3/4 gibbous moon - the earth's shadow on it was backwards :-)

The Bay Area's resident demigod, Karl the Fog, tweeted that "I just ate San Francisco. It tastes like #Supermoon and disappointment."

I went out several times and was rewarded most of them. I recalled Vachel Lindsay's "The Moon is the North Wind's Cookie" seeing the unusual bite out of the underside. The part in shadow was more visible than usual. Slightly different color than its own shadow is.

When it was all gone, I couldn't see it at all, but I suspect that clouds helped with that a little. Later on I saw it fully round, but in a reddish-brownish shadow whose gradations made it look quite spherical. The last time I went out, it was emerging, and the white part was really pushing out the photons. Shadows cast were sharp-edged.

I was inspired to see if I could line up my cell camera with my monocular, but that's much easier during the day when you can see more than one thing. I never succeeded. While I was fiddling with it, the moon became more or less entire.

Inconstant moon!

(Near Rochester, NY, by the way, out in the bedroom suburbs. Stepping around the side of the garage puts me in a substantial shadow that counteracts a goodly amount of light spill.)

Boston had ~99% clear skies (early on, some haze or very thin cloud enough to give some glare around the moon), making very good viewing. (This matches unusually clear weather of the past couple of weeks -- great for viewing and solar generation, not so great for the blackberries we hope will ripen.) I noticed that the dark red-orange was only visible near totality -- otherwise the shadow looked very dark colorless grey -- and suspect this reflects the limitations of the eye (subtle shades disappearing when there's a bright white right next to them).

Can you adjust to thinking of it as a paycheck, drop it mentally back to the level of "day job," and focus your love and attention and creativity somewhere else instead?
I'm going to have to, I guess.

It was interesting, for a decade and a half, having both an interesting job and involving hobbies and interests. But the former is likely gone. It is not going to be easy to forget that.

We had Agile dumped on us in the last year, and yes, it's very Kool-Aid-ish, plus I think we aren't doing it right. But the fundamental problem with us doing Agile is that our customers need enormous quantities of direction from us. I and the other main analyst have come to the same conclusion: really what we should be selling is consulting about the business we serve, not just our software, because much of the time we know their business better than they do. (And that's not counting the couple of customers who let everyone competent go. Some of them pay us to run their system for them, because they can't.)

The adaptiveness of Agile ends up being a problem for us, not a feature. We have to cut the customer off from continually revising things, so we have to rigidly lock down specs fairly early in the game.

Fragano@171: That is the strangest thing said by a student I have ever heard of. Was it said in a challenging way, as in 'How dare you know?', or just inquistively?

Jeff and Bill, my condolences. :(

My experiences with Agile have been few, and fairly laid-back; my little three-dev department does daily 15-minute standup and I've gotten us into doing irregular (every 3-4 weeks) retrospectives to work on improving our process, but our sprints(/iterations) aren't inviolable, we don't track velocity, and our weekly iteration completion goal is 70%.

Upon hearing that I was going to be working in an Agile environment, my father lent me his copy of Scrum and I thought it was reasonably compelling, if a little cultish.

I am curious to hear a little more solid on why Agile is awful/impersonal/grindy, for those who have had negative experiences with it (this is my first programming job and I have been at it since April, you see. Little perspective has I).

I didn't bother looking for the moon, as it was cloudy all evening and kept on being on my drive home in the dark. :(

We only saw the cookie-bite at the end, but got lots of atmospheric glimpses of a big golden moon swimming in artistically torn clouds. The sky cleared overnight, though, and the moon was so bright early this morning that I thought somebody was shining a spotlight off the neighbor's porch when I left for work. Then I got up the steps (the front door is downstairs--I live on a mountainside) and saw the fog rolling in. It's some of the thickest we've had all year.

Jeremy Leader @122: Another view of that spider skeleton, showing the ribs(?!?).

And the rat skeleton...? Last I looked, nose and ears weren't part of the skeletal structure.

Bill Higgins @151: Dear Apple: Please do not sell an iPhone to the woman who sent a robot to wait in line for her

Where is Emily Latella when you need her...?

CHip@198: We woke up the young one to see the eclipse once we saw how clear that view was (and once friends in other places reminded us not to take the clear sky for granted). The response was a sleepily confused, but generally interested.

Fragano@171: The first answer that occurs to me is, "Have you ever just delighted in learning something?", but I'd be afraid of hearing, "No."

(Replying to two comments that made me feel fortunate today.)

Jacque (204): Yep, the rat's ears are another big Oops. I liked that one when I saw it in the store; the ear problem was a fridge moment for me.

Eclipse: Moon was clear for the first fifteen minutes after rising, then hid behind the clouds for the next couple of hours. Finally, at 9:55pmMDT, I decided to have one more try, and was rewarded with a sight that looked almost exactly like this. I did take a pic, but on preview at least, all it showed was a very faint gray crescent. Better than what my neighbor's tablet managed, though.

Stefan Jones @190: I'm faced with not knowing a fracking thing about Microsoft web applications

Are you by chance dealing with ::gag:: SharePoint? If so, I might be able to help, some.

David Harmon @178: I forget the proper terminology for various forms of conditioning, but this seems pretty basic, there has to be a standard term for it.

Well, the one-trial learning that produces the easily triggered flash-back is, in NLP parlance, referred to as an anchor. Can be achieved with both negative and positive experiences.

estelendur @202

Agile is workable if used in its proper context and for the correct type of projects. The problem is that a lot of companies seems to adopt it because it is the new shiny thing in the business (or was 7 years ago or so) and to try to use it to solve problems that just get hidden by it or get worse actually. It was scrum done badly basically - and the next few attempts did not help much.

I've seen it done properly on projects that are clear and know what they are trying to achieve. Then there are the usual kind of projects that I am involved in (these days on the implementation and services side and not on the writing code ones but still), agile basically does not match the needs and ends up a pain. Including a manager that does a daily standup with 60 people for example. Or a project that changed its main requirements 6 times in 8 weeks (no strategy would have helped that one; someone sticking to weird things made it worse).

Welcome to the business and have fun.

209
They kept pushing SharePoint at us, the last couple of years before I retired. It wasn't 'taking', though.
When we asked what made SharePoint so great, we got vague answers along the line of 'try it and you'll love it' - that's the kind of answer that you get in stories where someone's brain has been taken over. No, thanks; if you can't give me actual reasons with actual examples, I'll pass.

I think they were trying to get us to stop using our network virtual disk. (People tended to use it for everything, so the space filled up, when it was intended only for shareable files.)

'try it and you'll love it' - that's the kind of answer that you get in stories where someone's brain has been taken over.

*snerk* Not, um, inaccurate, IME.

213
That was what they kept telling us. But they never could explain why we should use it or what exactly it would do that we couldn't already do.

I am, actually, kind of glad to be out of there. I miss part of the work, some of the people (not all of those I miss are still there), and, of course, the paycheck I was getting. But not the stress I wasn't seeing, and not the idjit lead person I had. (I was hired to do a certain kind of QC work, and idjit lead was making me do a different kind, without the training I needed, and no one was getting that I wasn't doing it as well as expected because I didn't have the training. And lead person couldn't be arsed to provide the manual that everyone else got.)

Something "try it, you'll love it" reminded me of.

I should clarify: "try it and you'll love it" with SP—I've been "trying it" for coming on nine years. I don't, um, "love it." Politely speaking. (It says a lot to me that SP 2013 will be the last version released.)

Idjit lead person sounds like an idjit.

Nancy, #215: Heh. My brain went here instead, but I can see how you got to that one.

After working as a consultant for almost two years, I've come to agree with one of my coworkers: Agile is fantastic for about 5-10% of companies out there. For everyone else, it is a slow rolling disaster.

I have worked at places where it is brilliant and wonderful, but it's hard to implement correctly, and it requires a certain type of environment to fully thrive. When I was doing my most recent round of interviews, I asked a lot of questions about how the interviewing company implemented their Agile process, and several companies failed to make the "I would work here" grade based on their answers. Sad that folks are encountering the bad side of it; that sucks.

216
Not really qualified for that job, based on their prior experience, and generally a paper-pusher more than anything else. (Also was earnestly disliked by their previous workgroup, for reasons that should have gotten said idjit fired.)

SharePoint: Used that on the last project. Miserable.

Also, a god-awful bug tracking / Agile requirement/story/task tracking thing called RTC/RQM. It was slow, obscure, badly laid out.

FWIW, the tools I'm learning about for this new group are better. JIRA for bug and test and task tracking. Confluence for Wiki.

But really, I'm sick and tired of it all. My career is over. I'm getting paid an exorbitant salary to train for a job I'll have for about a year and a half. In this industry, at my age, that's easier than job hunting.

I'm going to get by a day at a time, and enable fantasies of agency and freedom by indulging in the ritual of buying a couple of lottery tickets on Saturday evening.

Sheeeeesh. I forgot to mention. My former manager, the rest of whose team (my former direct co-workers) was dispersed from beneath her during a shake-up on Friday . . . got to create a new position for herself in the product group I'm now in. Engineering director or something.

She got to choose. Agency. Choice. Respect for her skills.

I wonder what that must be like.

Well, you know, if you can keep it from killing your soul, an exorbitant salary is not such a bad thing.

If you have any taste for writing, maybe approach it as research for your next novel...?

MacArthur Fellowships just got announced. Ta-Nehisi Coates got it - well-deserved, and everybody else will have told you about it by tomorrow morning.

But the pleasant surprise was to see Basil Twist as well. Back in 1998 or so, he did an abstract underwater puppet show called "Symphonie Fantastique" in San Francisco that was simply amazing. They had a tank of water about 20 feet long, 4 or 5 feet high, light-show system behind it, puppeteers on top (hidden behind curtains) moving various objects through the water, eponymous music. You could probably create some similar effects with CGI and psychedelics, but they'd both have to be pretty good.

Thanks for all the sympathy for me about my cat, and I'll try not to be back for more of it too soon, though I'd be surprised if the 18-year-old cat lasts more than another year, but she's done pretty well for a stray kitten my wife found in a parking lot.

We've been doing Agile for maybe two years. It's not been a particularly good match for what we do, and we tried to split it up into one set of people working from user stories that require actual code to be written, and another group of people trying to translate user stories about things like network security into user stories about things you'd like to have computers actually do for you, like look at packets and decide whether to allow them in or not. On the other hand, traditional waterfall methodology hasn't done us a whole lot of favors either, so our management's been pretty flexible about treating Agile as a metaphor and letting people hand us jugs of Kool-Aid and have us provide PowerPoints about how someone could take the jugs and apply drinking methodologies to them to generate exciting business opportunities for The Future, but with frequent short Scrum(tm) meetings instead of less frequent presentations to upper management.

What Agile seems to be well-matched at is developing something that has an architecture that looks like a web interface and some business logic and some database backends for a customer who's got fairly unclear specific requirements and needs a bunch of prototypes to understand the problem. For network security / system integration things, that's probably not a bad set of tools to use for designing how the user interfaces for the management system that configures them work, if the vendors of the various components actually provide APIs you can manage them from, even though it won't always do what you need for the actual network parts (e.g. taking each packet, wrapping it in a RESTful system call along with the history of all the other packets with the same source and destination, and handing it to a random server that's not too busy right now but might disappear before it can answer you? Not so efficient.)

Stefan @221:

Wait, a woman employee got to exert agency and choice, while the male employee got rerouted to a position irrelevant to his skills? In the *tech industry*?

Where the Sam Hill do you work?

I know it sucks for you, but you have to appreciate the trends your company is bucking ...

Are there publishers who scavenge for books which are out of print and it's hideously expensive to get a reading copy?

I'd been meaning to ask about The Abomination of Moab-- I'm in the middle of it, and I'm planning to write an overview-- and now I've found out that The Good American Witch is also out of print and expensive. Those two books have probably never been in the same sentence before.

I realize that sometimes there are copyright problems and sometimes there isn't an obvious audience, but I'm curious about whether anyone makes a specialty of checking.

I mostly don't write code. Actually, no, I spend quite a while writing code, but I don't write "features", I write "tooling" (the things that make running "the features" a smoother experience for the people writing them, the people using them and the people kicking the tyres to get the whole kit and kaboodle down the metaphorical Intahrwebz Superhighway.

I find that some elements of Agile are useful, like a regular standup meeting (although 2-3 times a week seems plenty) and the stressing of communication as a general good (see "stand-up", which we have declared means "I am working on ..." and "These are my current blocker").

I can see how those would enhance feature-writing productivity. However, the part of Agile that stresses flexibility and requirements change is something I didn't need telling me, because our production environments seldom stay static for more than a few days.

Nancy, Dover Publications might be a good place to look.

Nancy Lebovitz #227: The Good American Witch <pokes searchbar> Peggy Bacon, 1957? If you want I can look around at work (used-book store) today.

@Josh: Also, a female VP of engineering.

David, thanks. Yes, please look.

Nancy Lebovitz @227: I hope one of the other good suggestions above bears fruit. If not, have you tried interlibrary loan?

I've gotten Abomination of Moab from interlibrary loan. Sometimes I'd like to be able to own the book, and I also like the feeling that it's just plain available to other people as well as to me.

I must be an oddity here. I rather like Agile, even though I'm in one of the more stressful positions in it (Product Owner). We're a big department, with seven scrum teams across two locations, so we're using Scaled Agile Framework (please don't make me call it SAFe).

It helps that we have buy-in all the way up the management chain, so when the dev team says "we can't do that this sprint" management goes "OK". They whine a little sometimes, but they accept that they have to listen to the teams.

We have our choke points, particularly when it comes to strategic technical thinking (too few architects, too few devs willing to take the broad view that architects do) and customer requirements (one person as the channel to our customers is not ideal, but getting her to split the role requires time she's not got).

But what I really like about it in comparison to the other ways I've worked is that if you look at the processes in the light of human interaction management, they fluoresce. What I mean by this is that the role of the scrum master (as we practice it) and the function of the retrospective are to steadily, incrementally work on how the people work together. Space is made for koinopoiesis. I like that.

Annie Y @211: Welcome to the business and have fun.

Thanks. :) My first professional language, actually, is Smalltalk - which is obscure, obscurely delightful, and delightfully obscure. The two reactions I get when people ask what I code in are "What's Smalltalk?" and "People still use that?!" So I am already having fun with that.

Thanks, all, for the replies on Agile.

abi @235: On the topic of making space for koinopoiesis: I went to a meetup on retrospectives and was inspired (~2 months into employment) to get my team to start doing retrospectives. I also noticed that there was a severe divide between Dev and Non-Dev in terms of communicating what we should work on next, and spent this quarter getting a process into place to address that gap (basically, making the other departments jointly in charge of keeping the backlog and passing on the next five most important things to work on). Both of these things seem to be working out well so far! From what I have heard, this would only be possible under fairly atypical management styles. And I am helping, a bit at a time, to heal the (at times jagged) divide between the head of Sales & Marketing and the Dev team.

So that's part of why I have liked my experience so far with Agile-esque management(? possibly the wrong word).

The company I work for has a daily standup meeting in the morning: each person in turn says, "Here's what I worked on yesterday; here's what I plan to do today" and in some cases "here's what's blocking me". That is theoretically supposed to be 15 minutes but in practice nearly always is more like 20. After that we have about 10-20 minutes of discussion, of topics placed on a whiteboard. (I remember the first time I dared to put one up! But nowadays I do it without a qualm.)

There's talk about "iterations" and "sprints" and "story points", but things rarely seem to be set in stone.

Someone above linked to a site about "What was the last straw at your job", and I read some of it and marveled at what a good workplace I seem to have fallen into.

Stefan Jones @ 231

Not that unusual lately... a lot more unusual to see a woman in the high management/under VP positions though (at least in the companies I work with).

Nancy Lebovitz #232: I looked, but alas, we do not seem to have it.

estelendur #236: As you surely know, Smalltalk is also seminal in computer science, especially for graphical interfaces.

David Goldfarb #237: I've been reading that comments thread too. My big mistake at a number of junctures was not recognizing things that should have been the "straw", so that eventually it wasn't the camel that broke, it was me.

#239 ::: David Harmon

Thanks for looking. I wasn't especially expecting you to have a copy, it seems to be a fairly rare book.

Ouch, that book "The Good American Witch", cheapest I can find at first search on bookfinder is £20.97.
Which is related to something that sometime puzzles me, sometimes annoys me - online book pricing. I often see books, say 20 year old fairly niche books, priced at 2 or 3 times what I might be prepared to pay for them, sometimes much more than they were new (e.g. published by an academic press). I appreciate booksellers have to make a living and all that, but the variations in price online are confusing. Some are down to algorithms pricing them, others, not so much.
I mean who is going to buy a hideously expensive niche book? Niche would bring out a few people who might pay a lot, but still.

Then there's the way the same sellers seem to have multiple listings at increasing prices.

Yet by spending time looking through actual physical bookstores and charity shops I can often get decent books at an affordable price, much cheaper than online, even often the same niche/ unusual books, but half the price.

I think my biggest problem is that I'm remembering better times. Really, really good times. Bonusses several times a year just because, departments staffed with lawyers who dangle a bonus in front of you to blather about ideas, shirts and tote bags, sumptuous lunches left in the break room after business meetings. Stock options.* Sabbaticals for cripes sake; I missed out on mine by a year. The mission-spirit of a start-up where peopled worked late because they were building something great and not because their team hadn't fulfilled its quota of Story Points. Beer in the fridges.

It hasn't been like that for over ten years, but even after three acquisitions and layoffs my old product group still had a glimmer of the old times. Patent plaques being handed out; new technology initiatives. They hosted an SCTE standards group meeting today. But I think the last remnants is on the way out; I might have been transferred out so I could still have a job.

I shouldn't be indulging in whiny and nostalgic. I've been incredibly lucky and privileged. I'm glad I only have a year (well, it looks like two) left in the new sweat shop reality.

* You know, if I was able to keep the stock options I lost when Oracle sold out division, I'd be writing about trying to feel needed and useful in my retirement.

guthrie@241: That's because online bookselling has much more liquidity.

Booksellers price to (a) get the most money they can reasonably get out of a given item while (b) not having to store it egregiously long.

Each seller's definition of egregious is different, of course, and some are less motivated to maximize (a) than others.

A physical store will get a limited number of walk-in browsers a week, and if a book doesn't move, they may lower the price until it does.

An online seller can watch how often they sell a given title (or titles like it), pick a nice lucrative point, and wait a month or two to see what happens. Often within that time someone who has quite a LOT of money and REALLY wants the book, will jump at the price and take it. If not, they may gradually lower the price below 'specialized collector' levels.

Online booksellers can also use eBay for research purposes to see what similar things go for when there is a competitive price auction.

abi @ #235:

Based on the fact that the only part we've really adopted is "communication"... :)

Most of the toosl I write are relatively small, call it up to 1-2 person-weeks of "how to do it, implement a rough prototype, polish prototype, get feedback, polish more or throw away". Some tools can go from "idea" to "implemented, submitted and have automatic builds" in half a day.

But, internal tooling and production support are, I gather, quite different from feature development for a large-ish customer base and "the only constant is change" has been true for the 4.75 years I've been here (and, on an unrelated note, today is my last day "here", starting "elsewhere" on Monday).

I like Agile, too. We used it at my last job, which was an environment well-suited to it (a startup). At my current job everything is very, very overplanned from above, such that key improvements we need (I'm on the data science team now), that we requested in mid-September, can't be done until next year, since we're already in the throes of Q4 planning and the things we need weren't budgeted for. I can certainly see scaling problems with Agile for large teams, but there are environments where it works really well.

Bud Webster told me once how he looks online for prices to sell his books at—the prices they've actually sold for. Other vendors, he says, look at the prices that have been asked, regardless of whether they moved at that price or not.

I'm reminded of how the existence of the Overstreet (aka Overprice) catalog seems to go along with back issues invariably ratcheting up in price every year. I can't speak to causality, but the books document the one-way trend. When I was managing a comic store, I was sure the insanity couldn't last, and it was going to crash soon. That was in '76. Some day, if I live long enough, I'll shake my wizened finger and say, "See? SEE?"

Elliott Mason #243: not having to store it egregiously long. Each seller's definition of egregious is different...

No kidding -- my default test is whether the book has been on our shelves for 10 years. Given weeding is uneven, I've seen books marked from the 70's (the store's "only" been here for 41 years).

HLN: Local woman hunts in vain for canned pumpkin at local supermarket, in the process passing display of Pumpkin Spice Everything several times. "I kind of like some of the pumpkin spice* things," she said. "But this is ridiculous. I just want to make pumpkin bread."

*Cinnamon-ginger-nutmeg-and-maybe-cloves. What's not to like?

While I was getting ready to go to work last Sunday morning, I heard an interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno (and Father George Coyne) on NPR's program On Being.

I knew it would be of interest here, but I was concerned with getting out the door (and it would be considered inappropriate to post from work computers), and I figured someone else would post about it.

I haven't seen anything, so here is a link to the archived episode: Asteroids, Stars, and the Love of God.

Nancy @227

If you have a rare-ish book from interlibrary loan and you want to own a copy, find a secluded copy machine, lay the book down page by page, and pump in money until you have a copy. Mentally apologize to the copyright owner.

That's what I did for the obscure Spanish novel I wrote my master's thesis on. Plus, I could write on my copy. I still have my copy somewhere.

This post is not intended to advise anyone to break the law, of course.

#246 ::: Kip W

How do you find the prices books actually sell for?

Mary Aileen @111: Target just flunked basic biology. Someone needs to tell them that spiders don't have bones.

I saw those recently at a thrift store in the Savers chain (not recycled — it seems thrift stores offer a lot of new stuff for Halloween).

It reminded me of a story: Art Linkletter used to have a segment on his TV show called 'Kids Say The Darndest Things' where he interviewed young children — many of best bits got recycled into books. In the intro to one of those books, Linkletter says he originally started the tradition on his radio show, and it had been inspired by an interview with his young son.

In that interview, his son had talked about having a spider. He said he'd put the spider in a box with a butterfly, and when he looked in the box the next day, the spider had eaten the butterfly.

"How do you know the spider ate the butterfly?"

"Because when I looked in the box, there was nothing left but butterfly bones."

David Harmon @239: Actually I am unfamiliar with the significance of Smalltalk to graphical interfaces in particular! Would you like to elaborate?

I haven't looked at the thread yet, but while I'm not sure what the straw was I can identify the moment at which I realized the camel's back was, in fact, broken: the moment when I was vividly fantasizing about performing self-harm at my boss in the hopes that she would realize her employees were being hurt and it was her fault and she should stop. Since that wasn't going to happen, I kicked up the job-hunting to an intensity that actually got me a new one.

Stefan Jones @242: That sounds like a great workplace. I am sorry it has gone.

Brenda Kalt @250: My university had a scanner that one could easily use for an entire book; since it was in the library, they assumed anyone using it was a student or faculty member and had legitimate reasons. I once scanned two entire books. They were by an anarchist who makes sure his books are on "the free sites", so I suspect he would not mind if he knew. I miss that scanner, goshdarnit.

Rob Rusick #252: For a young kid, I'd consider "butterfly bones" a decent summation of shell scraps and whatever.

Mary Aileen @248 "Local woman hunts in vain for canned pumpkin at local supermarket..."

It should be in the canned vegetables section. If it's not there, use the canned squash.

Brenda Kalt @250 to Nancy @227 "If you have a rare-ish book from interlibrary loan and you want to own a copy, find a secluded copy machine, lay the book down page by page, and pump in money until you have a copy. Mentally apologize to the copyright owner."

The book I did that with was The Pedant and the Shuffly. Except... I found six other people who wanted a copy, collected $2.00 from each of them (The pricetag on the book was $1.95.), and sent John Bellairs a check for $13.65.

Pfusand (255): Canned vegetables was the first* place I checked. No canned squash, either.

*No, I lie. I passed by the baking stuff on the way to the canned vegetable aisle, so I looked there first. (In the run-up to Thanksgiving, there is often canned pumpkin near the evaporated milk. But not now.)

Possibly of interest: A lot of canned pumpkin includes squash.

David Harmon @ 36:

Wow, that's a neat-looking game. I'm always fascinated by the sorts of things that people make games of, and good ones at that.

Jenny Islander @ 60:

The word you're looking for is eruv. I'd never even thought about that at an event like the SCA has, but it makes complete sense.

CHip @ 99:

would people in the past have lived the sort of semi-perpetual outrage that we see now, given the same stimuli? Huck Finn's father is a good example of unthinking outrage from over a century ago, but he was a social extreme. Or has such outrage gradually seeped into mainstream culture? (e.g., is it a habit the current generations picked up in their youth?) Or is it a reflection of increased leisure, such that people have more time to fritter away on stack-blowing?

I wouldn't call it leisure time, but certainly the talk shows and long commutes that Teresa mentioned are a part of it. So is having waiting room televisions tuned to a cable news channel. Still, we can go back to Hearst inflaming people's desire to go to war with Spain in the 1890s because it would sell more newspapers, and I don't think people had more leisure time then.

Whether or not Huck Finn's father was a social extreme, he was still recognizable as a part of society, and openly said things that many people would have at least thought.

What's been itching at the back of my brain for the last few days is that what's really new about the issue of ignoring reality and hating people outside their self-selected community is that white people have started doing it to other white people in the same country.

abi @ 235:

I don't think you're an oddity for liking Agile. I'm not in software development (although I'd sort of like to be), but I do try to keep an eye on the field. My impression is that, as you point out, with good human interaction and good management, it works quite well for many people and many projects. When it's buzzword seasoning sprinkled on top of an existing structure because some manager thought it was pixie dust, not so much.

abi @235: if you look at the processes in the light of human interaction management, they fluoresce.

This looks interesting. Expand, please?

KeithS@258: what's really new…is that white people have started doing it to other white people in the same country.

I'm having trouble reconciling that idea with the history of religious conflict, even just within the U.S.

abi@235: Like Jacque, I'd be interested in more about this. I've so far never been in Agile shop—nor, as far as I can remember, in any place that used a named methodology.

(In an unrelated point (I assume), it just occurred to me that, contrary to Josh Berkus@226, all or nearly all of the paid programming work in my career has been for organizations headed by women. Huh.)

Nancy Lebovitz ,

I have "The Good American Witch" in one of my boxes (long story about me catching up on children books I had never read, buying way too many of them and then not reading all of them - it's a pattern for me). I am not sure that I will be able to look through the boxes this weekend and locate it (insert some grumbling about weekend work) but I will be happy to send it to you when I get around to it (and probably read it before that - I do not remember reading it). It may not be in the best of shapes (I do not really remember - can let you know when I find it) but if you want it... :)

My first Internal Server Error! Trying to shake it loose now...

Mary Aileen: If you haven't already, check the baking isle. See also: "seasonal."

My theory on Agile is pretty much like Bill Stewart's @225. And we've rather beat on it so that we probably aren't doing it "right", but it doesn't get in the way of doing what needs to be done in our business too much. But it doesn't really fit what we do that well, and it obviously got dropped on us as the latest industry fad. The one time it "worked" (people developed a new feature out in a completely wrongheaded direction, which was caught at the demo) it was treated as a failure.

Pfusand @255: It should be in the canned vegetables section.

One would think, wouldn't one? But that's not where my grocery store keeps it.

I saw canned pumpkin in the market last weekend. Near the evaporated milk, and with the canned pie fillings. (YMMV.)

Huh. I just remembered. I started seeing Christmas decorations going up in the last week of August (!?) in my groc store. When the shelf-top display went up with the ginormous tree-bulbs, I was moved to write a nasty-gram.

Blessed Ghu, it seemes to have worked! I haven't noticed them the last couple of times I've been there.

Nancy Lebovitz @251: if copies have sold on eBay, it's possible to find what they sold for in the Advanced Search menu (just check "Sold items"). If you're just looking at Bookfinder or ABE, it's not possible to tell.

My grocery store always has canned pumpkin, including some organic ones. It's either with the baking supplies, or with the canned fruits, in most stores I've checked.

Jacque (263)/P J Evans (266): Yep, checked the baking aisle. Even took a good, hard look at the Pumpkin Spice Everything display.

Tom Whitmore (268): I did look at the canned fruits in passing, but I could have missed it. In the past, it's always been either with the canned vegetables or with the evaporated milk. Or with the big "everything you need for Thanksgiving dinner next week" display, but it's too early for that in the US.

Annie Y, thank you very much. I'll cover postage.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 270

As long as you are not in Australia or something (and even then, it won't be such a problem really), don't worry about it :) Will post back when I pull it out. I see an email on the page you have linked to your name - is that a good email to drop you a note for the address when I am ready to send it?

Annie, thanks. That email is good.

Nancy, I don't recall whether the conversation I had (over a decade ago) went into that detail. Tom Whitmore's answer is a good one, though whether it's what Bud would have said, I don't know.

Jacque @267: I was in my local Costco last weekend, and they have their Christmas section set up already, plus various holiday goodies scattered around the store.

Mary Aileen @248: I always struggle to remember where my local grocery store stocks the canned pumpkin (even after shopping there for close to 30 years) since I only buy it once a year. The only thought I have that hasn't already been suggested is if they have a seasonal goods area. My store has part of one aisle where they stock things related to upcoming holidays. They're probably still on Halloween at this point, but if your store has something like that it might be worth checking.

Jon (274): The seasonal aisle is a good thought, although all I noticed in that regard was lot of Halloween candy plus the Pumpkin Spice Everything display.

This discussion is reminding me of abi's long, chewy thread about The Sugar Problem a couple of years ago.

Here, the canned pumpkin is usually in the baking aisle with the other pie fillings. Most of the stores I shop at put the pie fillings on the bottom-most shelf in the display.

Lori Coulson @#276, that's exactly where my supermarket puts it.

Regarding canned pumpkin: If I'm not being Captain Obvious here, why not ask the Customer Service desk (or one of the employees) where it is?

I used to regularly buy canned pumpkin for use in making a homemade cat food mix. It was always in the baking/pie-making section, on the bottom shelf, along side canned butternut squash and canned pumpkin pie mix (with the sugar and spices already added).

And one day, there was no regular pumpkin there. They were all out and I guess weren't in a hurry to restock, because there was still plenty of pumpkin pie mix, and anyone making a pie should be just fine with that, right? And there's no other reason to buy canned pumpkin, right?

So this is a thing that sometimes happens.

David Harmon (278): why not ask the Customer Service desk (or one of the employees) where it is?

Because I didn't think of it. I should have. That's how I finally found the wheat germ; my family uses it for baking, so I was looking by the flour. Turns out it's in the cereal aisle.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little (279): No pumpkin pie filling this week, either. Not that I would use that; it tastes all wrong. Besides, I want to make pumpkin bread right now, not pie.

KeithS @ 258: Personally I think this discussion is mistaking stuff that popular history books politely gloss over, and stuff we'd rather forget from our own lifetimes, for "didn't happen".

For example, whatever you think of the Mormons as a religion, it's worth looking at the history of how they got run out of Missouri, and then out of Illinois by violent mobs, which is why they ended up moving the entire sect to Utah. Or look at the American Party of the 1850s, aka "Know Nothing" party. That's just off the top of my head.

From what I read a long time ago, the kind of general public bile and WTF in our current election cycle doesn't even approach the level that was common in US elections in the 1800s.

Too far back? I understand JFK was initially considered an unelectable candidate because of the level of unreasoning grass-roots feeling against Catholics. How about the roots of George Wallace's political career? Chicago '68? How about the people in 1970 who were loudly saying "they should have shot more kids at Kent State", while around the same time some leftist radicals were calling for people to go out and jump-start the imminent revolution by shooting some cops? Guys getting beat up for having long hair? Teenagers' tackle ball game being called "Smear the Queer"? The '60s and '70s were pretty damn rancorous. (I'm not really sure if the '80s were less so, or if I just noticed it less.)

The current level of discourse is pretty crappy, but I think it's also being juxtaposed with a view of the past through rose-colored glasses.

Realized, today:

I turn 54 on Saturday.

Tuesday is my 18th service year anniversary.

Meaning I've had more or less the same job for a third of my life.

* * *
I used to scoop up dented or past-the-holidays-sale cans of pumpkin puree.

For helping with canine digestive issues. Not quite a cure-all but close to it.

Now I miss my dog again.

dotless ı @ 260 and Clifton @ 281:

There's some interesting stuff relating to who was and wasn't considered white in the US, too. For a long time, Irish weren't, and, I believe, Italians weren't either. Strange to think that now.

You're right, and I'm wrong about my last claim there. Well, that's what I get for my mind going to mush during my long commute. I'm glad to be wrong, I think.

And how I could forget about the Know Nothings, I don't know. I swear I paid attention in my good history classes. (Owing to my schooling situation, I missed out on most of the American Propaganda Disguised as History classes, for which I am grateful.)

David Harmon @ 278:

Back when City of Heroes was a thing, I heard about a character called Captain Obvious. He tended to announce things like, "Ouch, that hurt," or, when face-down in the sewers, something like, "This tastes yucky." I wish I'd seen him for real, because he sounded fantastic.

Regarding the "Owl doing laundry" particle:

I don't know either, but then I never thought doing laundry was a real hoot.

Jon @274
Costco supplies stock to a lot of small retailers so they need to front run the seasonal stuff so that Costco's business customers will have time to set up their displays and sell things to the eventual retail customers.

They really do sit in the wholesale slot in the supply chain for some purposes. The timing works differently.

Very tentative theory-- it's not that politics has become unusually hostile lately, it's that we're contrasting the present with a relatively polite and/or apathetic era, maybe from the sixties to the nineties.

It really does seem to me that Americans didn't used to lose friendships over party affiliation. There didn't used to be advice on how to endure being around relatives whose politics you couldn't stand.

Nancy Lebovitz #285: I suspect you're thinking of the artificially-regressed period from the end of WW2 running into the fifties of the late forties and fifties -- after WW2 let the women have a taste of working in factories and managing households, there was an actual propaganda campaign to get them "back in their place". Likewise for blacks, though the GI Bill was something of a spoiler for that. Until, of course, the lid started to blow off in the late fifties....

And I've heard occasional mentions of politics dividing families pretty far back. (Not to mention the Civil War!)

PS: Also, things got pretty nasty even during the Reagan era, let alone afterwards.

I don't pretend to know what the lack of canned pumpkin in a particular store might be caused by, but I do know that, in past years, if there was a particularly bad harvest where the majority of the squash was grown, the canned stuff can be hard to come by. (What we call pumpkin is a squash, and almost all canned "pumpkin" is actually a variety of Cucurbita moschata, frequently something like the Butternut squash.) It's really easy to roast and mash your own (and freeze what you don't immediately want to use), but suboptimal if you want to bake now.

Nancy, #285: a relatively polite and/or apathetic era, maybe from the sixties to the nineties

I honestly don't see where you're getting that.

Maybe people didn't fight over party affiliation directly, but there were definitely friendships lost and families split (up to and including disowning children) over whether or not you supported the Vietnam War.

What I think has made the largest difference is media capture. Faux News is the worst offender, but there's a whole media industry now that makes its money off encouraging people to hate each other.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 285

Or maybe with internet, FB and Twitter (and all similar things) it became a lot easier to see some of these things - and for people that are prone to it, to get worked up a lot easier and find easy ways to keep hating.

Lee:

This may be my fuzzy memories of childhood, but I have the sense that in (say) 1970, there was more-or-less one US mainstream media picture of the world, driven by the three big TV networks, the big radio networks, and the big city newspapers (especially the New York Times and Washington Post), and by the two big political parties.

My impression is that this picture was often propaganda or other bullshit, sometimes more-or-less crazy, but also more-or-less unified. And it seems to me that cable news shows and talk radio, and later Fox News and related stuff, have served to create an alternative media bubble, separate from that of the NBC/CBS/ABC/Washington Post/New York Times consensus. That alternative bubble is often bullshit and sometimes crazy, and looks even worse than the mainstream media bubble in most ways. But the thing that makes it visibly bad is that it's also very *different* from the mainstream bubble.

This is where I suspect there's something interesting happening: It's commonplace for the media bubble inside a country to give you a skewed picture of the world, with lots of blind spots and things nobody mentions. (For an entertaining example of this right now, look at the US media coverage of the Russians' bombings in Syria vs. US bombings in Syria.)

What I think is not so common (at least in my lifetime in the US) is multiple conflicting bubbles, with substantial numbers of people living in different bubbles whose pictures of reality are often wildly incompatible. This makes it harder for people to resolve their differences or make common cause on any shared goals, because they start out saying things that sound crazy to each other. I think this effect is made worse by the tendency of these bubbles to come up with terminology and throwaway references and such that serve as group membership markers, and thus further divide the two bubbles' members.

I mean, it's a big problem that most voters have a picture of the world that's incompatible with reality. But it's an even bigger problem that large groups of voters have *contradictory* broken pictures of reality.

This Pew Report talks about some of the political polarization of media. There's a lot of detail there, but one big difference between conservatives and liberals in their survey data really stood out: Liberals have a pretty wide range of different media sources that are their primary ones--NPR, CNN, PBS, etc. Conservatives have one really dominant media source--Fox. That means that Fox is in a much better position than (say) CNN or NPR to change their viewers' pictures of the world, say by deciding that some particular story deserves to be shouted from the housetops, or that some particular question needs to be asked over and over[1]. By doing that, Fox can probably get a critical mass of conservative viewers all reading off the same page. By contrast, if NPR tries the same thing, it only gets 15% or so of liberal viewers. It's much harder for NPR (or any other source) to directly decide what liberal listeners will think is a big issue, than for Fox to directly decide what conservative viewers will think is a big issue.

[1] I recall being on vacation a couple years ago when the underage immigrant crisis was in the headlines, and being stuck in a hotel lobby with Fox running for a couple hours. They managed to hit the "Why doesn't Obama visit the border?" question, as far as I could tell, every fifteen minutes.

The Toxoplasma of Rage is a wonderful SSC post that talks about how a lot of our idea-ecosystem (including both media sites and people on social media) are becoming optimized for outrage, because that's how they become more successful.

Political movements and media sources have used outrage to drive their success for a very long time. But two things that may be different now are:

a. There are potentially an enormous number of sites and people looking for attention, clicks, audience, etc., which can be gotten more efficiently through outrage than in any other way.

b. They can evolve *very* quickly in the current environment.

Area retiree is disgusted to hear of another gunman going wild in a public place. Watching a few videos found from Googling "how to survive an active shooter" does not help feelings much, but is recommended. Retiree wonders if this might be a good time for one of those emergency preparedness threads, dealing with this sort of occurrence. (If, in fact, one was not already done some years back.)

My new work gig means not having Twitter up on my work station. I didn't know about the shooting -- way south of me -- until my lunch break.

Local radio news is all over it of course.

I'm so sick of this stuff.

Ugh, I looked at the screen shots of people egging the shooter on. I don't know if he was specifically an MRA type, but one of those encouraging was, because they suggested he target a girls' school, "which is safer because there are no beta males throwing theirself for their rescue."

I just. I'm furious. I can't tell which is worse, people with this much hate or people who just don't care and it's all a big joke to them.

KeithS @ 258: I see several other people have raised the first objections (e.g., treatment of any new strain of immigrants and generations of their descendants).

re Agile: with good human interaction and good management, it works quite well for many people and many projects; I suspect \anything/ can work given those conditions, and that little or nothing (existing -- let's not ask for clue-by-fours) can fix their absence.

albatross @ 291: (For an entertaining example of this right now, look at the US media coverage of the Russians' bombings in Syria vs. US bombings in Syria.) Expand, please? I see the BBC is also remarking on the Russian bombing of Assad-styled "terrorists".

@ 294: "Toxoplasma" was interesting for a bit, but I wonder about the claim of the effectiveness of outrage; how often does it move people rather than just getting eyeballs for ads? (The author suggests this further down.) The author notes that support for police body cameras was already high before Ferguson blew up; did the blowup move more operators of civil police to think about body cams?
      OTOH, the Moloch metaphor sounds eerily accurate; maybe the reason we don't hear from star-faring species is that their own tech gives too much growth room to chaos.

Raph Koster's Timeline of Online World Development. I noticed at least one unexpected name, providing a few quotes starting in the 1973 entry.

David Harmon @298 -- just made a correction there about Tolkien first being published in the US (1955, not 1966 -- and the Ace pbs were 1965, even). Surprised nobody's caught that one before.

David Harmon @298: That's a fascinating and very detailed timeline, with some odd lacunae. The quotes you mention probably come from "Oddly, a paper written by a pair of Jesuit astronomers." (in the credits at the bottom of the page)

I would argue that he should have included H.G. Wells' "Little Wars" of 1913 (possibly the first published manual for table-top wargaming).

He mentions Rogue in passing, but don't mention when it was developed (I remember it being very dominant on my school's VAXen in the very early 80s, but don't know anything else).

He says Worlds was founded in Seattle, and developed WorldsChat. In reality, WorldsChat was developed at KnowledgeAdventure in Southern California, around 1994, then spun off into its own company, Worlds, which moved to San Francisco and also had people in Seattle (and elsewhere). They say AlphaWorlds was a successor product to WorldsChat, which isn't quite correct; the two were developed in parallel with very different design goals (though they both used the same underlying 3D renderer). AlphaWorld was oriented towards people being able to build out their own spaces, but had some performance problems with dynamic content downloading on low-memory systems or slow modems as a result; WorldsChat was designed for higher performance, but only in a pre-designed environment (the content was all delivered ahead of time, either on a CD or in one big download&install). Worlds also made several abortive attempts to build MOORPGs based on the WorldsChat engine; none ever saw the light of day. Worlds went under around 1997, then the technology was bought and the company was re-launched around 2000, with a plan to create 3D multi-user environments for various popular musicians. I know Hanson World and Bowie World both reached public view. I've heard that the WorldsChat servers are still running somewhere, though there are very few regular users.

Angiportus @294:

Here's the thread:

Active Shooter

Tom Whitmore #299, Jeremy Leader #300: I suspect the lacunae represent the "stone soup" character of his contributors, and/or limited attention to the list.

My own comments: As of '84-85 (my freshman year), nethack had shown up and was competing with rogue. And if he's tracking group chats, Ascii Express was a dialup chat in the early 80's, running off and mostly accessed from Apple IIs. Some of the chat hosts had hacked their machines to handle up to 10 modems!

David Harmon @298: Philip Sandifer has posited (in his wonderful Tardis Eruditorum deep dive critical blog) that Terry Nation accidentally hit upon the ideal plot structure for a video game in 1964 when he wrote the Keys of Marinus.

It's not nearly as successful as a television story, but for us much later re-viewers thinking of it that way adds some points of interest.

Darnit I munged that link. It should go here instead of to nowhere.

I've long thought of Budrys's "Rogue Moon" as a story that is practically a template for video games, except for the fact that it's got an end.

I once drew a flyer for a comic shop that sold video games. My representation of a game cartridge had a cartoon picture on it of a little guy rolling a huge boulder up a hill.

Rob Hansen @1: PigGate reminds me of a Smothers Brothers skit, part of a WW1 arc, in which a British officer is interviewing a private who has just been hauled before him for kissing a pig.

"Kissing a pig? … At teatime? [pause] It's just not done!"

"I married the blooming pig, sir."

"You can't marry the pig! … She's mine."

David Harmon @302, I doubt he's following chat software development per se, or surely he wouldn't have ignored ddials (which were very big in the early-mid 1980s). It looks to me like he's mostly focused on game-related stuff. (Granted, many a trivia game was played on ddials...)

Has anyone here seen "The Martian" movie yet?

No spoilers, I promise.

I splurged and went to the 3D* version. Solo. Late on a work night when I really needed the sleep.

Ridley Scott understands the 3D media well. The whole movie was basically one big money shot^. I'm a very visual person, and this movie almost overwhelmed me it was so pretty and sooooo big. So much so, when I go back to the theater with my friends (who chose not to go without sleep), I will happily go the 2D route.

Having read the book, I figured it would translate well to the silver screen. I was right. Drew Goddard, the screenwriter, and Scott are obvious in their appreciation of science geeks and really got behind the "Love Letter to Science" theme. (In interviews, that's how Ridley Scott described the book and screenplay.) The movie was very faithful to the book. I will note that a good bit of the stuff that got cut from movie was used in the promotional stuff. The book stuff that didn't get used at all I didn't really miss because book story mechanics are very different from movie story mechanics. There was some very Hollywood bits added, but not very many, and they worked well.

Goddard did a great job of taking the geekery-heavy plot and making it work for the non-geeks while not alienating the geeks. The geek-culture in jokes were wonderful.

I've been reading reviews from mainstream media about the movie. Everyone of them, so far, says "It's good... and funny. I didn't expect the funny." The geek-stream media reviews I've seen basically say, "It's good, but they cut out too much of the science geekery."

Me, I think it's a good "geekery for beginners" movie. I can see why NASA was a wholehearted supporter of the movie. For them, it's a 2 hour and 21 minute recruiting ad for science and exploration.

===========
* Which turned out to be a good choice. I normally hate and/or are disappointed by 3D movies. I don't like having stuff thrown at me. A lot of the early users of the media seemed to favor expanding into the theater rather than making the viewer fall into it. It turned me off of 3D movies really quickly.

^ I find myself paying attention to how the visual elements work during a movie. Every 3D film I saw before abandoning the category, didn't shoot the action to take advantage of stuff like depth of field. ("Up" was the first movie I saw that did that.) Even the interior shots of "The Martian" gave the impression of depth. It worked to give the claustrophobic bits more impact.

Victoria (308): The (mainstream) reviewer in Newsday thought that the science stuff was really well done but complained that the movie had no plot as such.

310
The reviewer at SFGate thought all the MacGyvering was great, but that it slowed when they went to the government/scientist part. (And didn't like the music.)

Mary Aileen @309, I guess "Cast Away" didn't have a plot, either. Funny that it had two Oscar nominations, one for Tom Hanks, and that it won a Golden Globe...

PJ Evans @310, fair's fair; Watley didn't like the music, either...

(Hoping to see the movie this Sunday.)

David Harmon @ #302:

QZ-KOM was a dial-up "BBS" (the subtle differences between a KOM/COM and a BBS are numerous and subtle, it's all about feel, and to some extent threaded comments) that started in 1978, spawning multiple derivatives (and a company, KomUnity Software, who developed PortaCOM as a commercial product).

PJ Evans @310: I've heard a lot of reviews of the book that wish all the NASA stuff was cut, too.

I don't get that. I really like those parts.

David Harmon@302: My memory is that "Hack" was around in '85 but it hadn't yet become "NetHack". I'm not 100% certain about this, but I remember noticing the name difference sometime later.

Speaking of "stone soup", I had a a "con vs. catalyst" perspective shift yesterday. I heard someone refer to "stone soup" with an entirely positive connotation, implying that everyone would put a little bit in to make something big to share. I realized that the notion that had stuck with me from childhood, perhaps based on the first versions of the story I heard, focused entirely on the deception—the provider of the stone as a (perhaps admirable) con artist—so I found the reference momentarily startling. It was a common cultural reference that had exactly the wrong meaning to me. (I see that this difference was briefly mentioned here a couple of years ago.)

P J Evans @ 310 and Mary Aileen @ #309

This is something that does not surprise me at all. I spent a lot of years participating in work shops and critique groups both in college while pursuing my degree and afterwards while writing for fun and profit. (At my Day Job, I have to write to meet expectations or needs. So judging the audience is a critical thing.)

Over time, I've developed a habit of reviewing the reviewers' reviews. Because lots and lots of workshopping taught me that everyone has their biases and expectations. Every single reviewer I've read/watched so far, puts their expectations in their review. (Along with a full plot synopsis.) As a result, the stronger the expectations the worse the review when one or more expectation is not met.

Lois McMaster Bujold wrote/gave an excellent speech about readers'/viewers' expectations If you want to see a real life version of this in action, (as a preserved narrative) go to Amazon and read the readers comments on "The Sharing Knife: Beguilement". She made a lot of her hardcore fanbase very angry when she didn't stay true to their preferred genre.

So I went and read your examples. (I hadn't seen them yet, since I have a pool of reviewers I prefer plus watching whatever clips a search on YouTube threw up for the talking head-bits.)

There's an expectation gap, for lack of a better term, between the author/movie producer and the audience. I'm willing to bet that if I went and looked at Rafer Guzman's past movie reviews, that he favors plot and action over other kinds of movies. Mick LaSalle prefers standard space operas. Both reviewers seem to need to have an active antagonist to make a movie work -- someone to hate or strive against. They like predictable plot devices.

Both miss the fact that the whole story is a man vs nature story in a setting where no one is out of touch or out of range for very long -- even over incredible distances.

The trailers made it abundantly clear that the movie was about a rescue mission. To "win" against the "shit happens so deal with it" plot, The Survivor has to fight to survive and the The Rescuers have to work hard to retrieve The Survivor. All of the "political and NASA boring bits" are actually vital to the story that was being told, not the movie those reviewers wanted to see.

I didn't think their "draggy, boring bits" were draggy at all. I found them to be some of the funniest parts of the movie -- but then they were all about the coping mechanisms of intelligent and capable people who felt helpless and overwhelmed by the task at hand. I like character-driven feely stuff as well as a good action flick, so my expectation gap is/was a lot smaller than theirs.

albatross @ 291: "What I think is not so common (at least in my lifetime in the US) is multiple conflicting bubbles, with substantial numbers of people living in different bubbles whose pictures of reality are often wildly incompatible."

I agree, though I think another unusual characteristic of the current moment is a high, albeit highly selective, awareness of those other, wildly incompatible bubbles. Insofar as there were such bubbles in the 70s (and there were: the John Birch Society has been around for a long time, as have the Wobblies) their bubbles were relatively invisible from the outside. Maybe there was a bar, or a club, or a living room where there was a radically different consensus reality, but unless you somehow got access to that physical space (or accidentally subscribed to their newsletter) you could easily go years without hearing a word they said.

The internet has changed that dramatically. It's another aspect of the "randos wandering into your living room" problem of the internet: sometimes we're the randos, wandering to the living rooms of people inhabiting very different bubbles. We're suddenly in the direct presence of all those strange, hothouse arguments that exist there, full of non-sequitur logics that reach the Right conclusion and therefore go unchallenged. Before, we mostly saw the relatively polished, moderate words of their professional representatives. Now we can peer, at will, into the darkest recesses of Stromfornt or numberChan.

And then that too becomes part of how the bubbles sustain themselves: there are, on both sides of any conflict you care to name, individuals who take it as their purpose to dig through their opponent's communications in search of outrageous claims to carry back and share with their fellow travelers. It's equally characteristic of Fox News and the Daily Show, of GGers and SJWs. "Truly," we all think, "the other side is populated entirely of radicals and monsters! Their extremity surely exceeds my own."

For those who have seen the Martian: we're planning on taking my (science-interested, space-interested) ten year old to it this evening. Does anyone have any warning flags to throw on this idea? I'm not worried about bad language, there's nothing in the book that I think would upset her, and she's capable of sitting through all of the Hobbit movies without a complaint to the length, so I think we're good. But if someone here does have a warning, I'd like to know.

AKICIML: Does anyone know if the Vorkosigan books have been translated into French? And if so, how I may get my hands on them? (The versions on Amazon.fr are in English, so far as I can tell.)

dotless ı @314:

Thank you for the link back to that post. Rereading it, I was struck by this passage:

And although I’m sure the Conclave is intending to vote for the Pope who will make us all our best selves, I don’t think they’re the right electorate to identify him. I think they, and the entire hierarchy, have forgotten (or never knew) what it is to be a Catholic in the world. I don’t think they will elect a Pope who will make us our best selves (or them their best selves), and when he does not, I think they will continue to blame everyone but themselves. [...] I wish it were not so. I’d love a Pope who renewed the church, and turned us from an engine of politics and condemnation to one of love and healing.

I'm astonished how close we've come to that, particularly given the electorate and the candidate list.

Carrie SS @318: apparently yes! French Wikipedia mentions a set of French editions published by J'ai Lu and the entries for individual works have ISBNs listed, which are searchable on Abebooks. E.g. the first omnibus (Cordelia's Honour, I think.)

Re previous: no spam - forgot to normalise my nym. Apologies.

And totally doesn't mind the occasional whoopsie. It's a reminder that our community cares so much about our common home.

Craft (Alchemy): I'm pretty sure that's the version I saw on Amazon.fr, which has the language listed as "anglais". Though I admit it seems odd that they'd translate the titles and nothing else.

dotless ı #314: The thing is, even the original story wasn't completely a "con", in that the resulting soup was shared among the village. The "trick" there was convincing a bunch of folks (who were "shields up" against giving up anything) to each give a little that they could spare, to produce a common good that was greater than the sum of the parts.

And that's the name of the game for "crowdsourcing", always has been. Note that as Mr. Koster points out elsewhere, "attention is the currency of the future present.) But even so, the same model applies even to "crowdfunding", where many small contributions add up to 'real money". What makes this much more practical in modern days is that it's possible to reach so many people, and for the willing to chip in from a distance.

cyllan #317

My answer is a bit spoiler-y, so Rot-13.

Bgure guna gur bppnfvbany fjrne jbeq (naq gurl qvq n terng wbo bs hfvat prafbe-sevraqyl s-jbeq flabalzf gb uhzbebhf rssrpg), gur bayl bgure guvat gung znqr vg CT-13 jnf znyr ahqvgl, shyy yratgug svyzrq sebz gur onpx.

Gur svyzznxref fubjrq jung frireny zbagu bs n fgneingvba qvrg qb gb gur uhzna obql. Zngg Qnzba unf gjb ahqr fprarf: bar jvgu "orq fberf" sebz jrnevat uvf cerffher fhvg sbe 100 qnlf jvgubhg n oernx (ur jnf punatvat vagb uvf mreb-t uneq fhvg) naq bar jvgubhg (ng gur ortvaavat bs uvf gevc gb gur ZNI).

Nyy va nyy, gur ahqvgl jnf hfrq va na nccebcevngr jnl gb shegure gur fgbel. Rneyvre va gur zbivr, Zngg Qnzba'f punenpgre qrzbafgengrf, sbe gur pnzren/bssvpvny erpbeq jung n fgneingvba qvrg ybbxf yvxr ba n cyngr.

dotless ı (314)/David Harmon (324): The stone soup story that I originally learned featured a traveler* and a kindly old lady who wanted to be hospitable but who had nothing to eat in the house. Except that she did turn out to have a few odds and ends of things to add to the soup produced by his magical stone. So he "tricked" her, but in a for-her-own-good, now-you-have-something-to-eat kind of way. He left the magic stone with her (having just picked it up from the side of the road himself) so that she could make her own soup with it in future.

*I forget his actual occupation--peddler, maybe?

cylan #317:

I'm interested in the same question. I've been reading my kids _The Martian_ (though my middle son took off on his own, so he may finish it before we do). I'd like to take them to see the movie. I'm okay with the occasional bad language (though it causes some giggles among my kids), but I'd like to make sure they didn't insert something wildly inappropriate in there. ("And here's where we cut to a shower scene, followed by a high speed car chase and gun battle through NASA headquarters. Just because.") My youngest is 6, so she's the one I'm most concerned with. I could see her getting scared.

So, so I've just started The Library At Mount Char. I'm about two chapters in. And I have to ask, does it stay this grimdark-horrors-all-is-bleak all the way through? Because I'm strongly tempted to walk away right now, whilst i still have some will to live....

Mary Aileen #326: My, but that's very different! To me, the point was always in the gathering a little bit from everyone, whatever they could spare.

In considering your version, my first thought was why someone whose "cupboard was bare" (especially someone old enough to know how to make soup from scraps) wouldn't already have been scrounging such bits out of the corners. (And that would in turn imply more of a con.)

I'm reminded of another "traveller's tale", where the traveller, refused food despite the apparent prosperity of his hosts, begins stalking back and forth in front of the hearth, exclaiming angrily "well, then, if you'll give me no food, I'll just have to do what my father used to do! Much as I hate to, I'll just have to do as my father would do, when none would give him food!" After a few rounds of this, the increasingly frightened locals decide maybe they should avoid trouble, and share with him some of their food. Afterwards, one asks him meekly, "just what was it your father would do?" To which his response is "Why, he would tb gb orq uhatel, bs pbhefr!"

Thanks, Victoria!

heresiarch:

Yeah, that's a good point. There are always a lot of information bubbles whose worldview is incompatible with the most common information bubble in the country. But most of the time, the small bubbles aren't visible. In this case, we have a bigger bubble, and a smaller (but still quite big) bubble, which are in conflict on a lot of questions about what the world looks like. And that makes it hard to come to a consensus.

Note that both bubbles are often wildly out of synch with reality. The way it looks to me, the Fox and NPR/CNN/PBS/NBC bubbles provide a view of foreign policy that looks like a cartoon, complete with obvious villains and good guys, no memory of anything that's happened in the past, and absolutely no notion that the US has ever really done anything *bad* in the world[1].

But even if we're all living in a drreamworld, if we're living in the same dreamworld, we can at least agree on what's to be done. Often, we'll agree on doing silly things, but at least some kind of decision or discussion s possible.

And you've also got a good point about the whole point-and-laugh aspect of a lot of reporting from one bubble to another. I think that's always been somethign that was done (mainstream media sources have no qualms about finding some apparent wackos to point and laugh at), but it seems like right now, it's some huge fraction of visible web articles. Sometimes these are actually reporting what the other side believes, but I think it's a lot more common to find the craziest or dumbest person on the other side, or to find something that sounds crazy taken out of context but actually has some rational thought behind it.

An extremely common construction of these is helpfully "translating" someone from the other side. In these articles, the phrase "In other words...." is usually a flag for "I'm about to spin the other side's views in the most vile, crazy way possible, confident that my readers will be too unsympathetic to him to object."

[1] A lot of the cartoon worldview of the Fox and non-Fox big media bubbles is actually shared, which is one reason why it's often easier to come to consensus on foreign policy than domestic policy. Plenty of Republicans are on board with bombing in Syria or Yemen as a response to ISIS or Al Qaida.

# 318 etc: I used to own 'Cordelia Vorkosigan' (the earlier title for the French translation of 'Shards of Honor') - bought on holiday in Martinique. Quite enjoyable to see it in another version, though involving vocabulary I do not imagine I shall need again...

David Harmon@329: That's the fun thing about folk tales: lots of versions. I wouldn't put money on saying which way the "original" story went. In this case, there are differences both of facts (a whole village vs. a lone mark) and emphasis (on the cleverness of the con or on the collective benefit). The way I remembered the story put much more emphasis on the con: if the marks were happy afterward, that just demonstrated how clever the con was.

Amazing Spouse's reaction when I mentioned this was "Seventy-six trombones?"

David Harmon (329): It's entirely possibly that kid-me interpreted both characters as nicer than they were meant to be (she more hospitable, he less of a con-artist). The fact that he left her the magic stone does support my reading, though.

Cassy B, I don't know about the Amazon listing itself, but the back cover picture here mentions the translators.

Also, several people have mentioned The Library at Mount Char on another thread if you're interested.

Idumea, thank you and I shall try not to do it again in any case. I am still learning my way round, but spam-spotting seems like one of those chores that basically anyone can pitch in with and be useful.

David Harmon @329: Reminds me of the wonderful bit in (is it?) Men at Arms where Carrot declares that if he doesn't get some answers he will be forced to carry out the order he was given before coming in...

Mary Aileen #334: Well, there usually is some ambiguity in trickster tales -- exploiting the mark, or teaching a worthwhile lesson, mocking the victim or bringing them into the joke? Not to mention the ones where the trickster gets caught in his own machinations (as in The Music Man, noted by dotless ı #333).

Lori, #301--thanks. I have also done some Googling on the subject, and feel a tiny bit less helpless now, but still twitchy when downtown.

Any fluent Japanese speakers in the house? Korean? Chinese (not fussy about dialect)?

Did anyone else feel terribly conned as a reader when they found out that the magic stone wasn't magic? I think that might be a typical youngest-of-a-big-family reaction on my part, as I was so used to people playing on my gullibility.

cyllan @ 330

You're welcome.

I hope he, and you, enjoy it. I had very high expectations and came away satisfied and happy. Not unlike this reviewer.

@318 Carrie S.

AKICIML: Does anyone know if the Vorkosigan books have been translated into French? And if so, how I may get my hands on them? (The versions on Amazon.fr are in English, so far as I can tell.)

Gee, I haven't posted here in ages... hello, everyone!

Carrie, I haven't looked at the Wikipedia page, but you can find a list of all LMB's translated works on her official website; the French are here:
http://dendarii.com/translations.html#French

Cassy B. @ #311:

To be fair, the review explicitly mentions "Cast Away" and talks about what it had that the reviewer believes "The Martian" lacks.

Albatross@331: As Reginald Perrin famously said when confronted with an 'in other words' translation of his views, 'Those certainly are other words'.

Well, all I hear all day long is how wonderful Martian is, and Martian did this or Martian did that.

Martian, Martian, Martian!

Jan, Jan, Jan!

Jenny Islander, I'm still happily exploring the byways of radio echoes. There's a radio version of KING KONG from 1938, and a 1954 LAURA which has Gene Tierney (like their first version with Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb), but this one co-features Victor Mature and, with barely discernible billing that you have to wait until the end for, Joseph Kearns as "Paul Lydecker."

They don't list the casts for Lux Radio Theater (and its related names), which is unfortunate, as the casts are often the best part. Edward G. Robinson as Sam Spade really, really kicked ass in THE MALTESE FALCON, for instance, and the Lux folks practically reassembled the original cast of AFTER THE THIN MAN. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE also has the principals, as do DOUBLE INDEMNITY and others. SHADOW OF A DOUBT has William Powell in the Joseph Cotten role.

They seem to have about the same set of programs as archive.org — I mean, of Lux programs. I'm also set to give Cadfael a try there.

And they have a number of more recent Philip Marlowe adaptations from the books, which looks mighty appealing. The regular Marlowe programs include two different dramatizations of "Red Wind," one of which is pretty close to capturing the story, albeit in digest form. Not sure if either one had the sense to present the devastating original close. (The opening is often quoted, but if it wasn't for spoilers, I'd be broadcasting the end of the story instead. All the ineffable feeling of loss from THE LONG GOODBYE is there.)

Regarding "Stone Soup," the version presented to me as a child was the one about how the people of the village had enough to get everybody through if they just quit hoarding what they had for fear that if they offered one person one morsel everybody would take every bit. They each had a lot of one ingredient, but man cannot live by celery alone.

Apropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4A1rRBNSPQ

(Above link is to a Society for Creative Anachronism version of "Stone Soup" by Heather Dale.)

So, Hurricane/whatever Joaquin is soaking up the US East Coast (and well inland, including here in C-ville). In the course of investigating, I decided to follow Weather Underground on Twitter (which I don't use much), and encountered what I think is my very first Twitter spammer:

"Bernice" followed me unsolicited, announces herself as "Im a hottie geek! And I love to party, even lanparty!" (note density of spamflags), and is following 885 people, but is followed by only 34. Only posts seem to be 20-odd racy-to-porny photos (half celebrity shots) all from September 10 (I told you I don't use Twitter much), starting with her #myfirstTweet.

I'm wondering... just what does somebody hope to gain by this idiocy? Obviously they're not doing too well at keeping followers, but maybe a bunch of porn-fans might have followed them at the beginning (and presumably dispersed when there was no more material). Is that spike something they could actually monetize? Or would they be trying to lure people to direct-message for conventional predation?

#348: P0rn and spam twitter is like tree pollen. Incredibly easy and almost no cost to produce. They just count on one "grain" amongst millions finding a target.

Even more puzzling that than p0rny spammers are Simulated Ditz Spammers. Their feeds having nothing actually objectionable, just dozens of retweets and vapid generic comments. Sometimes you'll see the same vapid comments on different Simulated Ditz timelines. Best guess is that these are followers for sale, doing their bot thing, or maybe they're trying to get followers prior to a suicidal spam-blitz.

Joaquin steamrollered the Bahamas before hitting the U.S. and it was doing 157 mph at the time. I've seen an attempt to signal boost this because apparently it isn't getting much coverage in broadcast news. What, did another movie star get divorced?

Angiportus @337:

You're welcome -- I had fun prowling the archives!

Now I know why I suddenly started to get corrections to the timeline again!

David Harmon @298: I presume you mean from Consolmagno? Bumping into his name in multiple contexts was one of my first experiences of Internet serendipity.

As it happens, the history of PLATO is contentious, and there are still simmering feuds around it! More than once I have received emails with updates that have had a fair amount of anger at forty-year-old slights.

@Jim Whitmore in general: thanks again for what you sent in!

Jeremy Leader @300: if you don't mind, I'll scarf that very interesting paragraph up for inclusion! Alas, the last time Worlds was in the news was when it threatened patent lawsuits against every major MMORPG -- I recall a call from (probably?) Thom Kidrin around 2006 or 2007 about it.

Cassy B @307: the original intent was purely around the history of online multiplayer virtual worlds, namely those things that have been various termed MMOs, MMORPGs, MUDs, ORPGs, VW's, PSWs, MOOs, MUCKs, MUSEs, PIGs, and a host of other unpleasant acro- and backro-nyms. Chat systems entered more as a historical sidelight, mostly where there was some trace of mutual influence.

The original historical material was supplied by a few extant timelines, munged together, plus active contributions from people on the fabled MUD-Dev mailing list. I think It last saw major updates in 2002, though minor updates have trickled in from time to time. I remember how tickled I was when I started getting emails from the original authors of Zork.

I used to maintain a list of SF books that portrayed virtual worlds. The volume of said books has now exceeded my ability to track it, but for quite a while there were less than a few dozen.

Jeremy Leader @ 300: I also noticed the absence of a header for Rogue, which I remember from 1980. (I tried to comment on this and the incorrect Brunner title (it's The Shockwave Rider), but couldn't find a way in even after registering.)

CHip @353 -- the way I found to comment was to look for the "Contact me" under Raph's "About" section. It worked well (even if he got my first name wrong here).

Raph Koster #352: Yup, Brother Guy is something of a social-graph nexus, probably from being memorably distinctive in most of his various contexts.

Heh... talking about Agile, Trello just sent out an article about using it within families.

Tom @352: Oops, sorry Tom! I blame poor short-term retention plus having to scroll back and forth a bunch of times as I was finding who to respond to. :(

CHip @353: I'll fix the book title...

Kip: I happened to remember that the Lux Radio Theater version of "Laura" had Vincent Price, just like the movie, and with that information I was able to find the other major stars of their 1945 production: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, & Otto Kruger.

In 1954 they did "Laura" again, with Gene Tierney, Victor Mature, Joseph Kearns, & Carlton Young.

Like pretty much all the Lux Radio Theater shows, it's excellently done.

I now just checked Jerry Haendeges' Old Time Radio Logs, and he lists at least one star for almost all the shows he has listed. http://www.otrsite.com/logs/logl1008.htm

Jacque @338:

Moderately fluent in Japanese. Why do you ask?

Thanks, Cally. I can generally find info on a show, but that's a lot of back and forth with a list of 650+ (though a number of them are dupes, maybe from different source tapes). I also have a fallback, "Ask Andrew," because this guy seems to know every voice. Notice I didn't qualify that. I expect if I said "1954 Lux Laura," he'd say "Joseph Kearns," because Kearns is one of his favorites.

I compared the two "Red Wind" broadcasts while I was on the trudgemaster and futile cycle at the Y. (If I mentioned that to Andrew, he'd first mention Parley Baer, who has a small role in one of them.) The scripts are nearly identical, but with occasional small surprises, so it comes down to a matter of who I like better as Marlowe. Van Heflin sounds a little less stagey than Mohr, but maybe that's just me having listened to dozens of Mohr shows. It even has a version of the standard Mohr opening line that lists three things Marlowe will run into in this caper. "…But who knew that, before this case was over, I'd run into an disgruntled parakeet, a 50 pound keg of Marmite, and the concept of logical positivism in a case I call THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR!"

Screen Directors' Playhouse has some great casting as well, but is usually a half hour. CHAMPAGNE FOR CAESAR got a whole hour, for some reason.

I should go to bed soon. I can't even tell if I'm digressing.

ps: Thanks for that link. Even one name per show is a big improvement, all right.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Martian."

Chris @359: Moderately fluent in Japanese. Why do you ask?

I have a silly I want to commit: about once a year, life reinforces to me how important diet is to my mental well-being. In particular, the impact that consuming dark leafy greens has on my mental health.

To motivate myself, I think of it as a practice, such as meditation or a martial art. But, of course, a good practice needs a good name. My joke to myself is to practice this as a 道 (dō) which, of course, needs a proper name. Something in the nature of "broccoli-do." But me being me, of course, it also wants cool calligraphy to go with it, and a simple transliteration of "broccoli" into katakana just won't do, so my search for the Japanese equivalent of broccoli turns up nanohana the kanji for which is 菜の花.

So far, so good; I get approximately this:

菜の花道, which certainly meets the "cool callibraphy" requirement.

But when I ran my construction past my Japanese-speaking neighbor, I just got a puzzled look. Apparently the "nanohana" and "do" don't go together in a way that makes syntactical sense; or at least that was the closest I came to understanding her objection.

So, I could just go with what I've got so far, since really this is just for me to help me remember to be dilligent about this. But it would be really nifty if I could construct the joke such that it actually worked for Japanese speakers, and I could use it, and get a laugh.

Does this make sense? Is this in any way possible?

Jacque: Your problem is that "nanohana" is already not really a word but a phrase, "flower of vegetables". Notice how the "no" character is noticeably simpler than the two surrounding characters? It's a preposition. So you're trying to take (菜の花) and treat it as one lexical unit, to which 道 can be appended, but it doesn't really work – any more than the phrase "flowerway of vegetables" would work for us.

Some poking around in an online kanji dictionary turns up this:
菜食, read "saishoku", which means "vegetable diet". I think that 菜食道, saishokudo, would work.

(But I am not remotely fluent or expert, so please don't blame me if I'm wrong.)

(And yes, that's the same character which was previously being read "na", now being read "sai". Japanese is really annoying that way.)

Raph Koster @357 -- No worries, as they say in Australia. I hope you spend a little time looking around here and hanging out -- this is a fun and knowledgeable group of people. Didn't get far enough in your timeline yet to figure out if you talk about Howard Rheingold, Electric Minds, and Brainstorms (the last of which is still going moderately, and I spend too much time there -- it's a lot more comprehensible than the firehose that is F***B***. And if you write poetry....

Raph Koster, perhaps you can help me find a book I have been seeking for years. Goodreads and Tomato Nation have come up blank, but it definitely includes virtual reality and it is at least 25 years old. Is there somewhere I can see your old list?

SorchaRei #366: IIRC, One of Clarke's novels (The City and the Stars?) had reference to VR entertainments.

Another 6 thumbs up for "The Martian" from me, my husband, and our kid the Mars researcher.

A 花道 -- read "hanamichi", because japanese -- is the walkway on stage right in a kabuki theatre.

The vegetable's actually called 菜, na, when people aren't being more specific; nanohana just means the flower. Google image search is good for these checks.

I think 菜の道 [na no michi], the path of na, has the meaning you're after.

I think 菜の道 [na no michi], the path of na, has the meaning you're after.

I love this community.

I've been thinking recently about how sex gets plopped into places where it just doesn't belong. I've liked the recent song called "Big Girls Don't Cry" (I hope you know, I hope you know/That this has nothing to do with you/It's personal; myself and I/We have some straightening out to do...) ever since I first heard it on the radio. So the other day I went to Youtube for a link because it was relevant to a discussion.

Lyrics: I'm sorry, but I've outgrown who we were together; I'm using our relationship as a crutch; it's time for us to separate; I have to figure out who I am as not-part-of-a-couple.

Visuals: The performer, somebody called Fergie, dividing her time among playing with some guy's nipples, sashaying around in tiny underpants, and doing the high-heeled butt strut up to a microphone so she can sing the refrain while splaying on a stool. All with a wet-lipped drunk-eyed stare. I'm embarrassed to run it on this computer, which is in the living room. I found a good acoustic cover instead.

Yes, we're sexual beings; yes, prudery is not healthy; but if somebody is going to aim a camera at her butt, breasts, and crotch, I expect to be listening to a butt, breasts, and crotch song.

And yes, I know, fish complains that water is wet. I've been off cable for so long that I had no idea music videos were still this bad.

Kip W @ #360:
I now really want to hear "The Case of the Very Hungry Caterpillar."

What a coincidence that the thread mentions games, ...and then we held hands and Agile. I've been working on a cooperative game based on software development that incorporates things like pair programming to gain experience. (If anyone would like to playtest it, give me a shout; I've got a prototype running on Google Drive).

I've also been trying to get more people in my workplace to play coops (both because they're fun and as part of team-building exercises). We've tried ...and then we held hands, but couldn't really follow the no-communication rule. We had to resort to a third party whom we dubbed our marriage counselor to help with rules and legal moves. I find it very appealing from an abstract puzzle point of view, though. Would love to get good at it. (In the end we decided to try Hanabi for team building, because it's so much easier to explain and fast to play.)

To add to the Agile conversation: I think perhaps if you haven't worked with waterfall, or if it somehow worked well for you (it didn't for me), it's harder to see the appeal of Agile. And like anything else it can be done badly -- I keep hoping that Annie Y's comment @211 about 60 people has an extra zero or that the standup in question refers to the comedy kind.

Jenny Islander #371: It's basically the same pattern as tossing refined sugar into prepared foods, or onto "children's" cereals -- going for the cheap "hit" from basic drives, at the expense of deep value.

Tom @365: Actually, I've been here many times before; I read semi-regularly but post rarely. I've even had dinner with TNH though I doubt she remembers (there were about thirty of us there; I was dragged along by Cory Doctorow, who is a friend).

I even once posted a poem. :)

I know Howard, actually, we've shared a stage once or twice. BrainStorms is on the list of links I am about to point out to...

SorchaRei @366: I didn't track all "virtual reality" books -- only those that were about online virtual worlds, as opposed to single-user virtual experiences. Otherwise it would have been hopeless. That said, the old list is here: http://www.raphkoster.com/games/links/ To help you find the book, I would almost certainly need more of a description of the plot. Can you remember anything about it?

Raph Koster, as a matter of fact . . .

Summary: Book is about people who live inside a giant immersive virtual reality system, although I think it was written before IVR jargon was invented.

Spoiler-y description: Turns out I recall a LOT about this book, just not the author or title.

Written in first person by a male narrator. The other main character is a woman named Jen. I do not recall if the narrator is given a name.

Book starts by describing Jen and the narrator growing up in a mid-20th century town somewhere in what I think was the Midwest. They are childhood sweethearts. She is more restless and intelligent than he. When they are in high school, she starts asking things like "what if this is not a real world?" and "what if we could escape?"

Soon, the narrator suspects that she has, in fact, escaped, partly because she seems to have no more interest in such questions. So one night he lies awake in bed and manages to somehow think himself out of the small town. He lands on a beach in Hawai'i, where Jen appears, tan enough to suggest she has been there awhile. She pulls a wad of money out of mid-air.

Then there is a section about some of their adventures, both together and apart. In the course of these adventures, they also figure out how the system is set up. It seems that aliens came to Earth with an IVR-type technology. Most humans have been absorbed by the machine and now exist as some kind of glowing balls in a big vat. The planet has been allowed to return to a state unintruded upon by humans and their technology. At one point, the narrator asks to see his little glowing ball. Then he wants to see Jen, but it turns out that she is one of a small minority of people who are too restless and intense to be reducible to a glowing ball, so her body is kept in suspended animation.

Meanwhile, narrator and Jen are growing bored with being able to invent new scenarios and live them out. Narrator becomes discouraged when an alien tells him that in all the lifetimes he has lived in the system he has had no moment of experience that is entirely original to him. Jen and narrator realize that last time they got this bored, they had their minds wiped and started over as children in the location that was the first part of the book. This time, they want to opt out entirely.

So the aliens cook them up new bodies and release them in the North American plains. It all goes well for awhile. Then Jen is injured or sick, and they realize they do not have the skills to survive outside for real, when death is final. So they decide to brainwipe again, but this time, they choose to be raised in a pre-Columbian North American tribe so that when they eventually get bored and get new bodies, they will have the skills to live in that environment. The aliens take them back into the system.

There are numerous issues with the book, including exoticising non-Western cultures and depicting women in a way I sometimes had trouble relating to. On the other hand, as you can see, in a world where I read several hundred books a year, this one stuck with me for over 20 years, and I want to find it and reread it.

Any ideas what it might be?

SorchaRei #366: Try us. What do you remember about the virtual reality book?

Bill Higgins @ #377, SorchaRei @ #376:

Nice comment time-travel you two managed! Well, probably complete co-incidence.

In HLN, local area man is about to set forth to work. Normally not something considered newsworthy, but it is the first day at a new workplace.

Good luck, Ingvar! Hope you have a great day.

Victoria @ 308: Can I just say how much I like "geek-stream" as a contrast to "mainstream"? So much less implied value judgement than "niche", and makes "mainstream" into an equally marked state. Very elegant.

Open thread: Today I learned this was a thing. Along with seeing statues of Buddhas with heavy Greek influence on the art. Neat!

(In other news, I am in Greece on vacation, basically illiterate in Greek and still a compulsive reader. It's exhausting.)

Jaque @ #363

I used to be more fluent in Japanese than I am now, sadly. But...

葉菜道 (yousaidou) might also be a gloss for what you want, while keeping the onyomi (or Chinese-influenced) pronunciation for 道, which does carry a very slightly different connotation than the aforementioned "michi" kunyomi (native Japanese pronunciation).* 葉菜 by itself means leafy greens or edible herbs. (Japanese doesn't make a linguistic distinction between herbs and vegetables.)

* I could write you a brief-ish essay on the distinctions between them, but it's boring unless you're into that kind of thing.

Andrew M #201: It was said in a rather challenging way, as in 'Why on earth would you know that?'

dotless i #206: So would I.

Ralph Koster @352: You're certainly welcome to use my paragraph about Worlds. Those were fun times with interesting people, that I look back on warmly. Yes, Mr. Kidrin was one of the purchasers of Worlds in 2000, it's sad to see what he's done with it lately.

Sandy B @ 381

Hi! You're close enough that if I were Sarah Palin, I'd be able to see you from my back-garden. If I had a back-garden, obviously.

Oh, hey... The photographs taken on the Apollo mission (8,400 of them) are now online, at high resolution.

Project Apollo Flickr Account. Or Facebook.

duckbunny @ 380

Thanks!

Re: Stone Soup

I've always thought of the miracle of the loaves and fishes[1] as being more stone soup than miracle. (I mean, okay, I imagine if God wanted to he could make five loaves of bread and two fish expand to feed a huge crowd, but it was easy for me to imagine everyone saying "Ah, what we're supposed to do is share what we have around. Okay, then."

[1] Christian New Testament reference--basically a big hungry crowd is gathered somewhere far from easy-to-find food, and Jesus has his disciples start sharing the very small amount they have for lunch. And so everyone else sits down and does the same, resulting in plenty to eat for everyone, and a fair bit left over for later.

albatross #389: The water-to-wine thing is another one that I find tempting to reimagine as a trickster tale.

albatross@389: Xopher made a similar observation in the other thread I mentioned. It's an appealing interpretation, given the "croudsourcing" versions of the stone soup story.

abi@319: You're welcome. I had related thoughts when I reread that post. (Not being Christian, I'm generally cautious about expressing strong opinions on what the Church "should" be or do, but I'm not blind to the effect on my loved ones.)

Thought I'd mention.

Capclave is this weekend (Friday-Sunday) at the Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg in Gaithersburg. The hotel is on Perry Parkway, just off of I-270. Is there any interest in a Gathering of Light?

(Probably either Friday or Saturday evening.)

(Driving directions can be found at the hotel website. capclave.org has transit instructions and other information, including registration, progamming, etc.)

A couple of belated responses:

estelendur #253: Actually I am unfamiliar with the significance of Smalltalk to graphical interfaces in particular! Would you like to elaborate?

My understanding is that it was the engine behind one of (if not the), first windowed GUI(s), using "blits" for highlighting and boxes, and messages for inter-process communications. I'm not sure if that was at PARC, MIT, or what (the actual developments were well before my time), but that was how Smalltalk was introduced back in my freshman CS "language survey" class.

abi #319: Talk about your "true kings"...

SandyB #381:

On a business trip to Israel (I got five days notice), I got some insight, perhaps, into the world of a child before they learn to read. All these letters, and they don't convey meaning yet.

I could attack Hebrew script by a basically cryptographic approach, decoding in multiple phases with a pocket Berlitz book. The first Hebrew lettering I read spontaneously was actually food packaging; I realized that it said "bar burger" on the burger box. English written in Hebrew turns out to be moderately common in Tel Aviv.

The other thing that was interesting and challenging is that the letter forms tended to be rather more modern, sans-serif, and harder to recognize (less distinct) than the black-letter equivalents I'm used to seeing. To see that, in Windows charmap, access the Hebrew range of Arial, and compare to the fonts named David, Rod, or Ahroni.

Somehow I was expecting the particle about the "owl doing the washing" tile to involve one of those peculiar medieval anthropomorphic animals motifs (like the preaching foxes and the rabbits going hunting). Now the (false) image is so fixed in my brain I may need to draw up the design.

*waves to praisegod barebones*

Michael I @392. We're in the area, and would be interested in gathering some light. I guess Saturday has the higher ease of doing it.

Henry Troup @#394:

The first Hebrew lettering I read spontaneously was actually food packaging; I realized that it said "bar burger" on the burger box.

Now I'm wondering if the feminine form would be a "bat burger"....

Henry Troup @ 394:

My first trip to China was very strange from a reading standpoint. I didn't mind so much that I couldn't understand the spoken language, because I'm used to that anyway. As an inveterate reader, that there were all these signs that I knew contained meaning but I could not read and couldn't even puzzle out how to read was deeply frustrating and disorienting.

WRT canned pumpkin, this may not suit the need, but I notice that my local groc store has fresh pie pumkins in the produce section. My recollection is that rendering it for pie is as simple as cooking like a squash, and then puree-ing the flesh.

Jacque (400): Thanks for the suggestion, but any additional work* (such as turning an actual pumpkin into puree) means that I'm not going to do it. As it happens, my even local-er grocery store (the smaller one) had canned pumpkin in the baking aisle this weekend. So I'm all set.

*I find cooking to be incredibly spoon-draining, but every once in a while, when I'm feeling energetic, I have the urge to bake something.

Louis Patterson @369: I think 菜の道 [na no michi], the path of na, has the meaning you're after.

So, does this refer to that specific vegetable*? If not, is there a way to make that clear? Because the point I'm trying to emphasize is that, while vegetables are all well and good, it's the dark leafy greens—broccoli, especially, in American cuisine—that really make the difference. Just consuming J. Random Vegetables doesn't do the job.

If that makes sense.

* I.e., the rapeseed plant

alsafi @382: 葉菜道 (yousaidou) might also be a gloss for what you want

Heh. And Google back-translates this as "Leafy Road," which totally works.

I could write you a brief-ish essay on the distinctions between them, but it's boring unless you're into that kind of thing.

Yes, please!

me, prev: I'm giggling at the italicized kanji, above. I'm wondering if this is a meaningful construct in any Asian language?

SorchaRei @376: I'm afraid that book does not ring a bell, and was not on my list.

Jacque @ 404:

My admittedly limited experience is that bold and italics aren't typically used for hanzi or kanji due to readability issues. I know emphasis is done with a different size or typeface. I think, but am not sure, that it can be done by playing with spacing as well, and would be curious to know if this is true. A cursory search also says that in Japanese, spelling things out in katakana can be used for emphasis, as can using quotation marks. I don't know if using quotation marks holds for Chinese or not. For quotations and book titles, quotation marks.

@Mary Aileen: Tired Person's Punkin Chunks

We eat this a lot in late fall and winter.

Get a pumpkin that is meant for pie; they're easier to cut up than Halloween pumpkins even if they do cost more. Or get a butternut squash, same-same. Hack up, de-gut, put chunks face down on a foil-lined tray, add just a little water, and bake until soft enough to pierce from the skin side with a fork. (You'll probably have time for a nap or a bath if you're using a full-sized pumpkin.) Turn over, mash butter, sweetener, and pumpkin pie spice into punkin chunks (non-tiny people must do this themselves because Mom is tired), and eat right out of the skin. Nobody likes the crust anyway. If you are of the cohort that takes pie as a reason for whipped cream, have cocoa with lots of whipped cream on the side.

I have been at my periodic task of marking papers, and am, once again, in search of a good suicide hotline. Either that or some really good aged rum.

I learn many things from my students, one of them being that the English language is stuck in the ICU.

Consider:

Although humans are all the same, we are very different.

A summer in Algeria, which is already located in the largest desert in the world, can leave a civilization completely famished and dry, due to a very long drought during the dry season.

In the begging of Mozi's teachings as a boy, he was influenced by the ways of Confucius due to his established teachings in the Zhou dynasty.

These forms of benefits would range from a variety of things from providing the local children with a proper education to providing needs for the poor.

Han Feizi contends that rulers should ignore what philosophers like Confucious have to say and govern people by strict and ridged application of laws.

Plato, a Greek philosopher and educator emphasized that someone who is educated is good and withholds morals.

In this essay I will answer the question as to why I Aristotle, rather than Plato, is seen as the founder of political science.

Plato based a lot of his philosophies off Confucianism which of course did not give much room for people to obtain freedom.

Jenny Islander (407): My eyes started to glaze over when I saw "easier to cut up". When I got to "hack up, de-gut" my mind went NOPE!! really loudly and shut down. Starting from an actual pumpkin and not canned puree Is Not Happening.

(On going back and forcing myself to read--or at least skim--the rest of your comment: Hey! I like the crust!)

Good crusts are a very important part of a pie. Bad crusts -- well, that's an excuse to eat only the filling. I outsource my crusts in-house (that is, Karen has a recipe that is outstanding for piecrust -- she makes the fruit pies, I make the pecan, and we're negotiating about the savories).

A good pie crust is a thing of wonder. I can't make them, but fortunately I live with someone who does.

@Mary Aileen: Best to stick with a small butternut squash then, because you can just stick holes in it, like baking a potato, and then cook it for an hour (shut oven door, set timer, walk away: I love those). At that point you can cut it in half with a butterknife, scoop out the middle, and mash in some butter etc.--again, like a big potato, just with one extra step. This plus a glass of cold milk is lunch sometimes...

But if you're trying to make actual pie, stick with the canned stuff unless your market sells top-quality pie pumpkins.

Tom Whitmore (410), Naomi Parkhurst (411): I usually buy ready-made pie crusts, although I have been known to make a graham-cracker* crust. Pumpkin pies demand graham-cracker crusts.

Jenny Islander (412): Thanks for the instructions. Unfortunately, I don't like butternut squash. There is at least one pumpkin pie in my near future--Thanksgiving is coming--but the current can of pumpkin is destined to be made into pumpkin bread.

*wheat germ works, too

The Way of Broccoli:

How about 油菜, pronounced aburana and literally translating to "oil greens"? That's the Japanese word for the Brassica family.

Brassica oleracea is the plant from which we've cultivated all the leafy greens except for chard: kale, collard greens, Chinese broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and broccoli.

Disclaimer: I don't speak Japanese and have no idea how common this word is or if it can be made into a "Way of" without making Japanese people look at you funny.

Fragano Ledgister @408, I deduce from the subject matter (Plato, Aristotle, Confucius) that these are college students?

Yikes.

Mary Aileen @413: Well over half of the canned "pumpkin" sold in the US is actually butternut squash, and it's not labeled as different.

Elliott Mason (416): I'd heard that. Same genus, apparently. If I can't taste the difference I'm not going to care. But I've had butternut squash prepared the way Jenny suggested and hated it. Quite possibly I would hate pumpkin prepared in the same manner; I'm not about to try it to find out.

shadowsong @414:

That would run into the same problem as nanohana, in that you're trying to put a Chinese-derived suffix (-do) on a Japanese-derived word.

@Mary Aileen: I wonder if the big canneries peel it before they cook it. There might be a taste migrating inward from the skin.

Pumpkin bread is fabulous! Pumpkin cheesecake too.

Butternut squash, like sweet potatoes, goes very nicely with soy sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil.

I also cook it, scrape out the innards, mash, add a couple of eggs, a little milk and some spices (coriander, clove, nutmeg) and bake as a casserole. But I also like it with butter and spices as Jenny suggested, so that may not work for everyone.

If you have issues with sweet potato casserole being too sweet, try julienning the potatoes and sauteing them with garam masala and a little cinnamon. Had me asking for seconds, and I thought I hated sweet potatoes!

HLN: Local woman spies a new teahouse and decides to give it a try. The judgement is that Kung Fu Teahouse, at Yoakum and Westheimer right across from Half Price Books, makes a very good bubble tea.

So, I've got a couple of reusable shopping bags that I've been using for years-- very convenient, they each stuff into their own little pockets. Since they were showing a bit of wear (and I didn't have enough of them), I tracked them down to Chicobag, and bought a few more.

By way of the site, I learned that a number of states and cities have been trying to ban disposable plastic bags, but are getting serious pushback: Arizona's city bans forbidden by state legislature and California's ban delayed for referendum. :(

My latest favorite squash is red kuri. I cook it in the pressure cooker for a bit to soften, take it out and halve/de-seed it, and put the halves back in and cook it to death. Mash up skin and all. The seeds roast fairly well, too.

I think it would probably be good in a pie, as the texture is very smooth, but I haven't tried that yet.

Regarding canned pumpkin, I just heard on NPR that there's liable to be something of a canned pumpkin shortage this year. Apparently harvests are down by about a third. So that might explain the difficulty in finding it.

Chris @418: Like using a Greek root and a Latin suffix, I guess?

In addition to 道 -do, Japanese also uses 術 -jutsu and 芸 -gei. Are any of those Japanese in origin?

Alternately, some relevant Chinese words include:

• 菜花 cài huā "flower vegetable", broccoli
  
• 卷心菜 juǎn xīn cài "curly heart vegetable", cabbage
  
• 甘蓝 gān lán "sweet indigo", cabbage
  

(Apparently I treat foreign words like puzzle pieces, trying to see which ones I can fit together.)

shadowsong: Yeah, pretty much the same sort of thing. It's more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule - shortly after that post, it struck me that karate-do is exactly that sort of mixture.

And I had to look them up to be sure, but both jutsu and gei come from Chinese.

David H., #422: One thing that several cities with local bans have discovered is that there has to be an exception for grocery items, especially fresh produce. The interiors of reusable bags can harbor bacteria which get onto the produce and hence into the people who eat it, with less than ideal results.

Not one bit surprised about AZ, however.

Seeking advice: I have The Martian, but for various reasons I have not yet gotten around to reading it. I want to see the movie, preferably before it leaves the theaters. Would I be well-advised to read the book first, or does the movie stand up well on its own?

Cassy B. (424): Hmm. Maybe I should have bought more than one can.

@Lee: I have not (yet) read The Martian.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

I understand that the book amps up the geek appeal and science content by an order of magnitude.

Lee, #427:

The film of The Martian, being an adaptation faithful to a remarkable degree, stands on its own quite well.

The book has pleasures of its own, of course, but the film will be a very satisfying experience, if you like this sort of story.

I'd compare it to The Princess Bride (which was famously adapted by its own author (who also wrote a book about adapting novels into screenplays)). You miss stuff if you only see the movie and don't read the book, but the essentials are definitely in there.

Much of the book consists of Astronaut Watney's snarky blog entries. The movie gives him a video blog instead; this weakens the John Scalzi on Mars effect.

427
I have reusable (and washable) mesh bags that I use for bananas. Other produce, depending on what it's like, will get plastic bags or not. (Apparently the bag ban is not aimed at produce bags so much at shopping bags. But even produce doesn't need to be bagged all the time.

Lee @ 421: I hate super-sweet sweet potato casserole, too, and thought that I hated sweet potatoes.

I discovered that I love sweet potatoes cooked and then drizzled with fresh lime juice, and a bit of salt. You can cook them like a baked potato, and just split them open to add the lime juice, or be fancy and peel and boil them.

Lee @ 421:

I saw "The Martian" movie Saturday, then immediately came home and devoured the novel.

No preparation required for the movie.

The weirdest part for me was HLN: Local man sees first movie in a theater since having detached retina reattached. Minor distortion in repaired eye made 2-D movie almost feel like 3-D.

> So, does this refer to that specific vegetable*?

Translation's more an art than a science, you know! And my japanese is only conversational level anyway, not translator-level. From wwwjdic:

菜 【な】 (n) (1) greens; vegetables; (2) rape (Brassica napus); rapeseed; (P) [Edit][ViewDB][FreqCnt][L][G][GI][S][A][W]

2: is the historical / original meaning; calligraphy is usually pretty gnomic, so that's probably OK.

[but the flower has a larger role in japanese perception than it does in english; my google image search for na no michi got me pathways surrounded by nanohana, for example. We could use nappa 菜っ葉, na leaf, but that takes us back to "greens" generally rather than the plant you want. Words don't map 1-1, and stuff. Like map projections: you don't eliminate the distortion, you push it to where it doesn't cause problems.]

On a related note: the discussion about pumpkins vs squashes is interesting to me, since australian english doesn't make the distinction. They're all pumpkins, treated equivalently.

... but we roast or boil them rather than making pies. Is that part of the difference?

Louis Patterson #434: On a related note: the discussion about pumpkins vs squashes is interesting to me, since australian english doesn't make the distinction. They're all pumpkins, treated equivalently.

Did you perhaps mean "they're all squashes"? I'd be amazed if a fellow colony of England folded all of squashdom (including "marrow" and other summer squashes?) into an American winter squash.

No, speaking as a New Zealander, Louis has it right, if it's got hard yellow/orange flesh it's a pumpkin, so butternut squashes and buttercup pumpkins and the like are all pumpkins to us.

We wouldn't call a marrow a pumpkin, but we don't see them much either, only their smaller versions, which we call courgettes or zucchinis fairly interchangeably.

See:
http://www.countdown.co.nz/search-results?topsearch_query=pumpkin

[Capclave GOL?]

Checking interest in a GOL at Capclave this weekend. Second post, the initial post is at #392.

Capclave is a local SF convention being held at the Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg in Gaithersburg. The hotel is on Perry Parkway, just off of I-270.

Driving directions can be found at the hotel website. Transit instructions and other information can be found at capclave.org

Any GOL would probably be on either Friday or Saturday evening. So far Lady Kay has indicated interest and a preference for Saturday evening.

See also parts of England (Staffordshire, and possibly elsewhere) where because pumpkins are expensive, they laboriously hollow out a root vegetable and carve it into a "turnip lantern", which in my vocabulary is made of a swede. Turnips are the little ones with white flesh, swedes are the big ones with yellow flesh, except apparently when they're not.
A pumpkin is a large round orange gourd used almost exclusively for decorative lanterns. Smaller gourds are squashes, including the ones that look just like pumpkins provided they're of eating size. Large green summer squashes are vegetable marrow and not popular, but we eat courgette. I wouldn't personally call a squash a pumpkin, but I'd understand if someone did and was referring to food that they might mean any form of autumn squash.
Pumpkin pie doesn't exist.

Louis Patterson #434, Aquila #436: Interesting! In fact, that got me poking around Wiktionary and Wikipedia. Things I discovered that I hadn't known:
1) All the Cucurbita genus are New World species.
2) American-usage common-name "pumpkin" is mostly Cucurbita pepo, but some of the biggest varieties ("giant pumpkins") are ringers from Cucurbita maxima. WP includes this choice phrase regarding the giants: "Such germplasm is commercially provocative...".
3) C. pepo includes not only pumpkins and acorn squash, but also, surprisingly, summer squash and zucchini.
4) Gourds are a different genus (Lagenaria) native to Africa, but still within the family Cucurbitaceae.
5) "Vegetable marrow" seems not to be what I had thought it was -- I thought it was zucchini, but WP shows an oval squash and notes spaghetti squash as a winter variety.

The one time I saw a Harry Potter movie before reading the book, it turned out to be the best way to do it, and the others might have been as well. When I saw the movie, I was able to enjoy it without wondering where plotlines had gone, and then when I read the book, there were these new parts I hadn't suspected, so it was a win-win.

Also, Cucurbita pepo is likely the oldest human-domesticated plant species!

[Capclave GOL]

I live in the area, I'm not planning to go to the con, but I'd like to get together with other MLers.

In regards to the Martian and 10 year old children:

We went on Friday, and Daughter was hooked by the movie hard. She talked about it a lot (it replaced her Manual of the Planes discussions for several days which was worth the price of the ticket on that alone) and is plowing through the book with glee.

There was nothing in the movie that I considered objectionable for a 10 year old. Naq juvyr fur jnf n yvggyr jvttrq bhg ol gur ubzr fhetrel fprar ng gur irel ortvaavat, rira gung qvqa'g ernyyl obgure ure. What did bother her were the trailers. While I understand what boxes The Martian ticked to earn the PG-13 rating, it didn't contain anything really bothersome. The trailers, OTOH, were for Crimson Peak (which I'm interested in seeing, but only at home with a pause button and a lot of daylight) and a movie that centered around a dead child and her mother's search for revenge/justice/resolution.

Daughter flatly refused to look at the latter trailer and insisted that I help cover her eyes and ears because it freaked her out. Crimson Peak got a "I'm so glad I've skipped this ad on you-tube" comment, and more hiding in my shoulder.

In short, we will be skipping trailers for non-Marvel PG-13 movies in the future -- at least for a few years.

cyllan @443, yeah, I saw The Martian last weekend, and my husband and I joked that the person who set up the Coming Attractions had no idea what The Martian was about. There were, to my recollection, two horror flicks, two chick-flicks, one testosterone-drenched revenge fantasy, and at least one other film that I don't quite remember. NONE of the trailers were for an SF movie. (Unless you consider horror to be SF, of course.)

Mary Aileen @413: Graham-cracker crust pumpkin pie? Brilliant! I must try it...

cyllan @ 443

V gbgnyyl sbetbg nobhg gur QVL fhetrel!

But having witnessed (and helped) first hand with some of that at the approximate age of your daughter, it never occurred to me that it might not be considered "appropriate" for children. Ah, the joys of growing up on a farm.

I'm glad she enjoyed it.

I will say the trailers were a bad match for the movie. Usually, the trailers are in the same spirit as the feature film. It was like the people who organized this went "We're really short on Space Adventure movies and Marvel/DC has nothing slated for release.... What OTHER movies don't have enough ad placement?" It's either that or "Well, this movie has a certain chance of death along with endless struggling against the odds... Horror sounds like a good fit to me!" (This is knowing that, in Hollywood, the people who make the trailers are not the same people as the ones who make the films.)

I did see a 15 second ad for "The Martian" while waiting for "The Martian" to start. It was a weird mix of surreal and Meta.

I refer to hard-skinned squash-category vegetables as squashes unless they are round and orange (or white), in which case they are pumpkins.

I refer to soft-skinned squash category vegetables as zucchini, and never as squashes or summer squashes.

I see there are several kinds of summer squash which haven't crossed my path.

I got into a heated discussion with a friend about a successful hot sausage and (butternut) squash spaghetti sauce I made because I said squash and he heard zucchini and he hates zucchini. I like zucchini and have no problem with putting it in spaghetti sauce, but hadn't in this case.

Most squashes taste the same to me, but I think butternut and some kind of squash whose name I can't remember (shaped like a pumpkin, but with red flesh, bought it at a farmers market stand which specializes in asian vegetables) are superior.

estelendur @445 and Mary Aileen @413
graham-cracker crust pumpkin pie

I have discovered that a recipe of pumpkin pie filling (I use the recipe on the can) nicely fills two purchased premade graham cracker crusts because they are smaller and shallower than a regular pie plate. Bake for less time than the recipe calls for.

Cassy B #415: Your deduction is correct.

My own preference when it comes to pumpkins are those that are close to watermelons in size, have orange flesh, and make really good soup.

Trailers for The Martian: we got James Bond, The Hunger Games, and Star Wars. We're actually planning to see two out of three of those, so that might be a record for proportion of interesting to non-interesting trailers.

Nancy, #447: Squashes definitely don't all taste the same to me. I love zucchini, can eat yellow squash (summer squash), and have issues with most winter squashes. Have tried several ways of preparing spaghetti squash, of which by far the most successful is what we dubbed "Hash Yellows".

Ingredients:

1 spaghetti squash, halved and seeds scooped out
1 medium or 1/2 large onion, chopped
1 stick butter
Salt & pepper
Optional - other spices to taste

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 375°. Put squash halves cut-side-up on a baking sheet. Fill the hollows with the chopped onion, and top with half a stick of butter each. Cover tops with foil and bake until done (it took about an hour and a half here). Scrape out squash-innards-with-onions into a serving bowl, add salt & pepper to taste, and mix well. Feeds 2 as a main dish, probably 4-6 as a side dish.

This comes out remarkably like hash browns in both flavor and texture.

ISTR having a butternut squash soup with curry once that was pretty good, but we've never tried to replicate that ourselves.

Stir-friedd Spaghetti Squash with Slivered Carrots and Basil

For me, summer squash is all the thin-skinned varieties, frex: zucchini, crooknecks, pattypans.
Winter squash are the ones with hard shells, frex: pumpkins, butternut squash, acorn squash, spaghetti squash (which is unusual because you don't eat the shell).

(My favorite slow-cooker cookbook has a recipe for 'pumpkin job'. If you like the filling but hate crust, that's the recipe for you.)

Mary Aileen @409: Boy, I tell ya, that NOPE wall, right? It's amazing what will set it off, and it doesn't always make sense. Couple of times lately, I've been faced with making a grocery run on days off, and while it would, in any meaningful way, be easier to do on my bike, I have to go on foot because otherwise NOPE.

shadowsong @425: In addition to 道 -do, Japanese also uses 術 -jutsu and 芸 -gei. Are any of those Japanese in origin?

Well, now that you bring it up, I'm not completely wedded to it being Japanese. Though I think I do want more of the "path" or "way" connotation than "skill".

Bill Higgins @430: this weakens the John Scalzi on Mars effect.

*splorfl—!*

Aquila @436: No, speaking as a New Zealander, Louis has it right, if it's got hard yellow/orange flesh it's a pumpkin, so butternut squashes and buttercup pumpkins and the like are all pumpkins to us.

Butbutbut...what do you make your jack-o'-lanterns out of?

Question for the thread: I was talking elsewhere about Ann Leckie's Ancillary books, and described the characters as either human or 'Star Wars human', meaning by the latter 'as close as you like to biologically Homo Sapiens, but in the universe of the story not descended from east African plains apes from Sol 3.' And it struck me that there really should be an SF term of art for the concept, but I'd never heard it. Is there one?

Butbutbut...what do you make your jack-o'-lanterns out of?

Any of the pumpkins at that link. Crown pumpkins work well, despite being hard as hell to cut through and not orange on the outside. I've also made them out of actual oranges once. But yeah, jack'o'lanterns aren't that common here, Halloween is in spring here, after all.

Here's the one I made last October.

https://instagram.com/p/usJlUCPJt_9n3bY_2JEyna8MY1QXYaWA8VthI0/

https://instagram.com/p/usJed4PJt3xKiKlLhVDqb5ry0f6FVa0LSDyNo0/

Jacque @458
That's in the same class as "Why don't you have fireworks at Guy Fawke's?"

BTW, Aquila's definition would appear to capture some of the varieties of sweet potato that we refer to as kumara (which are different from what Maori had on European contact).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato#New_Zealand

LizardBreath #459: AIUI, in "Golden Age" SF (e.g., Asimov), they tended to be simply described as human, or "humanoid" if they vary a bit more. Sometimes there's a "seeded by Forerunners" backstory, or a "convergent evolution" handwave, but sometimes there's just the declaration "yeah, there are humans on lots of worlds".

Now, with the current state of biological knowledge, both seeding and convergent evolution look pretty unlikely, but then, we haven't actually seen what's on other worlds. If/When we ever do get out there, if we do find effectively-human inhabitants, well then we'd surely be looking for some explanation why.

Errolwi @461: That's in the same class as "Why don't you have fireworks at Guy Fawke's?"

THANK you. Yes, I was being a snot. :-)

An acquaintance of mine grew up in Peru, so for her Halloween is kind of an alien abstraction. Day of the Dead, now....

It's fascinating to me that things that are so much a part of our native social landscape can be exotic arcane practices to someone else.

Which is why the penny only now dropped wrt Aquila's @460: But yeah, jack'o'lanterns aren't that common here, Halloween is in spring here, after all.

Halloween in the spring is weird enough, but, yeah, ripe squash fruits would be thin on the ground because, duh, spring.

Aquila #460: Your links are not found on Instagram. :(

David Harmon @ 462: Yeah, I've got that generally. It just seems like a concept that it would be useful to have a word for when talking about the sort SF where it happens, but I don't know what the word is, or if there isn't one.

I'm fairly sure that Leckie's humans do come from Earth, because they have songs which originated on Earth (notably L’homme armé).

Yeah, the humans of the Ancillary* books are very much descended from east African plains apes of Sol 3. Though there's at least one subset of them that's done some significant genetic modification such that they don't look particularly humanoid, just to confuse the issue. (And which show up for maybe six paragraphs of backstory.)

Andrew M @ 466

Any Human society sufficiently distant from our current context (time and/or place) counts as alien.

David Harmon @439: Yes, everything from zucchini out through most pumpkins and all the weird decorative squashes/gourds are technically the same species. Sort of.

Well, they fit the "biological species model," in that they will quite happily cross-breed and make fertile offspring.

This is somewhat inconvenient to people trying to grow prize (or merely 'jack-o-lantern') pumpkins one yard over from people growing ... any other member of the species. Because the fruits are grown from the genetics of the SEEDS, not the PARENT PLANT.

This led to one very memorable summer and fall in my childhood yard, where a single, extremely enthusiastic and fecund pumpkin vine, sprouted no fewer than eight wildly different fruit morphologies (apparently our bees were busy and cosmopolitan; there were a lot of yards with high fences, so I have no idea what came from where).

Most of them were really tasty. One made an absolutely FABULOUS jack-o-lantern, because ... well, it wasn't near-spherical like most pumpkins. It sort of almost had a neck, like those knobby three-color gourds they have you make birdhouses of in nature camp. But it was really effective, once we were careful about where we put the face. :->

469
I think the description I read was that squashes are promiscuous.

[Capclave GOL]

Initial suggestion for meeting time and place.

Meet in the hotel lobby at 6:00 pm on Saturday and then proceed to a restaurant.

(I'm open to meeting earlier or later. The lobby seems the obvious place to meet.)

I'm not suggesting a restaurant right now. Any suggestions are welcome. I did print out a copy of the restaurant guide from the Capclave website. There are a number of places within a fairly short driving distance and several within walking distance of the hotel.

#468: Any Human society sufficiently distant from our current context (time and/or place) counts as alien.

I think Bren Cameron would disagree. Or to put it less cryptically, any sufficiently alien society is distinguishable from a human one -- because it's built and sustained by beings whose minds don't work the way human minds do.

LizardBreath #465: TVTropes might have a name for it. I won't be looking it up just now, because I want to get some sleep tonight. ;-)

duckbunny @ #438, I think what you call "swedes" we call "rutabagas".

Bill Higgins, "John Scalzi on Mars" is a pretty good fit.

Though I liked the movie, there's a single line in the book that I think is worth the cover price all by itself. (It involves Aquaman.) I was disappointed that the movie had the setup for it, but not the payoff.

My first impression after a few days testing the product I was abruptly reassigned to work on:

I am WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY overqualified.

[Capclave GOL]

I am good with 6:00pm meeting at the lobby. I will have spouse and child.

albatross @ 331 "I think that's always been somethign that was done (mainstream media sources have no qualms about finding some apparent wackos to point and laugh at), but it seems like right now, it's some huge fraction of visible web articles. Sometimes these are actually reporting what the other side believes, but I think it's a lot more common to find the craziest or dumbest person on the other side, or to find something that sounds crazy taken out of context but actually has some rational thought behind it."

Yes, it's true. One of the more frustrating things about the last few years is how all the left-wing media email lists I signed up for over the last decade have slid slowly but surely into outrage bait. This is particularly annoying when followed by "--and so send us money!" It's also becoming a much larger portion of my twitter stream than I'd like.

There's a space between "finding the craziest person" and "taking things out of context," which is to find the arguments which maybe don't quite make sense but reach the ideologically correct conclusion, and so are hard to eradicate from within* and become widely circulated. These are almost perfect for propaganda purposes: it really is widely-held, and even relatively sensible members of the group will try to defend it even though, really, it isn't a good argument.

* "Hmm, I agree with cause [x] but I think this particular argument is a bit wonky, see, it--" "YOU TRAITOR" "eep, nevermind"

Fragano@408:

Taking up the other half of your conundrum, I'm currently very fond of the El Dorado 15-year Demerara. If your tastes run to the more piratical style, I like Smith and Cross quite a bit, as well as the local-to-me-anyway Lost Spirits brand.

Working the other half of the problem, I try to remind myself that part of college is discovering that chronic sleep deprivation does not help in intellectual pursuits. It helps keep me out of the rum when I run across one of my old college papers unexpectedly.

Despite the evidence, I turned out OK.

#462 ::: David Harmon

I wouldn't mind having a term for humans who aren't plausibly connected to our timeline-- Game of Thrones is a prime example.

janetl @432,
For the longest time only one restaurant in my neighborhood -- and even the whole SFBay Area -- had nothing but 5/5 stars on yelp. It was the sweet potato stall outside of a local Korean grocery store. It's one person who sells one item: absolutely perfect fresh-from-the-oven sweet potatoes. I learned that done right, they don't even need salt.

The variety they use is thinner than the typical ones I see in stores, and the oven is made specifically for roasting them. At home I've gotten results not too far away from the SPS by starting them up in the microwave (getting the internal temp to about 140F) and then roasting at a high temperature.

On Peeling Hard Squashes
I've had good luck with my pressure cooker for hard squashes, either to fully cook them or to make them peelable. What I'd found by accident (when I stopped a cooking 7 minutes in because I'd forgotten an ingredient) was that part way done meant it slipped out of the shell easily. (This timing for a squash of a size where 13-14 minutes is done, and 16-20 minutes is done and very, very soft).

Ever since then I've used this method to peel squash, especially those with ridges. Much more recently I learned that a tiny bit of baking soda/ alkalinity added before a pressure cooking lets the squash caramelize. As a complete replacement for roasting I find this works if I'm making soup, but the start by PCing, finish in the oven method is better if the squash needs to stay in identifiable pieces.

Ooh - a new use for the pressure cooker! Do you cut the squash up first, or do they go in whole?

Victoria @468

Which makes a lightly-fictionalised account of the Bounty voyage into Science Fiction on the meeting, and clash between, cultures.

This isn't ridiculous, but I think the classification does depend somewhat on the writing style. Anything Aubrey/Maturin is already alien culture, but historical does it differently.

VictorS@481
The cooking utensil with 1000 uses, now 1001. I've had mine for about 5-6 years now, and I have no idea how I got on without one before. All those "then simmer for 3 hours" reduced down to 20 minutes means all sorts of recipes are doable in a short evening.

Cut in half, and this has been for soccer-ball (or a bit smaller) -sized squash. It's a bit trial-and-error, still. I've now had times where the shell slips off and is still hard enough to work as a bowl, and I then use it as such, for a dash of shiny.

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

1 butternut squash
400g tinned chickpeas*
400g coconut milk*
Curry paste or powder
Seasonings

*Based on the size of tins easily available to me; other proportions are highly likely to work.

Peel, remove seeds and chop butternut squash. It will be blended later, but I chop small-ish so it'll cook quicker.

Simmer butternut squash in a minimum of water until you can stick a fork in it.

Transfer butternut squash to blender, along with as much of the water as possible because some of the flavour is in it, and blend until smooth. Or blend with a hand blender.

Add chickpeas, with or without the chickpea water, and blend again. I have to put most of the soup back in the pan first, or it won't fit in the blender's jug, but the soup provides the liquid to keep the blender happy. If blending seperately, stir together before seasoning.

Season. I always use curry paste or powder and a vegetable stock cube, which I (surprise) blend into a portion of the soup and stir in. I will usually use at least some of:
tomato paste (tablespoon or so)
garlic paste (teaspoon)
soy sauce (big splash)
fish sauce (small splash)
salt (a pinch or two, carefully - stock cubes, curry paste, soy sauce and fish sauce all contain salt already)

Simmer for five minutes or until the hungry household arrive home from work.

Add tin of coconut milk. Stir until the coconut has combined. Let it come just up to simmering temperature, and serve.

Makes four big bowls or six starters.

Also good, although notably less thick, with sweet potato. Chickpeas can be replaced with other pulses but be aware of the skins, which may not blend well. Pulses are strictly speaking optional but make for a heartier dinner with protein in it. Chilli haters can use korma powders or roll their own spice mix; chilli lovers can add cayenne or chilli paste.

Lila @474: They put that joke into one of the pre-movie online promotional vids (supposedly the result of pre-Mars-mission psych training and testing).

Kathryn from Sunnyvale, forgive me, but I have been reading waaaay too much Avengers fanfic, and must recommend you search AO3 for the Foodieverse. It's a restaurant alternate universe. Tony and Bruce do molecular gastronomy. Steve hates being called the hot hipster chef and has a food truck that donates to the hungry. Eventually, Sam Wilson shows up with Potato Rescue, a truck that does nothing but potatoes.

It is ridiculously comforting to me that this exists. And your sweet potato stall. Good job, sweet potato people. Good job.

Diatryma @486, Kathryn @483: Helpful link directly to the Foodieverse stories.

[Capclave GOL]

There's a Panera (chain bakery/sandwich place) more-or-less across the street from the conference hotel that wouldn't be a bad place to sit and talk. There's a pretty decent vegetarian Indian place a couple miles away (I normally only eat there for lunch), and there's a pretty nice brewpub with good local beers a couple miles away--they'd all probably be pretty decent places for a gathering. (The Panera will be quieter for talking, but will have less interesting food; the brewpub is quite good, but it will be loud on a Saturday night.)

Lila @ 474
Oh, but they did! in the teaser trailers and "training mission excerpts" The advertising team took the idea and ran with it. Aquaman and whales.

Nancy Lebovitz @ 479
Alt-Humans (as in Alt-History?)

Dave Bell @ 482
"The past is another country" or rather "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." If I want to get the quote right.

Having tutored ESL post docs and their spouses -- and provided instruction on how to do everyday tasks* I never stopped to think about -- doing a year-long residency, I've had more than a few paradigm shifts in my thinking. There is a reason the definitions of "foreign national" and "resident alien" are pretty much the same.

----
* How to get your hair cut. How to find a doctor. Where to find certain types of groceries. How the US Postal Service works.

I'm not crazy about alt-humans because it suggests to me that humans are different, rather than humans being a stable factor while the background of the story is what's different.

Lila @ #474:

Ayup. The English call it "swede" as short for "Swedish turnip" and the Americans call it "rutabaga" as an Anglification of "rotbagge" (root ram", which was a local dialect word for the cabbage-roots (which is a literal translation of their Swedish name) in one of the areas that had a high incidence of "emigrate to the Americas" roughly 1830 to 1910-or-so.

Dave Bell @482: Go read Randall Garrett's "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" (on Project Gutenberg here for various epub formats). The idea's been around for a while -- the story was published in Astounding in 1959.

Nancy:

It seems like there are several different variations of this.

1 Humans evolved from Earth, but somehow got other places:

a. You can have some prehistorical alien abduction thing going on--someone sampled some humans or hominids a very long time ago, brought them to other planets, and they've gone on their merry way adapting and evolving in their own direction. L Neil Smith's Forge of the Elders series had this idea--a few humans had been sampled by some time-traveling (kinda) aliens, and so a human shows up with no common history with modern humans for tens of thousands of years. I've seen this other places, but can't think of other examples right now.

b. You can have aliens or gods or God or someone forcing evolution to converge on the same or related forms everywhere. There are a couple Star Trek episodes with this idea (retroconning why you can have Vulcans and humans crossbreeding--some powerful ancient aliens planted the seeds for all these related species like humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Cardassians, Bajorans, etc, somehow.) CS Lewis also did something like this in his Space Trilogy--all intelligent life after the birth of Christ would be in man's image to honor the one time God took human form. (If you can get an omniscent, omnipotent God forcing things to come out the way you want, your problems of explaining impossible coincidences nicely go away.)

c. You could have some story where humans developed spacefaring civilization and spread in the past, but then the civilization got bombed into the stone age without leaving evidence. I can't think of an example, but I've probably read this story somewhere.

d. Convergent evolution magically makes sentient beings look a whole lot like humans. (Bipedal, one head, standing upright, etc.) This seems to me to require the equivalent of the dice coming up snake eyes a million times in a row, but I think it was a common handwavy explanation in a lot of SF stories. Subverted in _Protector_.

On the other hand, panspermia[1] is a plausible notion--that wouldn't give you humanoids, but it would give you some shared biology--perhaps enough to ultimately share pathogens and food sources.

2. Humans originated elsewhere and we just got the origin wrong

The best example of this I can think of (for hominids, not humans) is Niven's _Protector_. But I think there have been other stories like this, too. In terms of plausibility, this is almost as bad as convergent evolution, given the incredible amount of fossil and biological evidence about shared ancestry among all living things on Earth, along with approximate timelines given by isotope dating and geology.

Another possible example is in _The Dispossessed_-the dominant spacefaring civilization of the time claims to have proof that humans evolved and spread from their planet. It's not clear if we're supposed to believe them, or simply figure that they're claiming this prestige for their own reasons despite any inconvenient facts; we see people from Earth in the novel, BTW.

3 Human origins lost in the mists of time (they may have come from Earth, they may not, nobody knows)

I think this is pretty common. In _A Fire Upon the Deep_ I think this is the situation--we readers know that humans originated on Earth, but I don't think the humans know much about our actual origin. A lot of stories involving humans or humanoids leave this as a possibility.

4 Humans are on some other planet/galaxy with no alternative explanation.

Star Wars, GOT, etc have this going on. They're just there, deal with it, the author isn't going to tell you how they got there.

[1] The idea is that once life evolves anywhere in the galaxy, it will spread by random events--an occasional meteor carries bacterial spores throughout the solar system, and then out to nearby stars. There will be selection for stuff that can spread via random meteor/commet strikes, planets breaking up, big celestial collisions, maybe even suns going nova. This seems more plausible when you realize just how unbelievably tough some bacterial spores are, and how wide the range of bacteria/archea living environments are. If we someday find bacteria living on mars with shared biological mechanisms with Earth life (DNA->RNA->protein via ribosomes, frex) that would make it really plausible.

David Harmon @ 367: I'd forgotten that -- but it pushes the line back decades. (Another vision from the inventor of the comsat!) Raph Koster, note that this is clearly multi-user remote VR; when the lead gronks the system he wakes up in his own room, then gets calls from other players complaining. Peripheral to the story rather than central, but definitely fits your criteria in #375.

Henry Troup @ 394: English written in Hebrew turns out to be moderately common in Tel Aviv.
      Is it English, or simply words that Hebrew didn't have? (e.g., I've heard that Japanese has (by pronunciation) "bei-su-bo-ru" instead of using J words for the concept of baseball -- although I can't vouch for the source from however-long-ago.) Is Israel as down on absorbed words as official France is about Franglish (e.g., "le weekend"), or are they more tolerant?

Steve Wright @ 398: Only if it's served at night.

Fragano @ 408: there's a really good single-malt bar whose tender makes intelligent recommendations; unfortunately, it's in Saratoga Springs.

Tom W @ 492: oh yes. Surprising for Garrett, though; I wonder if that was an idea Campbell spun out....

general wrt canned pumpkin: a story in yesterday's Boston Globe said you should buy now if you want not to make your own this year; they said that Illinois (90% of canned "pumpkin") had a lot of fields washed out, so there will be a shortage. I don't remember hearing of floods, but after last Boston's winter I was less attentive to other peoples' weather; can anyone comment? I see from later comments that this would not affect carving pumpkins, so that fact that I've seen at least 4 carved pumpkins (which will certainly rot before Halloween) on the half-mile walk from my home to the Y doesn't mean people are being wasteful.
      OTOH, I'm bemused at not distinguishing between butternut squash (mostly flesh, bright-orange inside) and US pumpkins (mostly air, pale inside).

Victor S #478: I like El Dorado 15-year-old myself. It's a double-distilled dunder-process rum.

CHip #494: That's a bit of a walk for me.

I'm reading "Ancillary Justice" just now, and thought it pretty clear that the humans are Earth originated, but the fun question is when did their alternative history branch out from our one? European Iron age? Roman empire gone differently? A mix up of Indian and Alexandrian empires starting in the 4th century BC?

The other thing that occured to me is that I feel I can't judge it properly as a book without having read the other two, because there are clearly plots and backstory and world building which may or may not make sense in the end, but I don't know because I haven't read the other two books.

Also, for the humans elsewhere in Space, Iain Banks had a story where that was virtually just a throwaway back story, that they were descended from ones kidnapped from earth by aliens thousands of years ago, and thus we were really put in our place when first contact came.

albatross @493:

If we someday find bacteria living on mars with shared biological mechanisms with Earth life (DNA->RNA->protein via ribosomes, frex) that would make it really plausible.

Interplanetary distances are sufficiently smaller than interstellar distances that a common origin for life on Earth and current or former life on Mars is no more indicative of the plausibility of interstellar spread of life than the common origin of life on continents separated by 1000 km is indicative of the plausibility of the interplanetary spread of life. (The orders of magnitude actually work out pretty well for this analogy.)

(And while it's not relevant, if we ever did find such a thing, it's more likely that the original origin would have been on Mars, rather than Earth, for the same reason that meteorites on Earth of Martian origin are known to exist and those of Venusian origin are, last I heard, not - it's a lot easier for rocks to fall downhill than for them to go uphill.)

albatross @493: Michael Kube-McDowell's Trigon Disunity trilogy is sort of an example of 1c; the ancient human civilization was destroyed by an alien attack, the nature of which is the main plot thread.

AKICIML: My husband has finally finished the complete revision of his novel, and is about to put it into the hands of beta readers.

I dimly recall some excellent advice about beta readers, more detailed than the also excellent "If they tell you there's a problem, they're usually right; if they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong." I think it may have been Mary Robinette Kowal?? But I don't remember where. Anyway, she said there were 4 (?) specific things she asks her beta readers to tell her: something like what surprised you, what didn't you understand, what kicked you out of the story, and...???

Does this ring a bell for anyone, and if so, can you point me at the original?

lorax #497: On the other hand, chemical pre-panspermia is marginally more likely -- AIUI, we've seen some biochemical precursors (amino acids at least) in interstellar dust clouds -- and more interestingly, they matched Earth's chirality.

Of course, that doesn't preclude another world's biota using, say, peptides for genetic coding, and nucleic acid polymers for structural material.

Lila @ #499:

From this blog post by Mary Robinette Kowal:

I ask my readers to tell me:

1. What bores you
2. What confuses you
3. What don't you believe
4. What's cool? (So I don't accidentally "fix" it.)

Lila @499:

She goes into it here, too: How to train your internal editor.

CHip@494:
Surprising for Garrett, though; I wonder if that was an idea Campbell spun out….

I read the story in his anthology TakeOff, where the afterword summarizes the discussion that led to the story. I can't remember who he was talking with, and I don't have the book on hand at the moment, but it was someone who had a habit of asking leading questions that would inspire stories.

[Capclave GOL]

Meet in the hotel lobby at 6:00 pm on Saturday and then proceed to a restaurant.

I'm not proposing a restaurant right now, albatross suggested some possibilities above at #488.

There are additional possibilities in the Capclave 2015 restaurant guide (I am planning to bring a copy). There is a link to the guide on the capclave.org website (at the "Printable Material" webpage).

I'm about 5'4", male, japanese ancestry, glasses. I should also be wearing my name badge.

If anyone's taking requests, a spoilerific Ancillary Mercy thread would really hit the spot.

guthrie @496: Why does the Imperial Radch's timeline have to be an alternate to ours? I haven't read Mercy yet, but I don't recall anything in the first two that's inconsistent with them just being our own far-future descendants.

Chris @503: My copy is at hand (it's where I found the title) and CHip is right -- it was a Campbell idea.

There are some sampled-from-the-past humans in other solar systems in Ken Macleod's Cosmonaut Keep and its sequels.