When the Hapsburgs invade Emeryville...

Wicked line from a review:

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:52:36 GMT

"In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae."

Figs and Shrimp rejoice!

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:45:04 GMT

In order to pay the judgement against Westboro Baptist, a court has authorized seizing the church and Phelps' family law firm property. Now, there is a loophole stating that homes cannot be seized, and the Phelps family is going to argue, on appeal, that the church and law firm property are their home.

Nonetheless, it does mean that they, their church, and their law firm are bankrupt and *they* are now getting the feeling of being poked with the legal sticks.

(thanks to brithistorian for the information.)

Hah! They finally admitted it!

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:47:58 GMT

For years, I've had this feeling (corroborated by conversations with others) that the financial markets were, in effect, filled with imaginary money, that existed as long as we believed in it. And I was dubious about working with imaginary money.

Today, the Federal Reserve Bank chairman said:

"Moreover, the adverse effects would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability."

The *real* economy! It's admitted!

(Now to go multiply the Dow Jones by the square root of -1 to make it all clear....)

Weekend Of French Fries

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:14:23 GMT

(OK. There was a lot of other stuff too, but this requires remarking upon....)

Friday night: Orson, in San Francisco. Their duck fat fries surpassed Zuni's and have moved to the top of my Favorite Thin French Fries Ever list. (There was a place named Thrasher's in Baltimore's Harborplace that did great thicker fries -- research shows it still exists). The sauce with the fries was not as good as some of the better ones I've had -- I point you specifically towards Frjtz, in San Francisco.

Saturday night: Chow, in San Francisco: Their fries are *really* good, especially with their Burger Royale (with cheese ;) ) on a baguette, and mayonnaise.

Sunday, daytime: Gregoire fries (to go with lunch brought to the housebound) -- these are also *damn* fine fried potatoes.

I don't think I've ever had this good a weekend for the skinny fried potato goodness.

Weird Historical Point of the Day

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:40:43 GMT

The first dated printed work we have using movable metal type (from Gutenberg's press)?

An indulgence.*

A printer in Spain sold a bishopric there 18,000 indulgences, printed on fine paper, in 1498. 18,000! I am sure they cost a pretty penny, and I am also very sure that the printer was not being paid on a "We'll give you the money when we've sold them" basis.

While it's certainly true that there was venality in Church doings before the press (witness Chaucer, and many other complaints) it is worth noting that buying 18,000 indulgences from a printer puts a lot of pressure on the sellers of indulgences to recoup their costs. (Rather different then when you had to write each by hand, on the spot (or a few in advance at a time) Leading to -- who knows ;) -- the sort of pressure tactics that a certain German priest objected to, amongst a host of other issues of theology or dogma.

Not a causative factor, those 18,000 indulgences (and their equivalents around Europe), but a possible contributing one. And one I'd never even thought of, until today.

*all historical printing facts from this post are from Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, I & II, Cambridge University Press

A depressing, but worthwhile, poem

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:47:58 GMT

For those of you who care about the linguistic drift in torture, and indeed, in the word in general, I refer you to this:

"A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties", by Edward Hirsch

A tribute to Gary Gygax

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:48:28 GMT

brithistorian beat me to the posting punch ;), but here's the Order of the Stick tribute to Gary*.

(Any D&D players (or people who know about D&D) who aren't reading OOTS have a 500+ big strip archive of fun waiting for them. ;))

(FYI: When I checked it, it was timing out. I suspect you may need to try more than once, as lots of people are probably hitting that site.)

Requisat in Pace, GG

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:45:54 GMT

Gary Gygax has died.

There are a lot of gaming-related ways I could put that fact, but I'll leave it where it is. (For those of you on my f-list who are not gamers, Gary was one of the creators of D&D, and, as a result, the entire role-playing-game hobby.)

Thank you, Mr. Gygax, for a whole lot of fun in my life.

The Junior University* Does Something Right

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:42:34 GMT

From Daily Kos:

Stanford has decided to eliminate tuition fees for students whose families make less than $100,000 per year. But, that's not all....if a family makes less than $60,000 per year, Stanford will pick up their room and board as well. Why the change of heart?

The university is making the change in the wake of published reports last month that its endowment had grown almost 22 percent last year, to $17.1 billion. That sum had begun to attract attention from lawmakers who want wealthy institutions to do more to reduce tuition costs.

Now, alma mater o' mine, let's get to crescating that scientia, and excolaturing some more vitas rather than just your endowment, eh?

*Stanford is officially "Leland Stanford Jr. University", leading me to tease my high-school classmate who was Stanford-bound that if he got lucky, next he could go to a grown-up university**.

** He did. MIT, for graduate school.

I don't know the rest of their set-list

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:52:31 GMT

...but I give credit to KFOG for including "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" in a Valentine's Day mix. ;)

Sometimes, I think it is a brand new world we're moving to...

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:46:36 GMT

Australian PM to officially apologize to "the Indigenous People of this land". (link to Dailykos, with text of apology.)

A few half-baked thoughts about Revenge of the Sith

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:25:05 GMT

I finally saw it, last night, after deciding I wanted to see what the movie version of the Lego Star Wars game looked like. ;)

(And yes, that's actually the exact process. Played the game, wondered what the real version looked like.)

A few thoughts from that experience:

1) There is something artistically unsatisfying (though perhaps inevitable) about the end of the prequels having what felt like a better-constructed end than the end of the series proper. As a long-term advocate of what can be done w/out dialogue in film, I have to give him a thumbs-up for such a long ending montage sans words.

2) If the dialogue in that film was after Tom Stoppard script-doctored it, I think the original draft must have been destroyed in order to protect the sanity of future generations.

3) Ian McDiarmid did his valiant best, but couldn't save the movie. But man, did he try; and for low pay, too, since CGI scenery isn't as filling as real stuff, I bet.

4) I think that there was a really good movie in there, or at least a much better one. The problem is that had it been made true to the story, it wouldn't have been a "Star Wars" movie as people had grown to expect them. I don't know whether it wasn't made that way because Lucas couldn't do it, felt he would have been letting people down, or just plain didn't want to. Or didn't feel Hayden Christensen was up to it.

Because it isn't about the big battle scenes. For that film to work, it really only needed two battle sequences -- the battle between Dooku and Skywalker/Kenobi, and the final Vader/Kenobi battle. Because those two battles, with the final conclusions (Dooku killed by Skywalker, Vader left alive by Kenobi) tell us a great deal about the contrasts, and pose the moral question that is, in some ways, at the heart of the movie (when is it correct to do the wrong thing for the right reasons -- a question not asked, or, really, answered, by any of the other films.)

Instead, in the Steven Schwartz Rewrite/Reshoot (arrogant? Me? Never) We start with the rescue of the Chancellor, minus the buzzbots and much of the struggle getting to the ship, have the fight with Dooku -- and then switch back to Coruscant, where the important stuff plays out.
Because what is *important* is Anakin's fall; and it isn't convincing, despite McDiarmid's best efforts. He just doesn't have enough time to make the switch happen.

Chasing General Grievous? Not important to show; nothing happens in that fight that matters for the story -- all that matters is that it's *not* Anakin who was there.

Similarly, the Yoda/Palpatine fight? Dramatic, but it undercuts the idea, set up by Lucas, of the momentum of empires *not* changing because of a single "winner-takes-all" duel. It's about moral questions, rather than who can better fling Senate hovercraft around. Get rid of it.

And with the time saved by removing some extraneous space-battle, a second Grievous fight, and the big boffo Yoda-battle at the end, show the more subtle development of Skywalker's dissatisfaction. Heck; add another character, a sounding-board who is *not* Palpatine, who understands Skywalker's resentments and upset (and thus provides a counterpoint to the chorus of "It's all right, just be patient" that we get from everyone else). Unless, of course, the objective was to show Palpatine's overwhelming mind-whammy, in which case the story becomes a lot more tedious.

As I say, I don't know why Lucas didn't do this; there are plenty of potential reasons. It's just what I would have done.

Of course, I also would have wanted a time machine, so that I could cast the Malcolm McDowell of "...if" and "A Clockwork Orange" as Anakin. Or Jake Gyllenhaal, for that matter.

Still, I'm glad I saw it; the little kid in me who fell in love with the first Star Wars movie is content.

Random Workplace Quote

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:29:16 GMT

"Let's not pick the day with a chance of hail to move the server, OK?"

Other people have done it, and I'm curious.

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:03:35 GMT

Ask me a question. You'll get an answer. Will be truthful, if not helpful. ;)

(Comments screened, anonymous posting OK.)

Random Quotes from the Household

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:04:50 GMT

"They were dancing, because that's what women do when left alone on an island with moisturizer"...

Soccer today, in one hyphenated word

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:45:53 GMT

hat-trick.

Quotes from around our house:

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:55:11 GMT

"Sweetie, your feminist manifesto is on my underwear."

Some Notes On Heinlein and A General Aesthetic/Moral Problem of Science Fiction

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:49:50 GMT

(aside from the well-known general aesthetic problem of SF, best exemplified by the title to this essay and the titles of short fiction by Samuel R. Delany and occasionally James Tiptree Jr., the Very Long Title)
Thanks go out to genderfur, with whom I lunched and discussed the beginnings of some of these thoughts, recently.

I've stopped reading Orson Scott Card; he got to me a long time ago as a person, and there was always something nagging at me about him as a writer -- I enjoyed some of what I read, but some of it really got on my nerves, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then I read John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer, which I have referenced in this journal before. And when I read that, I went "Ah, that's some of what I like, and some of what drives me absolutely bugfuck! I understand it now..."

And with that mystery solved, I felt much less compelled to read further.

Minor circumstances, oddities, and coincidences led me to do a bit of Heinlein rereading recently, and Heinlein's in the same category, for me, as Card -- I enjoy some of his work a great deal, and at other times he annoys the living daylights out of me. It wasn't just the politics, though they certainly didn't help. It was something else.

And I think I've found it (and some other things along the way):

1) Heinlein cheats for his political rhetorical purpose. It's not just him (Card does it as well, and I'm sure that if I spent a bit of time working on it I could dredge up authors from the other side of the political spectrum who do it as well -- I suspect people would accuse Kim Stanley Robinson of doing it) and it's not always, but he does. And because of the nature of science fiction, it's particularly vulnerable to that sort of cheating.

The example that made it painfully clear was a discussion in Time Enough For Love, in which the characters are discussing why Old Earth has fallen on very, very bad times. The assertion is made that it's because the brains of the planet left due to migration, the really really smart and important people, leaving the rest behind to gradually collapse.

Now, this is assailable on a lot of levels; Heinlein makes some historical claims which can be shown to be, at the very least, much less obvious than he thinks they are (that it is always the brightest who migrate, given the chance, to be most specific. I am sure some historians of Australia would be highly amused at the corrolaries to that particular statement) -- but the "fact", that people migrating have caused Old Earth to fall on hard times, can't be argued with. Because, to those characters, it's a fact. It's a fact within the architecture of the book, and to refuse it means to refuse the rest of the book, which includes a lot of statements of moral philosophy that a lot of people would agree with (say, for example, "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity".)

Now I know that on one level, it's foolish to take one's ethical viewpoint from fiction, but given the amount of weight as a Person of Wisdom certain authors have received, both within and without the SF community, it's worth pointing out when they're palming aces to support their points.

Let us compare to another author of very vividly political concerns: China Mieville. I suspect that anyone reading Mieville's books would not have a terribly hard time guessing where his sympathies lay; but because he presents not a world of solutions, or, indeed, a world of *conclusions*, but a world of specific examples of specific individuals and lets us draw our own conclusions -- for example, questions of the ethics of weapons research take on a new level of interest when discussed around slake-moths -- and thereby does a lot less ace-palming than Heinlein did. Or, for that matter, than Card.

This is a problem of any sort of fiction, really -- but in the case of memetic fiction, there is always the appeal to the specific case that Mieville uses, rather than the ability to draw on planetary or universal examples. Heinlein may have written "If this goes on....", but that is not the style he chose to take in what he wrote; what he wrote was 'This happened because..." and while you may not agree that his reasons are correct when applied to the now, they are fundamentally correct, because of the power of the author, applied to then.

2) What makes this particular bit of cheating so significant, I think, is also some of what makes Heinlein so compelling. I sat back and thought about the scenes in Heinlein that I found particularly appealing; the moments that made me go "Hey, I want to read that again". And while some of them were moments of drama -- the courtroom scenes in I Will Fear No Evil, or the embassy scenes from Stranger in a Strange Land -- many of them were really domestic moments more than anything else -- the second half of Glory Road, for example. These are moments that could be described, in a stretch, as forerunners to Mundane SF. To take another example, while the frame story of To Sail Into The Sunset (and yes, I know, Virginia is supposed to have written a lot of that.) is supposedly tense, the rest of the book is "Main character gets laid a lot, deals with domestic crises, and makes wry observations on what passes around her."

I submit this is much closer to, say, Geoff Ryman's Air than it is to Foundation.

Which leads to the third point, in which points #1 and #2 combine. ;)

3) Heinlein didn't understand privilege.

Power, he understood. Authority and liberty, to a point. Coercion? Yes. Privilege, no. And I'll explain why.

Throughout his books there are many, many, many examples of "You do this to keep peace with your neighbors, but it's not really significant" -- heck, his main character-arc includes a huge segment of "We masqueraded to avoid getting in trouble because people have archaic and pointless oddities about them." He understands the crushing power of conventionality.

Yet, over and over again, from the beginning of his career (Beyond This Horizon) to the end of it (To Sail Into The Sunset) he insists upon the crucial element of politeness and courtesy as the foundation blocks of civilization. To the point where it is appropriate to shoot someone for cutting in line (Time Enough for Love, IIRC) or throw them out an airlock for an inappropriate piece of flirtation (Moon is a Harsh Mistress).

While he has nothing but contempt for people who follow arbitrary rules of morality, he has nothing but contempt for people who fail to follow rules of courtesy and politeness. While failing utterly, as far as I can tell, to accept that the latter might, just maybe, possibly, not be any less arbitrary than the former. I am sure, for example, that the discussion of negotiation style in Kochman's Black and White Styles In Conflict would have been alien to him.

And that is a hallmark of privilege. It's one that took me a long time to get over. But it's there when I read his writing, and it seeps through his political stances. And what's more, it seeps into his "facts", which are all we can use to view an SFnal setting.

It may be a while before I read him again, now that I've got this puzzled out.

ETA: I corrected the author of the excellent Black and White Styles In Conflict. The authors of UNIX Shell Programming have more than enough fame on their own without my giving them credit for someone else's work. ;)

Everyone has a happy place. Mine has Legos.

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:50:36 GMT

Take that, evolutionists! Now we have documentary evidence of dinosaurs and man co-existing! Look here! Clearly a baby dinosaur trying to eat from a pre-Noah's-Ark Christmas Tr....

waitaminnit...

firp. Ding. Blast. Back to the drawing board...

Ow. Good ow, but ow.

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:46:06 GMT

For the first time in a few weeks (work, injuries, Thanksgiving) I played soccer at lunch today.

Last night, I asked rednfiery, my marvelous massage therapist, to give my calves some attention, as they'd been bothering me. They're fine. They came through beautifully.

My thighs, from deflecting a point-blank full-strength shot by one of the group's better players, sting a bit.
My lungs, from running more than I'm used to, have recovered now, but had their moments during the game.
And my chest -- well, it's not happy. You see, when you bring your hands up to protect your face, but the shot's a bit low, and so comes slamming into your hands on the way up, driving them into your chest, it *hurts*. A lot.

On the other hand, by my own accounting, I blocked at least 5 shots that would otherwise have been goals. And demonstrated to myself that yes, I can still play the way I'm used to playing. I need to get my passing back on track, but that'll come.

A good day, for the most part. And only one moment* of athletomoral hypertrophy. ;)

*I don't care if you're "Used to play pro in the Mexican league and can dribble really well", and I don't care if you're "I like encouraging the weaker players" -- you do not play fancy loose-with-the-ball dribbling tricks right in front of your own goal and challenge the other team's weaker players to come get you. I nearly levelled you myself just to get the ball away from the damn goal. Go up to the other end and play offense, please.

Two and a half hours left for $100 buffy!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:25:41 GMT

Amazon -- $100 for a 40-DVD set of Buffy, normally $189. Just as an FYI, in case anyone cares. ;)

Writer's Block: I Rock The Microphone

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:01:37 GMT

What song makes you rock the karaoke mic?

View other answers

500 Miles -- the Proclaimers.

Did you feel that?

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 03:06:44 GMT

8:04 PM, rocked things a little bit.

J.K. Rowling -- the Author is Undead

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:35:26 GMT

Someone on Salon finally noticed something that had occurred to me, and which has probably occurred to many other people that I just haven't seen on my friends'-list.

According to J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore's gay. Not "I conceived of him as gay", not "I wrote him in such a way as to let people believe he was gay", but "He was gay" (paraphrased.)

Now, IIRC, there was some small fanfare a little while back about the last Harry Potter book having been written. The series was over. Done. Complete.

Except, apparently, not. Because the author is not dead. The author is undead, and is coming back to remind us of this fact. ;)

I know that in fanfic communities, there's "canon" and not-canon. And what Rowling now says, independent of any books having been written? Well, as far as I'm concerned, it's not-canon, because until she's written that stuff down and printed it, it is, in the words of someone from that Salon article, "just describing what's showing on the teeny TV screen inside her head, and that's not playing fair."

I will freely admit that I'm not a big one for Authorial Intent to begin with, but I've especially never been a big fan of "Trivia Outside My Major Work" work -- a la Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Castle Amber, which made it such a, well, *boring* place; so much so that I've informed everyone I play Amber RPGs with that it is absolutely, completely, and utterly different in my game. ;)

The same goes, I think, for people who give interviews with little extra featurelets; DVD extras and side notes are not privileged. No one privileges the trunk novel, so why should we the outside-the-work pronouncement?

Sometimes the Bible works well, rewritten:

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:28:14 GMT

From slacktivist.typepad.com, regarding the word "Shibboleth":

* The condensed version of the story, from Judges 12:

"Art thou an Ephraimite?"
"Um, no?"
"Say 'shibboleth.'"
"Sibboleth."
"Aha! Die Ephraimite!"
"Oh sit."