2012: Writing Year in Review

Written This Year

Novels: Zero, I'm sorry to say. I did a lot of editing on Fire in the Belly and Throne of Nightmares but grad school really prevented me from making much progress. I think I might have added another 10k words to King's Hand.

Shorter Stuff: Relatively more success on this front, perhaps because shorter stories are ideal for picking up and putting back down while dealing with horrible grad student things.
Flash: 5 (spoiler: I still suck at flash)
Short Stories: 12 (six of which I wrote during the Clarion Write-a thon, one I wrote today!)
Novellettes/Novellas: 2 (just finished the rough of The Ugly Tin Orrery!)

Consigned to the trunk of awfulness, never to return:  None yet this year, but there are two that I'm giving the stink-eye that might be vanishing once I have the brain power to look over them better and do more editing.

Best/favorite story of the year: Comes the Huntsman, no question. It was an intense story to write, and I'm still very proud of it. It was also published by Strange Horizons, which has been a personal dream of mine!

Considering last year I wrote well over 200K words, by any measure my productivity has been much, much lower this year. To the point that I started getting a bit weird about it back in October because I hadn't gotten to just write fiction in what felt like so long.

On the other hand I've written two drafts of a Masters Thesis, so I think that should count for something.

Publishing
Queries sent: 102
Rejections received: 72
Most rejections received: For just this year, A Crack in the Mirror is leading with 10. For all time (discounting Throne of Nightmares) Entangled had 18 when it was accepted for publication by Specutopia.

This was an amazing year for me for publishing. I had four sales, two of which were pro-level, and signed the contracts for five novellettes/novellas, only one of which I had already written. The two pro sales this year kicked me over to three total, which means I get classified as a professional writer. That was incredibly exciting as well, and Comes the Huntsman was the story that did that for me.

Published this year:

• Entangled in Specutopia (which seems to have vanished, I'm sorry to say)
• Comes the Huntsman in Strange Horizons
• The Jade Tiger in Penumbra

Slated for 2013: 

• Hyperion from Scape
• A return of The Jade Tiger in the Best of Penumbra Anthology
• Murder on the Titania from Musa Publishing
• The Ugly Tin Orrery from Musa Publishing
• The Curious Case of Miss Clementine Nimowitz and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog from Musa Publishing
• Blood in Peyote Creek from Musa Publishing
• Do Shut Up, Mr. Simms from Musa Publishing

Stories put online this year: 

• Infection 
• The Last Lighthouse

Unless Specutopia reappears, once I've run out the six month exclusive period in the contract, I think I'll probably put Entangled online here to be read for free in February. It's a story that I really like and I don't want it to just vanish. 

Also, I'm hoping to get back to my little fanfic habit once the thesis is done and I have spare time again. I'll be working a real, 40 hours per week job for the first time in five years, but I'm pretty sure I'll still have more spare time then than I do now. 

Goals for 2013: 

• Finish King's Hand
• Finally get representation nailed down for at least one of my novels
• Work with Kat on our joint project and get it done!
• Write another birthday story in February for Mr. T.H.; an important goal for me because the one last year turned out so stunningly well I'm terrified another attempt won't produce anything at all good. 
• Keep the novellettes rolling in on time to Musa and be faithful to my contracts there.
• Finish editing the stories I wrote for this year's Clarion Write-a-thon
• Participate in the Write-a-thon again
• Be generally more productive than I was this year, since I'll no longer have a thesis hanging from my neck like a stone.
• Flash fiction - how the fuck does it work?

A relaxing day in Cambridge

Spent today bumming around Cambridge with our friend Dan. We've now hit the pub by his place (the Green Dragon) twice for dinner, and it's been pretty good both time. There is this thing they do that involves a steak covered with cheese and we really don't need to get more deeply into it than that.

It was a grey day, but it's basically been nothing but grey days the entire time we've been in the UK. The Cam was very swollen, up onto the natural banks in places, which is not good. The sluice gate at Jesus Lock was partially open, which kicked up an impressive sediment plume in the water. There was also quite a bit of standing water in the various commons we passed by, shallow little ponds with park benches and trees sticking up out of them.

There were quite a few house boats parked along the river banks, many of them complete with cats. One of the cats was a very seriously little orange tabby who came up onto the path to be petted by us. (We didn't see him later when we came back, post-rain-storm, but there was a cat flap in the door of the boat so we figure he was safe and dry). There was also a pretty grey and brown tabby who had a lot to say to us, and a very quiet black cat who seemed well aware of the fact that there were swans not five feet from him on the other side of the boat.

We did most of our walking when it wasn't really raining much, and sat out the worst of the storm while having coffee at a little Italian cafe.

Pictures here.

Congratulations, Maine

Same-sex marriage was legal in Maine as of midnight tonight, with couples lining up to receive their marriage licenses first thing in the morning. Maine was one of the three states that approved same-sex marriage by popular vote this year; the other states that have legal same-sex marriage were all made so by the legislature or judicial decision.

I'm really happy for the loving couples in Maine that will now be able to marry. Seeing pictures from Maine, from Washington have just put me in joy overload. When you see other people who are that happy, there is no way to avoid feeling happy yourself, and maybe getting a little teary-eyed because your heart just overflows.

And feel the tide turning.

Straw men

This is a term I've used in the past on my blog, and I bet most if not all of you already know what this is. But just in case, let's cover it briefly, because this is something anyone who has, say, ever watched a politician speak ought to understand.

A Straw Man is a logical fallacy. If you're not familiar with logical fallacies, there's an excellent summary over at the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, which is worth reading. In summary, a logical fallacy is an incorrect argument, normally due to an error in logic or rhetoric, and either purposeful or accidental. There's a massive list of formal fallacies, because certain errors just pop over and over again in argument.

Straw man tends to evoke the image of soldiers bayonetting straw dummies, and it's used for a reason. In the straw man logical fallacy, instead of arguing against your opponent's actual position, you make up an entirely different, misrepresentative position, one that's normally a lot easier to attack, and then argue against that instead. Politicians do it all the time by putting words in their opponent's mouth or purposefully misinterpreting something they've said.

I've attempted to come up with some real world examples, but feel free to offer your own in comments, or correct me if I've made a mistake.

• Just about any politician ever who has claimed that anyone opposed to Law X just wants to maintain the status quo. George W. Bush did that when he argued for No Child Left Behind, Obama did it for the Affordable Care Act. While some opposition comes from wanting to keep things as they are no doubt, there were plenty of people opposed to both because they thought they didn't go far enough (hey, wouldn't it be awesome to have single payer?) or that it went about things the wrong way (way to require mathematically impossible rates of success in testing!) and cogent arguments to that effect.
• Arguing against feminism because we're all just a bunch of man hating bra-burners who want to put a matriarchy in place is one that happens all the time. So often, in fact, the Straw Feminist is a trope. 
• Just about anything to do with the Fox News fictional "War on Christmas." (Example here.) I would argue that the entire concept of the "War on Christmas" is a straw man, since it's a characterization of people wanting to destroy the holiday when basically the evil opposing forces (anyone who says "happy holidays" and atheists for the most part) most commonly want to make the holiday season inclusive for all faiths and/or feel that the government shouldn't be promoting a particular flavor of religion.
• A popular one currently is to characterize any discussion of regulations on guns as an attempt to ban all guns forever. I've gotten hit with that on both my post Sandy Hook massacre blog posts; note in neither do I say anything about banning guns entirely.

Logical fallacies are a powerful, useful tool. Two things you need to keep in mind however:

1. Just because an argument contains a logical fallacy does not mean that the conclusion will necessarily be false. Sometimes someone with shitty logic still gets to a correct conclusion. Also, sometimes people will purposefully commit these fallacies as a rhetorical device, so be cautious of that as well. 
2. Just because you know the logical fallacies does not mean you are immune to committing them yourself. I know I've fallen victim to their siren call in the past. So don't let it get to your ego, okay?

You may not have noticed, but I cuss a lot

People who have read my blog for a while may have noticed that I use rather... salty language. In the past, I've been accused of having a mouth like a trucker. Can't say it's wrong. And think about this - I actually cuss way less than I did about five years ago. Having a little niece that I adore to bits has had the effect of making me more aware of what I say and how I say it, as has just being a writer.

But here's something else you should know. When I cuss in writing, I mean it. The occasionally f-bomb might trip unthinkingly from my lips, but those four letters don't just type themselves. I have in the past actually gone over my blog posts and carefully rearranged the bad words, sometimes adding, sometimes subtracting.

Because words have meaning. And curse words have a great emotional, emphatic load to them, which is why I use them.

My opinions are my own, and when I'm on my own time and my own dime, I will express them in the way I find most effective. On my blog, no one else gets to dictate the terms of this debate. And if someone determines the worthiness of an opinion based solely on their judgment that the language is sufficiently elevated, they have my pity. Pretty prose can be window dressing for an ugly idea, but no matter how much frosting and fondant you put on a cake made from manure, that doesn't change the fact that it's still something that passed through the anus of a large mammal.

It drives me batty when I see people mix up your/you're and they're/there/their, for example. But if the worst criticism I can think of someone's argument is that their grammar is terrible (presuming that their grammar is not so horrific that I can actually understand what they're saying) then I have already lost. "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly!" stopped being a worthwhile debate tactic upon leaving grade school. It just means that you actually have nothing of worth to add but still want to wave your verbal fists in impotent, angry disagreement.

You don't like my opinion? Fine. You don't like my opinion because I scorched your delicate ears with my use of the f-bomb? I mean this in all sincerity: get the fuck over it.

A baseball bat is never an acceptable debate tactic

Check this one off on the list of internet firsts for me - I had a complete stranger state he'd like to "challenge me" with a baseball bat to my head because he didn't like my opinion on Wayne LaPierre being a horrible person. (Well, actually, he didn't like a straw man of my opinion about gun control, but that is a subject for a different time.)

Straw man or no, why does the initial reaction involve talking about perpetrating blunt force trauma on a complete stranger and not a I think you [optional: you moron] are totally wrong and this is why?

This should go without saying, but it's not okay to engage in a public violent fantasy just because you disagree with someone. And immediately trying to excuse it by adding something to the effect of, "but I totally wouldn't because I'm not actually a violent person" doesn't make it any better. You still said it. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or unring the bell, pick your metaphor. Someone taking about baseball bats in one sentences and being a totally nonviolent person hahaha in the next is really not something that inspires me to trust the latter of the two opposing statements; it's smarter to assume the worst because otherwise you could potentially, I don't know, get hit in the head with a baseball bat. 

If you didn't mean it, why the hell did you say it?

Frankly, at that point it just feels like a pathetic little fig leaf. Maybe it should be followed up with a "wow you're humorless can't you take a joke?" since that's classic. I can almost see that as something you'd joke about with people you know. I've "threatened" to punch a friend or two of mine in the cock, for example, and it was all good because everyone involved knew it was a joke. Because we're all friends.

I am under no illusions that this person would actually take a baseball bat to me. To begin with, they don't know me, let alone know where I live. And frankly, talk is incredibly cheap, particularly on the internet where you can say shit like that and never have to look the other person in the eye. That said, it still upset me. It made me angry enough that my hands shook.

"Joking" or "speaking metaphorically" about hurting someone else isn't a way to engage them in reasoned discourse salted with facts or even hyperbolic posturing. Bullshit talk about violence feels incredibly personal because things like that happen to real people, and it reads as an attempt at intimidation. It adds nothing to discussion. It cuts discussion off with an opening position that is hostile and devoid of reason.

So no. It's not okay. It's never okay.

This is the most damning thing, I think. I haven't done it recently, but I'm 99.9% certain in the past I have said things along that vein, most likely related to wishing I could punch a politician or two in the face. I've now come to the conclusion that if I have made even vaguely threatening statements before, that was wrong, and I deeply regret it.

Joking with your friends is not the same as showing your ass on the internet and talking about a complete stranger that may some day soon read your statement. Words have meaning. I've committed to not saying things I don't mean.

And I'm going to grow the fuck up.  

Liveblog of the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas Special

Yes, I am in England, which means I get to see it before most of my friends HAHAHAHA

Needles to say, SPOILERS.

Slimbridge Wetland Centre

So, it actually stopped raining for about an hour and a half, which is amazing. I know I like to give the UK a lot of shit about being rainy and having no sun or blue sky, but this year has been kind of ridiculous and now I'm regretting all that teasing I've done.

But yes! Sun! Or at least lack of rain! Fresh air! We went to Slimbridge Wetland Centre, which is a little reserve for aquatic birds. I'm not much of a bird person (though I think my parents would love it) but I still had fun seeing all the pretty and exceedingly talkative animals.

Have some photos.

By the way, this cute little guy? Is a Nene, which is a goose from Hawaii. Apparently they breed them here in captivity and send them back to Hawaii. But if you go to Slimbridge, get used to this sight. They're always there, watching you with their cute, black button eyes. And there are always two of them. Weird. Eerie. Cute.

The Woman in Black

And I don't mean the movie with Daniel Radcliffe. I meant to see that when it came out and never got around to it, then I heard it was a bit crap anyway. I think I will see if I can catch it on Netflix or something now so I can compare it to the play.

Since the play is what I saw.

Mike and I decided that we wanted to go see a show while we were in London, since we'd never gotten to do that before and were staying the night. We stopped by Leicester Square around 3 in the afternoon, which I was a little worried about since I heard you should go early. We checked the list of shows and decided to go for The Woman in Black first, since it's been a long time since we've seen anything that wasn't a musical.

I'm really happy we spent the money to see it, and so was Mike. There are only three characters in the play - Arthur Kipps, the Actor, and the Woman in Black. I'm amused that the Woman in Black isn't on the cast list for the website, which really is in keeping with how they presented her in the play, where she isn't supposed to actually exist except as an ill omen. At the end she got to do her bow by appearing behind the translucent curtain across the stage briefly, with spooky lighting.

The play was scary. I haven't actually seen a scary play before, and didn't expect it to actually be as scary as it was. There were a lot of jump scares in the play, which I did sort of expect, but the real fright was the continual build up of dread, which the jump scares just served to punctuate. Dread would build,  then there'd be a loud noise and people in the audience would scream, then sort of try to laugh off, but then the dread would just start again. It was excellent.

I was actually having some sleepiness issues because I'm still fighting through jetlag. I fell asleep during  intermission (trying to power nap since I was fading fast) and was having a hard time waking up... until the first scary thing happened about three minutes into the second act, and then I was awake and the thought of sleep didn't return until we were on the way back to the hotel.

This also reminded me that I just really like to watch plays rather than musicals, and I should do it more often. Hopefully it'll be something I can do regularly once I'm settled in to the new job. Plays are very different from movies, and in a way that I thoroughly enjoy.

I see that there's also a tour, but it looks like it's just staying in the UK. I hope there's a production of the play in Colorado at some point soon. I really think that Kat and Ivona would like it, and I'd love to see it with them.

Liveblog of Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

So apparently this is a thing. Which I have been lucky enough to find on British television at 0200, and how can you say no to cannibal Santa Claus?

We join our show, already in progress. Any mistakes in detail, please forgive because it's early in the morning and the movie is subtitled in English with dialog in Finnish.

Wayne LaPierre is an awful person, no one is surprised.

“More guns, you’ll claim, are the N.R.A.’s answer to everything,” he said. “Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?” (source) 

Note please, Mr. LaPierre, that the headlines will claim that the NRA's solution to everything is more guns because that is what you fucking said.

I watched the majority of the NRA press conference on Sky News in the empty bar of a hotel in London at oh my god in the morning. It was not the full press conference, mostly because every thirty seconds, the newscaster would break in and say something that roughly translated out to, "Are you fucking kidding me?" (But you know. It sounded more cultured because British accents do that.)

Which is basically how I felt.

Apparently the Sandy Hook shooting is the fault of video games and violent movies. The same video games and movies that are seen in countries throughout the world that don't have our problem with gun violence.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Seriously, are you five? Have you forgotten that good guys with guns, that good cops, good federal agents, good soldiers get killed every fucking day with guns?

I didn't expect anything good out of the NRA on this. But I expected better than the hostile call for more guns in schools, the angry finger pointing at the easy scapegoat of video games and the mentally ill, and the logic that we'd normally expect to see out of a kindergartner who hasn't quite figured out how cause and effect work yet.

In a brief aside at a press conference this morning, the NRA's chief executive officer blamed elementary school shootings in Newton, Conn, in part on the "nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill." (source)

National registries of gun owners are a violation of civil liberties, but it's okay to do that to people who are or have been mentally ill. Right. Because it's not okay to stigmatize gun ownership, but we should stigmatize the hell out of mental illness because it's not difficult enough yet for people to get treatment.

There's that old joke about the doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result being the definition of insanity. Well have we not been trying, over and over again, more guns as a country? More power for the NRA?

Though part of me that hopes this awful, pathetic, angry finger-shaking on the part of the NRA is because they know this time a line has been crossed. It's the tantrum of an organization that knows things have gone to far and that there's no going back from this. At least I can hope. Time will tell.

A little AGU story

Here's a little story from AGU, or rather from on the way to AGU. The airplane was apparently full of geologists, because there were a ridiculous number of us with poster tubes. We're like a weird little clan and that's our totem. There were so many of us with tubes they had two bins reserved just for poster tubes.

Anyway, I had a poster of my own, and thus a big poster tube I had to carry with me. My life was in that tube, my entire reason for going to AGU at all. So of course I forgot it in the bathroom near the gate and then walked merrily out of the security checkpoint so I couldn't even go back and get it.

I spent the next fifteen minutes running from counter to counter, security to the airlines to the information desk, trying to get someone to help me. I was nearly in tears. There wasn't time to get a new version of the poster printed out without it costing a lot of money I didn't have.

Thankfully I ran into a group of three police officers while I was running through the terminal. I explained the situation to them and they agreed to go check the bathroom for me since they thankfully had a female officer with them. They strolled away, and I waited by the security checkpoint and wrung my hands for about five minutes.

Then they walked back. No poster tube. They shook their heads and shrugged.

I wondered if it was all right to faint over a stupid poster. Or as a mature and responsibility thirty-two-year-old grad student, burst into massive, sobbing tears.

Then the tallest of the three officers pulled a poster tube from behind his back and grinned at me.

Such relief, I have not often felt. And we all laughed.

I'm very grateful to those police officers for being so nice to me and helping me out. I'm grateful even now that they found my poster and saved me a world of trouble. And I'm grateful to them for messing with me, as weird as that sounds. It felt great to laugh. And back when I was an EMT, that was kind of the rule - if the cops don't mess with you, it means they don't like you.  

Catching up on movies or: My swanky trans-Atlantic flight

This was one of the most relaxing trans-Atlantic flights I've ever been on. The Lufthansa flight to Berlin may still beat it, but that's mostly because the stewardesses gave me a beer every time the drinks cart went by on that one, so I was feeling pretty good the whole time. This flight on BA, Mike and I were randomly upgraded to the Economy Plus class. We're guessing it's because the economy cabin was oversold (it sure looked packed) so we gut bumped up a class.

In my current impoverished state of grad student-ness, I don't think I could convince myself to cough up an extra $200 on a $1200 flight to get a seat that's a tiny bit wider and a significant whack of leg room. Once I'm working a real person job, though, I'm thinking a hell to the yeah. I have an outlet. For my laptop. And a foot rest. And a giant TV screen for movies. You'd be amazed how these little comforts add up on a 9 hour flight (or maybe you wouldn't).

Speaking of movies. These long flights are normally my chance to catch up on movies I wanted to see but didn't have the time for (often the case this year) or movies that I thought looked amusing but would be damned if I'd pay full price for.

Premium Rush - This was a fun little movie with bike messengers as the heroes trying to keep a delivery from a crooked, malevolent, yet wonderfully inept cop. The movie is not nearly so serious as the preview would have liked you to believe, which I think is for the best. It was just fun and I enjoyed it from the perspective of a cyclist who would never in a million years be that insane. Though I do appreciate that through it all the main characters were wearing their helmets - thanks guys. Also, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has the most adorable little evil giggle, which he uses every time he skunks either the crooked cop or the world's most unlucky bike cop, and it's impossible to not giggle along with him. I think my older brother would appreciate the fact that the main character (who is apparently the best bike messenger ever or something) rides a steel-frame single speed. Though he doesn't have brakes on his, which is a sure sign of insanity if the mischievous giggle didn't tip you off already. The music for the movie was excellent by the way - it begins and ends with Baba O'Reiley, and I feel like it earns that honor.

Lawless - I have some very uncertain feelings about this one. It was either good, or boring as shit, five minutes at a time. I loved Tom Hardy (Forest) in all his understated, casual menace, and his way of liking the Woman With a Past without ever changing his facial expression or tone; it was all body language and looks. Not so sure about Shia LeBouf, but he did a better job in this than in any other movie he's ever been in I've seen, which if I'm to be honest is not saying a whole lot. I swear I tried to go into this with an open mind, but there was nothing about his performance that convinced me, let alone grabbed me. The special agent from Chicago was appropriately creepy, and the Woman With a Past was a perfect match for Forest, where it was a love affair all in looks. Now, I did appreciate the way violence was handled. Someone got punched hard, they went down, and they bled. Someone got nailed in the side of the head with a shovel? Down and stayed down. Not the usual thing that you see in more action oriented movies. I liked about half the movie in those five minute chunks, the other half I wrote things like this during because it just didn't have my attention. A lot of those five minutes were the ones where Shia LeBouf was romancing his girl.

Snow White and the Huntsman - I actually had wanted to see this when it came out, but I was just too busy because grad school blah blah whine whine my life is so hard. Anyway, I ended up liking this far, far more than I thought I would. I'm still not entirely convinced by Kristen Stewart as an actress, but there was a fairly minimal number of times where she appeared visibly incoherent and she had some very good scenes. The movie was also just so goddamn pretty. I knew it would be pretty, but I didn't expect it to be that visually arresting. Charlize Theron just stole the entire show, though. I love Chris Hemsworth, but it was her I ended up watching the movie for. (Poor Chris Hemsworth, getting his thunder [hahaha] stolen by the villain again.) Every moment she was on screen she just had me by the throat, she was so angry and menacing even when she appeared entirely calm. Charlize Theron's speech about men using women right before she kills the king? She turned it up to eleven there and kept going for the entire movie. I think what amazed me the most about the character - and Theron's performance, since she sold it mightily - was that there was so much raw pain still in her, a ragged internal wound that she has obviously kept carefully open and bleeding, yet you never had any doubt for one second that this woman was evil. If I were less of a pathetic Tom Hiddleston fangirl, Loki might have some serious competition for my favorite villain ever.

[Obligatory Loki fangirling shut up I know I have a problem.]

Speaking of Loki, I think the reason I like both him and Ravenna so much as characters is because they each have such a clear internal framework of pain and perceived wrong-doing on the part of the world at large that their villainy makes sense. They're not being evil because nyahahaha evil is fun, they're evil because they believe bone deep that they have been wronged at the world deserves whatever it is they do. And because they are both played by such good actors, for a few seconds at a time they can even convince you to feel that raw internal wound even as you're appalled by what they then use it to justify. From the outside moral perspective there is no justification for their horrible acts, but it gives them a very human emotional core that makes them wonderfully complex as characters and so much more than boring one-note villains.

Really, I think Ravenna is where Loki will soon mentally end up once he's finished completely divorcing himself from reality as we know it. He's almost there, except for those few flashes of hesitation we so in The Avengers. Which does give me hope that he could still find redemption, which was plainly impossible for Ravenna since she was invested in her own narrative twenty life-times worth.

I think I just blew my own fangirl mind.

[/Obligatory Loki fangirling]

Favorite movie for the flight was definitely Snow White and the Huntsman. If the movie list doesn't change on the way back, I'm thinking I'll catch Ruby Sparks (I was super disappointed to miss that one in theaters) and then two out of the three of Men in Black III, The Campaign, and The Watch. If I'm not entirely done with comedies by that point.

Mike, I will note, watched Battleship, and then Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. He actually liked the former better, which shocked me. Though it sounds like it wasn't gleefully bad in the same way. I don't think I'm curious enough to make myself watch it though.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I wish I could say I came out of this movie with my concerns about the book being split into a trilogy assuaged. I really do.

I'm afraid not.

I'm left wondering why this needed to be a trilogy of nearly three hour movies, and not, say, a two parter. It definitely needed to be longer than a single movie, but right now it feels really stretched out, sometimes palpably dragging. I wasn't one of the people who thought The Fellowship of the Ring dragged when it came out, but this one had me wondering just how many wooden bridges I really needed to see a pack (a hoard? a buffet?) of dwarves run across. I also wondered why the hell we needed two prologues, one of which (regarding Thorin) would have been better served by being described during the story I think.

There was a lot about the movie that I loved, though. I though Martin Freeman was great as Bilbo. I almost died of squee during the riddles in the dark sequence. While I still have no idea what half the dwarves are named, at least some of them (other than Brooding Dwarf -- I mean Thorin) really stand out and have very distinctive personalities so I could keep track of them. And shockingly I was very glad to see some of the additional scenes, such as the conversation between Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel. That was very cool, and I enjoyed seeing more character development and the foreshadowing of things to come. (Also, anyone else find themselves wondering what might be between Gandalf and Galadriel?)

One small but important thing I'm very excited about is that two of the songs from the book made it in at least. I wish there could have been more of the singing, once they got away from the hobbit hole. Songs are such a major part of the book.

Visually, it was just as pretty as the original (if that's even the right term) trilogy. I just saw it in normal 24 fps with no 3D, and I thought that was plenty. I don't do 3D anyway since it gives me headaches, and I'm not sure if a super sharp picture would have helped anything.

I laughed, I enjoyed most of the fight scenes (until they got a little too stretched out), and I'll be happy to see the next part. I'm looking forward to hearing Benedict Cumberbatch be an evil dragon. I do hope it's more dragon-y and a less draggy.

Ninjabread Men

In honor of the awesome little boy with the pink shoes, who pointed out ninjas can be pink if they darn well want:

It's been a while since I've gotten to decorate cookies. I had a ton of fun with this. My mom baked the cookies and made the icing and then Mike helped me decorate.

The pink ninja clan versus the green ninja clan. Because as Mike pointed out, ninja can be any color they darn well want. It's not like you know. They're fucking ninja.

Signing leases and moving dates

Well, now it's official, we have a lease in Houston. Not that it wasn't official before, but this just feels more final, somehow. We've got a place that's about 3 miles from my office by side streets, so I should be able to commute via bicycle unless it's raining!

Mike and I are both pretty excited about this apartment - we looked at a lot of website, and this one jumped out at us as perfect. And we got lucky, getting in. It's a relatively small number of apartments, and apparently people don't tend to leave very often. We snapped up the perfect place, and it's got a garage and comes with all the appliances (including washer and dryer). We're getting a two bedroom apartment, so we'll have a guest room so people can visit us!

Oh, and it has a huge bathtub. I'm even more excited by that - finally, I can take proper baths!

The closets are ridiculously huge closet. Mike is standing in it with me for scale.

The move in date is the first weekend in February. Mike will hopefully have a job to get in to by then. For me it's unfortunately a little more complicated. I originally wanted to start work the first week of February, but I've had to push my thesis defense to February 21. That means we'll be moving to Houston, but then I'll probably fly home to Denver and haunt my parents' house until I'm done with my thesis. 

But we're a step closer. 

Politics is not an island

Another school shooting, with 27 dead, 18 of them children. At an elementary school. A fucking elementary school.

I have now seen people rushing both to frame this in a political context and to shout about people commenting on something politically when it's a horrible tragedy. And it is horrible, and indescribable, and I cannot begin to imagine how the people in the community feel, let alone the families of the victims. I have been crying about this, about people I've never met and now will never possibly meet.

Yet I also think it's bullshit to pretend that this is somehow separate from politics and should not be viewed in that light. A tragedy shouldn't be used to score cheap, disgusting points in an argument, shouldn't be used for manipulative posturing that solves nothing. A tragedy shouldn't be reframed and distorted through the lens of ideology, just like facts shouldn't be attacked because they're inconvenient to beliefs.

But.

At the same time, politics is not an island and the availability of firearms in this country is a fucking political decision. The decisions we make as a country politically are felt by everyone who lives here, and those decisions have consequences, both bad and good. Things that happen in this country likewise should effect the political debate and should effect the decisions we make for the future. Things that make us angry, that make us cry are not sacrosanct. They are even more important because they tear at our very hearts.

Politics is about deciding what country we want to live in. It should be about having an honest conversation about problems and tragedies, and being able to stand up and say enough, this has to fucking stop.

That is not the same as politicizing.

I'm sick of writing posts like this. I don't want to have to be afraid that someone I have never met with a gun and a dearth of morals or self control or mental health will end my life at a grocery store or a movie theater or a mall, or do the same to my niece when she is supposed to be in the safest of places. And because I don't live on an island, that fear, that problem is not mine alone to solve.

Like it or not, how we solve problem together is politics.

ETA: My friend Kat has made a very good point in comments so please read that. Also, on LJ, Dan has pointed out:

I agree that it's inherently a political issue. My problem with immediately discussing political solutions (everything from "ban all the guns now" to "if those kids had been carrying, this wouldn't have happened") is that people tend to make very, very bad decisions in the wake of a tragedy. "USA-PATRIOT" comes to mind.

Which is also a very, very good point. I would still say we need to take this energy and go into debate. But let it be a reasoned debate. 

Little Boy Wears Awesome Shoes, Adults Freak the Fuck Out

Just a quick break from thesis hell to link to this: Photograph Of Little Boy Wearing Pink Shoes To Preschool Sparks Heated Blogosphere Debate

Which really reminds me of this: 5 year old boy dresses up as Daphne for Hallowe'en, other moms have gender panic

The little son of one of my kung fu buddies has an amazing pair of bright pink crocs with sparkly jewels on them. The kid loves those things, it's adorable, and they keep him from getting glass in his feet, so it's win/win, right?

Something just really bugs the shit out of me about the "but if you let your boy wear pink shoes, he'll get bullied" argument. Because beyond letting bullies win, wouldn't that just reinforce the stupid cultural more that the bullies use to excuse their shitty behavior? And frankly, if there are bullies, they will find a way to be an asshole to your kid no matter what. They make fun of your clothes and you change your clothes, so next they make fun of your hair, or that you wear glasses, or that you're smart, or whatever. Living life because you're afraid someone's going to say something mean to you is no way to live.

And I would think that's no way to force your kid to live. But I'm not a parent, so I can't really speak authoritatively on that. Parents? What say you?

Also, I feel like the "but bullies!" argument is just lipstick on the pig of "but pink will make him gay" argument. Because it's still about fear that a little boy will be perceived as gay - not that there's anything wrong with it, there are just mean people who obviously aren't me, say the concern trolls. It really feels like a more subtle take on the the same old shit, just spoken in a concerned voice to make it less ugly because people have finally realized that we're fucking done with accepting overt homophobia.

She explained to him in the store that they were really made for girls. Sam then told her that he didn’t care and that 'ninjas can wear pink shoes too.'

Rock your shoes, kiddo. Haters gonna hate, life is short, get out there and make it work.

New desk!

I bought myself a new desk to celebrate turning in Zeno's Grant Proposal (not because I was happy with it but because I could no longer pick at it any more like a scab) and today it arrived! It's super pretty.

The butcher blog surfacing is really lovely. And see the little control pad on the right? It does, indeed, make the desk go up and down! So I can finally have a desk that's low enough for my short little torso.

And even more exciting, I can raise it up so I can work while standing, or even better:

Yes, I am excited indeed. It also gave me incentive to clean out my old desk, and I was able to cut down on the amount of stuff so it could fit in that three drawer plastic organizer. I have the packrat gene badly, so I have to fight against it every day. Having incentive to get rid of things (like the move coming up) really helps.

This is also one of the quietest sit/stand desks I've ever had. It was kind of a pain in the ass to assemble (and I am so very, very glad that my dad helped me) because it didn't come with any of the correct holes for screws pre-drilled. And they actually send a cordless drill with it (really?) but it was, according to my dad, a very wimpy cordless drill. Now that it's together, though, I'm very happy with it. It's definitely the quietest sit/stand desk I've ever had.

Boo.

And then I worked on editing my thesis. So that's been my day.

I'm still at AGU

And I have many stories of my adventures here which I will type up at some point. Because I'm certain you can't wait to know what the hell it is we geology grads do in our natural habitat. (Spoiler: Look for free internet and suck down as much free beer as we can get our grubby little hands on.)

But here. I bitched about Suzanne Venker's ridiculous editorial about women not being women any more before. There's a much better examination of why it's bullshit on CNN now, which is incidentally written by a guy. I only mention this because apparently there's at least one guy out there that thinks women haven't become houseplants: The mythical 'war on men'

So wait. You're saying carbs AND protein?

Note, this post is going to involve talking about food, and my personal quest to get my weight under control. So proceed with caution if you have a problem with those topics.

While I've got my awesome health insurance, I decided to go in for a visit with the dietitian today. (Dietitians and nutritionists aren't the same, by the way.) I've been kind of stuck on another weight plateau and the last couple of weeks I've been feeling unusually tired. Last night at kung fu I actually became light-headed and couldn't focus, and that's not normally a way I like to feel when kicking things.

So, here's what I learned from the dietitian. It may or may not help you, because my situation is likely different from yours. Take with a grain of salt.

- First off, calorie tracker websites are lying to you when they tell you how many calories you're burning with exercise. The one I use (Sparkpeople) was off by about 50%. So take that into account if you're counting calories. If it's throwing numbers over 1000 at you for an hour and a half of biking, for example, don't trust it.

- Also, you don't get to eat 2000 calories, subtract how much you think you've burned today, and then call that your calorie count. This is not a mistake I was making, but it's apparently a common one and I thought I should mention it. 

- When you're calorie counting, the most common mistake is not entering the right food, or not measuring the portion correctly. That's the first thing to check if you hit a plateau like I have. 

- And sometimes those plateaus happen. The way around them seems to be just making sure you're not cheating, and then cutting back a little bit (50-100) calories more. Then be patient and keep working at it, because it might also be that you've replaced some fat weight with muscle mass.

- You should not feel hungry all the time. If you're constantly hungry, you're doing it wrong.

- Everyone loses lean body mass when they're losing weight, along with actual fat. The reason to take the slow and steady approach is to minimize that loss.

- Eat more snacks and smaller meals. I'm actually really bad at this one, because I really like eating big meals so I can have a giant hamburger, say. But it's better to just have the snacks, and even eat them when you aren't really hungry yet to keep yourself from getting unreasonably hungry. Also, make sure to eat something after working out, and potentially have a snack a bit before doing so if you're planning to be going for several hours. (Heck, for long bike rides you need to take snack breaks in the middle too, just to keep the blood sugar from crashing.)

- Eat protein with your carbs. Protein with your carbs. Did I mention protein with your carbs? This is apparently one of the big mistakes I've been making, particularly with snacks... I tend to eat fruit or veggies, but don't add in protein to actually make them stick, so to speak. So mix protein in with your carbs, even for snacks. 

- If you're still having problems with the weight plateau, you can try doing a couple weeks of meal replacements. (As in, replace everything with things like muscle milk, healthy frozen dinners, protein bars, etc. Things where the portion is strictly controlled and you know exactly how many calories you're getting.) This is a thing that sucks, isn't something you want to do long term, and can be really expensive besides. But it can also help retrain you if you've been losing it on the portion size issue. I'm going to try to avoid this option. 

So that was the advice she gave me. She's going to see if my doctor will be willing to order a blood test, since I've been feeling tired and light headed. She seemed kind of shocked by how little meat I tend to eat (only 2-3 times per week, generally), and thought it might be an issue of anemia. Which is very possible, since in the past I haven't been allowed to donate blood because my hematocrit has been too low. So I may need to get on the multivitamin train again, or do iron supplements. It's also possible that it's a blood sugar issue, which will hopefully be fixed by me (all together now!) mixing protein with my carbs. 

The Coldest War

Well, thanks to Ian Tregillis, I now know that I haven't lost my ability to dive into a book and devour it in a matter of a few days. Apparently I was just trying THAT HARD to avoid The Casual Vacancy, which took me weeks to slog through. Ian's new book, The Coldest War, I finished in less than a week, and this despite the fact that I was trying to design a poster for AGU at the same time.

(Spoiler: I finished the poster and it's covered in strat columns. OH THE HUMANITY.)

The Coldest War is the sequel to Ian's first book, Bitter Seeds. It's alternate history, which I'm normally not that in to, so it's another compliment to him that I liked these books so very much. Bitter Seeds takes place during World War II, and pits psychic Nazis against British warlocks. And trust me, that sentence does no justice to how fucked-up and awesome the entire thing is.

The Coldest War then takes place during the Cold War, following the same characters but years later. And I'll give Ian this, I had absolutely no idea where he was going with it until the end, at which pointed I tweeted excitedly at him about how the third book better be coming out soon because oh my god what a cliffhanger.

My favorite character out of the series is, oddly, perhaps the most evil of them all - Gretel. She's the psychic Nazi experiment that can see the future, and the first two books amount to her playing twelve-dimensional temporal chess with terrifying beings that aren't even human. She's evil, calculating, awful, and utterly fascinating.

Ian's got a writing style that's very clean and readable, and he knows how to keep things very tense. There isn't a lot more that I can say about the story without giving some of the fun twists away, but I really recommend these books. The Coldest War also just won the first semifinal round of Fantastic Reviews' Battle of the Books, and I have great hopes for it.

If women aren't women any more, are we houseplants?

I normally don't curse my eyes with shit from Fox News, but I couldn't quite resist this piece about the "war on men" because there is something I find particularly annoying about assholes that think they get to decide if you are a woman or a man. For example:

And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.
Women aren’t women anymore.

So wait, what are women then, if we aren't women? Houseplants? Evil robots? Corporate flying monkeys? A form of parasitic fungus? Cheap plastic toys? That little bit of popcorn that gets stuck in your teeth that you just know is going to give you an instant cavity?

Because goodness knows, we apparently aren't people. And neither are men, I guess. We're caricatures controlled by our biological natures, which I'd guess is that "poison from the gonads" stuff General Custer mentioned in Little Big Man.

As far as I can tell from this essay, women only get to be women if they want to get married and then let men do their manly man duty of manliness, which is to be the primary breadwinner and "protect their families." I am also going to take a wild guess and say that in order for a woman to be a woman, she must want to have kids too.

The entire basis of this argument seems to be that the author has talked to people. Woo, anecdotes! Well, I have a bunch of anecdotes, too. There are people who want to get married and people who don't. There are people who want to have kids and people who don't. There are men that want to be the breadwinner and others who would like to be stay-at-home dads and the same with women, and some that would even like to split things 50/50. This may come as a shock, but people are a diverse bunch. And incidentally, there are men that want to marry men (or don't) and women who want to marry women (or don't) and it'd be great if they had that choice too.

Oh yeah and:

All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

You know what would be awesome? If people were just allowed to be themselves. I've never bought the idea of their being an essential femininity that comes with possessing a uterus, just like I don't think there is something essentially masculine that people with penises get to have. (Okay, except maybe the part where you get to pee standing up because that's kind of awesome.) I don't feel like I've missed something important in my life because I don't like makeup and dresses and would rather die than be a housewife; but I also think the experiences of my friends who do like and want those things are just as valid because it makes them happy.

Ms. Venker, I'd hazard a guess that a great many people out there aren't angry because evil feminism has caused us to fight against our "natures." We're tired and cranky because we constantly have to fight with assholes like you who think there's only one way to conduct a life.

Also: Eric has some entertaining things to say about this from his naturally manly position of manliness as he tries to parse out just what he's so angry about.

Liveblog of 180

Okay, as promised. You guys are awesome and donated over $200 to the Red Cross, so I'm here to take my punishment. I'm going to watch the Ray Comfort "documentary" 180, a copy of which was left on my buddy David's windshield one day when he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. (That this particular Planned Parenthood is not a location that offers abortion services is neither here nor there.)

If for some perverse and awful reason you would like to play along at home. You can actually watch this entire thing on youtube. Sorry, can't bring myself to embed this one on my blog.

If you want to watch this update live, you'll have to go to the blog page and reload it every few minutes. I'll update entries elsewhere once I'm done with the liveblog.

T-minus seven minutes to suffering time.

This is the cover of the DVD, by the way. I'm thinking there's some false advertisement to the "hottest movie" on the internet thing. I'm pretty sure porn could be characterized as hotter, for example. And any bootleg of a movie that involves Tom Hiddleston will also win on the hot factor.

But apparently my world is going to be rocked for 33 minutes. Come at me, bro.

1300 - The DVD menu music is a dramatic piano riff that sounds like something you'd expect in, say, The Sixth Sense while there's a montage going on, or perhaps Bruce Willis walking around and looking really concerned. It ends with the sound of a heartbeat. Hoo boy.

1302 - I'm hitting play now. I just want it to be noted that I will apparently do anything for the Red Cross. Think of me fondly, farewell cruel world!

1303 - The movie starts with a black haired girl who apparently does not know who Adolf Hitler is. What in the fuck. Where did he find this person?

1303 - Ray Comfort is Jewish and deeply concerned about stock footage of Nazis.

1304 - This man has the most nasal, squeaky Australian accent I have ever heard in my life. He sounds as if he's been huffing helium between takes. Not sure if this is going to make my job more difficult or more palatable.

1305 - Ray Comfort is concerned about people forgetting the Holocaust. He gives some background on Holocaust education in Germany and other countries in Europe.

1306 - Oh look, he's managed to dig up more people who don't know who Hitler is! Seriously? I wonder how many people he had to ambush on the street to find these. Because ffs, anyone who has ever been on the internet knows who the fuck Hitler is.

1307 - I know this is jumping ahead since I know what the video is about, but basically this is a 33-minute-long Godwin, right?

1307 - Steve the Neo-Nazi. He has a startling mohawk, which is blue. I don't think Hitler would have gone for that, to be honest.

1307 - Apparently Christianity is a Jewish trick but Steve the Neo-Nazi is not fooled because he's Greek. This is a quote. But make no mistake, Steve is an awful human being. An awful, awful human being. And I do think Ray Comfort deserves a small salute for pointing out that Steve and people like him are awful, and also completely incoherent hate spewing horrors.

1309 - Okay. Still asking people who Hitler is. Some of them know. Maybe he ran out of people didn't know since he already found like the only twelve on the planet who have been living in a box their entire lives.

1310 - The piano riff starts back up as he talks to another awful human being who believes the world is run by Jews. I assume this is to point out to us that this is both Important and Very Bad. Unlike Steve the Horrible Mohawked Neo-Nazi, this guy's face is blurred out. An awful person with a sense of shame, perhaps?

1311 - I'll give Ray Comfort this. He's figured out that just letting the awful people talk pretty much makes his point for him that they are awful. However, I'm still waiting for this to get around to abortion so I can start beating my head against my desk.

1313 - Okay, next question he's asking people on the street - if you could kill Hitler before WWII, would you? Either by shooting him as an adult or killing his pregnant mom. It's an interesting ethical question, one which I have a feeling will not be done justice in this film. For some strange reason.

1314 - More stock footage showing the dead of the Holocaust. Starting to feel like those awful PETA videos where it's intercut with footage of slaughterhouses.

1315 - Well, at least he's not claiming that Hitler was an Atheist. Ray Comfort touches very lightly on some of Hitler's religious views (which are very complicated and weird and wikipedia can get you started) that he's plainly cherry-picked and then calls him an idolater, which is... different.

1319 - More horrifying stock footage. I'll note that some of it is actually photographs that have had a "old time film effect" run over it. There is also now a quote from a witness to the carnage read in a rather thick, nearly comical German accent, except the content isn't comical so I feel kind of gross about it.

1320 - Back to people on the street and now Ray Comfort asks if the people would comply with Nazi orders to bury Jews alive and aid in the Holocaust. If I pretend I don't know the point of the video, I can find it interesting, though I do have to wonder why he's so stuck on Nazis if he wants to talk about abortion.

1323 - "You value human life? How do you feel about abortion?" OH AND THERE WE GO. Because burying adults and children alive or shooting them is totally the same as a woman having an abortion.

1324 - The music would like you to know this is very sad.

1325 - "Finish this sentence for me - it's okay to kill a baby in the womb when..." Oh Ray Comfort, you are totally gross.

1325 - So apparently having an abortion is equivalent to blowing up a building that may or may not have people inside?  What?

1326 - Wow, a girl that had an abortion and says she doesn't feel bad about it.

1327 - More equating burying Jewish people alive with abortion. Gross, Ray Comfort. Gross.

1327 - The safest place on Earth is in a mother's womb? Maybe we should store jewelry in there!

1328 - So this is the thing Ray Comfort. You don't get to decide for other people. Fuck off.

1329 - Oh boy and now he's saying you can't value human life and believe women have a right to choose. Well, we all know women aren't actually human life, right? Argh I want to punch this man in the face so much.

1330 - Girl with sunglasses, you are awesome.

1330 - Wow Ray Comfort you are a gross human being. So very gross. Wow and then there's shots of people being like oh okay I guess a woman choosing what will be done with her own body is the same as Hitler "choosing" to kill Jews.

1332 - Yes girl on the street, it sounds bad when he puts it in those words because it's a disingenuous false dichotomy pushed on you by a gross person.

1333 - Well, I shouldn't be surprised that suddenly everyone in Ray Comfort's video gets argued around by his amazing logical fallacy skills.

1334 - Whee the American Holocaust! Gross, Ray Comfort. Gross.

1335 - Apparently we have low moral standards because we've freed ourselves from the Ten Commandments what?

1335 - No Ray Comfort, this is not an honest discussion you're having to change people's minds.

1336 - OH HEY GUYS I FOUND THE ATHEIST IN THE VIDEO! It's... STEVE THE NEO-NAZI. Well, glad we got that out of the way.

1337 - "Have you ever looked at a guy with lust?" "Nah, I'm gay." Wow, you are awesome, lesbian lady.

1338 - So apparently people don't want to believe in God because we're afraid of him because we lie and blaspheme and commit adultery by being lustful. Oh my goodness I just rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. Because people who don't believe in Hell are totally afraid of it? LOGIC YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

1341 - There is stuff written on my heart? I think I might need some medical attention.

1342 - Now we're just into sheer proselytizing and I'm falling asleep. Can we just get back to the Nazis?

1343 - When is a raven like a writing desk? When Jesus is like a parachute.

1344 - Aaaaaaaaand we're back to Nazis.

1344 - Talking about people visiting the concentration camps and being horrified. And then he suggests visiting an abortion clinic. Because they are so like in every way. (/sarcasm)

1345 - Ray Comfort would like everyone to see his documentary. And buy his book, Hitler, God, and the Bible. You know. Just putting that out there.

1346 - And we're done with a dramatic string piece. Well, this wasn't so much funny as infuriating, since I just wanted to reach through the screen and shake people. This is a bullshit argument that equates very different things in a false, emotionally manipulative, and disingenuous manner. A woman making a decision about what goes on within her own body is in no way equatable with a crazy, awful person taking power and ordering the death of millions of people who were born and living their lives. And frankly, I think his schtick is a pretty shameful appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people.

HEY RAY COMFORT WANTS TO TALK ABOUT NAZIS!

Needless to say, 33 minutes later my world is un-rocked. I really could have lived without seeing a bunch of ignorant people get unmercifully Godwinned by a giant Australian weasel with a pouch full of fallacies.

I think I'll do a different liveblog maybe today or next week to cleanse my palate. Maybe Metal Tornado will get a whirl after all.

Turkey day and blog note

So, happy turkey day to my fellow Americans. Happy Thursday to everyone else in the world who is probably once again sighing over the fact that the damn Americans think everything revolves around our holidays. I speak to you from the depths of food torpor to say, hey man, if you were around I would have totally given you a piece of pecan pie because that seems a good way to end a Thursday no matter what.

It was a good, relaxing day and at least I got to put in a 20 mile bike ride before the feasting started, so I'll pretend that counts for something. On the way home from that, wind at my back, I tried to think about what I would say for the traditional Things I Am Thankful For.Thanksgiving thing can be trite at times, but it is good to have a day where you feel obligated to sit down and think about what is good in your life and your world.

Best I can come up with is this:

I am thankful for that blue marble we see there, and the human ingenuity that enabled us to take such a breathtaking picture, and the incredible things we can do with this one life we have. I get all teary-eyed when I look at things like this because I need the reminder that maybe I'm having a shitty day here and there, maybe I'm stressed out, but humanity has fucking walked on the Moon, and put robots on Mars. Even when I wonder if we're going to make it because people are so intent on hurting each other every day, we can still do amazing and beautiful and unimaginable things. And every second when someone out there decides that they would rather love than hate, that we're all in this together on our little blue marble in space, I'm thankful for that too.

On a less serious note, don't forget that I will be watching a Ray Comfort DVD for you guys tomorrow and liveblogging it. Let's say I'll do it at 13:00 MST. Apologies in advance, the DVD is only 33 minutes long, so if I don't get enough snark out of that I'll see if I can grab something else short and do that too.

Reminder: The Red Cross still needs donations and you still want me to watch TWO terrible things!

Well, I'm already going to watch a terrible thing for you but there's 48 hours left to make that into two terrible things.

$209.40 have been donated to the Red Cross since I threw down this gauntlet on November 5th. That means I'm going to liveblog a terrible Ray Comfort anti-abortion DVD that got left on my friend's windshield because he was parked near a Planned Parenthood. I'll liveblog that on November 19th.

But remember! if $40.60 more get donated, I'll liveblog Metal Tornado as well! Or, if we get really crazy and there's $140.60 more out there for the Red Cross, instead I'll watch Dreams From My Real Father, which  is a right-wing birther propaganda movie almost guaranteed to make me blow out a vein in my head.

If you donate money, comment here, tweet at me, etc etc etc.

But trust me, I'm more than happy to get off easy and only have to suffer through one terrible movie. Even if the victims of Hurricane Sandy could still use the help.

Zeno's grant proposal

I've got one last class I have to complete in order to graduate, though at this point it appears I'll be technically graduating in the spring of 2013 rather than this semester, just because I don't think I'll be able to defend until January. But this class will be done at least, and all will be ready to go.

For this class, we had to write a practice NSF proposal, 10-page limit with an additional 1-page summary. Mine ended up being about 3000 words. This is also the most difficult 3000 words I've written in my life. I ended up with a four page reference list containing 36 references, and spent nearly three solid weeks driving myself batty writing it and tweaking it and formatting it and everything else.

So it's come as a major relief for me to hear that the other grad students all hate their proposals just as much as I hate mine, if not more. This thing was starting to feel like Zeno's Proposal, where it was physically impossible to ever quite finish it. But hey, if everyone else loathes their proposals, then I'm probably okay, right? Right?

I'm just glad the damn thing is turned in and out of my reach. I can't imagine having to write these constantly and facing the ugly fact that only 10-25% of them ever get funded. So it's probably a good thing I'm not staying in academia. One day I'd be found dead at my desk, having cut my own throat with a handful of reference pages cunningly fashioned into a blade.

I celebrated finishing the proposal and turning it in by buying a new desk that I can sit or stand at. Maybe this is how adults do things. Ice cream would have been cheaper and potentially more satisfying.

Why haven't you seen Wreck-It Ralph yet?

If you're one of the two people in the entire continental United States that hasn't seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, you really, really should.



It's definitely the best Disney movie I've seen in years. It's cute, it's funny, and it's got a lot of heart, but not in the oh god it's the after-school-special kind of way. You can tell the angle of approach from the bad guy affirmation of Bad-Anon: I am bad, and that's good. I'll never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me. But I really liked the approach taken; within the world of video games, bad guys are obviously a vital part of the ecosystem, and part of the movie is about the good guys learning that.

I've seen it twice already and definitely wouldn't mind seeing it again. (Only there's currently a brazillion movies out right now I want to see, holy shit November what's up with you.) But if you're a gamer nerd like me, the more times you see it, the more fun video game stuff you can pick out. (There's a list of video game character cameos over at the Disney Wiki.)

You don't have to be a big video game nerd to like it. Sure, those of us who have been playing since Atari will get a lot of the cameos and have some good laughs (OMG AERITH LIVES), but the main story takes place in two made-up games (Hero's Duty and Sugar Rush) and you don't even really have to be that familiar with first person shooters or racing games to get what's going on. It's all very evident from the story. (The script writers, by the way, deserve a hearty handshake.)

I loved all the main characters. Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch) is definitely my favorite, though. She has the most tragic back story ever! (I'm thinking this might seem extra hilarious if you have a few RPGs under your belt.) Also Felix sounded so very, very familiar - I had to remind myself later that Jack McBrayer is Kenneth in 30 Rock and yes, Felix sounds just like that, to hilarious effect. Also, Alan Tudyk voices King Candy, which I didn't even realize until I got to the credits and was like wait a second, that's Wash?



As a note for people with kids, the movie has a PG rating, and I think it's mostly inoffensive stuff, cartoonish violence and the like. However, the bit of the movie in Hero's Duty could be scary for little kids, since it's got the space-marine-bug-invasion-first-person-shooter thing going on, and at the very end the bad guy looks seriously creepy to the point that my first thought was how much he would probably scare the pants off my niece. So just be aware of that.

There's also an animated short before the movie called Paperman. It's probably the cutest short I've seen in a while, and it's about paper airplanes and love.

Nicely done, Disney.

The Casual Vacancy (review)

So, maybe you heard that JK Rowling wrote a new novel. Maybe you really liked the Harry Potter novels, and you're looking forward to getting another book from the pen that gave you those.

Well, don't get too excited.

The Casual Vacancy is an adult (as in meant for grownups, not as in pornographic) non-genre novel. I read adult fiction all the time. To be honest, I do not read much non-genre fiction. It's entirely possible that this novel is an excellent example of what non-genre fiction should be and plays off its tropes and traditions perfectly. In which case, let me just say that I'm glad I mostly stick to science fiction and fantasy. I was ready to stop reading this book by page 25, but I stuck with it under the principle that it's healthy for writers to read things we don't like, so that we can think about why we don't like them and thus avoid those things in our own writing.

This book is set against a backdrop of small town British politics, where a rather large cast of characters ranging in age from teenaged to 50+ years old are effected by the death of council member and all-around ridiculously popular guy Barry Fairbrother, who spearheaded one side of a raging political debate that divided the town.

Writing that summary was a more interesting experience for me than actually reading the book. It's 420 pages of a bunch of ceaselessly self-centered, entitled people being incredibly petty toward each other. The only characters I liked at all were a few of the teenagers, many of whom were in the process of being abused and destroyed by their utterly awful parents. And at least when the teenagers had moments of being self-centered and terrible, they had the excuse of being teenagers.

And yes, I know that in reality, adults are generally selfish and awful people too. But that really seems to be an argument to not spend my free time reading about what I can easily encounter in my real life.

I didn't care about the characters, which meant that I did not in the least bit care about the minutiae of their lives, their crumbling relationships, or their desires. I spent much of the book asking myself if one scene or the other was really necessary, because for example I already knew that Simon Price was a total bastard, that Stuart Wall was the most unlikable teenager in the entire book, that Gavin was utterly pathetic and that Samantha's marriage with her husband was a total disappointment. The last time I felt like that when reading a novel was when my book club read Under the Dome, which we all agreed could have been about 400 pages shorter because yes we get the point these people are terrible. I really hope JK Rowling hasn't fallen into the Stephen King trap of desperately needing an editor.

Don't run out and get this book if you liked Harry Potter and want more of the same. Harry Potter had a cast with likable characters, and an intensely interesting world - so when the plot lagged, you at least had those to keep you going. This novel has none of those benefits, and JK Rowling doesn't make up for it with memorable or beautiful prose.

Perhaps because it's not a young adult novel, there's apparently even less imperative to keep the plot moving at a snappy pace, and it generally stagnates. Every little thing that happens then seems to require we get the opinion of everyone in the rather large cast, some of whom it took me nearly half the book to get straight because they were so similarly awful. (Naming a woman Shirley and her daughter-in-law Samantha was not a good choice, by the way.) I would have been less frustrated by the slow pace of the plot if I'd actually given even half a crap about any of the characters. Ultimately I only stuck it out for Sukhvinder and Andrew - since Andrew actually manages to grow and change as a character.

(Spoilers, if you care)

The thing that really burns me about this book is that the plot conflicts that get hammered the whole time - what's going to happen to the council housing? what's going to happen to the addiction clinic? - never actually get resolved. Instead the end of the book is an unsubtle statement about children in poverty dying because privileged middle class people are too wrapped up in their own selfish concerns. Which is a point to be made, certainly, but from the standpoint of story structure it leaves the novel unresolved and disappointing.

Also, if that's the point JK Rowling wanted to make, I can't help but feel it could have happened in a lot fewer pages and with greater impact.

(/spoilers)

If you're still curious about it, get the book out from the library and try it that way first. If you like it, buy it then, and feel free to tell me you think I'm full of crap. Tastes differ, after all.

I Snoopy danced through the election in Colorado

Two days late, whatever. So yeah, this happened. 

As you can imagine, I'm pretty pumped about that, because the president of the United States hasn't switched over to being an plastic manbot with a faulty truth chip. I'm pumped there are going to be record number of women in the senate. I'm pumped we have our first openly lesbian Senator in the US.  I'm pumped Elizabeth Warren took down Scott Brown. I'm thrilled beyond words that every single one of the crazy Republican rape guys lost.

But that's not the point of this post. It was an awesome election in Colorado!

First off, in slightly less awesome news, we sent 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats to the federal House. I'm incredibly happy Jared Polis (who once entered The Internet is For Porn into the congressional record) is returning to Washington, even if I'm sad he's no longer my rep due to redistricting. I have Ed Perlmutter instead, who is less mind-blowingly awesome, but is also not Joe Coors thank goodness. Mostly I'm sad that Brandon Shaffer and Joe Miklosi lost (ugh to Mike Coffman) but there's not anything I could have done in those races but crossed my fingers extra hard.

So yeah, you might have heard we legalized recreational pot. Thought I'd put that out there first because apparently everyone I have ever met is planning on couch surfing at my house sometime before I move to Houston. And we legalized it by a 10 point margin, which is not too shabby. What does it actually mean? No idea, since pot is still illegal federally. I'm looking forward to seeing the conservatives that like to talk about states rights when it comes to screwing over women and LGBT people potentially tie themselves in knots over this one. 

But I'm excited about the idea that between Colorado and Washington, maybe we're sending a message to the feds that we've had just about enough of the bullshit "drug war." Here's hoping. I think we have a much better chance of a positive outcome with Obama as president than Romney.

Ah, and for the record? I voted to legalize pot. Duh. I've also never touched the stuff in my life. My vices have been limited to alcohol, and damn little of that. And I have no interest in ever trying pot, either. But I think responsible adults should be able to do it legally if they want, and that our police and courts and prisons have better things to spend their time and money on than a bunch of potheads whose worst crime is bogarting the Fritos.

We also signed off on a collective 'screw you' to Citizens United. Well, this one is a bit weirder. By 48% we amended the Colorado Constitution to direct our federal office holders to push for a Constitutional amendment to get rid of that shit-ass campaign finance decision. Which I have mixed feelings about... because I don't like just amending the Colorado state constitution willy-nilly, but man do I hate Citizens United like a champ. Plus this is actually non-binding... but I think it's something the representatives and senators from Colorado would have to think twice about before ignoring, since... 48% margin. 

We'll see if it actually does anything. I'm not convinced. But I hope Colorado has made its point about how we feel.

Jefferson County, where I lived, approved both of its school budget issues. I'm happy about that. The schools need more money, and it'll help the kids out. And even if I dont have kids of my own, these guys will be in charge of the country when I start thinking about retiring, so I would really prefer they're functional human beings with a reasonable eduction. 

The Democrats have retaken the Colorado state house and kept the senate. I'm excited about this personally because I no longer have Robert Ramirez (whom I have never liked) as my state rep - I have Tracy Kraft-Tharp, and by a comfortable margin. And I got to keep Evie Hudak as my state senator, and I just adore her to bits. But the really exciting thing about this? We almost had civil unions in Colorado this year, and representative McNulty, with the complicity of the Republican majority, kept the bill from going to vote. Well, McNulty is still around, but he no longer has a majority. So he can sit down, shut up, and get out of the way of progress.

Let's do it, Colorado. Civil unions, then let's fix our state constitution, and let's get back to leading.