Synova

New Titan AE music CD

2012-02-01T20:59:00.001-07:00

Or rather.... new to me.

I lost mine. (I suspect it was in the car we had stolen and crashed in California.) I bought this one used on Amazon. The new ones were listed at $38 or so. Eeep!

I'd have bought the music electronically or one song at a time but I couldn't find the songs. Couldn't find the artists. They're on You Tube. I suppose they're someplace purchasable, but I couldn't find them. I haven't bought music files before so I'm not good at it. But I thought I'd actually put some time and effort into compiling some music I like.

As old school as I am (obviously!) I was frustrated and upset. When I want something it should be there, darn it. Is there any reason I can't look up any bit of music ever published and just buy it because I want it? I didn't think that music from a movie would be the least difficult, but it was.

Now I just have to get the technical help to put the music on the CD onto my computer.

Human Clones and Human Dignity

2011-12-11T23:41:00.002-07:00

(I'm handing in this paper tomorrow... thought I'd share it with more than just my one instructor.)

Many countries and US states have outlawed reproductive cloning while accepting therapeutic cloning of human beings. In therapeutic cloning a human clone is created within an egg, allowed to divide to some number of cells, and then destroyed for medical research or therapy. Reproductive cloning would follow the same process except with the implantation of the egg within a womb, no different at that point than in vitro fertilization. It's backwards to view the destruction of human life as moral while viewing the nurturing of that human life as immoral. This turns reason on it's head.

Why is reproductive cloning opposed by so many? Is the idea of cloned humans too new?

The discussion of human cloning did not begin with the sheep, Dolly. It is not new. The conversation has been going on for decades upon decades.

Doppelgangers and changelings have existed in folklore for centuries, of course. Science fiction quickly picked up the idea of making human clones. These early stories were often warnings against hubris. Frankenstein is probably the first and most obvious example, although Frankenstein's monster was not a clone at all. In many stories the clones share memories or are telepathic or are simply evil. A common trait with clones and manufactured people in early written science fiction and later movies was that they were grown in vats to adult size. George Lucas went with that classic scenario, as have episodes of Star Trek and at least one movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. But before Dolly, well before Dolly, science fiction authors considered the possibility and considered, at length, what we knew was true about biology.

By the time Robert A. Heinlein was writing about clones or genetically engineered humans he speculated that they were certainly human but would be formally legislated into non-personhood. Friday, published in 1983 near the end of his career, was largely an indictment of a culture that viewed these people as non-human and property.

C. J. Cherryh, in the world-building of Cyteen, originally published in 1988 in three volumes, designed elaborate systems for producing adult sized people who could actually function, though with severe limitations. It was obvious that an adult grown in a vat could not develop properly. The novel itself is about the extreme efforts to recreate an important and powerful person from a cloned infant.

The monsters of earlier science fiction are simply not practical, not even with imaginary technologies so advanced they resemble magic. To make a clone you need a womb and what you get from it is a baby. The practical choke-point of available wombs remains. The practical choke-point of raising infants remains. George Lucas is not going to get his army of clones.

Lois McMaster Bujold, very much writing as a contemporary of Cherryh, imagined artificial wombs. Her 1986 novel Ethan of Athos considered the economic cost of child rearing, a theme she revisits as a side issue in A Civil Campaign, when one of the regional rulers decides to mass-produce daughters from surplus eggs gotten from a reproductive clinic. Her literary discussion of clones, culture, and law, however, is most direct in the 1994 novel Mirror Dance, though the subject is never completely absent from her Vorkosigan novels. Falling Free, published in 1988, directly addresses the legal status of quaddies, people with four arms instead of two arms and two legs, constructed to work in zero gravity.

Bujold's enlightened societies give full human status to any person, cloned or even put together from genetic spare parts and not looking human at all. In jurisdictions where the product of a lab was property, so were natural people. On planets where clones were grown for parts, a cesspool of organized crime reigned.

She's not the only author to make those connections. The imagined societies that find a way to give some humans a different legal status than other humans do it across the board. This is true of real societies as well. We understand that institutionalized inequality, if it is slavery or inequality under the law, impacts an entire society. Where people can be owned, all people have less worth.

Kerry Lynn Macintosh, in her book Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, makes the argument that by trying to prevent human reproductive cloning we risk creating a class of illegal, or legally excluded, people.

Infertile couples, and others, will certainly not be restrained by the law. If a lesbian couple can find someone who is willing to take the egg of one mother, create a clone nucleus of the other, and implant the egg back in the first, is it really possible that it won't be done? The child will have the nuclear DNA from one parent and the mitochondrial DNA from the other. A child gotten this way would be even less a copy than an identical twin that developed from a single egg within a single womb. The child would actually have the DNA of both parents. A couple with one infertile member may wish to avoid the complications of a biologically unrelated sperm or egg donor. Human clones will happen. They will happen with the technology and medical ability we have today. Macintosh suggests we prepare our legal system for the inevitable in order to avoid the creation of a class of illegal beings.

So much of the fear of human cloning expressed today is similar to the concerns discussed in science fiction half a century ago. Much of the fear may even be caused by those early stories. Are clones copies of the original? Are they unnatural monsters? Do they offend God?

There is no way to make a clone a copy of the original, not biologically, not psychologically, not even if you try. Cloned mammals have so far not had unnatural powers. And the Catholic Church, according to Macintosh on page 20 of Illegal Beings, has officially stated that, “although human cloning violates human dignity, the dignity of a human being born through cloning is not diminished.”

That last is a legitimate concern. Will we ignore the dignity of human beings born through cloning? Will we treat the people created in a lab as property? Will they be another class of slaves? Will we view them as spare parts for their progenitors?

Unfortunately, trying to make human clones illegal doesn't solve any of these problems, it reinforces them. The lines are not blurred, they are very clear. In fact, the only human clones we allow today are property. The only human clones we allow are lab materials.

Banning reproductive cloning can only solidify the identity of clones as lab materials, as property, or spare parts.

If we want to avoid creating a class of human life that is property, we must decide that this class of human life is not property and act according to our true belief. Unless it happens that our true belief is that clones lack status and dignity, that they are manufactured commodities and not whole persons? If that is the case we'd be informed by the discussion of clones and personhood in science fiction that's a little more recent than half a century ago. If earlier stories warned of monsters born of hubris, later stories warn of the danger inherent in defining some as less than human. Modern science fiction can write about societies that reject the obvious personhood of clones or even of strange genetic constructs, only by writing the society as a benighted and oppressive place.

Although, if society actually is a benighted, oppressive place perhaps we ought to ban the production of human clones to save them from oppression and slavery. Perhaps this consideration outweighs the message confirming clones as property that is inherent in the ban of human cloning itself.

Macintosh presents this argument on page 208 of Illegal Beings:

“Anticloning laws can protect human clones against suffering only at the cost of their own existence. Thus, cloning opponents implicitly argue that nonexistence is preferable to existence for human clones.” (…) “If the government cannot prove that nonexistence is preferable to existence, it cannot establish a compelling interest in preventing the birth of human clones, and its laws must be invalidated.”

Macintosh is talking about the law and equal protection and the requirement that government prove compelling interest before limiting rights. I'm talking about the law and the message inevitably sent by disallowing reproductive cloning of humans, leaving as the only legal category of human clones those who are in fact nothing more than property. The greater statement supporting human dignity and protecting human rights would be opposite of what we have now.

Let human clones be born and be seen to be people.

Went back to school

2011-08-22T22:50:00.002-06:00

Today was my first day. The classes were fun. Sort of.

I sort of dread the one class because it's going to be about arguing effectively and rules of logic, which isn't dreadful at all, but we're going to be making arguments in class and I expect it has the potential to include a fair amount of cringe-worthy college-age passion about "causes." The last thing I want to do is get in an argument with idealists who just graduated from high school. (Does this count as a "don't commit this to the internet" sort of sentiment?) I do want the logic class though.

And Algebra. The first Math class I've taken in over 25 years. So far I remember the material once it's shown, but before that the problems are entirely opaque and I couldn't even guess where to start. The on-line homework is new and confusing. On the one hand the way each step is shown is wonderfully helpful. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I exit if the problems that are not completed are counted as irrevocably wrong.

And I'm the only student in my Earth and Planetary Sciences lab that is an EPS major.

Tomorrow I've got the EPS intro lecture class that goes with the lab, and Greek Mythology.

And now it's way past my bedtime. ;-)

Conan the Barbarian - Review

2011-08-20T18:28:00.003-06:00

Sword and Sorcery tends to embarrass itself at the movies. The genre is simultaneously deathly serious and silly beyond all reason so it's easy to see how that might all go wrong. It seems less ridiculous if you're reading the story in a book. I don't know why, it just does.

So making a new Conan is a risk. It's a risk because any movie in the genre is a risk. It's also a risk because the original Conan movies were pretty darn good and who can top Arnold? Conan IS Arnold and Arnold IS Conan. It's a risk because too many people already know what Conan is and what Conan ought to be. Everyone has preconceptions the new movie has to live up to.

Well, I think they did good.

No, it's not brilliant. It's not as great a movie as, say, Iron Man, but then nothing is. What it is is solid good fun.

The plot is the plot to Conan and nothing particularly new. His village is slaughtered and his father is killed, he advocates independence and individual dignity, he glories in slaughter while he roams the world searching for the men who killed his father.

The world is Conan's world. There are still cities of thieves and barren wastelands and everyone is either predator or prey. The villain still has overblown and outrageously unappealing plans to gain ultimate power so he can trash the place even farther. No one is building anything and as far as I can tell no one is producing food for anyone. The first time I saw the first movie I understood that the economy did not work. But, oh well. It's a fantasy.

Still, they've added a level of sophistication to the world that was less apparent in the earlier movies. (Confession: I've not read the books, nor the comic books, where I'm told that Conan is far far from a muscle-bound dummy.) We see Conan as a boy and I think that those sequences support the idea that he always was something rather special and rather frightening.

The political landscape is one where there are slaves and slaves masters, and then there are barbarians. Conan divides women into the categories of "warrior" and "whore." In his village woman were warriors and respected, which emphasizes the divide between the free barbarian tribes and those people under subjugation. The sub-villains are barbarian leaders who submitted their own people to dominion.

Conan himself is portrayed as clever and rather shrewd, even if it's mostly implied between sword battles. In keeping with modern sensibilities about atmosphere and sanitation, everyone looks rather in need of a bath and the battles include copious blood splashing about. Actually, come to think of it, someone actually *took* a bath in the movie. They had a tub on the deck of the pirate ship. Conan actually had some body hair as well... pit hair and some on his chest. I was specifically looking for this because body-builders tend to Nair their entire bodies and the norm for barbarian movies has been slick hairlessness, as if barbarian warriors waxed. So, yay, hair! The ladies still all had nice make up, but that's okay.

Bottom line... they did Conan proud. This is good, solid fun that no one will have to pretend later that they had nothing to do with. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Personal stuffs... crabby rants...

2011-08-11T17:15:00.002-06:00

I bought at least some of my books today. I'm starting (returning?) full time at UNM this fall; easing in with a relatively light load of classes. I expect that math will be a struggle as I've not had a math class in 25 years and I can't afford to do "just enough" since I'm going to have to take more for my major. In any case, it's got to be solid. My other classes range from less worrisome to "easy A" even though I'm a bit hesitant to say so. It just sounds sort of bad. I'm looking forward to them all and am actually quite excited about them because it's all interesting stuff. It's much easier to do well in an interesting class for an interesting subject than one that is so easy it's dull.

So school is looking good, so far. Once it starts I have some administrative things to do. They gave me a whole bunch of transfer credits, enough so that I'm classed as junior year, but few of them applied to my "core requirements" which they really should have done, so I'm going to see what I need to do to get as many of those as I can. I also need to change my minor declaration from merely English to English with a professional writing concentration.

So where is the crabby rant part?

Argh. I probably shouldn't even do it, because people shouldn't complain about their jobs. Lets just say, if my boss sees this it won't be the end of the world. If a potential employer sees this, well I haven't named my employer and do tend to get on well with everyone. In this case it's grin and bear it. But it's still a whine. But I feel like whining, dang it!

I totally busted my butt to get all of my classes in the afternoon, getting all classes that apply directly to graduation and doing so shortly before the semester started so there were few classes to chose from. This was not a minor sort of effort. Spring semester I'll register as soon as registration opens and it will be much easier. In any case, success! My mornings are entirely clear. I'm on the schedule at work from 7:00 am to 11:30, M-F. The earliest I will ever have to leave work is 11:30 on Tuesday and Thursday for a 12:30 class. There is no conflict whatsoever between school and my work *schedule*. The thing about my work schedule is that we start at 6:45 and we work until we are done. This Wednesday that was until 8:30 am. Didn't even pay for gas. Sometimes it's until 1 or 2:00 pm or in very rare instances, 3:00.

So today I dropped the single 11:00 class I had and registered for an on-line class to replace it and told my bosses what my final schedule was and that I'd got my mornings entirely free. What I got for that was, "It doesn't matter, we have to take you out of the stock room."

Firstly, this is a lie. And it's the lie that makes me so angry. They aren't going to take me out of the stock room. It would be idiotic to do so. I'm not worried about keeping my job or staying on the stock room team. I've been doing this job for a year and while I'm not the fastest, I know what I'm doing and am reliable. The person doing the schedule will keep me right where I am. The handful of times that the stock team will stay past noon between now and Christmas are irrelevant.

The lie makes me angry. It makes me angry because my boss wants me to feel insecure about keeping my job. Does she think this will make me work harder? Does she think that I will be more loyal if I think I could be unemployed at any moment? Does she think that she's supposed to occasionally be a *capricious* hard-ass in order to prove she's a hard-ass?

I have no clue.

I do know that I'd far far rather take morning classes and not have to stress about my schedule, simply taking what I need to take at my *own* convenience. If I was told honestly "sorry we have to let you go" it would almost be a relief, not having to try to juggle both. But no one is being honest. There are a number of reasons that I won't quit, so she's safe, too.

Complaining about work is something like the #1 "don't do it" rule for blogs, but I'm hitting "publish" anyhow.

Planet of the Apes

2011-08-06T16:14:00.002-06:00

The Rise of...

Saw it this morning.

I will say this... it didn't FEEL like I was cheering the end of the human species.

Contrary to what PETA said (IIRC) the apes weren't getting their own back, not getting some sort of revenge against humans. What the movie does is establish how the apes got smart and set up the reason they were able to fill a void. The movie used an amazingly light touch in dealing with animal research. None of the villains were among the scientists or researchers. That medical research was dealt with as a complex thing and the motivations of the researchers shown to be anything but evil, made the simplistic treatment of the three individual humans who were villains a disappointment. Important plot points depended on teh stupid. It would not have been hard to do better.

Cowboys and Aliens

2011-07-31T16:50:00.007-06:00

I finally figured out what was wrong with this movie.

First, it was a great movie. It was fun. It held my attention every single moment from the beginning of it until the end. But even so I have to admit that some of the less than fabulous reviews have a point. The movie is missing something.

Mostly, it seemed to me that it was missing a big payoff at the end. It was great while it was happening, but when it was over it was just over. Some critics said it could have been Cowboys vs. anything... that the aliens were pointless.

Anyhow, I figured it out. I figured out where the essential mistake occurred when they made this movie.

They failed to identify whose story it was.

It was Ella Swenson's story. It was the alien's story. In the trailers they have her explaining that the aliens killed "her people" and you suspect that she's Native American. She's not. Her "people" are an alien race.

But because they did not make it her story, the pay-off when she sacrifices herself to destroy the alien ship has no emotional oomph. Is is not, actually, a pay-off at all. There is no real reason for her to want to protect the humans at so dire a price, other than not wanting the aliens to win another one. But since she only stops one scouting group from destroying one planet instead of revenging herself on the entire alien race, it sort of lacks strength.

Doc and Jake and Woodrow have wonderful stories. As I said, it was riveting.

But Ella was just sort of there. How did she get to Earth? Did she have a choice? How long had she been here? Why didn't she have any technology? Why was she willing to sacrifice herself for humans?

It was her story, and we had no emotional investment in her at all.

Proof Lileks is Brilliant

2011-07-13T20:13:00.002-06:00

He agrees with me. :-)

It's amazing how brilliant someone sounds when they say something that you've said yourself a million times, but with new and different words.

The movie Silent Running is a "peaty slab of crap" he says. And I'm all... that's brilliant! "Peaty slab of crap" is exactly the phrase I've been looking for all of those times when I wanted to express just how stoopid that movie is. How often can you use the word "stoopid" without it getting old? Peaty slab of crap!

Or it could be that the movie itself is brilliant, if you look at it from the right direction. The proper direction. If you look at it as a skewering of the modern environmental movement it's got every single thing it needs. Lileks mentions the most egregious detail...

"Gosh: you’re orbiting a planet beyond Jupiter, and there’s insufficient sunlight to keep trees happy. Who could have seen that coming."

Because Silent Running is a movie about the environment that was written, produced, directed and acted by a cadre of self-righteous gaia lovers who had never in their entire lives so much as attempted to plant a tomato. These are the Earth Lovers and Tree Huggers that condemn "factory" farms and scold us all to buy organic and think it's beautiful when third world people undertake "sustainable" hand labor and live in mud huts in harmony with nature and see themselves as virtuous for buying a few of these products while they live with modern convenience, flush toilets and air conditioning.

I wasn't much past my teen years when I saw the movie Silent Running, but it left an impression. I knew that plants needed various light levels, among other things. I knew the tomatoes wouldn't grow under the trees. I knew that the shaded understory had different trees growing in it than the sun drenched canopies. And I could not conceive of any adult person competent to get through their day without assistance not knowing what I knew.

And yet, they exist.

They walk among us.

Oh, and did you hear Al Gore is back to lecturing us about the planet? Do you suppose that HE has ever grown a tomato?

Movie: The Eagle

2011-07-11T18:43:00.000-06:00

Has anyone seen this and want to discuss it? I watched it last night and although the movie itself wasn't disturbing, I kept on trying to figure out what they'd done wrong, why it didn't work as well as I thought it ought to have worked. I woke up in the middle of the night with a bug in my head trying to figure it out.

To start with just one tiny nit: This was a good example of why you should put your skeptic in the movie instead of on the couch watching the movie.

In The Eagle, Marcus and Eska travel northward through the non-Roman parts of Brittan keeping Marcus's Roman identity secret. Both my husband and I were waiting for someone to cry out "Roman!" and point at the tack on the horses as evidence. Neither of us knew that they hadn't changed Roman tack for what would be normal in the area they were traveling but there was nothing in the movie indicating that anyone had worried about it. (My husband thought that the fact that they even had horses would have made everyone suspicious of them.) They weren't shown making efforts to disguise Marcus's sword or his patrician's haircut. He didn't even let his beard grow. The only thing done, as far as was mentioned in the movie, to hide Marcus's nationality was to have Eska do all the talking.

Someone in the movie should have worried about the horses, the saddles and bridles, hiding the sword, and Marcus's hair cut. If someone had worried about those things, my husband and I sitting on the couch wouldn't have had to, even if not a single wardrobe element in the movie was changed.

My "issues" with the production go on from there, mostly having to do with storytelling, narrative and symbolic elements.

Anyone seen it? Have any thoughts?

Combat Hospital

2011-07-09T17:37:00.001-06:00

I finally got my nerve up to watch the three episodes of Combat Hospital that are on Hulu.

I dreaded even trying to watch them, knowing that there was no way that either the US military or our presence in Afghanistan could possibly be subject to a television show without the producers making sure they didn't come across as uncritical of either of them.

Joy of joys... the show is Canadian.

The main characters/doctors are Canadian. One is a civilian Brit. One is American. The head nurse is American and a number of other characters are American but probably the same number are Canadian or British. The "gone native" special ops guy is American. The shadowy unidentified (CIA, undoubtedly) is in the back-ground (I don't care about that as the special ops guy is obviously a hero).

What being Canadian does is allow them, in one of the very first episodes, to have a situation where a soldier is shot in a friendly fire incident and the good guys *cover it up*. I didn't catch if the squad involved were Brits or Aussies. In any case, because this isn't US, the show seems able to explore some of the realities and ambiguities of what is right and wrong (the new doctor didn't think there was any question that if someone was shot by one of ours that someone had to pay - and the show portrayed her as idealistic but naive.)

There is no way a US show could do this. And there is no way that this show, with it's "coalition" of various nationalities, can be seen as not speaking to the American presence in Afghanistan and the character of the *good* people in OUR military.

MASH was a Korean commentary on the Vietnam war.

The is a Canadian commentary on America... and from three episodes it seems to me that the commentary is positive.

It would be great if this show got an audience.

Watched lots of movies this week

2011-07-04T21:42:00.002-06:00

The Warrior's Way - I liked this a whole lot. Very stylized. Very Eastern. Thoughtful, too. Still, if you're put off by the thought of mystical ninjas, cowboys and a cast of circus people, you probably shouldn't challenge yourself.

Unknown - Good enough. I sort of hate to be so tepid over it, because there wasn't anything wrong with it. About half way through, though, I leaned over to my husband and whispered into his ear (since we were with friends) "Bourne Identity."

Sucker Punch - I suppose this was interesting and supposed to be artistic, maybe Sin City-ish or something. I didn't see the problems that the critics complained about. But I can't complain about what bothered me without spoiling the end... Oh, what the heck. I'll spoil the end. Right at the beginning we see the girl getting a lobotomy. We then spend the entire movie in her multi-layered fantasy world hoping that she doesn't get the lobotomy. She gets the lobotomy. The End.

Battle: LA - I bought *shoes* to wear to this movie and we never made it to the theater. Extra high spiky heels, bright yellow with black polka dots and turquoise trim. I have never owned such awesome and totally impractical shoes. And then we watched it on On Demand and I forgot to wear my shoes. Which is really sad, because I wouldn't have had to walk in them or anything.

This movie had me the moment the young guys call out taunts as they sprint past the MSgt, who up until that point was looking mighty fit indeed. My husband called it a Marine recruiting commercial, and I can't disagree. But lets not say that like it's a bad thing. The Marines were individuals and well drawn... and thinking about the strategic situation. The gal from the Air Force didn't use a two syllable word when a three syllable word would do. Best, they pushed through to victory. I don't know why people think that a downer ending is more valid than one that makes you feel good.

I Am Number 4 : This was fun. About what I expected. A lot of Roswell. A bit of Kyle XY. Maybe even a shade of Edward and Bella. My husband said it played like a pilot, which is true. Apparently it's based on the book, instead of the book being based on the movie, so I may check it out.

Adjustment Bureau : Meh. The best thing about it was the Scooby-Doo "come out a door you didn't run in to" chase scenes. Those were rather fun. Whatever larger theological question of slavery vs. free-will that was meant to be explored, and I could see it was meant to be there, sort of got lost somewhere between the Scooby-Doo doors.

Falling Skies Review

2011-06-26T14:32:00.003-06:00

I watched the first couple episodes of Falling Skies... three episodes?.. last night, back to back.

I have issues.

Those issues are likely related to the fact that I read science fiction and I've seen post invasion scenarios done before. Life as we know ends. How do humans survive? How do they organize themselves. It's been done and it's been done well. It's been done and done poorly. The idea is primal. There is a reason it's an idea picked up again and again.

So what happened to the other television efforts? The Event? V?

My nits from the beginning of this one... Child psych... They have the kids (the kid) seeming the least able to adjust to this terrifying new world. This seems unlikely and unsupported by both anecdote and History. But it does provide a chain-jerking intro to the facts of events. I found it annoying.

The hero... a History professor with an interest in military History. Nothing wrong with that. Enter the military which, naturally, disparages military History. Oh, noes! Not another "military people are autocratic and incurious" stereotype! And it's actually made somewhat worse by what seems to be efforts to show the military leadership as more or less right, which means someone is *trying* to be fair... right or not, they are still incurious and autocratic.

The military/civilian division. This I can't see, but it's obviously meant as a source of ongoing conflict. Again, the History professor is the voice of wisdom. If it were me arranging things in my post-invasion world, everyone in the community of traveling soldiers, combatants and camp-followers, would be organized into the organization itself. No division. How could there be?

The aliens... so far so good. They capture children and attach a big insect to their spinal column and walk them around like zombies. When people try to remove the organism it kills the child. This isn't a spoiler, it's part of the Child Psych intro briefing to the show. No one knows why the aliens do this inexplicable thing. There were internal hints that the "leashed" children had something to do with the bipedal war robots (the aliens being somewhat spider-like). I can see interesting places to go with that. They aren't rational, but who says aliens have to be rational?

I may watch a bit more, to see what happens. But IMO the only real thing that could save it is if the "leashed" children are programing an organism that is then put into the bipedal robots and at least some of the robots experience a sort of Robocop type reawakening and start to work with the humans. (I use Robocop as an example because I doubt as many people would get a Full Metal Alchemist reference.)

Season 5 Episode 5

2011-06-17T19:05:00.003-06:00

Back when Sandra Bernhadt was still funny. Couldn't act, but this is still one of my favorite episodes the way it spoofs Romance novels. Way. Too. Funny.

And clever, too. His "true" version of the romance novel is hysterical. "But I will... protect... what is left... of the lady's honor."

Besides, what's wrong with rewards, anyhow?

2011-06-16T22:01:00.001-06:00

The alternative is "getting the girl" for doing absolutely nothing.

The death of sexy television

2011-06-16T21:33:00.002-06:00

So maybe you can tell me what happened, or which are the wrong television shows I'm not watching, but whatever happened to romance, whatever happened to sexy?

Granted, Highlander is sort of overboard in that department, and I'd actually like to get a male perspective on this, because Duncan Macleod seems so... purposefully beefcake-y... I mention this show to women in a completely neutral way, and if they have a clue what I'm talking about they need no prompt for a near universal response: a fraction of a second of complete stillness followed by an indrawn breath followed by some variation of, "Dang, he's hot."

Now I suppose a feminist scold would insist that the guy "getting the girl" in each show is a bad thing and places the woman as a reward and we should avoid that. Are we avoiding that? Common wisdom is that there is more sex on television than ever before. Is there? And if there is, what has changed? Is it simply my imagination that in the 80's and 90's that "getting the girl" was fairly common in action/adventures, and not just in Highlander? I honestly can't think of any examples to support my thesis. It just *seems* like it must be so.

I mentioned that Christopher Chance in the show Human Target had female guest stars that provided a measure of sexual tension between them, but he never slept with them. In the show Justified the guy, Raylan Givens, sleeps with Ava and also with his ex-wife Winona, but I'm not so sure it counts. In A-Team Face was always making it with the ladies, though off-stage and implied. Colonel Hogan was also what we might call highly successful.

But, in contravention of my thesis, there was Riker, the slut. Nope, on second look... 1987 to 1994 for TNG supports my thesis... except that it was done so poorly that who would believe the passion? No one I know would ever become completely still for a fraction of a second, breath in and then proclaim "Oh, he is soooo hot."

Watching Highlander Again

2011-06-08T17:59:00.002-06:00

Because I CAN! Bwa ha ha ha!

Anyhow... I'm into season two, dreading each reappearance of Ritchie... and starting to feel guilty about that. And I generally cringe whenever they have Charlie (Charlie? DeSalva? Whatever.) try to "act like a former SEAL." And I'm probably the only person who doesn't adore Amanda. (Reminds me of Q on Star Trek.) Because I remember a great deal of most episodes I'm finding myself being a little more analytical than usual.

Today I was thinking about the changes between season one and season two and happened to think of another of my favorite televisions shows... the first season of Human Target. Just the first season.

In the first season of Highlander Duncan was passionately in love with a mortal woman. I don't know if someone decided to make him single, or if the actress decided to leave the show so they had to do without her, but in about episode 3 of season 2, she dies. Duncan moves away from the antique store to a more masculine venue, buying a gym and moving into snazzy bachelor digs in the building. Two new male "regulars" join the show... Dawson and DeSalva. Testosterone oozes from every frame. And trust me, women LOVE this show.

The first season of Human Target was an adventure / bromance show featuring Christopher Chance and two other men. Winston, a former cop and good-guy who is interested in Chance's redemption, and Guerrero, an amoral monster who's only redeeming feature is loyalty to Chance. Each episode brought a new adventure, and about half of the time a sexy woman to play against Chance's near monastic existence. Chance is alternately seeking his own redemption or death, he doesn't have much faith in redemption and he figures he deserves death. This was a great over the top adventure show with some serious moral undertones.

So on to season two... What did they do? They added girls. Let's broaden (heh... I punned) the appeal of this manly adventure! And we get Mrs. Pucci (yes... poochie...) as a fabulously rich benefactor and naif... and Avery (I think her name was) to be a perky and annoying apprentice to Guerrero... which was actually sort of a fun relationship for an episode or two. Winston is sort of left on his own, no longer the moral compass - having given that up to Pucci, and without a new female cast member to play off against because, Dum dum dum!, Pucci and Chance are paired. Pucci classes up their bachelor digs and gives them a jet to use and is shocked, shocked!, to find that gambling is going on in this establish... well, no, but nefarious law-breaking... how shocking to hire a former professional hit man and his crew of "outside the law" bodyguards and find that they... DUM DUM DA DUM!... break the law!

Most of season two wasn't terrible... but it wasn't good either. Maybe if Avery was only an occasional helper on a caper and if Pucci had been as she promised an *absentee* owner and less of a naif... maybe if it was still about the relationships between the men instead of the relationships between the men and women... maybe if Pucci and Winston had found common ground instead of Pucci and Chance...

Highlander played for six seasons.

Sure, Adrian Paul is a sexy guy, but Mark Valley isn't chopped liver either. Duncan and Chance are similar characters... tortured by their past, trying to make up for evil they've done, lonely and alone - ultimately, and asked to make the hard moral choices at the expense of their own souls, and doing so.

*Sigh*

At least it was a library book

2011-05-27T18:59:00.002-06:00

I have a pet peeve.

This pet peeve is "Historical" romances with "modern" women who are too stupid to live.

Arabella Blydon in Julia Quinn's novel _Dancing at Midnight_ is truly too stupid to live. It's an older book and I've read a number of romances by Quinn that I enjoyed but this is just painful. Utterly painful.

It's a rather common thing, gives me a rash, but Quinn is certainly not alone. A "strong" woman is not an idiot. A "strong" woman trusts her man to be competent.

Please repeat these two sentences after me all you romance writers! A "strong" woman is not an idiot. A "strong" woman trusts her man to be competent.

Now tattoo it on your forehead.

Thank you.

The EVENT

2010-09-10T20:52:00.004-06:00

So... Hulu had some trailers for new fall shows so I watched the endless 4-5 minute trailer for the EVENT.

On one level it looks sort of like fun... aliens, I suppose, and lots of fast paced action and I think it had 'sploding stuff, too. So I'm probably the target audience.

I have no desire to even watch the pilot of this show.

The interminable trailer was nearly 5 minutes of "neener-neener, not gonna tell you, neener-neener-neener."

"Each week you'll get more clues. Each week you'll be more invested." That's what the web-site says.

So.

Essentially.

The "teaser" has come out of the closet. The unrevealed pay-off, the mystery, is not at all mysterious but standing naked in the public square with a bag over it's head while a guy with a megaphone and top-hat bellows, "Be amazed! Be astounded! Watch as the weather and sun slowly degrade the bag making it thinner and thinner until... you find out what could be revealed by me as simply as yanking the bag OFF! The suspense will be tremendous!"

My reaction is... jerk me around in a 5 minute teaser trailer while promising to do me the favor of jerking me around over the course of what you hope will be many seasons of the show and I *will* find something else to watch.

Went to Last Airbender

2010-07-07T23:36:00.002-06:00

So I took the kids to Airbender today. It had some weaknesses in the script but it really wasn't as bad as all that. I hope it does better over time. There were almost exclusively "kid" shows at the theater so there is a lot of competition. (And the not-kid shows were PG-13 offerings.)

I think that Shyamalan had to make a choice. If he didn't follow the television show people would have been up in arms, but following the show is what was wrong with the movie. Truly a no-win situation.

Zuko (I'm just going to guess on spellings here) was brilliant and his story told incredibly well. His conflict was the most clearly told. Also, I suppose it's likely that a double could have done his martial arts parts where he is wearing a mask, but it's also possible the actor playing the character did them. If so, he's brilliant. (The actress who plays his sister only appeared for the briefest moment, twice, and in that short time proved brilliant as well.)

The water bending katas were wonderful. The air bending ones not quite so much, but still good.

What didn't do so fabulously was Aang's conflict. It was unfocused, I'm convinced, because the movie followed the television show timeline. The movie needed his initial conflict to be central and clearly stated and it wasn't. Risking fans having even a bigger cow, it still would have been better storytelling to start with Aang in real-time when he runs away and *why*.

OR that could have been done and then the whole starting a rebellion in the Earth Nation just skipped over to move directly and immediately to the North Water Nation and putting Katara's problems with chauvinism back in, so long as Zuko didn't get shortchanged in the process. So... her brother's romance and loss (wonderful story), Katara being denied training, Zuko's daddy problems, and Aang accepting his role as Avatar.

But if Shyamalan had skipped the Earth Nation people would have howled.

So... is he a bad director or a good director for realizing that?

Olivia Munn does Twilight

2010-07-07T22:59:00.001-06:00

Olivia Munn does Twilight.

racebenders vs. Shyamalan

2010-06-29T12:12:00.003-06:00

I'm one of those people who experienced that moment of sharp disappointment when they learned that the movie AVATAR had nothing to do with the Last Airbender.

Now the movie that we really wanted is coming out and it looks fabulous. It's directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

And right on time the racebenders show up. (I'm absolutely stealing that term from one of the commentators on that post. )

In the world of the Last Airbender there are nations divided by what element certain people in them can manipulate. The Fire Nation uses fire. Benders in the Earth Nation can throw gigantic boulders and make pillars of rock rise from the ground. Water benders can throw water around. The airbenders, of whom only a single individual remains, can make whirlwinds to use as weapons.

Racebenders use race and racism and accusations of racism as weapons. They can manipulate and use and abuse race and are more than willing to do so.

It's a brilliant term.

Orchids

2010-02-11T13:56:00.002-07:00

This is my Plumberry Glow "York". I had to go back to 2005 to get a picture, but it's still hanging on to the threads of life and pushing out a couple of red flowers on a regular basis. It's fragrant only at 1pm. Orchids are so funny.

The second picture is a Paph that I bought at the grocery store. Itmanages to bloom every year and has for about four years in a row now. This year it bloomed from Thanksgiving to after Christmas. The picture is pretty bad and doesn't show the plant. I should have set it in the sun for a better photo.

Home Town Heroes

2010-01-29T21:48:00.003-07:00

It was too late by the time anyone had called the fire department. That can't be changed and one man is dead in a house fire, the tragedy for his family and loved ones irreparable.

I get an e-mail from my home-town paper and the headline caught my eye. Small, small home town, everyone knows everyone... certainly I used to. It was a long time ago. I quick clicked through and skimmed until I found the name. Not familiar. Thank goodness.

And then I read more carefully.

The call came at 12:30 am. Someone driving by saw the farm house in flames. My childhood is full of memories of the daily noon siren that could be heard for miles around. It would raise into a wail and then die off again. Other times it would wail on and on, eight times or nine. And the men would stop what they were doing and get into their cars and trucks and rush to the fire station to go to fight the fire. They even came to our farm once, when a trash burn got away from us. My mom, who was responsible for the blaze, made cookies and lemonade for them.

It would have been different men that night, but in a sense the same men, too, who went out to fight that fire. January in Minnesota... it wasn't quite 20 below zero. There was a stiff wind but no one counts wind-chill. The news article didn't even mention it. It was a battle to keep the pumps and hoses working in the cold and the men had to work in shifts to keep from freezing. The fire department from the neighboring town, the one big enough to have a news paper and paid fire fighters, more trucks and more pumps, came to help.

It was only ever a battle to keep the blaze from spreading, to contain the fire and put it out. It was dawn before the last ember was cold.

And somehow it seems to me to be even more noble, more heroic, to do something so difficult, to battle both the killing cold and the fire through-out the night, to persevere knowing from the beginning that there was no victory. There was no hope, only duty. Only duty and what is expected of men.

We lose too much when we forget what people are capable of, what ordinary people consider themselves capable of and what standards they hold themselves to.

Sometimes the minimum standard is being a hero.

And this is why true heroes never think they did anything special.

Free Speech - Is the Constitution about Fairness?

2010-01-24T00:17:00.002-07:00

If this isn't dug out at the roots we're not going to get very far defending even something as basic as freedom of speech.

The roots, the foundation of the rot, is in the notion that the purpose of the Constitution is fairness rather than freedom.

You know, actually... it's pretty close to exchanging some feel good "What would Jesus do?" for study of scripture and doctrine. (I know that some people think that's useful, but it's *lazy*.)

What the Constitution actually says, matters. Liberty and freedom actually matter. The defense of our liberty matters. But people have become lazy. Instead of adhering to the words and principles that are there they've exchanged it for what seems fair or sounds right. If something isn't *fair* then the Constitution can't actually mean that's the way it's supposed to be, right?

Wrong. Lazy and wrong. But that's what we've seen over the last how many years beginning with laws criminalizing speech as hate crimes, or criminalizing and punishing the expression of wrong thoughts on campuses... anyone paying attention has heard the earnest claim more than once that... "Free speech is not offensive speech."

Of course it is.

No speech is free if only approved speech is allowed.

And now with this... it's the *fairness* principle, and now it is that "free speech" requires shutting everyone else up so you can be heard. See... if other, perhaps louder, speech is going on that isn't fair. So those voices have to be silenced or our speech isn't free.

Maybe someone can be more pithy and direct than I can about this... the errors are three... "The Constitution is about Fairness and not Liberty." "Free speech is not offensive speech." and "Free speech requires silencing louder voices."

It's tempting to just blast people for being idiots, but political dialog and thought has been so shallow and our lives have been so comfortable that no one really knows in their gut the value of Liberty. So they need to be told. Not just that the three errors I mentioned are wrong, but that free speech and liberty have a purpose worth the discomfort.

Push back, but educate as well.

Speech can never be free if only approved speech is allowed.

Human Target

2010-01-21T14:45:00.003-07:00

I'm watching this on Hulu.com. So far it's fun and I think it's got some really great potential. I don't know where it normally airs.

I will say that the musical score and particularly the opening theme song sucks. Maybe something rocking would have been a bad choice, but they've gone orchestral.

The rest though... enough fights and action to make me very happy. And I like the three principles very much, at least so far. The main character is really attractive, but I think I like the computer/corporate specialist better. So far he is really my favorite. I really like what has been shown of each of their characters and struggles and their interaction. And also, for what it's worth... I like that they are all guys.

Now, that may be because this is supposed to be a guy show, but I like that they didn't feel like they had to have a female partner. At least not yet. For female guest characters they've had a high-powered engineer hard-core application of hard-science builder of really big machines, a world class computer hacker, and an assassin... and I thought they were played well, and portrayed well.

(I also rather like the guy/buddy aspect of "White Collar". As much as the common wisdom is that women get no starring roles in Hollywood, the fact that a show starring two men seems shocking suggests that it probably isn't as true as believed.)

The Best Video Evah

2009-11-11T13:36:00.002-07:00

But not necessarily fit for polite company.

Which isn't a *bad* thing. "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
-- George Orwell

The Warrior Song.

Christian faith vs. Alien life

2009-11-10T22:41:00.002-07:00

As a science fiction writer and a Christian, the idea that religious faith can not withstand the discovery of intelligent alien life really gets on my nerves.

Instapundit linked this today.

It's pretty much exactly what I'd expect. The Vatican is hosting some event discussing the intersection of Christian faith and possible alien life. There's quite a bit to talk about.

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organisers of the conference, said: "As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God.

"This does not conflict with our faith, because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God."

And pretty much like I'd expect someone feels the need to assert that it would-so be a problem.

Not everyone agrees. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and author of The Goldilocks Enigma, told The Washington Post that the threat to Christianity is "being downplayed" by Church leaders.

There is no *threat* to Christianity in the discovery of intelligent alien life, or alien life at all. There's not even all that much of a theological question or adjustment that would have to be made by believers. It's not being "downplayed". The "threat" is being exaggerated by people extrapolating the reasoning behind their own abandonment of faith onto other people.

And I really think that anyone who hasn't already given up faith for science, who can live well and comfortably with the two in cohabitation... is not going to have a trauma if we find life out there.

There may be people who haven't given it a whole lot of thought, unlike science fiction writers, but very few who will not be flexible enough to adapt.

I'm cranky, I'm tired. And I lost 5 pounds.

2009-10-17T13:38:00.002-06:00

In five days.

Which isn't bad.

My husband and I are doing the Atkins diet. (He's losing weight faster than me, of course.) In some ways it's actually easy. I'm not at all hungry, after all. But I do find myself wanting what I can't have rather badly. Just *one* cookie!

In the beginning part it's really strict. As I understand it, and this makes sense to me, when we eat carbohydrates and sugars and fats and proteins our bodies (through insulin) signal ourselves to use the fast and easy carbs and sugars first and store the rest on our butt.

So the usual sort of diet that eliminates fat and reduces carbs, doesn't leave us anything to store (like extra carbs and sugars). And on that sort of diet I wouldn't get a cookie *either*.

In any case it's been less than a week. And according to the books after I'm done losing the weight I want to lose I'll get to eat more stuff... UP TO the "store the fat on your butt" level. Which won't ever be going back to eating "normal" but leaves room for some treats.

Like a cookie.

I applied for a job...

2009-10-15T13:25:00.001-06:00

... at Whole Foods today.

Brain-Dead Conservatism?

2009-10-03T00:00:00.003-06:00

Ann Althouse linked this commentary from the Washington Post today.

“During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.”

Reading it I thought that the likely reason for an apparent lack of intellectual leadership in the conservative movement was because everyone was too busy trying to shut up the populists and remake the Republican Party or redefine conservative as something smarter by insisting that it shed the unwashed masses.

Which is what I was reminded of when I saw this about McCain. (And “compared to what?” was a laugh out loud moment, Bruce.) Rather than being comfortable with populism and intellectualism together (I’ll not say “elitism” because I think the word requires exclusivity) everyone seems to be trying to decide who to throw out or shun in order for conservatism to be fit for refined company. If it’s not the god-botherers it’s the social cons or the neo-cons or (even!) the tea partiers or it’s those foolish enough to be excited about Sarah (who could never win!) or it’s Limbaugh or it’s Hannity… and it’s certainly Glenn Beck!

From the Washington Post commentary:

Beck, for one, is revealing that despite the demands of filling hours of airtime every day, it is possible to engage in some real thought. He just might be helping restore the equilibrium between the elite and populist sides of conservatism.

Wow. Glenn Beck.

I think that there are other things going on as well, sort of a social shake-down happening that has the potential to turn out very well for the promotion of reason... when I manage to get my mind around the specifics I may write a post. (At the moment it's all rather ephemeral with bits of disjointed pieces such as "the exploding helicopter constant" trying to find where it fits with all the glimpses I haven't yet discovered evocative name-hooks for.)

Bogus Civility

2009-09-19T13:55:00.002-06:00

Finally someone said what I've been thinking about this constant call to civility:

Have we transformed into so brittle a citizenry that we are unable to handle a raucous debate over the future of the country? If things were quiet, subdued and "civil" in America today, as Pelosi surely wishes, it would only be proof that democracy wasn't working. (Please read the whole article.)

Sure, Pelosi wishes that everyone would behave already, but it is also often conservatives and others arguing over the proper way of dissenting rather than just dissenting already. There seems to be a practical meltdown in areas of the conservative blogosphere over comportment... the theory seeming to be that passion is off-putting to the all-important center. In order to win, therefore, we need to be bland.

Frankly, I think that other than those in power who would rather not be bothered by opposition, it's only people without ideas who are arguing over civility. The Tea Party protesters aren't spending all of their time trying to police their fellows. They've got a simple message of economic responsibility for the government that applies to the stimulous bill, the bail-outs and government buy-outs, and now health care. It's all the same message at heart: Don't spend money you don't have, and especially don't spend my money. A second, very simple message applied to each situation is that government is passing bills they haven't read that will have consequences they haven't considered. Or more succinctly put: Read the bill!

Those are powerful ideas.

But don't the pictures of Joker Obama or Hitler Obama or Witchdoctor Obama take away from that? Yes, maybe a little, or even a lot. But what is the alternative? Decorum?

Well behaved women seldom make History. This is also true for men, of course. People who censor their own behavior for fear of offending someone else never accomplish much of anything. And frankly, some people would like it that way. Freedom is rough and tumble. Free Speech is often raucous. Speak your truth even if your knees shake? Do people really mean that?

Yes but... Witchdoctor Obama?

Can we accept that people do and will do unhelpful things either from an excess of zeal, a tin ear, or even racism, and that they have a right to express themselves, and also that spending our time policing others for what they have a constitutional right to do is just as UN-helpful as whatever behavior we, ourselves, find goes over our own personal line? By all means, if appropriate, push back when someone is expressing something with which you disagree, but don't mistake for a moment that your right to speak is dependent on how well anyone else behaves him or herself.

There is no prerequisite on your right to speak, dissent, demonstrate or carry a poster.

There are a lot of people, today, who are trying to shame others into silence. For one reason for another; for some fantasy of a more civil past, for some notion that well-behaved people get more attention, for reasons that they don't want to be sullied by the unwashed masses, or because they'd just rather not have to acknowledge the opposition.

But really... who woke up one morning and made them Jell-o Sheriff? Huh?

I think my favorite at the moment is the argument that uncivil behavior toward the President or our fellow man isn't free speech but is a Civil Rights Violation.

Dreaming the end of racism together.

2009-09-16T16:35:00.002-06:00

The essential element of change is to be able to visualize the goal. It helps even more to begin to behave as though the goal has already been reached.

Then, when the real world situation doesn't conform to the new pattern it's easily recognizable as wrong. Everyone has already accepted the desired end state. No one needs to be convinced of anything, the situation simply needs to be corrected.

The pattern or template is just as important as the reality in this.

The end of slavery didn't come because people were determined to end it first and put equality into the Constitution later. The template and self-identity were there already and people said this is wrong because it didn't fit. It didn't fit their idea of Christian and it didn't fit their idea of American. The same with the civil rights movement. People had a self-image that they believed was true about themselves. Because of that they were able to see and change something that didn't fit.

Sometimes I use the word mythos to describe a sort of attendant fantasy world that exists in parallel to the real one. It holds all the idealism and identity and pattern that we conforming monkeys use or even *need* to transform the real and vastly flawed version of the world into something better.

Seeing honestly what exists around us and within ourselves is important but it's only half the picture. Without the other half we're stuck where we are.

So much of the conversation about race recently seems to be insisting that we're actually racist to give racism up.

Too Cool Science - Love Molecule

2009-09-11T14:11:00.001-06:00

"Markets are pro-social. Markets are about serving the needs of another—that is innately virtuous," says Paul J. Zak, professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

But I don't have to buy his books, either...

2009-09-10T13:10:00.002-06:00

Instapundit linked this by Neil Gaiman.

George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.

Well, true enough... but I don't have to buy his books either.

A couple of posts ago I lamented that I forgot to bring my books to Bubonicon for Mr. Martin to sign. I have three starting with _A Game of Thrones_. I loved the first one and would have read the others on the theory that these three are *it*, right? But I realized that the series was not complete and I chose to stop reading the ones I already *had* until I had them all. I will probably not *buy* any more until they are all published and Mr. Martin announces "The End." Until then I won't read the ones I've already paid for either.

Mr. Gaiman is, of course, completely correct that there is no contract between an author and fans that demands that he or she produce anything whatsoever.

But open ended series carry a significant risk for the author. As a consumer I no longer have to scramble to buy a book for fear it will not be available later. Books do go out of print, but usually they can be bought at any time over the internet. So I really can wait until I can get them *all* to buy any more at all. Obviously if a whole bunch of readers decide to wait the publisher's numbers will be low and they might get low enough to matter and new books won't be bought. This is a risk that I, as a reader, am willing to take. Are authors willing to take that risk?

I waited to buy Daniel Abraham's four books. I bought them each because I knew there would only be four. Now I will read them.

I waited to buy John Ringo's Posleen books until I could get them all and while I waited I lost interest. Sorry John!

David Weber, with a couple of exceptions, seems to be very good at writing a series where each book has a satisfying conclusion. But I told him myself *last* year... or at least I'd planned to!.. now I honestly don't remember... that not finishing a series is a poor way of getting people to pray for your continued health and that you don't get hit by a bus. _Oath of Swords_ is a whole lot of fun but apparently hasn't sold that well so he writes another one for fun when he needs a break. If they didn't sell that well before the prospect that the next installment will end without answering burning questions and leave readers hanging for a number of additional years before the *next* one?.. this will NOT help sales.

It is true, Mr. Gaiman, that these authors do not OWE me anything.

And it is true that I owe them nothing in return.

Little Old Ladies Driving

2009-09-07T21:25:00.002-06:00

Two little old ladies were in a car on their way someplace. The driver went through one stop sign, then another. "Edna!" The other said, "You just went through two stop signs." "I did?" Edna replied. "I thought *you* were driving."

A little old lady was put put-ing down a high way, holding up traffic. A police officer pulled her over. The officer explained that the speed limit was 50. "Oh, is it? I was sure that the signs said 30." The officer explained, no, the highway number was 30. The speed limit was 50. He noticed passengers in the back seat, two nuns, white as sheets. "Well then," the old lady exclaimed, "the road I was just on must have been highway 113."

Finding the Last Straw

2009-08-29T22:35:00.005-06:00

I just got home from Bubonicon. Bubonicon is the Science Fiction convention held in Albuquerque this weekend. I just get one day of it this year and for the most part had a great time. Hopefully next year I'll make the whole weekend.

What I want to talk about now that I'm not at the Con is... politics. And you know, I did this same post last year. I really did. The same exact post.

I have simply had it with Connie Willis.

I have had it.

If anyone has been to a science fiction convention anywhere they know that diversity is the norm. Lots of people seem to really love going to conventions because it's one place where they can really feel comfortable when they normally feel that they don't fit in. But somehow some people seem to think that in the area of religion and politics, the two really big social pit falls, that there is no diversity at a Con and no tolerance required. Sure, there are a lot of people who are politically liberal at a Con. Probably the majority. But there are political conservatives, libertarians, and social conservatives and any number of other people enthusiastic about fantasy and science fiction in its various forms. And they are there, too.

There are some very famous authors on the panels that I know are conservative in various ways and quite a few that I know are liberal... and they all manage to behave decently, respectful of others and respectful of diversity and at the very least having the good manners to avoid airing their personal political hobby-horses.

Connie Willis does not have good manners. She wouldn't know good manners if they bit her in the ass. It doesn't matter what the subject is, she will find a way to bring up politics and ridicule those she feels deserve ridicule. Ridicule has one purpose, and that is to allow someone to avoid having to even acknowledge that contrary opinions exist. Someone who deserves ridicule need never be engaged. And Connie Willis will find a way to bring politics into a non-political discussion just so that she can express ridicule. She will find an excuse.

The first time I heard her do this a few years ago I was annoyed but excused her. I figured that emotions were high and people were frustrated and while it was rude of her to give vent to that, I figured it was due to frustration at current events and would pass.

It hasn't passed.

Any number of other authors I know for certain are flaming liberals refrain from bringing up politics, political personalities or expressing ridicule while on panels in front of an audience. The authors I know are conservative manage to refrain from bringing up politics and political personalities. It CAN be done. My usual habit of trying to find a reason, to put the best possible interpretation on bad behavior, is all used up. I've found the last straw.

Other than THAT, I did have a great time.

I got to talk to Betsy James, who I had taken a class from last February. It was a great class and talking to her reminded me that I need to get my rear in gear and write!

I spent some time talking to Kirt Hickman and David Corwell in the dealer room. Kirt has a book on revising and editing fiction out that I intend to review here sometime soon. I actually have an early draft version of it that he'd test driven for my daughter's Girl Scout troop. I hadn't seen David in a long time (I knew him from Southwest Writers and LERA, the local romance writer's group) and it was great to catch up a little bit. It was also very nice to talk to people who already knew that I wrote. (I feel like such a wannabe poseur explaining "I write" to anyone at a Con.)

I got the last installment of the Long Price Quartet signed by Daniel Abraham. I enjoyed the first book a whole lot and had decided that it would be easier to wait until I had them all rather than tease myself with the anticipation between each book and then having to wait *again*... but now I have them all, nice hard-back first editions and all signed... so now I can finally read the whole quartet. Yay!

(Halfway to town I realized that I probably had unsigned books by Steve Stirling and I knew I had unsigned books by George R. R. Martin, both of whom would be at the Con... and I left them home. DRAT! But I didn't go back to get them.)

I also, and most wonderfully, got to talk to Suzy Charnas some more this year and got to attend a talk by her. There are so many times in this life where I will make some observation or other and be met by blank stares... if I'm lucky. (My husband is an exception. He's not always as interested in what I have to say as I am, but I never doubt he understands me.) When Suzy participated on rec.arts. sf.composition there were many times that I found myself in accord with her when normally I'd be entirely alone in my opinion or observation, despite us not really having anything similar in our world views... or not seeming to. I've noticed the same thing in small moments during panels at the Con other years. It's just NICE to feel, when I'm so used to no one seeing my point, that someone else sees the same connections in some odd thing or other as I do.

This time at her talk, which was entertaining and encouraging in so many ways, I found myself listening to her explain that every choice we make for something is a choice against any number of other things and that we edit our lives this way, eliminating all these other possibilities that might have been, and that those possibilities, while gone forever, might hover like ghosts over our life..... or something sort of like that. And it reminded me of something I'd said to Lois Bujold on a forum: I did not really want more Miles Vorkosigan books because as long as they were unwritten all potentials existed, that writing another book would collapse all of those potential futures Miles had and destroy them. She sent me a short, positive e-mail that she thought that was interesting and it was clear she understood what I meant. But here Suzy was pretty much explaining the same concept of eliminating possibilities. So I mentioned my Bujold story, of preferring the unwritten unlimited potential than to have all of those possible futures destroyed and while I'm probably relating this *very* badly, it was very much yes, of *course*. She got it.

And it is just so NICE to talk with someone who, when I open my mouth, doesn't look at me like I'm an alien that grew another head.

Explaining Glenn Beck

2009-08-14T18:14:00.002-06:00

Actually, what happened was that someone in an Althouse thread said something about Hitler not having anything to do with health care. I pointed out that we often don't hear about what was happening in hospitals in Germany at the time, the euthanasia and sterilizations of those entirely Aryan persons with mental disabilities or genetic illnesses and what not.

Apparently Glenn Beck made a similar point very recently because I got accused of repeating what he had said nearly verbatim.

Go figure.

"Glenn Beck!"

;-)

The need for bridges - an analogy

2009-08-14T18:06:00.003-06:00

HE: We need to cross this river. We must build a bridge.

SHE: We don't need a bridge to get across the river. Boats or a ferry, perhaps.

HE: Of course we need a bridge! Only rich people have boats and it hasn't gotten everyone over there. We have to cross this river.

SHE: A bridge is too expensive and will probably wash out during the spring floods. A bridge is a bad idea.

HE: The only reason you don't think we need to cross this river is because you hate the people on the other side, you hater!

SHE: I'm not a hater. I love those people as much as you do, but we do not need a bridge to cross the river. There are other ways to cross the river!

HE: Oh, and what about people who can't swim, you hateful moron, just let those people drown, huh? And you claim you aren't a hater.

SHE: I never said swim!

HE: Glenn Beck! Glenn Beck! Glenn Beck!

Do the poor have a "right" to free health care

2009-08-13T23:51:00.002-06:00

The “right” to free health care is the right to own the labor of other people without their consent.

Any time you’ve got a right TO something like that you take the rights of other people to their own selves and their own freedom away.

The libertarian idea, as I understand it, is that your rights end where they intersect another person. I have a right to “pursue happiness” to make my way in the world, to worship my own God, to feed myself, to supply my physical and other needs, rights to my own body and self-determination, rights to my own property, rights to employ violence to defend my rights (which is pretty much a good way to define what is a right and what is *not*)… just up *until* I intersect another human being. I may not take someone else’s food nor compel their labor nor sacrifice them to my God nor otherwise violate *their* rights in the pursuit of my own.

Read the rest at A Second Hand Conjecture.

How Suzanne Brockman lost me.

2009-07-25T21:19:00.003-06:00

I just finished reading the latest paperback from Suzanne Brockmann. _Dark of Night_. I'm disappointed and that's a sad thing because I've absolutely loved her series of romances about SEAL team 16 and the Troubleshooters. Aparently I'm not alone.

My complaint isn't the same as most of the others... I'm great with Sophia and Dave. I even am okay with Tracey being people smart. She and Decker did seem to come out of left field. I thought Decker was great even if I thought his overwhelming conflict was pretty lame.

What I didn't care for was the politics.

I read for escapism, for studly dangerous men acting like men, for sex, and adventure with guns, where our military are the good guys and the SEALs are supermen and military contractor's are heroes, too. (I wonder if Ms. Brockmann realizes that the Troubleshooters ARE Blackwater?)

I do not read sexy action adventure to be presented with a *cause*.

It's small things but they don't need to BE there. Yes, the relationship between Jules and Robin is part of that. Not because they are gay but because instead of a *story* their relationship became a *statement*. The point at which it became a statement is the point at which it got annoying. It *reads* different. The tone changes.

I could point to Dave (I think it was) a few books ago I think he was wearing a Che' t-shirt. And that threw me because I thought... would he? And in _Dark of Night_ someone is wearing a campaign t-shirt with either "Got Hope" or "Got Change"... don't remember... and big deal, right? And someone laments about how we used to be the good guys or something or getting sent to Gitmo. I am *fine* with having someone in the government be the force of evil or a rogue CIA faction undertaking illegal black-ops. And yeah, torture is bad and evil and the evil people can be expected to torture their prisoners for information.

But it is the way that it is done. When it is a *statement* it reads differently. There are no alternate opinions or shades of opinions or variety of opinions. No one has a "Peace Through Superior Fire Power" t-shirt to balance Che'. No one has a Sarah Palin bumper sticker to balance the hope-n-change campaign memoribilia. No one making a remark about Gitmo is balanced by someone who is of the opinion that the best place for "Tangoes" is dead.

In the real world there are a variety of opinions. Even keeping it light, the references fleeting, doesn't stop the feeling of preachiness if there are not opposing opinions expressed by other characters.

It starts to wear after a while and is more than distracting to be *waiting* for the next remark to happen. It throws me out of the story, and that is a bad thing. I don't want to be *lectured* by Tracey, at length, that there is no wrong way to have sex. I just want her and Decker to do it however they want to do it. I don't want to hear *Suzanne Brockmann* say anything at all about sex or about politics or Gitmo or torture or bigotry. That's what she's got *characters* for. And in the last few books I have definitely been hearing Suzanne Brockmann.

It's not that this novel was bad or unentertaining. It was fine, really. I'm just not all that interested in the next one because I know I'll be waiting for the next remark, wondering what it will be. Worse, the free-sample of the next novel that was in the back of this one starts out with three young ladies working together on a political campaign. Ugh.

Worse even than the expectation of having the politics put in there front and center is... I got confused about who was who and for a moment I thought that the working girl was being promoted as a political candidate by her wealthy ivy-league friends. But no, I was wrong... it's the proper and acceptable Ivy League trust-fund lady who has decided on a political career.

Well, okay then!

At least Brockmann hasn't missed that liberal necessity.

Which! I admit is a stupid political reaction for ME to have but simply shows that as things are I can not read her books without the politics being front and center and not only does that suck... it's boring.

It's not even a matter of getting in a snit over it, it's just not wanting to bother.

And that is sad because I really loved her books.

Claret Cup Cactus

2009-06-24T08:55:00.001-06:00

Masquerade

2009-06-09T00:04:00.004-06:00

Three dimensional, totally unique, hand painted, sturdy paper mache and gesso, felt lined, ribbons are attached with rivets.

This is meant to be worn or displayed.

What do you think?

So Wrong...

2009-02-28T21:22:00.002-07:00

Every now and then I like reading one of those thin, naughty, category romances. Partly, it's to analyze what works and doesn't work craft-wise... though that's sort of an excuse since I can't read anything without paying that sort of attention. This time I grabbed two... both paranormal... it seems like that's all of them these days. The fad will pass, I'm sure.

One had a fortune teller who could see futures. I actually liked that one fairly well. The fortune teller aspect wasn't spooky, just matter-of-fact, and it worked for me.

The other was a time-travel romance.

This is a sub-genre of paranormal that involves one party traveling forward or backward in time and meeting his or her true love. They can be fun. And this one was fun... but it was also so very wrong.

The whole time I was reading it my back-brain was hollering at me that any sane modern person, sent back in time, would conclude that she was insane. One way or the other. I kept thinking that a sane person would not even *try* to return home... she would assume that she was either a person from the future having a hallucination, or a person from the present she finds herself in, but with false memories. The sane thing to do would be to treat the here-and-now as real and make decisions assuming the here-and-now was real... and either way then, no harm done... If she wakes up back in 2009, super. And if she doesn't wake up back in the future, then at least she's been dealing with her present.

It was very distracting.

I've read other time-travel romances that weren't so distracting and I think it was because there was more of a reason for the person to travel. It can be a magical reason... just so long as it makes sense that it exists. One of the ones I've read has a goddess or witch or some such that looks through time and finds the two people and then brings one person through time. Another (which accounts for about all of them I've read) has someone in the past summon a hero and making a mistake over the name. This one had a book and a dress that had absolutely no relevance to the past that was explained and a necklace that was never mentioned again and... sigh... it was just so wrong.

Hey Tree Hugger! Try this one!

2009-01-30T19:22:00.002-07:00

Highlander Season Six

2009-01-07T14:21:00.004-07:00

Okay, I know what they were thinking... spin-off.

I haven't watched season 6 episode 10 because I simply can not bear to watch it. The last three episodes, including this one, have been job interviews. Unfortunately it was all archetype and no soul. I expect more of the same.

What happened to the fabulous writing? I think it died sometime mid season 5. I realize it's too late. I realize these are old shows and it's way too late. Breaks my heart.

It's not as though it would be impossible to do "immortal female crime fighter" and do it well. But didn't they have the first clue what made Highlander so great? What made Highlander great is that the immortals are tragic figures. The episode where Mary Shelly conceives of Frankenstein got it right... so who ever wrote *that* episode understood it. The immortals are tragic. Either they suffer and endure loss after loss after loss... or they become monsters.

It wasn't *just* that Adrian Paul is the sexiest man alive, but that Duncan MacLeod was simultaneously victorious and wounded, a superman and fragile. And he was best when he loved mortals... Tess or Joe. Amanda is great, but it's not the same. Methos carried those wounds. So did Darius. Richie hadn't had time yet.

They could have done a female immortal and even made her a crime fighter, or body-guard, or bounty-hunter, or spy, and done it so it worked. If the primary focus to start hadn't been to show how kick-ass she was, and if her primary motivation for the profession wasn't to do good in the world.

Live to Kill, or Kill to Live... as one of the writers who actually understood, put it.

The obvious reason to be in a profession like that is the excuse to carry weapons, know how to get false papers and new identities, and keep track of those who might want to kill you.

Or put her at the stage the psych immortal described... when the killing finally overwhelms her and she starts to run, and run, and run, to escape it. But she can't.

That's loneliness and tragedy, being chased by those demons.

I can't watch the last episodes. I have to go back and watch something from season one, to get the foul taste out of my mouth.

Season Six...

2009-01-06T15:14:00.003-07:00

And I'm dreading it. I don't even want to watch.

Spoilers, if you care.... For the end of season five.

Duncan is crazy again, and killed Richie. Did we just do this? Didn't he just go nuts and kill his friends? Couldn't they think of something new?

Worse, worse... last episode of season five and Duncan is thinking he might be crazy, and Methos and Joe think he's crazy, and Richie calls and says he saw Joe when Joe is standing right next to Duncan and it seems the most important thing would be that Richie was seeing things too... so why doesn't Duncan say so? Methos and Joe are standing right there. And Duncan runs off without saying anything. And kills Richie.

This is about as dumb as, "Let's split up."

"I think I'm going crazy, but rather than stay with people I trust, I'm going to run around alone and do who-knows-what."

Ugh.

And I was thinking that those writing Highlander were actually rather good.

Valkyrie

2009-01-05T02:31:00.001-07:00

So... this is sort of fun.

Update: Oops! Yes, Hulu.com doesn't work outside the US. The link is to the season 5 episode 10 of Highlander, in which Duncan MacLeod and a beautiful female Immortal, along with a German who has an eye-patch but doesn't look all that much like Tom Cruise, attempt to blow up Adolf Hitler.

The company he keeps....

2008-12-31T13:21:00.002-07:00

So.

I'm watching the second season of Highlander, an episode creatively titled "Warmonger", and the reporter who is trying to get the story of an evil immortal who has played the power behind the throne, tosses off this explanation of why she is taking the opportunity to interview this very dangerous man: "Stalin is dead. Mao is dead. And Saddam Hussein hasn't been giving interviews lately."

That's from memory so I'm sure it's not exact, but close enough.

I just thought it was interesting that in 1994-ish Saddam Hussein rated an offhand popular cultural reference that paired him, as the then living member, of a very elite company.

George Bush decides to do something about it ten years later and suddenly Saddam is just another guy, no worse than anyone else.

Highlander, Duncan MacLeod

2008-12-31T00:00:00.002-07:00

I am really enjoying watching the Highlander TV series on hulu.com.

Not that there isn't an occasional annoying episode but... don't care.

The best, of course, is when MacLeod does the flashbacks that involve barbarian outfits. *sigh*

What was Roger Ebert smoking?

2008-12-25T18:43:00.002-07:00

I love The Mummy. I love Jet Li. I was sorry to miss The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor when it was in the theater. So I bought it on DVD.

On the front it says, "The BEST in the SERIES!" - Roger Ebert.

Cool beans, says I.

But now I have to ask, what was the man smoking?

It was horrible!

Firstly, and I apologize to Maria Bello, but Evie was badly cast, badly written, and pathetically directed. Gone, gone, gone was the combination of vulnerability and stubbornness that made Evie so wonderful. The only thing Evie did well in this movie was the fight scenes.

The Evie who gloriously proclaimed "I am a librarian!" was replaced by a woman who wrote sexy stories about their mummy adventures and wanted to write another one to read to adoring fans. It was so wrong. Evie was into serious inquiry. She'd be writing esoteric, fabulously intricate, scholarly works while not fitting into society much better than her husband Rick. She might have written the romance, but she'd be shy and embarrassed about it. (One wonders, did Rachel Weisz read the script and bail?)

Now, this wrongness about Evie was likely made worse by the fact that some bright-bulb decided that the "human interest" element and arc was to be Rick's estrangement from his son, Alexander. Oh, please! Rick's character is simply not, at all, the sort of aloof male that can't unbend around children. Let Alexander attempt to make his own name as any young man with a famous father might do, no matter how close their relationship, but please let us not take out this old saw and substitute it for plot!

Now, the action plot wasn't bad. It had it's moments but all in all it was a fun action plot.

What made the movie hard to watch was how any glimmer of human interaction was destroyed by the dialog. I can think of only a handful of moments that were "real"... the looks between the witch and general... Alexander wanting to go back after Chinese members of his archaeology crew that had been killed... Alexander's first eye contact with Lin (but nothing after that)... the smile of understanding after the witch asked her daughter to sacrifice her immortality... the thoughts that crossed the witch's face when she saw a way to recover the special dagger...

And I am deliberately excluding the horrible father-son touchy-feelie moment. (Although Brenden Fraser shirtless is hard to beat.)

Too much of the dialog was artificial bob-talk. "As you know Bob, or as you can't possibly know, but in any case we must inform the audience... I have the dagger which is the only possible way to kill the Emperor." The dialog over personal matters seemed just as contrived.

While double checking character names and spellings I came across this review that suggests it would have been better to have had Evie die than to replace her with a different actor. I concur. It would also have given father and son a personal story more compelling than trying to pass Rick O'Connell off as an uninvolved father. It *also* would have resonated tremendously with the witch's thousands of years of mourning her dead lover and her daughter's reluctance to let herself love Alexander because she'd have to watch him die and couldn't bear it.

Web-publishing and Gate Keepers

2008-12-18T13:43:00.003-07:00

As the result of a discussion about web-publishing and the fact that few people have time to read what they aren't sure they'll enjoy, I've been thinking about what sort of web-publishing would actually work.

Anyone can put a novel or story on a web-page. We might think that this will result in that novel finding an audience, but I don't think there is any reason to think anyone will find it at all. The web actually multiplies the problem of sorting through and finding that novel that is sure to satisfy.

In the end I think that we will be able to do without a great deal of what traditional publishing relies on, even paper and ink, but I don't think we'll be able to do without the Gate Keepers.

I tend to be a dreamer without follow through, and to be honest this isn't an idea without a pretty steep up-front price tag, but these are some of the elements I'm thinking might really work if given a chance:

-First, assume for kicks and giggles that I know a good story when I read it. There has to be an editor or editorial staff to make sure anything offered on the site reaches a professional (or nearly so) quality standard.

-Second, offer complete novels and stories for free. Make it possible to download them into Kindles, PDA's, computers, etc,. Sell sidebar advertisement and signed, POD, high quality paper copies. Only consider pay-to-read subscriptions or pre-releases for popular authors later on.

-Third, get excellent "cover" art and illustrations. Pictures sell books. Consider a "fan art" function and index where amateur illustrations can be posted. Art costs money, so quality might be something to look to improve as time goes on, but essentially, art is necessary for browsing... both art and blurbs. This is the best way to let readers know if they might be interested in the novel or story.

-Fourth, have an intuitive and informative search function that keys to reader (and editor) ratings and key-words and feed-back functions. An "other people who liked this story also liked..." function is necessary.

-Fifth, host live author chats, contests and door prizes.

Expensive to set up!

But could it pay for itself and make money for editor and authors?

I think it could with enough traffic to generate ad revenue.

It also relies on people who find a novel they really like wanting it bound nicely so they can keep it, so that they are motivated to pay for a POD copy of something they read in electronic form. I'm assuming that I'm not the only one who does this. I'm assuming that many people will do this and continue to do this.

While I believe very much in the value of giving things away for free, I also believe that writers and artists deserve to be paid for their labor. Copyright is important. There may come a time when a person can walk into Kinkos and print any book from a copy on their thumb drive... people will do that without paying for the right to do so unless it is easy to direct payment to the author. And it ought to be. Walk-in book binding may be standard in the future and a simple method of coding copyright information and publisher's fees into the file means that book-binders can add that fee and pass it on to the rightful parties. Until then, the nice copy with the glossy cover and even the author's signature can be purchased from the pubisher's web-site.

I'm very much anti-piracy, but lets be clear... a downloaded novel (or song) that is never read (or listened to) is not stolen. In a sense it doesn't even exist. Too much worry that someone will get something for free results in legitimate customers who are annoyed.

So, how did that Charlie Stross thing work out?

2008-11-08T23:21:00.003-07:00

Pleading the fifth... or something like that.

I've had the worst time getting any writing done at all. I'm making forward progress though.

I'm still really excited about this story.

My son is ahead of my on word count. :-)

Got to write like Charlie Stross today...

2008-11-05T10:01:00.001-07:00

Because I am sooooo behind.

Well, I better get to it!

"His name is Lark, he sees in the dark."

2008-11-03T10:43:00.001-07:00

August started to rise but a small hand pulled him down again. "Why are your eyes like that?"

He glanced up at Lady Kirikyan who simply raised one arched brow. What harm in answering, then?

"I had my eyes replaced. My new ones can see in the dark." They could also see infrared and in wavelengths beyond the visual. "They're supposed to look natural so that people aren't made nervous by them."

Lark wrinkled his nose and peered very closely at one eye and then the other. "They look silvery," he announced. "They don't make me nervous. Seeing in the dark is fun."

"He's got a pair of toy goggles," his mother explained. "Time to let the Enforcer go back to work, Lark."

Attention Deficit Disorder

2008-11-02T18:56:00.003-07:00

Ava threw herself behind the rotted dumpster, pressed her back up against the slimy prefab extruded surface and tried to suck air into her lungs. She couldn't get enough oxygen, the pounding of her heart filled the spaces that were supposed to bring in air. It throbbed in her neck, her wrists, her gut. It was all she could hear.

It fought in her brain with the need to run farther, to get away.

Or hide.

She reached up to wipe a drip that was making it's way down her chin but her sleeve was worse than her face, she glanced down at her arm and a sob pushed its way past her beating heart.

She was soaked, not with blood, but with everything. Everything that had been her guardian and teacher, everything that had been Maklun Burr. His skin, his flesh, his bones. His brain... she thought his brain had gone the other direction.

Yet somehow it was almost easier to look at what was, now, to focus on it, the bit of cloth stuck in the goo, the part that was a fragment of bone, forcing the details to push out the larger picture burned into her retinas, the glowing muzzle of a shoulder cannon and flash of fire, a sound so loud it approached silence, and the impact, body heat and moisture, as she stood next to her guardian in the main room of their apartment facing Jennat. A woman she'd known her whole life.

Known and trusted.

That she had run at all rather than freeze in confusion and terror was because of something Jennat had once said. It's human nature to freeze. Condition yourself to act in that moment, to attack or to flee. These bits of wisdom would be delivered while her guardian's attention was elsewhere. Jennat was someone that he'd tolerated only poorly.

And now he was dead.

She'd killed him. The shot had ripped through him such that no doctor or regrowth chamber could ever restore his body or mind.

Yeah, I'm supposed to be doing NaNoWriMo... No this isn't my NaNo story for this year... No I didn't write this today, but I found it in my stuff... it goes on for about 10 pages and I'm thinking... no... THIS is what I'm supposed to be working on.

One freaking month... all I have to do is keep my mind focused on one project for ONE month.

The other thing is what needs to be written... and only then I get go back to Ava and how she saves her world and unbalances the universe.

Countdown

2008-10-31T22:40:00.002-06:00

It's an hour or so until midnight and I wonder if I should stay up and write... following the rules of course! Got to wait until Nov. 1.

I had a wee bit too much caffeine today so I may be up if I want to be or not.

I need to get my stuff organized, open a new file to start fresh, and that's about it.

The project seems to want to be multi-book, though I will definitely need each to be complete in itself including the first one. I really hate books that don't have a satisfying ending and then you're supposed to wait a year or more for the next one! Ugh! Yuck!

The villain for the first part had been eluding me and I realized today who it probably needs to be. The problem now is that I know that these people are not the ultimate villain at all, but will become the "good guys" later on. So how do I keep that fresh and not let on that they aren't bad? I mean, they *are* bad by a whole lot of standards... but what I know happens later might color my description of what happens before.

It's like reading a series out of order... or reading a book for the first time as opposed to reading it over again, when the ending is known. That first fresh exposure has a certain purity and value, a certain experience of it that you only get once. Now I'm realizing that I have to put that in there, somehow, for *other* people... because it will never happen for me.

NaNoWriMo starts on Saturday

2008-10-30T13:24:00.002-06:00

And I'm going to do it again. :-)

Last year I went with the "give yourself permission to write total crap" theory of circumventing the internal editor. It worked like a dream until I got to 20K words (the month long goal is 50K), looked at the story I had and thought, "Hey, this isn't half bad."

I didn't write another word.

This time I have a plan and most of a novel length plot, including the end. I expect it to be a first draft, but decent, and intend to finish and *market* this book. Sure, it will be my first ever time getting to the end of even a first draft of a novel, but that's what the participation in NaNo is about.

The average novel in science fiction is generally between 80 and 100K words, so 50K isn't very long, really. If I have to I'll write summaries of what happens with the intent of going back and fleshing it out later.

I'm really excited about this story. I'm shooting for a planet hopping shoot'em-up, with super spy-assassins and cybernetic (sort of) police investigators (sort of), with just a slight noir feel to it. Just a little bit Blade Runner. It even ended up having android (sort of) sex dolls. It's got evil scientists splattered on walls, a semi-sane telepath, monogamy inducing gene-splices, and puppies.

Woo HOoo!!

Kobold Army - and a few goblins

2008-10-22T16:28:00.004-06:00

I had the worst time with the auto-focus trying to take these pictures. They're in scale to the D&D miniatures we use... about an inch tall. I made the kobolds for my son. The blue goblins were a gift for my game DM. If I make any more I'll put a smidge of orange in the blue to dull it. I think the scraps of salvaged chain mail came out fabulous.

Prairie Rattler

2008-10-14T11:14:00.002-06:00

At least... I think that's what kind it was. We found this right under my daughter's window next to the house. At first glance I thought it was a gopher snake... at second glance I knew better. It was obviously a rattle snake.

It didn't rattle, though, until after I'd got it all the way into a bucket. Where was the warning rattle? That was more nervous making than anything. Would a young snake like this rattle before striking?

The picture was taken after we released it in the park.

It's SNOWING

2008-10-14T11:08:00.003-06:00

On DVD - Jason Statham

2008-10-10T13:35:00.004-06:00

(What is it about bald men?)

In the Name of the King

Bad and good, in odd ways, I think.

Some good acting some bad, some good cinematic choices, some dire... my husband and I both cracked up toward the end when "Farmer" and the others who were going to sneak into the evil fortress walked through one grand landscape after another, after another, after another... but while I don't think anyone would argue it was a *good* movie, there were elements of the plot that were refreshing to see.

Not everyone we expected to die, did. Some of the explaining about why to fight, and the King explaining that he was very like a farmer... that was very nice. The various people not waiting around helplessly, even when helpless, that was nice, too. It suffered from trying to get too many sub-plots in, from trying to make too many of the secondary characters have their own stories and character growth.

But mostly it suffered from the evil magus's Larry the Lounge Lizard hair.

That hair had me mesmerized... every scene with the evil guy instead of feeling dread I felt fascination. I don't think I heard a single evil monologue I was just, wow, look at that hair! Who was his hairdresser? Where did he get his "product?" Couldn't they find the guy a wig?

Sort of destroyed the flow, that did.

Update: (no really!)
The description on Amazon says that the American version was shortened by 30 minutes. When we were watching I told my husband that they clearly had cut stuff, *lots* of stuff.

What does Lawful Evil look like?

2008-05-21T21:49:00.002-06:00

I'm rather new to good old D&D and new to the classic classifications of good/neutral/evil and lawful/neutral/chaotic and I've been impressed from day one. "That makes so much sense!" Because I've always separated in my mind, morality from legality. This may be because of my Christian upbringing and admonitions to be apart from the world as well as out and out statements that not every thing permissible is profitable. Something legal, either in the civil code *or* Christian morality, may still be wrong. The passages about causing your brother to stumble because you've done something you're *allowed* to do (eat meat sacrificed to idols is the example) are probably why I do not conceptually equate legality with right and never have.

So... long story... I was visiting with a nice lady the other day... an interesting lady... it was an enjoyable conversation. But you know what? I think she's lawful evil. I will socialize with her but I'll keep it light. I don't want any sort of entanglement with her at all. Because she doesn't seem to tell the difference between what is legal or what a court will rule, and what is compassionate or *right*. I agree she's not a criminal and never would be... that's where the "lawful" part comes into it. She will *always* follow the law and believes she is a good law abiding person.

Which would be fine if abiding with the law made you good.

garden under construction

2008-04-13T17:06:00.003-06:00

Sailors of the USS Merrill

2008-04-12T01:21:00.005-06:00

Aboard the USS Merrill, June 1991, taking part in Operation Fiery Vigil.

Buffalo

2008-04-11T16:42:00.002-06:00

Mountains

2008-04-11T16:22:00.002-06:00

A Second Hand Conjecture

2008-04-02T18:32:00.002-06:00

Just a reminder that I'm blogging at A Second Hand Conjecture.

Jackie Chan! Jet Li!

2008-02-17T23:34:00.001-07:00

Oh, Rapturous Joy!

Fixed link?

Freedom can't exist without trusting the untrustworthy

2008-02-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

This is an extension of the commentary from this post from MichaelW.

Have you heard the truism that a person is smart, but people are dumb?

On the one hand it's profoundly true. On the other hand we fail to understand that the opposite is also profoundly true. A person is dumb, but people are smart.

Dumb people, making sub-optimal individual decisions, somehow manage to combine in aggregate into communities that most often are remarkably robust and remarkably effective.

It works with a market, where individuals make poor decisions about what to produce and what to buy. Somehow, with all those individual mistakes the result is highly effective and highly responsive. Compare that flawed mish-mash of poor decisions to what happens when there is directed organization and decision making, usually by experts, and the unwashed masses directing their own lives come out on top. Waaaay on top.

It would also work in education, given a chance.

Do I trust my fundie neighbor to do the best possible job teaching her children? Do I trust the secular unschooler down the street? Do I trust the Muslim who recently immigrated and would rather not have his child in public school? Do I trust the Amish who don't (I'm told) educate past 8th grade? Do I trust the polyamorist wiccan coven who wants to start a day school?

Not only no, but hell no.

But do I trust them in aggregate? Do I trust the robust nature of the way all of our various choices work together to optimize the end result? Do I trust the flexibility and diversity of knowledge and ideas to mesh into a whole that is by far the most desirable and effective totality of education to advance our country and perhaps our world into an unknowable future?

Yes, I do.

I trust people.

Maybe we're turning into Victorians

2008-02-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

Or: What I Learned About the World from Reading Historical Romances.

I learned that sometimes people get *more* uptight over time rather than less.

Victorians, according to custom and any number of novels, were concerned with propriety above all. Certain things were not spoken of and certainly the rougher aspects of life were hidden from young ladies. They were prudes.

Read enough novels and eventually a consumer of these delightful escapes will come across one that isn’t Victorian at all, but set in the Georgian era or earlier, or at the very least has a foul mouthed old grandmother who insists on wearing her wig and powder and scandalizing her adult children with accounts of her wild youth.

What brought this to mind (in a rather random fashion, which is typical for my brain) was this post of mine and what Joshua said about History.

Deeply partisan divide using fear is nothing new… hell, we could take a page from the 19th century if we want to feel better about how bad it really isn’t—

And it got me thinking of all the ways we seem to imagine that things are so very bad when, in fact, they are so very very much better than they’ve ever been. Race relations, economic opportunity, acceptance of diversity and lifestyle that really is unheard of before now, yet we’re supposed to be up in arms about the assault on this or that thing… on freedom and decency.

And I wondered… maybe it’s not just that we’re unaware of History. Maybe it’s that we’ve become prudes. Maybe it’s that our ideas of what *should* be are so constrained and so utterly… straight-laced… that any small violation seems like a slide into disaster.

We’ve never *seen* such negative campaigning. Or such division in politics. Or abuse of our privacy. Or fear of minorities. Or rushes to war. Or domestic poverty and joblessness.

Really?

I think we’re turning into Victorians who faint over the too direct glance of a young lady toward a man, while pretending we don’t hear dear Grandmother, with her quizzing glass and powder, expound on Prinny’s well known appetites.

WIP - pt 4

2008-02-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here.

Hey, that's me!

2008-01-22T19:05:00.001-07:00

Babies!!

2008-01-22T12:27:00.001-07:00

Attempting prescience, 2008

2008-01-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

ASHC

Can Mitt win against Obama?

The thing is… just about any of them could maybe win against Hillary. Or lose against Hillary. But winning against Obama is more problematic. People *like* Obama.

And is Mitt really that much better than Obama? Would it *matter* who won?

Giuliani or Thompson, as different as they are, could probably win against Obama. Huckabee? Not so much. Not because he’s a former pastor but because he’d be running against Obama’s strong points. Personality and likableness. Giuliani or Thompson would be running against Obama’s weakness, which is his lack of experience and lack of grown-up solutions to real world problems. Talk policy and Rudy or Fred can get into details and application (like them or not) and Obama really *can’t*.

McCain? Maybe he could pull the center away from Obama. Maybe he’d be the best to win against Hillary. Or maybe not.

Every little internet quiz I take comes up Mitt. But I’ll say this. I try to *not* pay attention and… well, it works for Mitt. He’s easier to not pay attention to than any other candidate still running on either side.

I think he’d be easiest to ignore on election day as well.

Check out my new Group Blog gig!

2008-01-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

I've been invited, and accepted the invitation, to blog at A Second Hand Conjecture.

I'll probably post copies to this blog of anything I post there, but you should go check out the other authors at ASHC.

A political education

2008-01-20T16:25:00.001-07:00

“Your sister thinks Huckabee is great.”

“Mom,” I told the phone, exasperated, “He’s not even Republican!”

My first participation in politics was a proudly worn “I (heart) DRNBGR” button that some son-of-a-Democrat defaced at a high school speech competition. (What gave him the right to wreck my property?) I went with my Mom as an alternate delegate to our local Republican party convention when I was 17. Later that fall I volunteered to work phones to get the vote out.

But even then I recognized that I got my party affiliation from my parents. I recognized that I didn’t know enough to decide between parties. And I couldn’t get answers to simple questions such as, “What’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans?”

The fact that there wasn’t an answer to that question was disturbing to my teenaged understanding of the world. There had to be a difference. So why was it so hard to get an answer to that question?

Even with the harsh rhetoric and hot emotion in politics today that question doesn’t have a distinct or objective answer. Both parties are Statist. Both are tax and spend. Both function on earmarks and pork. Neither doubt the role of government as a social safety net. Democrats are more rush ahead to do good and make a difference in the world. Republicans are more conservative… which simply means that they rush ahead in the same direction slightly slower, getting to the international interventionist party when the liberals are done with that and ready to go home.

When I was in high school no one thought to talk about other political ideas, (with the exception of communism which was still the essential evil in those early Reagan years.) No one mentioned Objectivism or Libertarianism. The idea of third parties never entered in to it. Not even the Green party. I don’t know if the Constitution party existed in the early 1980’s. What other third parties are out there today?

Whenever I suggest that the various efforts to educate young people about politics, in school or on Nickelodeon or wherever, should focus on those myriad third parties as much as the two big ones, or at the very least Libertarians (who sometimes get a few percentages in national elections), most often the response is, “Why? They can’t win.”

The “why” is because viewing government through the conservative-liberal axis of political thought is deceptive and inadequate. It can hardly be called an axis. It’s more like a continuum.

The “why” is because it’s not about who can “win”, it’s about education. It’s about exposing young people to opposing ideas about government and its purpose. It’s about having an informed electorate.

What we’ve got is government run and funded schools teaching government (can you say, “conflict of interest,” I knew you could,) MTV and Linda Ellerby.

WIP, pt 3

2008-01-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

Posted here:

"People?"

"Maybe we're in denial, too." Jesse smiled and ran a hand through his hair. "On the way back, though, we decided that "people" was the best word to use."

Angela thought about it. "I think you're right."

People. She could deal with people, no problem.

Illegal Beings

2008-01-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

_Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law_ is a book by Kerry Lynn Macintosh. It arrived in the mail today. My daughter is doing a major presentation at school on the issue of cloning and the library didn't have this book available so I bought it since the premise is explicitly that human reproductive cloning should be legal.

I'm probably the only person in the country who believes that the therapeutic cloning of human embryos should be illegal while it should be legal to do reproductive cloning.

It seems like most people are convinced any cloning of humans should be illegal, or else that only therapeutic cloning should be legal, and some few that think both therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning should both be legal.

I haven't started to read the book yet. The title, however, is fascinating to me.

To explain why I should explain that my experience in bio-ethics is primarily based on reading science fiction. Yes, there is a good amount of fundamental Christian upbringing involved in forming my views but my conclusion is essentially, well, what I said... I'm probably the only person in the country who sees no moral reason to limit reproductive cloning and every reason to view therapeutic cloning as, at best, problematic, and worst, outright immoral.

What I have learned from science fiction, as the meta-discussion of human cloning has evolved over a couple of generations from speculation about monsters to non-human status for clones to a present consensus that a clone is a person, is that when it all goes bad it is invariably because viable clumps of human DNA are not given human status.

The discussion of human cloning did not begin with Dolly. It had been going on for decades upon decades. People will point to Frankenstein, who wasn't a clone at all, of course. But science fiction quickly picked up the idea of making copies of people. The copies often had superhuman abilities, or else were zombies. (Heck, dopplegangers and changelings existed in folklore for centuries, now that I think of it.) They shared memories or were telepathic or were simply evil. By the time Heinlein was writing about clones or genetically engineered humans he speculated that they were essentially human but had been legislated into non-personhood. Not people and not citizens. His book _Friday_ was largely an indictment on a culture that viewed these people as Illegal Beings.

A common trait with clones in science fiction was that they were grown in vats to adult size. I think George Lucas went with that classic scenario. But before Dolly, well before Dolly, science fiction authors considered the possibility and what we knew was true about biology. Cherryh designed elaborate systems for producing adult sized people who could actually function, though with severe limitations. It was obvious that an adult grown in a vat would not develop properly.

To make a clone, you would need a womb. And what you'd get out of it was a baby. And that baby would not be like the original.

_Cyteen_ by Cherryh was published in 1988.

_Ethan of Athos_ by Bujold in 1986.

Lois Bujold imagined artificial wombs but clearly saw that raising babies was still the choke point. The labor was the same for any infant and technology would never solve that problem.

She also clearly saw that a human being was a human being. Her enlightened societies gave full human status to any person, cloned or even put together from genetic parts and not looking human at all. Where the product of a lab was property, so were other people. Where clones were grown for parts, a cess-pool of organized crime reigned. And she's not the only author to make those connections. The ethical issue is how should a human be treated. The societies that find a way to give some humans a different legal status than other humans do it across the board.

Biologically a clone is a baby. It doesn't matter at all how you get here. You are an individual human being. A clone is created by a human act just like any other human baby.

Which, frankly, may be why I've read or heard opinions such as "therapeutic cloning of embryos is okay but we shouldn't accept reproductive cloning." It may be that people realize at some level that if we accept that a clone is a real person, it's not so easy anymore to produce a bunch of cloned embryos and destroy them.

(Most therapeutic cloning does not depend on creating a viable embryo. Tissue cloning or even organ cloning (such as recent mouse breasts or rat hearts) uses adult cells and does not depend on creating a viable embryo.)

Best comment....

2008-01-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

"Politics is less hollywood for ugly people than it is high school for middle-aged narcissists."

By Pogo in response to the video in this post by Ann Althouse.

Uncharted territory...

2008-01-14T00:59:00.001-07:00

I've spent the last week not writing. I think I've figured out the main problem. (There were non-main problems such as lack of sleep and brain death, but that's normal stuff.) I had gone ahead with the action (such as it is) and not taken the time, now that the single alien had turned out to have four other survivors in her company, of taking the time to name them. The convoluted referring to individuals with descriptions was... prohibitive. It's just that things happened before they had a chance to point at things and repeat names until everyone figured out who everyone was... but too bad. I went back and *made* them have time.

So I added stuff to scenes or between scenes and messed up continuity. I'll have to do an editing pass eventually. But I think I still need to do a... plumping... pass of what I added and of the last couple of scenes before going forward again.

I still need to work on developing conflict, however. Now that I've introduced alien POV scenes it might be good to think of parallel conflicts on both sides, human and alien, rather than primarily conflict between them, though it would need to be that both sides need to find a satisfactory resolution or it all goes down the crapper. Some decent tension should arise from the fact that, even if they don't know what troubles the other side is having, everyone is essentially helpless if the conflicts they aren't aware of go south. The unseen danger idea.

Or something.

Miss America - Reality

2008-01-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

Leaving aside the fact that "Miss America - Reality" is an Oxymoron...

I wanted to watch even though I don't care for reality TV because Miss Utah has been mentioned on the milblogs. So I recorded... I think it was the second episode... and watched it last night. I don't know how she does it at all, frankly. The need to tell the "advisers" they were full of it would overwhelm me.

Miss Utah got "bottom three" because she didn't treat the advice she was given the episode before to glam it up with proper gravitas.

Miss Alaska got "bottom three" because she'd made Indian war... ah... noises when they cut 12 inches off her hair. Oh the horror! Only they didn't tell her that. They just said that she wasn't considerate enough of others. I wonder if it ever occurred to the "advisers" that she may very well *be* Native American. I don't know she's not. Do they know that she's not?

One of those who got "top three", I can't remember who, got chewed out for refusing a make-over when she was specifically told she had a choice. They gave her tops anyway (and gave the other "bottom" to a girl who said she didn't like how she looked without makeup and her hair done) but not before telling her just how *badly* she'd hurt their feelings.

In any case. One episode made it pretty clear just who this "reality" television show is about. It's all about the advisers and their own feelings of importance.

"I remember when cars ran on gasoline."

2008-01-09T09:11:00.001-07:00

My daughter at breakfast this morning imagining what she'd someday tell her grandkids.

I have a complete short story up

2008-01-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

... in Baen's Universe Slush.

For those who know what that is and how to find it. (If you don't and you want to very badly, ask.)

The title is "Wurm."

Part 2 is up

2008-01-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

The next installment of the work in progress.

civilian casualties...legitimate reason to oppose the war.

2008-01-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

How short our memories… Nov 15, 2001… two months after 9-11.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright

Directly connecting 9-11 to Iraq… (remember that next time “the right” is accused of falsely doing so)

“The grim question of how many people have died in Iraq has sparked heated debate over the years. The controversy dates from 1995, when researchers with a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study in Iraq wrote to The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, asserting that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children.”

This, before the war… 567,000 children killed by the United States.

It’s bogus and for a variety of reasons. It’s also the main reason for Food for Oil which was immediately diverted to palaces and bank accounts by those who claimed all those children were dying.

Children died of starvation and children died for lack of weapons grade chlorine to purify their water.

Oil wealth meant that regional leaders did not have to take care of the people in their countries.

It really is no more complicated than that.

And 567,000 children… why don’t we remember those charges? Why are the years 1991 to 2000 a complete black-hole?

That number got the press. Later revisions downward didn’t.

“Sanctions opponents place the blame for Iraq’s increased deaths squarely on the United States and the continuing UN sanctions. Certainly the United States bears primary responsibility for the war and unrelenting sanctions.”

But we should have let sanctions work. Remember that. Sanctions were better.

Pointless, but better.

As we know, sanctions put no pressure on Saddam. Sanctions only work if people have a way to hold their government responsible. In an oil financed dictatorship this can not happen. And Saddam got around even direct personal financial impact by selling the children’s deaths to the world and getting Food for Oil out of us bleeding hearts.

War is horrible, but it’s far from the worst possible thing. Not-war is not enough to claim moral righteousness.

Failure to go to war kills people, too.

Resident Evil, on the other hand...

2008-01-05T21:22:00.001-07:00

...ROCKED.

WAR - Jet Li and Jason Statham

2008-01-05T20:23:00.001-07:00

How much do I wish this movie didn't suck, let me count the ways....

This movie was bad. Not just bad but I'm talking *major* suckage.

I can't blame Li. I can't blame Statham. I love them both.

It was even a good concept, which I will now SPOIL because it makes no difference at all because the movie sucked so badly.

The neat concept is that a hitman is sent after an FBI agent and his family. The hit man kills the wife and child before making sure that the FBI agent is dead. The FBI agent kills the hitman (who was a notorious assassin of the FBI agent's knowledge) and takes the hitman's identity in order to destroy the person who ordered the hit. (Leaving the hitman's body to be mistaken for his own, after he burns the house down.)

But we don't know that.

The dead FBI agent's partner is distraught and goes on a rampage to find the person he knows carried out the hit. Years later his life is rather bleak, his wife left him, and he... finds a clue.

The hitman is in town. The Yakuza and Triads are at the boiling point. There is lots of violence, gun battles and assassinations. The FBI, for reasons incomprehensible, respond to this by shooting *everyone*.

At this point I'm groaning, my husband is disgusted, and I'm saying things like "It wasn't made in the US." My husband is rolling his eyes at me like that was random. I'm like, "No, that's why. It's a foreign movie."

You see, there is one thing in all those rogue cop shows and movies that *must* be there. And that is that the Dirty Harry or whatever character is always in trouble with the boss. *Always*. He's always about to be fired. Or *is* fired. IF the plan was to portray the FBI agent played by Statham as someone who has stepped over the line, they missed putting the line in the movie. It was not at all clear that he was *supposed* to be acting out because of overwhelming guilt and a need for vengeance. We didn't find that out until the very very end and even then it was not apparent. When something isn't even apparent in hindsight in a movie, we've got issues.

Jet Li is the "dead" FBI agent who has gotten plastic surgery in order to impersonate the hitman who was known for changing his appearance. He's orchestrating the war between the Triads and Yakuza, killing them off and getting them to kill each other for ONE thing. He is doing this to that the Yakuza godfather will travel to the United States where he will be accessible and killable because he is the person who ordered the hit and who specifically included "wife and child" in that order.

So, the living FBI agent wants vengeance for his friend. The "dead" FBI agent wants vengeance for his wife and child. Statham's character believes that the assassin he's chasing is to blame but the assassin is actually his friend. (It *is* a really great concept, no?) They meet. They part. No one the wiser.

Now, finally Li's character is alone with the Yakuza lord and just before killing him, the head Yakuza says, "It was Crawford. It was Crawford." Wow, that came out of left field. So Li's character thinks of the telling moments he never noticed before that reinforce the truth that it was his very own friend who arranged to have him killed. I'm thinking, "Don't let someone you know demands the murder of children play with your mind!" Still, thinking, that what will happen is that he choses to trust his old partner.

No.

It was really Crawford. He really set up the family. He says, "I thought they'd just rough you up a little." (Where's a desk, I need to slam my head into it repeatedly.) We're supposed to think, "Oh, that's why he was so out of control" or not, who knows? And then an FBI sniper gets Li's character in his sights and Crawford is redeemed by jumping in front of his old partner and saving his life. But his old partner shoots him anyway.

And everyone lives happily, or not, ever after.

Li drives off in a absolutely fabulous car to continue his life as an assassin and I'm like.... Wow, it's not just a foreign movie, it's a pilot for a foreign television series. (Or movie series... maybe Rogue is supposed to be the Asian Bond or something.)

There were other annoyances. They hardly rate.

This could have been a good movie with just a couple of very fundamental changes. We should have known that Crawford was bought from the very beginning. Had we known that he was bought and that his actions were an attempt to deal with guilt and make up for what he felt personally responsible for the movie itself would have been about his redemption. The gratuitous shooting of everyone by the FBI would still need to be scaled back, but at least it would have been clear that Crawford *was* over the edge and why.

I wanted this movie to be good.

New words...

2008-01-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

1238 tonight.

Plus I backed up my stuff off my computer.

And I have passed the point of having 100 manuscript pages of a single project. This is more than I've ever done on one thing before. Whoo Hoo!

Also, if anyone should happen by and anyone should happen to go to the Livejournal page and read the first scene... even if it sucks and you don't want to say so, post a comment there or here to let me know you looked. (Preferably there, so I can find out if the comments go to my e-mail.)

Thanks. :)

Not working...

2008-01-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Essentially, I've sat in front of my computer all day intending to write and have been doing everything but writing. What a waste.

Perhaps what I ought to do is anything else all day and *plan* on starting to write at 9pm or so.

This is so stupid.

New words

2008-01-02T00:19:00.000-07:00

829

But not a whole scene, maybe less than half of one. It's the first one from my alien's POV that I've done.

I think it went all right.

For anyone who wants to see what I'm working on now

2008-01-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

It's not the solution I was hoping for but I put the first scene of my WIP up on a livejournal page.

Comments welcome. It's probably the slowest beginning I've done but I tend to rush things. My theory is that I do this because writing is so very much slower than reading.

So... read here if you want to.

I might adjust permissions later.

Happy New Year!

2007-12-31T22:53:00.000-07:00

Best wishes for you and yours.

Trying to decide now if I should log into EQ or bring in the new year writing. :-)

New Words!

2007-12-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

I started with 20,482 and now I have 21,913.

I'm not certain they are the *right* words, but they are *new* words.

Yay!

Why my husband and I don't date

2007-12-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

We always end up in the same place.

The BOOK STORE.

NOT a cheap date.

But this time I was good. I put most books back on the shelf and only ended up buying two hardcovers. They are both book two that I already have book one of in hardcover. (It's just *nice* you know, when books that go together in a group are all the same size.) It's hard, but I'm waiting on paperbacks from several of my favorite authors including Lois Bujold and Wen Spencer.

I got _A Betrayal in Winter_ by Daniel Abraham, and _Sister Time_ by John Ringo and Julie Cochrane.

Books one are _A Shadow in Summer_ and _Cally's War_.

Not new words...

2007-12-27T14:56:00.001-07:00

... different words.

Well, I suppose that's progress after a fashion but editing doesn't really get me any closer to done.

I need new words.

Speaking of new words, I typed that and went to pick up my notebook with the new words in it and couldn't find it. 20 minutes later, I have the notebook and my heart has started beating again. Egad.

Looking for advice and suggestions

2007-12-26T23:34:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my husband today about setting up a web-page. We've had a domain forever (though it's only got his stuff on it, atm) and I could put up some of what I've written there. Even the shortest story I've got is 4K words and a scene is usually about 2K (thinks... 10 pages is 2500...) or at least not less that 1K words. I don't think that posting to this blog would work.

What do I want to get out of it?

I really would like feedback. I'm a bit worried that I'd get a lot that wasn't worth much (either saying it's stupid or loving it) but I think I've done this enough that I feel confident I could deal with sorting comments. So I'd need a commenting system of some sort. So... free for all commenting or invitation only? Or send comments back to the blog?

And how annoyed would people be to get a part of something and not the whole, or not the end?

Because besides feedback, authors usually hope to use a web-site to build a readership so that they can eventually sell books. Annoying the potential audiences would be bad. Although, it may be that having expectations to meet will be a good thing for me. A very good thing.

There's a potential problem with having a whole novel on a web-site. But probably it would be enough to simply take it down if I manage to sell it. Otherwise it might be a good idea to have a public area with a few short stories and other stuff, and an invitation-only area for works-in-progress.

Now, the invitation-only area could be an automatic thing requiring registration, so long as it's every so very slightly not-public. It's not like hordes of people are going to flock to my web site. (If they do, I could make the invitations less-than-automatic.)

Anyhow... anyone who sees this...

Would registration be too much of a hassle?
What do you think is important to include on a web-site?
What should I avoid at all costs?

I think I want to try this and as much as it's for me, it's for you... whoever *you* are.

Mantids for Christmas

2007-12-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Christmas at our house is sort of low-key, mostly because we don't live anywhere near any family at all so there's no going to Grandma's or anything like that. Plus we haven't managed to go to church so we don't have the church stuff either.

So we're home, sort of hanging out. But it hasn't all been dull.

I should be looking on the internet for mail order fruit fly cultures because we did have something rather exciting happen. One of the mantis egg sacks hatched. It probably happened a few days ago and it looks like most of the babies died, probably just dried out, but some are alive and they are so incredibly tiny that feeding them will be a challenge.

I should try to get pictures but I'm not sure my camera is up to it.

And tonight...

2007-12-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

I read though what I have so far on a novel with the working title "Secret Keeper." Only 7k words and pretty rough. Worse, what I have already probably needs to be trashed and I need to simply start over. Better, I actually have an abundance of antagonists for this one. I figured out a couple of plot points that were holding me up and I do think that I could get all of the way through this.

Reading what I've got so far, though, I realize that it's quite different from what I thought I had. A few bits are good and creepy but they're probably going to have to go.

So I'm taking notes in a "note" file of thoughts about the plot or reasoning and I hope that when I look at them later they will still make sense.

Part of what was wrong with what I've got so far is that the character Zhenu simply decides to let the character Raun walk around free and this is after I establish that nothing frightens Zhenu more than someone with Raun's particular ability. It was just wrong to have her decide because she was *tired* that she wasn't going to worry about him killing her anymore. So I've got to go back, she has to tie him up and utterly refuse to let him go, and her treatment of him has got to so anger a third character, a child named Ava, that Ava attacks her with a knife and nearly kills her. Because Zhenu *has* to somehow decide to trust Raun, or at least not care anymore that he might kill her or kill Ava and getting knifed will be enough for her to wash her hands of them both and decide to save her own life. Then she can come back and (insert a fight with bounty hunters) start fresh but uneasy with them both and go from there.

So it's sort of paradoxical. I'm *ahead* on this story compared to the First Contact one, but I have to start over.

I sometimes consider that I really ought to work on one novel or story and not several but then I think of how useless it would be to bang my head on First Contact if I'm stuck on it. It's not switching that's tripping me up, I think, but not actually producing new words on *something* every day.

New words.

We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Is this progress?

2007-12-23T23:33:00.000-07:00

So last night I read though the 20k words I have on a "first contact" novel.

There are only a few things that I might want to expand on but for the most part I like it very much. What I've got there is essentially final draft and, dangit, it's *good*.

The only problem is that reading through doesn't get me any new *words*. I do have a couple of scenes for this story written out in a first draft long hand and I could revise and type them up but there is something very important that I don't have... an antagonist. The protagonists are the good guys, the military are the good guys, the aliens are the good guys.

I realize that the antagonist doesn't have to be a character. It could be the situation or some other element of conflict that is working against resolution.

Things need to get worse, much worse, so they can get better.

The theme so far (if that's the right word) is that the concepts of "good aliens" or "bad aliens" or else "peaceful" or "evil war-like conquerors" are naive. So I suppose I want a rather ambiguous ending in that respect. The main POV character's take on it all is that the aliens *must* be assumed to be hostile and also that the aliens *must* be assumed to be peaceful. Both. That one or the other are equally wrong and that only both together are true.

I'm not equipped to start a war, a la Ringo, but maybe I could almost start one then avert it. Still, the people dealing with the aliens *now* are pretty much doing everything right. Someone else, human or alien, needs to do something desperately *wrong*.

I just can't figure out what.

Some possibilities are that other aliens arrive to rescue those who crashed, or that the aliens have more than one nation that are at war and the wrong group shows up. I don't want to rely on cliches such as politicians being stupid or fearful and deciding to bomb something. Perhaps having the crashed ship allows humans to make a secret weapon and so the aliens can't accomplish their take-over and have to either disengage or negotiate and they weren't planning on having to negotiate anything. So I'd need overtly hostile aliens to show up. That might work. I don't want the crashed aliens to give away their secrets, though, on account they learned to love us. Ick!

Maybe I need to start sketching out scenes from various alien point of views and see what happens.

Well, this is blog thing is working like a charm, isn't it...

2007-12-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

... NOT.

Or maybe I just haven't found my stride or something.

But really, I write better in response to some other person's statement so it's more like a conversation. I post all the time, just not HERE. *sigh*

Anyhow, I got a new case for my computer for Christmas. Yay! The power supply was going out on my old one. Even with all the same old insides it's like I got a whole brand new computer.

The fans are quiet, too.

And although I haven't been writing, I have been working on plots and stories, thinking about them and taking notes a bit.

Perhaps I should go back to the idea of posting about my writing progress here. Granted, that requires that I *make* progress.

Well, like I said, the new fans are quiet so I think I'll bring up my word processor and leave the computer on and ready to go in the morning.

Wish me luck! (Or wish me perseverance, or something else actually useful. LOL.)