Quiet

My long "holiday" was, well, a working holiday. My life is full of Day Jobbe right now, and not a lot else.

More as it happens.

Avatar

Did not suck.

What a relief.

Woman, Domesticated

Oh, how I love The Onion...

"A valuable commodity with seemingly endless uses, the woman has played a crucial role throughout human history," noted historian Alan Helbling said. "Not only could she be trained to perform a variety of tasks, but once her spirit was broken and her energies reined in, she could be taught to come whenever she was called."

Blood & Women & Swords, OH YEAH

Why yes, I'm a sucker for women with swords... isn't everyone?

One of the big issues I have with a lot of ye olde Sword & Sorceress type stories is that the women hauling around the swords just aren't that scary. I can't explain this except to say that, you know, I'm a fan of the cheesy awful that is Conan, and... I'm looking for a heroine that can kick the shit out of him.

Best Served Cold's heroine, Monza, is that heroine.

This book was an easy sell with the cover, but not so much the first few pages. The first 11 or 12 pages are kinda dull, really. Insipid people, insipid conversations, completely generic fantasy lite setting. Seriously, the setting was making me yawn. But according to the cover copy, this was a pretty solid rampaging revenge story, so I stuck it out.

I was not disappointed.

By page, what, 36? you're going, "OH HOLY FUCK YO!" and Abercrombie gives you the big book opener you need to have to drive a revenge plot. You know, the thing that somebody does to you that's so terrible that it can drive the whole bloody book all the way through. And trust me, it's tough to justify the blood in this book. The big book opener goes a long way toward getting you there.

This book isn't for everybody. It's savagely brutal (I'm not making apologies for GW gore ever again). The people are decidedly unlikable. They're the types of people who would survive and thrive in a world at perpetual war, and that means they are NOT NICE. So if you're looking for nice people in bad situations, well. This isn't it.

But they're *interesting* people, and that's what kept me reading. The cast is classically well done (reminded me of when I read my first Dragonlance novel... in a GOOD way). Folks are always backbiting, backstabbing. There are constantly shifting alliances and folks trying to play people off other folks. Old wounds and past events come into play. They're wacky, driven, crazy folks, and I enjoyed watching them bicker (that said, there were some rather useless "fan fiction" scenes which added nothing but character squee. But not so many that I threw the book out. Just enough to roll my eyes).

I loved the main character, Monza, our sword-wielding heroine, primarily because she was not nice or honorable, and she was very, very scary. She's out for herself. There's no huge realization or change at the end. Just sort of a slow ebb and flow that made the ending satisfying but not syrupy. I loved, loved, loved the reversal between her and her initially optimistic sidekick. I found the fact that she's supposed to be very good looking rather annoying (I do wonder how truly model-looking anybody in this world would look, but then, attractiveness is relative, so who knows what her face really looks like out there?), but Abercrombie made up for this with a few very nice, telling details about what it's like to be a woman leading men (no easy comraderie with your men, who might take a pat on the back as come-on; always have to be the hard ass to keep from seeming too soft and having guys take advantage; always careful who you sleep with [if you sleep with anyone at all], etc.).

And that brings me to another plus for this novel. At one point, the team on board for the revenge plot has three women and three men. The balance shifts as the book goes on, but I was genuinely startled to realize that there was an entire scene central to the plot (a torture scene, no less!) which consisted entirely of female characters (our heroine, a mercenary, a poisoner, and a courtesan). Yes, it sucks that something like that is so surprising. But still neat when it happens. You just don't see it a lot in fantasy epics.

The book was plotted like a dream, and I keep paging back through it to look at what Abercrombie did with this plot. My biggest complaint, as noted, was the bland fantasy lite setting. Incredibly disappointing with a well-plotted story like this with such great characters, brutality - and have I mentioned the plotting?

So, if you're looking for new weird, this is not your cup of tea. But if you like strong female heroes, bloody battles, complex and twisted anti-heroes, and... if you just want a good, page-turning romp with cool but nasty folks, this is definitely the book for you.

Recommended, with aforementioned reservations.

Dance & Etc.

Back At It

Up at 5:30 this morning to add 20 min of pilates onto my 15 min morning free weights routine. *Damn* I am out of shape.

This thing with having a chronic illness is that you just notice more when you're lazy about taking care of yourself. During the last couple of weeks of sporadic workouts and weird food, I've been experiencing some mysterious aches and pains - especially in my core - and inflammation. There is likely also weight gain tied to this, as my clothes aren't feeling so hot on me, either. I just can't get away with letting things slide for a few weeks. I just feel it too much now.

Not that there's been complete fail, mind. I still bike to work 5 days a week, do my morning weight routine 5 days a week, and even during last week's laziness, I still worked out for 20 min on the elliptical twice that week. It's just that... well, it's not enough for somebody with a sendentary job and wonky immune system.

A couple of weeks of pilates and getting back on track with my after-work workouts on the elliptical should help. 5 days a week pilates, 4 days on the elliptical - in addition to weights and bike riding commute - should do the trick.

I've also been combating some hunger issues. I'd been getting wacky-hungry at work between 9-10am and vainly searching for food. Some of this is just stress eating, but it's stress eating triggered by mild hunger. I went ahead and added a little more protein to breakfast - two scrambled eggs w/spinach in the morning instead of just one egg - and that seems to have done the trick (an extra 70 calorie egg in the morning beats a 350 calorie english muffin with peanut butter at 10am).

As we head toward the holidays, I'm being more mindful of what I eat. One of the drawbacks to getting the pump is that it made me a lot less careful with what I ate - and my #s and my body are paying for that. It's time to stop. I'm a carb addict, which means it's incredibly hard to change my habits when I get used to indulging again. Too much "well, it's the holidays!" means shitty sugar numbers, shitty health, and shitty mood.

And you know, I'd like to stick around those extra 15 years.

I've Got a Lot of Holiday Cheer... But Here's Some Folks Who Could Use Some

There have been a lot of people hard-up for money this year. And without fail, I found that I could, in fact, afford to give to those really hard up. Not a lot: $10 here, $20 there ($50 in one case, but there was a kid involved!). It's going to continue being rough out there for a long while yet.

A couple months ago, the rug got pulled out from under me when our insurance company pulled a smash and grab and “accidently” revoked our health insurance for three and a half weeks. It was a rough time, and looking rougher as things wound on.

But UHC did eventually fix the issue, J. got a part-time job in addition to his full-time school, and my day job continues to pay for things like $90 a week in groceries and the roof over our heads. If things are a little cold and lean sometimes, it’s because we chose to rent a big old 1850s house that we knew came with a lot of excess utility bills, and I’ve got a lot of student loan debt clawing at me. The good news is that the reason it's clawing at me is because I *can actually afford to start paying on it* now that I paid off over $10,000 in credit card debt. Things are lean because I'm paying off old debt and correctly managing my money. Correctly managing one's money always feels lean to me. Growing up, I thought that being "poor" meant not getting everything you wanted. I have since actually tasted what poor is like, and understand that this is nowhere near that.

It’s been a good year. I’ve done some traveling back at the WA coast to visit family, had a fantastic Florida vacation with J, and continue to enjoy the day job. My biggest complaints right now are that we can’t afford to heat the house above 55 and I have to wait until I’ve saved the money to buy the digital camera I want (been working hard not to rack up that credit card debt again). I mean, c’mon, really? Boo hoo, life is rough because I don’t have a flat screen tv…?

Yeah.

I’m comfortable, just not comfortable enough to stop trying to hustle up writing jobs as they come in, because heating the house and actually saving more than $50 a month would really be nice. Not totally necessary, but nice.

Anyway. There were lots of folks who offered to help me out when the health insurance thing was looking scary. Here are some far more deserving folks for your hard earned dollars this holiday season (they are certainly getting some of mine, and as noted, mine have been a tad lean).


Clarion West
SF/F writing bootcamp. Changed my life. But it’s a bitch to dredge up the money for this. I got lucky, and solicited friends and family, who collectively paid my way to Clarion. Not everybody has that kind of support network to draw from. To be honest, I didn’t think I did either. I begged for money in desperation. I was incredibly lucky folks were so generous. Be one of those generous folks for another writer.


Planned Parenthood
Keep women’s reproductive services easy, convenient, safe, and confidential. Good luck getting that from a lot of women’s clinics these days. PP is constantly under siege, because they do some of the most incredible work. I’ve been a client since I’ve been having sex, and they’ve always been a literal godsend.


Kiva
This is actually a micro-loans site. I love this idea. Basically, you give small loan amounts of $25+ to entrepreneurs all over the world. Sometimes it takes as little as $100 for a woman to start her own small business in her home village/neighborhood/community/city. And it completely changes their lives. I’m partial toward giving to women entrepreneurs, of course. It’s traditionally harder for women to get the money and support together, and it’s a huge ego/status boost when you become the primary breadwinner. It also means you don’t have to put up with so much crap from men with money. Skip the lattes for a week, and give somebody the ability to support themselves.


And a particular individual
J. is a cancer survivor (two years cancer-free in May). We met a few months after he finished his chemo/radiation combo. I knew going in that there's a chance it can recur, just as he knew about my own chronic illness and those 15 extra years - on average - that I won't have. So this one hit a little close to home. If it hits home for you (or if you’re simply a good soul), please do help her out. Cancer and other long, lingering illnesses take incredible courage, tenacity, and huge amounts of money to surmount (as I know with my own chronic illness, particularly in that first year of recovery/adjustment after four days in the ICU). We all battle dragons, but whether or not we win or lose, there’s a lot of wreckage and rebuilding that needs to take place when all is said and done. $10 to assist in rebuilding lives sure beats downloading an album you don’t need from iTunes.

Paypal address is: johanna_mead AT yahoo.com

Thanks to all.

Quote of the Day

On Being a Mother and an Artist

70-80% of art students are women.

70-80% of art in galleries is by men.

Why?

What I'm Up To

Drowning in Day Jobbe work. This will be the state of things until the end of January or thereabouts. Hard push for the next 6 weeks.

I'm also working on cobbling back together a good workout routine. Regular workouts are great, buy my sugar numbers have suffered. Lots of lows this week as I work hard to recover my sugar from Thanksgiving excess. It's certainly "allowed" to relax my restraint for a day or two, but man, I pay for it later. I'm starting to think the occasional slice of apple pie and sedentary days just isn't worth the resulting 3-4 days of achiness, inflammation, depression, and rocky sugar numbers.

Yeah. I'll be skipping the excess at Christmas, I think.

Also, I'm reading a damn bloody book, which I'll be blogging about soon.

The Protagonist Gets a Tree

Happy Holidays!

(and thanks to Stephanie, our wingman, for all the great photos!)

Happy Thanksgiving

NOM NOM NOM

Quote of the Evening

"I don't want to survive. I want to LIVE."
- The Captain, WALL-E

Thankful

I have a good many things to be thankful for, but it really hit home today as I was browsing through these blog archives.

The last five years have been nothing short of... harrowing? Amazing? Harrowing and amazing, perhaps. In any case, it's made me even more incredibly thankful for where I'm at right now. 2006/2007 is a particularly bitter and amazing year of archives. When you read about just how bad things had gotten, it's nothing short of a bloody fucking miracle that I'm where I'm at now.

I'm awestruck at how things have turned out.

Thanks to all the regular readers who have shared this incredibly weird, rocky, wild ride. And thanks for sticking with me as the beat goes on.

Here's to another (hopefully less harrowing) five years...





























Remember, as I oft-repeated at the end of every blog post:

"Tomorrow will be better."

Branded: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

New guest blog post up at Ecstatic Days: Branded: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

HealthCare Concerns

Is anyone else really concerned that the latest "health screening reversals" have targeted women? See mammograms, and pelvic exams. I have yet to see the "let's stop screening men for prostate cancer" and "forget the colonoscopies" announcement.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Short animation based on the Ray Bradbury story of the same name.

In Case There Was Any Doubt About Who's Creating Your Media...

... and why it's still assumed that every audience member is straight, white, upper-middle class, and male.

WGA report examining employment and earnings trends for writers in the Hollywood industry:

2009 Executive Summary (.pdf)
2009 Hollywood Writers Report (.pdf)

(via deadbrowalking)

Book Rejection Bingo

In conversation, a writing buddy of mine expressed interest in tracking down a "book rejection BINGO" card. I'm startled to say that, after much searching, I failed to find one.

So.... I made one!

Quote of the Day

"Don't worry about the world ending today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.'
- anon

100 Words

New guest blog post over at Ecstatic Days, 100 Words.

Your Daily Dose of Privilege

How Not To Be An Asshole: A Guide For Men

Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced

And for the record, yes, I do risk assessments all the time. If you're born female, you learn how to do this from the time you're very small. A woman would have to live in the absolute bread basket of rich, white, young, and gated suburbian privilege to not do a threat assessment every time she walks down the street (in fact, I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't do a threat assessment every time a strange man talks to her).

We grow up with stories about how it's our duty to protect ourselves from being raped, attacked, abused, murdered, and mutilated. And we hear stories all the time of female friends and family members who've been abused and harassed by men - sometimes strangers and sometimes men they love. It's pretty clear from the culture at large that nobody else is going to "save" us from institutionalized male aggression. I'm surprised that more male commenters on the Schrodinger post didn't seem to realize that. That's privilege, I guess.

Why do you think I took up boxing in Chicago? Do you have any idea how much women in get harassed on the street, trains, and buses, particularly in big cities? I'd say, at least twice a week I had some guy yelling something at me in Chicago, making inappropriate or uninvited comments, or otherwise trying to strike up unwanted conversation.

"Fuck off," works very, very well. Yes, you feel like a steely bitch for saying it. But men generally accept "fuck off" a lot more often than the nervous smiles we've been trained to give them. They may yell back at you, but they do fuck off. The polite, nervous "no"s never work.

It's hard to rework your training, and I hate that so much of the "fuck off" thing has to rely on women re-training themselves. This is why posts like the above are so important. Changing the culture of male aggression means changing the way men interact with women, not just the way we respond. If you're going to change anything, it takes concerted effort on both sides, not just boxing lessons and foul language from potential victims.

And, you know, I'll take foul language and good right hook over that terrified nervous rabbit feeling I get when I'm trying to be polite to some stranger who thinks that because I'm a woman he has the right to poke at me.

This doesn't happen as much to guys because 1) they're seen as people 2) they're seen as people who will kick the shit out of you if you keep fucking with them.

I can't do much to change #1, but I can take some action on #2.

Dollhouse

Oh, thank God.

YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.

Whedon is wasting his time on this one. Think of the incredible shows he could be creating RIGHT NOW but hasn't been for the last year and a half because he's been hip-deep in this piece of crap.

You can love two or three series from a writer, and hate their third. It's okay. It's allowed. Sometimes writers fail. It happens. I would have much rather he was attempting something great, like Firefly, than this piece of crap.

Moving on.

Recommended: Heart of Veridon

I picked up Heart of Veridon, by Tim Akers, quite by accident. I was actually looking for Graceling and something by somebody named Connelly. I couldn’t find the Connelly and once I picked up Graceling, the prose on the first few pages was just so dull I couldn’t get myself to buy it.

Veridon was sitting on the shelf with the cover facing outward, and who isn’t going to pick up a book with a rotting, menacing, mechanical angel on the cover?

So I did. Read a few paragraphs.

It only takes a few paragraphs to know whether or not a writer actually knows how to write. It only takes a few sentences to figure out if they’re writing the type of story you’re interested in.

I didn't even get to the end of the first page. I bought the book.

This is an incredibly good read. It has its flaws – which I’ll go into later – but man, what a read! This is an incredible, creepy, messed up little Victorian/noir/steampunk/bug tech world full of massively screwed up people.

I loved it.

Way more readable than anything by Mieville, and far more boneshaking than Boneshaker (which has, alas, been consigned to the bottom of my reading pile after I discovered there's very little in this book that's shaking my bones, 70+ pages in).

In Heart of Veridon, our protagonist is Jacob Burn, an outcast “noble” with a bum reconstituted Pilot’s engine in his chest that once allowed him to fly zepliners. It's basically a steampunk version of hooking into a spaceship and becoming one with it in order to fly it. After getting cast out by his family, Jacob’s been doing odd jobs for a shady crime boss named Valentine, which has led him on board the particular zepliner, Glory of Days, which we find ourselves on in the beginning of the book.

Suffice to say, Glory of Days doesn’t quite make it back into Veridon, the city at the heart of this novel. It’s hijacked by an unknown group or groups of people who go ravaging through the ship. With his dying breath, an old acquaintance of Jacob’s who he bumped into on the ship hands him a mysterious Cog – basically a religious relict in this world – and tells him to bring it back to the city.

Then, more chaos. Shooting. Blood. Crashing.

Mmmm mmmmm.

It’s a fantastic novel opener, and things just keep going. I love the worldbuilding in this book, and the religions are… beautiful. I have never seen gods and religions done with just this right blend of sadness and creepy.You see, there are things in the world of Veridon that its residents did not and do not understand. Things that we, the reader, still don’t understand, and so they worship them. They create entire temples around them. It’s the first time I’ve convincingly seen gods created out of what are, quite possibly, advanced/aging races and/or their relics. What I love about this is that is speaks so… poignantly about the human need to make sense from nonsense, to control what they don’t understand and completely botch it in the process, and to worship what we fear in order to feel that we have some control over it.

Now, I have a lot of love for this book – I stayed up late last night to finish it, and it only took me a couple days to read because I was picking it up whenever I had a spare moment – but it does have its flaws.

The female lead carries a sword and a shotgun at one point. She’s tough as nails, full of secrets, and has no qualms being a whore, to boot - and I was desperately hoping Akers would pull an Ever After at the end of this one and she wouldn’t need any saving. But, well. There are two more female characters – both tough, calculating, and vindictive. Neither has a great end. I was secretly hoping that one of them would break free and just torch the whole fucking city. You’ll know which one when you read it.

Bah. This was more than a little disappointing. On the one hand, bad things happen to pretty much everybody in the book. On the other hand, there aren’t a whole lot of female background characters, so these were the only ones I had to root for, and they were pretty badly treated there at the end. That said: they were certainly cool enough to root for, and disappointing as the ending was in that regard, I appreciated a book that gave me a full cast of fleshed out characters.

There were a couple of annoying structural flaws. The first was that Jacob keeps repeating what’s just happened to him to characters not in the know. We have to sit through his version of events every time he fills somebody in on them. It got old, even when it was over in just a couple paragraphs. A one line, “I filled him in on what happened,” would have been fine. Overall, folks sat around and talked a little too much (as a writer, I felt I recognized this is as the writerly, "Holy shit, a lot of shit just happened. I'll have my characters sit around and figure the plot out while I take a breather."), and there at the end, the bad guys were actually *inviting* Jacob to ask them why they did what they did, you know, so they could exposit their reasons for being so bad. It was the classic bad guy monologue. It was a little silly.

Finally, there’s Jacob’s motives. There at the end, I was just like, “Dude, give up already! Give him the relic and have him destroy the fucking city!” (OK, yes, I may have been on the side of the chick who wanted to burn the city to the ground. But if I’d been fucked over so much by this city, it’s what I’d want too. I was totally on her side. It’s a creepy city). Jacob’s motivation for wanting to save the city was… strangely absent. I kept looking at what people had done to him, how much he’d been screwed over, how toxic and creepy the place was, and I just couldn’t figure out why he kept going when any reasonable person who have stopped (especially at the end, when he’s fighting this crazy rotting mechanical angel in a scene that, oddly, put me in mind of the end battle between Deckard and Roy in Bladerunner).

Overall, the characters were put together very well. Everybody had their own secrets and motives – many of which weren’t even totally revealed at the end. They were complex characters. I remember being struck, in the beginning, at how Jacob’s voice would weave between street tough and educated nobility. It really did that. I initially thought this was a clunky first-time novelist mistake, until I realized that, in fact, the character had been raised a noble and simply spent the five or so years in exile as a street tough. The strange voice changes made a lot more sense.

In fact, some of what makes this book such a good page turner is that Jacob is incredibly unpredictable. At one point, when the calvary comes in toward the end of the book, he refuses their help. Yes. Refuses. He gets out and the book goes on and you’re like, “What the hell? That was a comfortable trope you just totally stomped on!”

He makes a lot of mistakes. Mistakes that get people killed and get him into deeper trouble. He’s not a hero, he’s tragically human, and tragically flawed, and it shows every step of the way. I like flawed heroes. Jacob is a good one.

In any case, this is a wonderfully wild ride. Rotting angels, fish people, half-mechanical people, bizarre alien gods, steampunk tech, bug tech, shotguns, outcasts, folks coming back from the dead, folks who can’t die, crazy mods, zepliners, chicks with swords (or, at least, a large knife), and lots of gunfights and backstabbing and double-crosses.

What’s not to like?

Did I mention there’s a chick with a shotgun? And a totally rotting half-mechanical angel on the cover?

Good.

Prince of Persia

Sooo.... let me get this straight. You had folks like this chick and this guy to carry this movie:




And YOU CHOSE this guy and this chick?




I'm sorry, what planet are you living on, Hollywood? Because it's not the same planet I'm living on.

Also, it looks like a terrible movie.

Sunshine

This was not a bad movie.

No, really!

I’m a sucker for psychological horror in spaaaaaaace and this was a prime example of that. It’s not a great movie, but it was... entertaining. This may have been because I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from it.

The conceit behind Sunshine is ridiculous, of course. If you’re watching a movie for SCIENCE you should probably just… stop. The premise is, hey, the sun is dying! Humanity launches a manned spaceflight to save it! By launching some sort of superior nuclear physics-thing bomb into the sun!

Really!

This is why it took me so long to see this movie. How utterly stupid, right? I haven’t seen The Core either, and I was leery of this damn thing turning into the ridiculous gore-fest that was Event Horizon. I’ll take crappy science over crappy, nonsensical gore any day (I found Sunshine far creepier than Event Horizon, actually. It's all about what you don't know and what you don't see. The more gore, the more ridiculous the movie, for me. I prefer subtlety).

But, see, Sunshine had what a lot of crappy-science movies don’t have: an excellent cast, great effects, tight and suspenseful direction, AMAZING soundtrack, and wonderfully creepy shenanigans. All that… in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace.

And who doesn’t love adventures in space?

The cast included Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh, which gives you an idea of how seriously (B+/A- movie actor seriously) the cast took it movie. And trust me, that helps. It reminded me a lot of alien in that way – you put a strong cast and creepy direction into a lost in space movie, and you can carry it a long way.

The cast was reasonably diverse, split pretty evenly between white and Asian characters (tho at the end of the day, it was still white guys saving the world and fighting each other. The captain, psychologist, and navigation guys all check out pretty early. And the female characters only seemed to make it so far into the movie so somebody could be menaced at the end – would have preferred it was the navigation chick who got frozen to death trying to save the ship instead of held off til the end so she would go down with the male lead, but - you win some, you lose some).

Overall, it was a well-paced movie right up until those last 10-15 minutes, when things got weird. And yes, in case you’re wondering, in a movie about a group of people who are *restarting the sun* there are a LOT of moments where you just have to let them handwave-handwave their way out of things. Like how the fuck is he hanging onto the ass-end of a spaceship whose rockets just went off must be ignored… and there are lots of cut-aways of even more improbable scenes like how he then opened up the airlock and crawled inside while the rocket boosters are STILL GOING OFF (and let's not get started with the whole "oxygen garden" business, or the space walking suits, or the ridiculous observation window).

But if you liked Pitch Black, I think you’ll like Sunshine. Good cast and a lot of fun so long as you don’t think about it too much. I rate it slightly better than Babylon A.D., mainly because the ending to that fucking movie was about on par with Padme’s “lost the will to live” bullshit. I will make many allowances for my SF popcorn, but empty vessel female characters are not one of them.

God's War Update

Guest post over at Ecstatic Days about Surviving the Book Contract that Wasn't.

I am not pleased

NOT PLEASED AT ALL.

Maine, Or, the Legacy of Why We Don't Vote on Human Rights Issues

"Someone in power is finally going to state the obvious truth that gay marriage is absolutely necessary, and they're not going to put it up for a vote, because that's not what you do with basic human rights. You don't let six wolves and four sheep vote on what to have for dinner (or in this case, what, fifty-two wolves and forty-eight sheep?).

The National Guard will stand outside the courthouses and force you to grow the hell up, and you will be remembered in history like those sad ugly white people yelling at the black kids coming to class.

And this isn't the fifties. This is the twenty-first century. Your bisexual grandkids will still be able to Google your sorry ass and see that you were a spiteful hateful closeminded bigot. They'll have your lying ads, annotated with footnotes showing how you knew you were lying at the time. They'll have your ugly homophobic comments and your hate-filled fake news reports captured in crystal clarity on whatever magical Internet++ they're using decades from now. And they're going to be ashamed of you.

All you've done -- all you've accomplished with your lies and hate and fearmongering -- is to delay the inevitable. In the next few years, every widow who loses her home because she "wasn't really married" to her life partner, and the life partner's kids have a good lawyer? Every man who dies scared and alone because the man who should have been his husband wasn't allowed to be at his bedside? Every not-spouse who dies because of not-health-coverage, coverage they would have gotten were they married? Every one of those things that happens between now and whenever the National Guard puts a little learnin' on you? That's on you.

That's your legacy.

(read the rest)

Heart of Veridon

Picked this one up on a whim at Books & co today while I was looking for something else (ended up passing on the other one and got this and Best Served Cold instead).

Folks, I may be in love. I'm 30 pages in and really hoping he doesn't screw it up.

Proper review when I finish, but the guy sure knows how to take you on a bloody, weird, wild ride.

If chicks with swords show up later, I'll have no complaints!

Why is it...

... that so many "lit" stories are about 1) whiny emo college students 2) whiny sub-par college professors?

I wonder, indeed.

Insurance is Officially Back Up

And not a fucking moment too soon. I have $2500 worth of pods that should have been in the mail last week.

The delay means I'll be on shots from tonight until at least tomorrow when/if the shipment arrives. They've been holding it since Monday, likely waiting for the fucking payment to process. Not looking forward to a whole weekend of shots, so let's hope the shipment arrives tomorrow, shall we?

Two Girls -UPDATED

A first pass at video creation with Windows Movie Maker. Cinematic art it ain't, but it looks like if you can navigate PowerPoint 7, you can navigate Movie Maker. This is a pretty hack job I did in a few hours. I'll be interested to see how I can improve things as I figure out what the hell I'm doing. Some of the transitions are still running a little fast.

Video is based on the unpublished short, Two Girls (I wanted to start with a story I didn't mind messing up). View below or go directly to my my YouTube channel.

Website address at the end is still, obviously, not live, but I've started adding it to things in anticipation of the day.



I'm still not sure if giving me these sorts of tools is a good idea or not...

First, they come for...

"I was Jewish. There was no doubt in my mind (what would happen). I left in 34. Hilter had taken over in 33. A girl... and a physicist... and Jewish. Well, that's a combination that had no chance! (laughs) That was clear."

-Hilde Levi, refugee physicist from Nazi Germany (from here)

The Power of Books

(more here)

Mantisland

You know you want to check out the rest....

Exquisite photos. I may be ordering some prints (now that I may no longer be dirt desperate uninsured poor!) if I can figure out how.

Light At the End of the Tunnel

There appears to be some light at the end of the health insurance tunnel, which is good cause today was the day I was going to drop $1154 on health care premiums through Sinclair.

I was able to place my pod order without a problem (!! really !!), and tho our account still shows up as "inactive," I'm told that doctors are taking and processing the claims, which will be back up to date by the time anything we do this week actually gets processed, so at least we don't have to pay out of pocket at the hospital or get turned away.

Still paying out of pocket for prescriptions, but that wasn't my urgent concern. The terror and sleepless nights were in trying to figure out how to come up with $1100 for my pump supplies and $3,000 for J's twice-yearly post-cancer scan (which he was due to have last week).

We are both a lot less hysterical now, and should hopefully be sleeping a lot better. Man, what a nightmare. It's not quite over, but it's a fuck of a lot less urgent. It's like the difference between wondering how you'll survive and just wondering how many nights a week you'll be eating ramen.

Oh, there was some other good news today, too.

As J said, "IT'S LIKE CHRISTMAS!"

Women in the Fight

Images of Women in WWII.

(via Elizabeth Bear)

The Autumn Feast!

Full set here. Here's what we cooked:

Ranch Style Chicken
Sweet-Roasted Rosemary Acorn Squash Wedges
Spicy Pumpkin Soup

Maple syrup substitute for the pumpkin soup and acorn squash consisted of Splenda mixed with no-carb maple "syrup" substitute. Honey called for in the ranch style chicken was substituted with no-carb maple "syrup" (and turned out very well!).