SOPs

Mmmmm SOPs.

There's NOTHING MORE FUN THAN EDITING and FORMATTING SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) ALL DAY.

How To Install Windows XP/Outlook/Office, whatthefuckever:

Now hit Next.

Next, you'll click NEXT.

We'll select "Next."

Choose Next.

Now press "NEXT."

I usually hit NEXT.

NEXT.

NOW HIT NEXT!!!!!!

Delicious!

(and yes, every single one of the SOPs came to me in a different tense and style with wildly different ways of signifying that "Next" was the name of a button and not just a word. This is why they hired me. I did these for eight hours today, and I'm only about halfway done. More are coming)

And you know what?

I still love every minute of it.

Yup, That's the One

Starting tomorrow, this will be my new MA school.


Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!

Suck it Up, Hurley

Well, the collective effort of three moderately active people finally made the old elliptical I carted in from Chicago go kaput. Me and the roomies spent the entirety of Sunday afternoon looking for a similiarly compact and reasonably priced machine, to no avail. We'll eventually get a new one, but not this week.

This means I either need to go jogging or take another bike ride tonight. And, really, I need to bike down to the proposed MA school and sign up for a free trial class for Wednesday.

But! But! But!

Ugh. Exercise. You do it cause you feel better afterwards.

Really, that's the only reason.

OK, and you lift weights cause it makes your arms look cool, and you can hit people.

I mean, in self defense!

Geez!

I Carry A Spoon

Blarg

Just... blarg.

Heartless E-Cards!

Useful for every occasion...

One for the Road

Note To Self:

That oatmeal raisin cookie in the pastry case at Boston Stoker downtown may *look* like the Healthiest, Lowest-Carb option of the lot, but it's going to take a lot more than three units of insulin to cover it...

But boy was it good.

Happy Friday.

It's a Start, Anyway

Workadoo

I don't think I've ever spent eight or ten or whatever hours a day writing so many different things. Writing, sure, but writing resumes, executive bios, editing and formating SOPs, writing and revising company handbooks, and squeezing in some of my own fiction at the coffee shop at lunchtime?

Yeah.

It's good for me.

Yar.

Workadoo

I can't tell you how fucking awesome it feels not to be someone's secretary.

More on Women and Gaming

An interview with my buddy Patrick, a writer at Bioware.

The Search Continues...

... to find a dumbbell squat that doesn't *feel* to me like a dumbbell squat, so I may fool myself into thinking that I LOVE squats.

Tonight's variation looked like this (trendy work-out gear not included):


But with, you know, weights like these:



And it all ended up something like this:

Games I Seriously Need To AVOID

It EATS MY LIFE. EATS MY LIFE I TELL YOU!!!

It's like those fucking claw thingie machines that you just keep feeding quarters into, only it's free! EXCEPT FOR ALL THAT TIME IT EATS FROM YOUR LIFE.

But I did make myself work on Black Desert line edits and do laundry beforehand.

OK, back to line edits and some French exercises, but dear LORD that game just ate another HOUR from my life.

NO MORE!

And that would be....

So, Ray Bradbury insists that the public has been "misreading" Fahrenheit 451 since, well, 1952. According to this article he wants to "make news" by speaking out about his real intent behind writing the book. It is not a book about censorship. It is "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature."

And yet:

Bradbury imagined a democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo. He imagined not just political correctness, but a society so diverse that all groups were “minorities.” He wrote that at first they condensed the books, stripping out more and more offending passages until ultimately all that remained were footnotes, which hardly anyone read. Only after people stopped reading did the state employ firemen to burn books.

So.... the people... censored... the books?

I'm thinking his issue is more about disuading the belief that it's some heavy-handed government doing all the censoring, and not the people themselves.

It's the people who are participating in their own oppression. They censor and burn their own books.

Governments are run by people, too.

Isn't This Counterproductive?

There's nothing more annoying than having to carb-up after working out because your sugar's low.

Conjugating French Verbs

Where does this other "s" come from????

.........

It's still here!!!!

Missed the Boat

Sunday's a good time for a bike ride...

I realized tonight that I haven't done a lot of purely recreational biking since I got here. Since I don't have a car, the bike is largely a tool to get me from here to there, and though it's great to combine exercise with a bookstore run, I hadn't done a lot of exploring around the neighborhood on my bike.

I love bike riding. It was something I didn't learn to do until I was 12 or 13 because there just weren't a lot of places around my house to learn. I spent most of my biking time at my grandma's house; there was a church parking lot nearby, and the church had this great courtyard where we could ride around these little statues of saints.

I got back into it after getting back from Bellingham and getting my life and health back together. I'd put the bike in the back of my truck and drive over to Lewisville Park and bike around. In Alaska, biking was my primary means of transport and recreation all summer and even much of the winter. It wasn't until my last few months in Chicago that I took it up again.

There's something I like about the freedom of bike riding. It's like that girlish yearning for a horse - all that speed and power. It's probably why I have such an interest in getting a motorcycle - more speed! More power! More freedom!

So tonight I picked a direction and just rode for a few miles down sleepy little streets. The evening was cool and muggy and there were a few people out on their porches. Somebody was having a block party. People played catch with their kids. The gardens were lush and well-landscaped, and despite the people everything was just dead quiet, just a sleepy summer night.

It was one of those nights that I try to wrap up and store away to remember later when things are not so good, when things are low. Because these are the nights you miss if you get hit by a car or hit by a shovel and keel over, you know. These are the nights it's so beautiful to be alive, when it looks like, for the barest moment, that everything really will be all right.

So I wrap these ones up, and I put them away, and I remember them when the winter comes.

Twenty Epics

Through a bit of careful politiking* I finally managed to get a hold of a copy of Twenty Epics, which turns out to be just as fucking awesome a collection and everybody says it is (oh boy is this is rare in a field where a lot of stuff gets overhyped).

I had considered writing something for this anthology when it was first announced, being a lover/hater of the fantasy epic - I'm in love with the *feeling* of the epic, but disillusioned by the 11-books-and-counting nature of the Robert Jordan epic.

So this antho had the potential to be pretty much just perfect for a reader like me.

It could have also sucked some serious goats.

But you know, it was put together by Groppi and Moles, so I had some hope.

I loved the way this anthology was put together - there was a careful mix of different lengths and styles and even a couple of SF-y bits in there. I'll just say a few things about the stories that I really enjoyed, and maybe a note or two about why I liked them.

DeNiro's "Have You Any Wool" is a cat-and-mouse Cordwainer Smith-ish epic that does with the far future just what I like done with the far future - it's so alien, so Other, that it reverts back to fantasy, to myth. It's the tale of a young boy aboard a ship that's been sent out to fight wolves that prowl about the stars devouring worlds. The wolves fight each culture by turning its own myths and folktales against it, so:

"Slowly, folklorists and anthropologists took to the front lines. They analyzed what the wolves had transformed. They developed applications of technology that would counter the warping of space-time according to the morphologies of folktales. They would be sheep in wovles' clothing, becoming participants in whatever fantasies the wolves would devise, and then stealthily alter them for tactical advantages. If the wolves mutated a pod settlement into a pastoral scene replete with carillion castles and fair damsels, Parameter shocktroops might become knights, or even trolls."

I mean, really, how fucking cool is that?

Another story that lodged itself in my brain through the sheer power of its imagery was K.D. Wentworth's "The Rose War," an... epic family saga about a family that slowly trains up and eventually interbreeds with an army of roses that they use to devour whole armies (you'll note a common theme running through the stories I enjoyed: blood, war, devouring armies... mmmm).

Christopher Barzak's "The Creation of Birds" had a slow start, but the emotional core of the story steadily took hold of me as I read about a woman who creates birds from paper, ink and starlight and her fucked up relationship with a man who believes he is hording all the stars in the world for her... but will not release them when she asks. This was one of those stories, as I've talked about before, that hit some core emotional truth for me and left me a little sad and breathless in the end.

"The Muse of Empires Lost" by Paul Berger was another far-future fantasy about a young girl living in the belly of a living ship that has long been cut off from its makers. The living ships have created their own ecologies; the ships love and mate and die with no regard for those living on the planets that spawned them, and Jemmi, our heroine, finds herself with a deep attachment to the world that is her ship. When a strange man arrives, sharing Jemmi's ability to alter the will of others to his own, Jemmi finds that she must choose between her attachment to the living ship and a possible godhood on another world.

It took me a long time to figure out whether or not I enjoyed Sandra McDonald's "Life Sentence," because the theme was old and tired: a Korean war veteran finds that he's able to re-live his life again and again from different starting points. In his first few tries, he ends up repeating the same old failures, and I was worried that this was going to be another one of those "sorry, the future is already set and everybody gets fucked no matter what you do!" stories, but that's not ultimately where she went with it, and I was glad I stuck it out.

I found a sort of female-Elric-bound-to-a-sword story in Mary Robinette Kowal's "Bound Man," which was an interesting take on the warrior-bound-to-sword trope. Li Reiko is ripped away from play with her children to fight trolls in another time thousands of years after the death of her children, among a people utterly foreign to her. As with Elric, the two peoples can somehow miraculously understand one another, and Li Reiko resents her summoners. I enjoyed this one because I'm always looking for what the female version of a Conan/Elric would look like, but I had some quibbles with the end, mainly because this one goes with the "the future is already set!" mode of time travel, and that always bugs me. It also screws with the agency of Li Reiko's daughter, which bugged me.

As someone with some training as a historian, I couldn't help but like Ian McHugh's "The Last Day of Rea" as well. We get a sort of fantasy-SFish story about an inbred dynasty that decides to go up against a small city-state with ties to the stars, and our protagonist is a clever historian who tries to avert the worst of the disaster. I enjoyed the witty protagonist and tongue-in-cheek humor.

One of the cool things about the anthology was the stylistically diverse stories that snuck in here, the infamous "Choose Your Own Epic Adventure," and the chaptered and numbered biblical epic, "The Book of Ant" and Ya Hoon Lee's cleverly laid out "Hopscotch" all played with narrative set-up that added a lot of variety to the anthology. And yeah, "Epic, The" is a bit cutesy, but not in a sugary way.

I'm not a huge fan of anthologies or story collections, cause you know, there's usually only one or two stories you actually like, a bunch that are mediocre and several that you just never even finished.

I finished all of these, didn't actively hate any of them, and I can only think of one or two that I found actively mediocre.

That's pretty fucking impressive.

Pick up a copy.

This ride is totally worth it.

----------------------------

*Which consisted of me saying, "Hey Moles, give me a fucking copy!" when two promotional extras were handed to him at the con in my presence. I am nothing if not subtle....