The kitchen gadget meme

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The kitchen meme making the rounds: Bold the ones you have and use at least once a year, italicize the ones you have and don’t use, strike through the ones you have had but got rid of.

pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainers, bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses, gravy strainers, double boilers (bains marie), sukiyaki stoves, food processors, ice cream makers, takoyaki makers, fondue sets

Context.

I’ve never had a pizza stone, but I have several pizza screens. I love them and would never switch to a stone. And I left “sandwich maker” untouched but I do have a George Foreman.

Anyway, my breadmaker was one of the first ever. My mom bought it off the TV and gave it to me, and it didn’t work very well.

The Unexpected Return of This Week’s Hypothetical!

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You get wind of a unique dining experience: a chef has had his own penis and testicles surgically removed and frozen. Now he is planning a special meal where he will serve them up to interested diners. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.

There is no law against cannibalism in the country where this is taking place and you can afford it. Would you go?

What if a close friend or member of your family intended to go; would it change your relationship with them?

For this one, I’m going to experiment with opening up comments again. Let’s see how awful the spam gets.

Context.

Testing the thesis that 10K hours of practice makes you an expert

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This dude is trying it with golf, and after two years, he’s got about 1/3rd of his 10,000 hours.

I’m sure it took me more than that to start writing stories that sell, but I still don’t consider myself a writing expert. I don’t think I’ll ever feel that way. But good luck to Dan. It’ll be interesting to see if he can do it.

via @RodRamsey

I share my rage with you

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Four years and ten months ago, my laptop died. I don’t even remember what brand it was, but I went out to the Apple store and picked up their cheapest laptop.

I’m still using it almost five years later, but the internet has become nearly impossible. All sorts of web pages make Safari seize up. Facebook, G+, The Daily Beast… the list is endless. My browser picks up the spinning beach ball with only very few tabs open.

Twitter is trying to discourage third-party app makers, but I can’t type out a single tweet without stopping for the spinning beach ball. My own fucking website slows things down interminably, mainly because it tries to contact Twitter et al.

It’s frustrating and a waste of time. Most of my laptop browsing is book-related research, but this old software is just excruciating. The browser crashes too much, freezes too much, and wastes way too much of my time.

And I can’t afford new right now.

Infernal Relics

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The Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion Infernal Relics (plus swag) arrived today.

Check it out:

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For folks who don’t know, this is a superhero-themed cooperative fixed-deck card game. It can be a little fussy, what with keeping track of all the plusses and hit points, but the enhanced edition makes that easy. What’s more, it’s fun.

The boy and I both wanted to play tonight, but I’m just too wiped for it. This weekend we are going to be doing two Pokemon tournaments, so I’m not sure when we’ll have a chance to take on some of these new villains, but the boy and I are pretty psyched to give it a try.

Great game. Seriously.

Randonmess for 9/17

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1) In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?

2) Little kittens battle each other in B&N review section: “Will you make an alliance with tigerclan?”

3) The Proper Way To Lock Your Bicycle.

4) Bat Man of Shanghai. Video.

5) Real Lady Sleuths.

6) How to cut your own hair.

7) Over-the-counter DIY witchcraft from the 19th century: The (annotated) Long Lost Friend. Available on Amazon.com

“The Truth About Dishonesty”

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Do you guys like the RSA Animate videos? I do. They’re occasionally inaccurate (when the speaker gets a fact wrong) but I think they’re a visually arresting way to take in information.

This one is especially good and it’s relevant in several ways. Check it out.

Additional thing about that attack on the agent

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As a followup to yesterday’s call for public shaming, I want to make a point that I’ve made on Twitter, G+, and of course in the comments on LiveJournal: When bloggers or Goodreads reviewers receive crazy hate mail from authors unhappy with their unhappy writeups, there’s a huge groundswell of support. Comment sections fill up with commiserations and well-wishers, and folks turn to their own blogs and Twitter accounts to talk about how awful it is.

That’s how it should be.

But when agents receive hate mail for a form rejection, they get crickets. As I mentioned yesterday, the flow of vicious emails agents get camouflages the threats from truly dangerous people, and it should not be accepted with a sigh and a what are you going to do?. There’s no reason to accept it; those writers should be exposed and shamed just like the self-publishers who get nasty with reviewers.

Rejected author attacks agent: a call for public shaming

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Last night on Twitter it came out that an agent was attacked outside her house just after she’d gotten into her car.

After being convinced to call the police, they wanted to look at the emails she’d gotten recently. She was sure there was nothing to it. All she had were the usual responses to rejection every agent gets from writers: “The normal I hate you and I want you to die and I’ll kill you”.

The cops were not so casual about it. They identified one guy, went to the address he put on his query, then busted him.

But here’s the thing: how did we get to the point where an influx of hatred, threats, and vicious remarks are an acceptable thing? I realize people have been turning a blind eye to the horrifying shit women bloggers get, but agents have been receiving the same treatment for years to the point where it’s seen as the normal course of business.

Here’s a tip: If you’re so outraged at receiving a rejection that you have to send a hateful response, self-publish. Seriously, if you’re moved to respond in a nasty way, you aren’t ready for that end of the business. Just go ahead and publish your work yourself.

Because every nasty response, every threat that you didn’t really mean, every expression of contempt, is just cover for threats that come from the crazies who really will do violence. It normalizes the awful behavior to the point that recipients can’t tell when the threats are genuine.

I suggest there be some sort of public display of these hate messages, along with identifying information: name, city, email address. Your query would be confidential. Your response to a rejection would not.

I don’t know if that would work, but I wish there was something we could to.

Real Review or Sockpuppet? A Handy Guide

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There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about sockpuppet reviews: essentially, dishonest reviews posted under pseudonyms that either praise books or slam them. Sometimes the author themself is writing the review. Sometimes it’s a firm they hired, or friends. Sometimes the review was written out of spite by someone who hasn’t read the book.

Still, book buyers say they still use reader reviews to help decide whether they will buy a book or not. So! How can a reader tell the difference between a genuine response to a book and a review written for those Nefarious Other Purposes?

Allow me to illustrate some basic principles from the fictionalized examples below. And feel free to play along? Sockpuppet? Or Real?

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At first glance, this might seem like a sockpuppet. Look at how effusive that praise is! And completely unqualified! But note that the reviewer makes sure to mention that they totally found the book at random, not because they were intrigued by the premise or the author’s other work. It was just crazy luck! Convincing? I say yes.

Also, there’s no way this could have been written by, say, the author’s friends. My God, it’s like, two sentences. Two and two words. What kind of shitty friend would take the trouble to post a fake review but only write a line or two?

Verdict: Real

*****

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If you thought this sockpuppet review was the real thing, then I feel genuine pity for you, my friend. Look at it again and you’ll see within those few words a brutal personal attack on the author. To whit:

What kind of inhuman monster says they would recommend a book to their friends and then give it only three stars? Have YOU ever looked at a three-star review and thought “Gosh, I should pluck that out of the ceaseless tsunami of printed matter washing past me every day!”

Of course not. That’s a clear and obvious taunt directed at the author.

Verdict: Sockpuppet

*****

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A less-savvy observer might view this as a kind of author advertising, most likely placed by the author themself!

However, note the run-on sentence and sloppy spelling (er… in the review, not the body of this post). Would a sensible author write so poorly? I think not. What’s more, the book named in the review is on the Kindle, which means there is almost certainly a free excerpt available. These books are pretty much uniformly terrible. Would an author want readers to sample a terrible book? The idea itself is ludicrous.

Verdict: Review.

*****

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The raw, vicious hatred behind this review is clear on its face.

Verdict: Sockpuppet.

Remember, authors: Any review that makes you feel bad is probably a personal attack.

Remember, readers: Any review that makes you reluctant to buy one of my books is absolutely a fake.

I hope you found this lesson helpful.