interesting things

8 Questions

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Eight Questions about health-care reform answered. For those who might not be following the political process closely.

Randomness for 9/7/09

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1) MightyGodKing’s latest Stab at Relevence, the card game.

2) F=MA? Or F=MAWill(MagicNecklace)? From a blog created by filmmakers planning their first hard-sf indie feature film.

3) RT Book Reviews gives Child of Fire four and a half stars. (I hope that’s not out of ten) Unfortunately, I can’t read the review because I don’t subscribe.

4) Don’t settle for cheap knock-offs! A dieselpunk ray gun commercial

5) Outrageous burgers across the nation. Starting with, you guessed it, a burger with a donut for a bun.

6) 20 Neil Gaiman Facts. Reader, I lolled.

Randomness for 9/4/09

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1) Man builds houses for low-income citizens using mostly recycled material. My wife would love this.

2) Arkansas fire chief shot in court room after criticizing local police. Apparently, while criticizing cops who do nothing but write speeding tickets, there was a “scuffle.” The fire chief was unarmed.

It’s interesting that the town where this took place has 147 residents and seven officers. According to the article, they spend their time manning speed traps, but the county sheriff dept. is investigating where all that money went, since the police cars are about to be repossessed.

As yet, no one has been charged in the shooting.

3) The GOP released a press release listing doctors who oppose the current health care reform bills. Unfortunately, the doctors on the list didn’t know a thing about it.

4) Fire ants build a life raft from their own bodies. I understand that it’s almost certainly staged to some degree, but it’s still fascinating.

5) The Coen Brothers make a short film about a man entering an art house theater. It’s simple and wonderful. “A Human Comedy of Sorts.”

Speaking of Randomness

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Here’s something that’s random and 100% AWESOME

via Josh Jasper on the aforementioned health care discussion on John Scalzi’s blog

Randomness

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I’m going to compile a bunch of random things into this post and publish them all at once.

1) via geniusofevil: Heat Wave: Richard Castle is a real writer!

2) I’ve been going back and forth on some common euphamisms. Yesterday, in a comment, I used the term “godsend.” Is that a word an atheist should use? I think not, obviously, since it bothers me. In the few stolen moments I had to type out the comment, I couldn’t come up with an alternative that said the same thing.

Except there’s “ghu” or “ghod” but I think of that as an SF fandom thing, and I’m not part of that community, either. Sometimes I write “Thank Pikachu” or whatever as a joke, even though at this point I’m the only member of my household who thinks Pikachu is cool.

I don’t really have a point. This is just something I’m thinking about.

3) Nicholas Kristof on the myth that government can’t do health care. And yeah, I spent way too much time yesterday arguing health care on John Scalzi’s blog.

3a) Arguing about health care on the web makes me hate the universe!

4) PW’s newly focused blog, Genreville (verdict: interesting so far) offers Lev Grossman the opportunity to knock over some straw men. He accepts.

5) Inglourious Wizerds

6) Man builds house out of Legos.

7) Work on Man Bites World continues slowly, but this is a really difficult section. Very different from what I’ve been doing before, and I’m going to have to revise it significantly once I straighten out in my mind how the protagonist would react to extremely strange events.

Ten seconds radio air time = 42 syllables.

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Yesterday, my wife paid for a day sponsorship at our local NPR station, to congratulate me on the release of Child of Fire. (It was supposed to be a surprise, but… oops!)

That pleases me, partly because I love our local NPR affiliate and I want to support them, and partly because it would be cool to hear my name on the radio in some other capacity than “Harry in Seattle writes to us…”

Here’s the interesting thing, though: The day sponsorship messages have to be ten seconds long, and that means 42 syllables. Interesting, huh?

The difference between “smart” and “rational.”

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via Jay Lake:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

Yes // No // Cannot be determined

Answer in the article, and yeah, I got it wrong.

Reposting a comment

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Jim Hines has an interesting post on his blog and LiveJournal about writing to follow a popular trend and, through my own dumbosity, managed to turn it into a discussion of art vs. craft.

Check it out–the other comment threads are interesting.

Anyway, here’s the comment I wrote describing the diff between a craft and an art (because it’s easier than coming up with all new material, that’s why):

In twenty words or less, right?

When you make art, you make a thing that has no other function but to be experienced as art.

When you make “craft”, you may create a thing (like a bookshelf) that can be appreciated as art, but which also has other intrinsic constraints on its function.

To clarify: “intrinsic” is an important word, because the novel I’m writing has to have a length of 90K words, give or take. That’s a constraint imposed by my publisher, but it’s not intrinsic to the form.

Both take tremendous skill, but “I’m not an artist” is reflexive anti-elitism, an assurance that the speaker is regular folk, not one of those flighty effete types. It took a long time for me to shake off my working class attitudes about art and self-identity. Now I’m willing to call myself an artist if I’m forced to, but I make low, pop-cultural art about monsters and face-punching.

Self-identity is weird.

Take a look at this if you have the chance (and don’t skip the comments). It’s interesting stuff about, in part, using writing to solve problems created by the writing.

Jim’s followup, and mine, too, are in the thread.

The new Segway

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This is the new product that will change the way the world exercises!

As far as I can tell, that’s not a joke. It’s a real product.

In lieu of actual content…

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I give you this sad and tender song about GI Joe and Cobra, at the end of the day.

Which is freaking hilarious! I wish I were better at recognizing all the stars doing cameos here.