1) A Book by its Gorey Cover. And Part 2.
2) That Old Spice “I’m on a horse” commercial–and an interview with the guys who made it. CGI or no? via madrobins
4) “It’s like MOBY DICK, right, but with a white dragon!“ I’d better get started on my ROBO-MEO AND POD-PERSON JULIET story, quick!
5) A restaurant dessert like no other. I don’t even know what most of this is, but I want it.
6) Twilight invades every aspect of our culture.
7) The Brad Pitt Guy, Part Last. With bonus note-arguing.
Here’s the “Safe For Work” version–an article in the NY Times describing the program. Short version: it’s social networking with complete strangers. You and your webcam get onto video chat. You click “Next”. A completely random person from anywhere in the world appears in their webcam image. You chat with this stranger.
Of course, you could be looking at a guy in a cat suit (see link above). Or a naked fat guy. Or some dude’s penis. Or a woman sitting on the toilet. Or someone in a freaky mask.
Here’s the NSFW version, with screencaps of unlikely/unfortunate/basically weird interactions between strangers.
Seriously, that’s NSFW. Don’t even open that link with kids in the room.
1) Part two of the screenwriter stalker story! with bonus Brad Pitt at a urinal. And here’s Part 3. (Here’s part 1, in case you missed it.)
2) More OKCupid data crunching: this time about “older” women.
3) Remember the American version of Godzilla from 1998? Well, an early draft of the script was written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the guys who wrote PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, SHREK, MASK OF ZORRO and ALADDIN, among others. Although their script was very different from the version that was filmed and released, some elements were kept and they ended up with credit. Sometime in the last 12 years, they posted their final draft online so people could compare the work they did with the finished movie. Well, someone has taken it upon themselves to turn that script into a webcomic. It’s not finished, but it is pretty cool.
4) Hot dog salad dressing??? 20 Unholy Recipes, Dishes So Awful We Had To Make Them. via Jay Lake
5) An insider’s guide to writing for Mills & Boon. Interesting stuff.
6) That “Ten Rules For Writing” article in the Guardian Part one, Part two. Those are fun to read, even the ones I disagree with.
I was about to post a link to a one-star review in honor of John Scalzi’s latest post on the subject, but I see I already have, way back in November. Ah, hell.
So instead, I’ll post this: The book I’m reading is The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. It’s an interesting book–excellent in a lot of ways, and mildly disappointing in others. I get the impression it’s made for readers with buttons in different places than I have.
But that’ll have to wait until after I finish reading it. What I wanted to mention was a scene about two-thirds in where Protagonist’s Best Friend is talking to Screwed-Up Protagonist about his screwed-upness. SUP has a Mysterious Terrible Event in his past that has him acting like a contemptuous jerk throughout the book, and PBF takes the brunt of it. Eventually, PBF says this:
I read these books on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they described you pretty smack-on.
And I was immediately thrown out of the story. My brain went straight to “Author did research. Research in book” and suddenly it was like I was smelling plastic flowers.
Which isn’t fair to the author, because the scene is completely earned and totally in character, but who ever said reading is fair? It was a clunker moment, and it hurt. I’ll want to write more about this book later.
Let me wrap up with this: After I wrote my “Review-down” post on Saturday night, I started feeling pretty rotten. Wisely, I announced this to my family and went to bed at 10. By 4 am, I was up again, thanks to muscle aches and a sore throat. I gargled with Listerine, took some Tylenol and played Meebling until the drugs kicked in (no link to Meebling, because your life is made of time, and both are so very precious). Then it was back to bed until–no kidding–ten am when my wife dragged me out of bed. Sleep! How good to see you again!
I still feel sorta awful, and I’m going to see if my good buddy Bed Rest can do anything about that.
Independent economic analysts–organizations unaffiliated with the White House or the national Democratic party–have put forward their conclusions on the federal stimulus bill.
It has worked, and will continue to work.
Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.
But those aren’t the sound bites you hear in the media, are they?
First: Andrew Sullivan points out that Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime in a recent interview.
In fact, the attorney general of the United States is legally obliged to prosecute someone who has openly admitted such a war crime or be in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture. For Eric Holder to ignore this duty subjects him too to prosecution. If the US government fails to enforce the provision against torture, the UN or a foreign court can initiate an investigation and prosecution.
These are not my opinions and they are not hyperbole. They are legal facts. Either this country is governed by the rule of law or it isn’t. Cheney’s clear admission of his central role in authorizing waterboarding and the clear evidence that such waterboarding did indeed take place means that prosecution must proceed.
Cheney himself just set in motion a chain of events that the civilized world must see to its conclusion or cease to be the civilized world. For such a high official to escape the clear letter of these treaties and conventions, and to openly brag of it, renders such treaties and conventions meaningless.
Not that anything will be done about it in this country. A former Republican can confess to war crimes on TV and nothing happens to him, but Obama administration has to respond to frivolous birther lawsuits.
Second: Here’s an essential breakdown of the insanity of the current American political situation. You can skip the lengthy analysis that comes after the five steps–it only reiterates the opening in more depth.
But I still find it astonishing that the DC media continue to insist that Democrats must do more to reach out to an opposition party that has refused to abandon discredited ideas and are determined to obstruct governance. I also find it hard to believe that the media keeps calling this a “center-right country” when it simply isn’t true.
1) Garry Marshal, keeping it classy: “But two things I’m sure audiences all over the world understand: prostitutes and love.”
2) [Broken link deleted]
4) I’m proud to say I fit within nine of the categories on this sign, or I would have in the past. How many can you claim?
5) Now for something equally stupid but much less hurtful, a thoughtful dissection of the infamous first edition Fiend Folio. Here’s part two. I have a bit of a D&D theme this week.
6) Real life is cooler than fiction could ever be.
7) Christopher Bird on the Captain America/Tea Party kerfuffle.
While skimming around Scalzi’s blog, I found a link to this post by Patrick Rothfuss about advice for aspiring writers, along with a note by John saying he agrees. I recommend clicking through and reading it (if you want) but the Readers Digest version is that aspiring writers should live somewhere cheap so they have plenty of time to write.
One of the places Rothfuss mentions is Seattle, my own adopted hometown, as though people would need to work 70-hour weeks to survive, and when would those city folk do their writing, huh? When?
Well, hey, I was an aspiring writer in Seattle for almost two decades and I never worked a 70-hour week in my life. At first, I shared an apartment for several months, crashing on a friend’s couch. That was back in ’89-90. Then we rented a house–a thousand bucks a month split four/five ways, depending who had come and who had gone.
Then my wife and I moved in together back in ’94. We’ve lived in the same apartment since then, with only a couple of minor rent increases.
Yeah, on one hand we’re lucky. On another we’re typical. We decided to live cheaply and we have. We don’t own a car. We just cancelled our cable. We don’t own a cell phone or an x-box, and if my wife were more tech-savvy we’d be all over Skype. My wife walks to the supermarket with a cart and carries our groceries home. I ride the bus to work (which is less than 30-minutes away, by design). My wife and I both have part-time jobs (if you don’t count my writing, which I don’t for this discussion). We work three days, homeschool the other three.
I don’t say this to crow about my virtue, such as it is. It’s really not a matter of virtue. It’s about choices. Living in a city means I can pinch pennies that non-urbanites can’t. It also means that I have access to public services that make it possible to live poor. The downtown bus that goes near my apartment is considered to run on a meager schedule, but that only means it passes by every 45 minutes. And if I take it the other way, I can ride to one of the largest parks in the city.
And that doesn’t even touch on our library system here, which is wonderful despite the belt-tightening that’s been ongoing.
You know what else helps? Living wages. The median wage in Southcentral Wisconson non-metropolitan areas is less than $13.50 an hour. In Seattle, it’s nearly twenty bucks. Yeah, it’s balanced by a higher cost of living, but there are ways to make that money go farther.
Above all that, you have museums, concerts, galleries, independent bookstores, and people. Lots and lots of people to meet.
What I’m saying isn’t that Rothfuss is wrong (actually, I’ll say that here: “He’s wrong”), it’s that you don’t need to run off to Small Town, USA to have time for your writing. You don’t need to work 70-hour weeks (or even 60- or even 40- hour weeks) to survive out here. You just have to want it.
Now, once you have a writing contract and are making your pennies from your books, that might be the time to run off to the hills and live cheap on your advances–if you can give up all those libraries and museums.
Things have been pretty busy lately. I’m finishing up the galleys for Game of Cages and itching to get back to Man Bites World. Not to mention coming up with a new title for the latter. (I came up with one I really, really liked, but it turns out to be the title of a pair of unrelated-to-each-other non-fiction books, one of which is forty years old and still in print. ::shrugs::)
So, busy. And that means I haven’t had time or mental energy to follow important news stories. I haven’t looked at a single image or video of the devastation in Haiti. I haven’t sat down and teased out the differing reasons Portugal, Spain and Greece are struggling with economic collapse. And I haven’t been following the renewed Green Movement protests in Iran.
I have had the emotional resources for more minor stories: The Amazon.com/Macmillan confrontation exploded all over my blog list, and I stuck with that story throughout the week. And yeah, it was important to the people involved, but not Haiti-important–the stakes in the conflict were not going to send me into a fit of misery. (And let’s not get started on the way Democrats, including Obama, have fucked up on health care reform.)
But still, we can’t shut our eyes to the rest of the world, which is why I wanted to post this: Marc Lynch on the latest Green Movement protests in Iran. It appears that regime change in Iran is a long, long shot at this point. The government has consolidated its hold on the country through force of arms and the shutdown of communications technology, and there’s not much we can do about it besides what we’re already doing.