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Five Things Make A Post

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First, my Father’s Day was pretty great. I asked to get no gifts and didn’t receive any but the cards were wonderful. We also went out to brunch. My wife is pretty cool on the idea of going to a restaurant for breakfast–and my son actively hates it–so this is something I sorta love but get to do only once a year. And yeah, I ate more than I should have.

We went some distance to a little place called Mulleady’s, mainly on the rule that we could get things we never make at home, like blood pudding, boxty, scotch eggs, and other things we didn’t order. Sadly, marrow wasn’t on the bfast menu, but maybe another time. One downside of going there is that it really doesn’t many people before it becomes uncomfortably loud.

Second, you may have seen news articles everywhere recently claiming that bike share programs increase head injuries. They’re wrong. Head injuries fell after bike share programs were introduced, but they didn’t fall as fast as other kinds of injuries. Therefore, according to the media, head injuries rose because, among those injured, a greater percentage of them had head injuries.

It’s statistical fuckery. To quote the linked article: “A more critical view would be that the researchers went looking for evidence that bikeshare programs are dangerous, and upon failing to find any, cherry-picked a relatively unimportant sub-trend and trumpeted it as decisive finding.”

My wife rides almost every day and she always wears her helmet. When I rode (back in my office job days) I wore a helmet all the time, too. We also have lights, reflective vests, and all the safety gear that people make fun of. But it’s important to remember that nothing makes the streets safer for cyclists than having a whole lot of cyclists on the streets.

Third, I’ve sent out copies of The Great Way in hopes of getting blurbs for them, and the first two have come back. Both are wonderful and make me feel like dancing around my apartment singing “I Feel Pretty.”

Fourth, I’m currently at work revising my pacifist urban fantasy, and never in my life have I had so much trouble making headway. My revisions are creeping along at a pace barely better than my first draft days. Stuff is difficult, you guys.

Fifth, I bought the first edition of CHILL (by Pacesetter) way back when it first came out. I bought the second edition enthusiastically, and when I made that six-figure deal for Child of Fire, I rewarded myself by buying up all the Chill books I didn’t already own.

Even though the game is pretty much unplayable.

Pacesetter’s first ed. was fun and had simple game mechanics. Mayfair’s second edition improved on things, but still couldn’t deal with Fear checks. You could prep a haunted house, prep the monster that would be there, arrange the clues the players needed to find or the person they needed to save, but what you couldn’t do was predict who would pass a Fear check. If all the players made it, the monster would not be able to stand against them. If only one made it, that player would have to face a villain designed to challenge a party while his compatriots ran screaming into the streets.

It was impossible to create a balanced confrontation, because you could never tell how many players would make that Fear check (the first thing to happen in every encounter), so you didn’t know which would stay in the scene.

And let’s be honest, any time a GM takes control of a player it sort of sucks, especially if you make the run in terror.

So, none of the games I tried to get off the ground ever went anywhere. My friends had no interest in horror games, since they’re pretty much the opposite of jokey power fantasies, and the only truly successful Chill game I ever ran was with my six-year-old son, and it was one session.

Still, it was great fun to read, and now I’m foolishly excited to see that, after a couple of false starts, there’s a third edition on the way. The previous attempt at a third edition got as far as informal play tests, which I took part in until assholes drove me away, but I’m hopeful for this. I don’t even know anything about the game, but I’m foolishly hopeful.

Not everyone celebrates Father’s Day, nor should they.

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C.C. Finlay talks about terrible fathers.

Let’s not make everyone celebrate. And let’s not ever talk about “all dads.” That’s a category without meaning. To everyone who doesn’t celebrate Father’s Day, to everyone who avoids it because it brings up too many painful memories, this post is for you.

Randomness for 6/12

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1) 20 Terrible Real Estate Photos. It’s hard to believe some of these are real. via Beth Pearson

2) Man Builds DIY ‘Hidden Pool’ In His Backyard That Disappears Under a Grass-Covered Top When Not in Use.

3) Man trolls Craigslist ad searching for “disguisable” weapons.

4) The Holy Taco Church. It’s funny, but I just sold a story to John Joseph Adams about a (mobile) taco church for his anthology of sff kickstarters. You think you’re being outlandish….

5) Tracking Detroit’s Decay Through Google Time Machine.

6) A review of Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas.

7) Know your double. <-- Funny

Randomness for 5/27

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1) A comparison of Zulu and Filipino stick fighting. Video.

2) The Oatmeal on the wonderfulness of the Tesla Model S electric car.

3) Five Details They Cut From My Season Of The Biggest Loser. We all knew this show was complete shit, but it’s even worse than I thought.

4) What happens when engineers own dogs. Video.

5) The 10 Commandments of Typography.

6) San Francisco “real estate magnate” hides $100 bills around city and leaves clues to their location via twitter account.

7) “In my view, the parties do not need a judge; what they need is a rather stern kindergarten teacher” Spiteful upper-class twits drive each other wild.

How to recognize when someone is drowning 2014

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Summer is about to start, so it’s time to repost my annual warning for 2014:

How to recognize when someone is drowning.

It’s not what you think. Before you take your kids or loved ones into the water, read this article.

“Edit” is not synonymous with “fix”

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I just saw the umpteenth iteration of “If only this had been edited!” which I’m not linking to because why and also because it’s always and everywhere. You can’t swing a dead pixel without hitting some forum comment lamenting that There Are Errors Where There Shouldn’t Be.

So.

The verb “edit,” when it’s applied to text, does not mean “fix.” I don’t care what the dictionary says, it doesn’t. It means “change.”

Obviously, yes, we hope the changes we make will be improvements. We’re trying to fix things when they’re broken, correct inconsistencies, smooth out sentence structures, fix verb tenses, switch out that off-key word with a clearer one, whatever. Edits are an attempt at improving things.

However, sometimes an edit creates a conflict with something else in the text. Sometimes it’s just a flat out error. What’s more, as a reader we can’t tell if an error was added in the first draft and missed in revisions or if it was added on the very last pass through.

Hey, mistakes happen, even when you edit.

Randomness for Mother’s Day

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1) Map of boys names from around the world. I didn’t see one for girls.

2) Huge 3D printer built ten one-story buildings in one day out of construction waste and cement. The video is cool.

3) Sony wages a brutal 35 year war with record producer over their refusal to pay royalties.

4) New Zealand artists create 3D Sand pictures.

5) Movie Scripts Ranked by Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Hey, the higher the reading level of the script, the more critically-lauded you’d expect it to be, right?

6) What are the most overrated and underrated movies?

7) How to tell if you’re reading a gothic, an infographic.

About Those “Big Name” Writers…

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Last Friday, a funny conversation popped up on Twitter. It started with Kameron Hurley, when she tweeted this:

Click through to read the whole thing, but there was also this:

I think it’s worth saying that science fiction and fantasy is a small, disparate field, even on the internet. Those writers whose names you see on popular blog posts or online articles, or who have award nominations, or several thousand Twitter followers? You might be surprised by how much they struggle getting their books out there. Getting noticed, convincing readers to try their work instead of that other author’s, racking up enough sales to keep going and maybe, just maybe someday earning enough that all those hours of writing pay off at something like minimum wage.

Sometimes I think of the internet as a huge cave complex with innumerable caverns. Where I am standing, it may seem crowded with people, and many of the voices I can hear seem so big they echo off the walls, but people just one cavern over have never heard of any of us and don’t care a whit for the drama that sucks up all of our time. And beyond that cavern is another and another, all filled with people that we can’t reach.

The U.S. has a celebrity culture, which seems to be spreading beyond our borders, that encourages folks to assume that “well-known” somehow means “powerful” or “successful.” I’m just saying it’s not so, not with writers. A footprint that might seem large to an individual is probably smaller than you think in real terms.

Anyway, Kameron Hurley has a cool series you should check out, and so does Tobias Buckell. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, you should. That’s how Big Name Authors are made.

Randomness for 5/1

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1) The LEVERAXE! which twists in your hand to split wood faster. It’s science!

2) Was the drop in crime caused by unleaded gasoline?

3) Orion, The Masked Man. The singer, not the comic book character.

4) How to make a “sick edit” with mountain bikes. I don’t even know much about mountain bike videos, but I learn a lot from parodies.

5) Is “mankind” the right word to use when you refer to all human beings? Scholars weigh in.

6) German man builds a “web shooter.” This is very similar to the “mini-railgun” ranged weapon my buddy gave to his Champions martial artist years ago.

7) Lip sync battle between Jimmy Fallon and Emma Stone. Video. This is just flat hilarious and amazing.

Do streetlights make traffic less safe?

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Occasionally, I’ll see an article or post suggesting that traffic would move faster and be safer if we would only remove our street lights and stop signs. Let people self-regulate, the claim goes, and not only will they be more careful, they’ll get where they’re going sooner.

Well, here’s a time-lapse video of an intersection in the heart of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. No traffic control, lots of scary moments.

Note, according to wikipedia, Ethiopia’s traffic fatalities per 100,000 people is slightly below the world average.