politics

Randomness for 4/30

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1) 35 Fantastic Lego Ads.

2) Every Time Magazine cover in one image. Warning: big file

3) The Sartre Star Wars. Video. via Tor.com. The YouTube user’s other videos are pretty good, especially “Be A Good Sport, Sport.”

4) Now for a big change. Gorgeous… and I do mean gorgeous time lapse photography from a mountain in Spain. Video. Really amazing.

5) It’s been a while since I dropped politics into one of these link salads, but here’s one: Three important health care graphs. This is why I support effectiveness studies, which Republicans oppose: we’re already spending too much, and we don’t take the time to find out what works and what doesn’t. The first thing we should be cutting from our health care spending is a treatment that doesn’t work. Plus, I happen to believe we can learn something from the good examples of others.

6) Vintage condom posters.

7) This is awesome, and they need help from book collectors.

It’s funny because it’s not happening to me

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Quick timeline: DC does a story where Superman decides to renounce his U.S. citizenship so that he can do good on an international scale without being seen as a tool of U.S. government. Comics Alliance does a story on it. Drudge Report links to the CA story.

Right wing freakout begins in the comments section.

Descendent of Ancient English Tyrants to Wed

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Tom the Dancing Bug

Let the rage begin

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Here’s a news article that encapsulates so much of what is wrong with my country. Parents discover that high school English teacher writes racy novels.

Let’s start with the way it was written. The byline is “Staff” so I can only assume no one had a keyboard to type out individual sentences, since this reads like they tried to cut and paste the article from outraged emails. Maybe they could only use their mouse with the right click?

Let’s continue with the article itself: Why do these parents care what their teacher is doing in her free time? Times are tough and people need to make ends meet. If the woman has a second job, let her work.

Second, who cares if she’s teaching high school during the day? Is she reading erotica to her students in class? Is she pointing out the best pron sites on Tumblr (as opposed to letting the kids find that themselves)? No? Then STFU. If it bothers you that your kids know their teacher writes erotica, don’t tell your kids. It’s called having common sense.

What’s more, I remember being a teenager. I didn’t need any encouragement to think about sex in the classroom. I was a teenager! Thinking about sex was pretty much the only thing I was competent at.

What’s more, who cares if teens think about sex? Really, do you think you can control them that much? Quick note to those parents: When your teen rides in a car looking out the window, they’re thinking about sex. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s healthy. It’s what they’re supposed to do.

But of course I expect this poor woman to lose her job, since kicking around teachers is the new national sport.

Now I have to go back to this thing I’m supposed to be revising.

Randomness for 4/21

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1) “Speed-climbing” the Eiger. This dude is nuts but the footage is gorgeous. Video.

2) “You will ripen with my child, faerie girl.” I don’t like to take digs at romance novels because so many people do it out of ignorance and misogyny, and I think the genre is unfairly maligned. Still, these excerpts from bad romance novels are pretty damn funny.

3) Curious to see what a professional comic book script looks like? Greg Rucka helps you out.

4) DIY Bacon Roses. via Jay Lake.

5) Ten Important Tax Charts.

6) Ten Deadly DIY Gadgets. The “flame gloves” pretty much qualify you as a Batman villain, and the crossbow that shoots machetes would be perfect for a zombie apocalypse, but it’s the car you can drive with an iPhone that really scares the hell out of me. via Jay Lake

7) An interactive map showing how much oil each country produced over the last fifty years. Just click “play.”

Randomness for 4/5

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1) So you want to get published? A flowchart. Is it just me, or are flowcharts made of awesome?

2) “Don’t you have any vegetarian meat?”

3) A big discussion on selling stolen IP in the Kindle format.

4) Advice for writers who suffer the pangs of jealousy.

5) Nerf guns painted and modified to have that steampunk look.

6) How slavery really ended in the U.S.A.

7) Black Gate is having a sale on their back issues. I have stories in issue #2, #3, and #10.

Randomness for 3/30

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1) Canadian politics made fun by nitpicking about monsters. Via James Nicoll.

2) Shit my students write.

3) Jon Stewart on class warfare, without ever mentioning class. Video.

4) This is genuinely awesome. It’s better than GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD.

5) This writer’s evening is nothing at all like mine. How to be a social writer. via James Enge

6) Are these the best D&D adventures ever?

7) Sixty completely unusable stock photos. This is hilarious wtf-ery, but it will take a while to load. Open it up in a tab and do something else for a while, then come back to it. Seriously, people, I can’t pick the worst one (okay, I can: it’s the blackface one).

About a video game I have never played

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“You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.”
— David Galder, Bioware employee (I don’t know his job title) (eta: he’s the lead writer for Dragon Age 2)

Randomness for 3/26

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1) How great entrepreneurs think.

2) A flowchart guide to the Affordable Care Act.

3) Ten supposedly sexy super-heroine costumes that really aren’t.

4) Every new social media offering, now online. (This is pretty funny, and it even includes a certain cat)

5) Author Ryk Spoor responds to my hypothetical vampire child question of a few days ago.

6) I know there are a lot of people who don’t like Rachel Ray, but I think everyone will accept that she deserves a comma or two here.

7) J.K. Rowling’s next project, courtesy of collegehumor.com

Here I am

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It’s after 12 noon, PST, and my son is struggling to wake up on the couch. Thank you, clock change. As much as I appreciate the energy savings that comes from switching the times we get up during the long daylight hours of the year, we just spent a month trying to adjust my son’s sleep schedule so he can be awake in the morning and not sitting up, alone, in the dark of night trying to sleep. He’s described himself as “a kid with weird sleep problems,” and we were so friggin’ close to settling him in to his new schedule.

Can’t we just skip our “fall back” next November? Hell, half the time I wish we could just all switch over to GMT–do absolutely need to have my lunch at 12:30 pm rather than 8:30 pm? I don’t see why.

In other news, I’m sitting here in Seattle listening to my city officials hit the snooze button on earthquake preparedness yet again. Every time a big quake hits somewhere on the Ring of Fire (or a minor quake hits here, as it did in Feb of 2001) the news starts talking about “waking up” and “alarms” but of course nothing was done. There’s no prestige associated with seismic retrofitting–instead our local governments are fighting over a “deep bore tunnel” under downtown Seattle as a replacement for the elevated viaduct highway.

Meanwhile, I’m living in an apartment in a converted house–built with cinderblocks (and uninsulated, too, the bastards)–and I have no idea how well it would stand up to a real earthquake. Luckily, Admiralty Inlet would blunt the force of a tsunami before it reached Seattle itself, but the quake itself could be a nightmare.

And what the hell can I do about either of these things?