The time for equal marriage rights? It’s passed. Read this. Not even a durable power of attorney and a living will was enough to overcome prejudice, and a woman died alone without a visit from her children or her partner.
Seriously, read it. I have my ballot on the table behind me. I’m going to fill it out right now.
1) E.E. Knight explains “modeling” and bookshelf presence. There’s always something knew to learn about writing and selling books.
2) Honda unveils Segway-like unicycle. Tremendously awesome and tremendously uncool at the same time. via Genreville
3) Buy your own secluded Bond-villain hideaway! If this had been built in the woods instead of the desert, I’d be showing it to my wife. via seawasp.
4) The art and science of boiling perfect eggs. via Ezra Klein
5) Will climate change mean the near-extinction of basic food crops?
6) Here’s your word of the day: Procrasturbation: to waste time by pleasuring oneself. via Savage Love. Also discussed in that linked article is the ethics of sex with zombies.
Yesterday after taking my son on our usual swimming trip, we bought ourselves bus transfers and headed out to a few local bookstores to sign copies of Child of Fire.
Details and narrative behind the cut, along with a little talk about public transportation. Continue reading
“Please don’t scare us any more.”
1) A new type of cloud is recognized. And it’s beautiful.
2) Manly men = Straight men, now and in the past? Not so.
3) Cops have their water hoses, but what do protesting farmers have?
4) Paul Krugman answers readers’ questions about the economy.
5) Facebook status updates from comic book superheroes. So damn funny I can’t stand it.
There’s something I alluded to in my Big Idea essay that I meant to expand upon. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit the theme of the essay, so I’m inflicting it on you here.
Writers, do not make your vampires cringe away from/burn at the touch of crosses and crucifixes.
Why? Well, let’s talk about honor killings. Seriously.
In Jordan, as much as one-third of the murders of women are honor killings. Women who are raped are not treated as victims–they’re treated like criminals and killed.
In our own culture, we’re still trying to get past the idea that women are at least partly-responsible for sexual assaults against them. We still still have people who want to what a woman was wearing or what she did to cause the assault. It’s taking a long time to excise that attitude from our culture, but I like to think that most people, if they stop to think about it, understand that you don’t blame the victim.
And here’s why I think these two topics are related: You (man or woman) are walking home from work at night when someone jumps out of an alley, drags you in and kills you by draining your blood. Or maybe you (man or woman) meet someone sexy and interesting and decide to invite them back to your place; once there, things go way too far and you end up the victim of an attack.
And how does God treat you afterwards? God burns you every time you touch one of his symbols.
I know, it’s a trivial thing, really. It’s a silly vampire story, and it isn’t a patch on the real misery real victims endure. Still, it’s a relic of an older, awful time, when crime victims were held at least partly culpable for their victimization. It enshrines a culture where the highest, most exalted being repudiates someone because of a thing they had no control over, because of a choice and an action that fell on someone else.
It turns God into a blame-the-victim asshole. Really, the Supreme Deity really ought to get his public relations department to work on this.
If I weren’t an atheist, I’d be seriously annoyed. As an atheist, I consider it simply inconsistent characterization and a cultural relic of awful times. Also as an atheist, I have to admit that, while I consider vampires dangerous and scary, I don’t think of them as “evil.” Certainly not more evil than a shark or a tiger–they’re hungry, and people are their prey. As soon as The Lord starts turning away crocodiles with the power of faith, I’ll accept it with vampires.
So, God=one of the good guys. In theory, at least, right? Then maybe he should stop setting fire to crime victims who come too near him in our stories.
1) Entrepreneurship and health care. “You’ve heard of learned helplessness? This is learned corporatism.”
2) Giant stuffed microbes. Just in case you wanted to cuddle up to the swine flu.
3) Want to receive free advance reader copies of Del Rey books to review on your blog? Fill out this form.
4) Limits of human endurance: in the muscles or in the brain? Crazy-interesting, and my wife will love this. via Jay Lake
5) Do you guys like these link roundups? Anything you want less/more of?
1) qotd: “I don’t mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.” — James Nicoll
2) Best Fiction Generator Ever.
3) Reverse image search. Pretty cool.
4) What are the effects of killing all the pigs in Egypt? via Jay Lake
5) “Writers want to write short fiction and they’re going to keep finding ways to get them to readers. Writers seem willing to keep writing, even in the face of comparative commercial indifference.” Short fiction as loss-leaders for novels? As hobbyist activity? via matociquala
6) Real estate agent sends listing to sf/f lit agent for two and a half million dollar mountaintop retreat, because of course her millionaire genre writers will want to snap that right up. I wish she’d linked to the listing; I’ll bet Castle would look great perched on a rough wooden bench, staring thoughtfully into the morning mist.
6a) How to get rich as a writer? (geniusofevil, skip this part) Donald Maas’s free e-book has some interesting conclusions about the things writers do and don’t do to make a six-figure salary. I can’t help but wonder if he’d get the same results if he ran that survey again.
7) International Beard and Moustache Championships. Honestly, some of these make me a little sick.
8) Homes with cats 8 times more likely to contain mrsa. Not that it isn’t totally worth the risk!!! More interesting are the things listed that do not increase the germ risk.
People often say we can’t afford to reform our health care system. Let me throw out a data point, courtesy of the new intranet site at work that lets employees look up our own benefit info.
My health insurance, which covers three people in our family, costs approximately $20,000 a year.
That’s over 1600 a month. Now, that’s not all “employee contribution.” That’s my contribution and my employer’s added together, and that’s how it should be calculated–those fees are part of my compensation, even though they’re going into Great West’s pocket, and not mine.
Of course that doesn’t include my deductibles, my co-pays, or the things my insurance doesn’t cover. When the pediatric triage nurse told me to take my son to the ER, I went, even though our health insurance “discourages” that by making us pay way more for that sort of care. (That particular day was over $300–what the heck, the kid is worth it.)
That figure doesn’t include dental, by the way. It also doesn’t include vision. You know what else it isn’t? It isn’t the “buy-up” plan at work. I’m not getting the gold-plated coverage; I’m getting the lowest level of basic care they offer.
Twenty grand a year, just for insurance. We’re already paying a fortune.
America can do better.
1) Tron light cycles build out of Lego. Pretty cool, but it’s not something for my son–he’s never seen the movie.
2) Strange and spectacular sinks/wash basins. I expect you think I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, link-wise, but these are pretty amazing. I want the Art Ceram, myself. via marthawells
3) Newsweek does a story called The Real Cause of Obesity: It’s not gluttony. It’s genetics. Why our moralizing misses the point. The comment section, as you might expect, is a disaster of dim-witted moralizing. “Mr. Friedman is not very well informed. Genetics is only a very small factor in obesity. The role that it plays is that as a person eats junk food, is sedentary in their overall activities, it weakens the genetic code and gets passed on. But not only do the genes get passed on, the bad habits get passed on to the offspring and the genetic code continues to get weaker. ”
4) Sexual assault prevention tips that are guaranteed to work when employed correctly. via james_nicoll and theweaselking
5) One thing I struggle with in my writing is how to show mental states of many characters in a first-person POV. This TED talk about the development of the part of the brain that recognizes other people’s mental states doesn’t address my struggles specifically, but it’s pretty interesting.
6) You know who wants more Americans to have government-run insurance? Doctors. Yeah, doctors complain about Medicare reimbursement rates, but private insurance is an even bigger headache.