Look out! Octopus!

9:15am: The wonders of Wikipedia.
From Fin Fang Foom:

"Foom appears in the limited series Nextwave as a pawn of the Beyond Corporation©. He is now back to his original size. Despite having no genitals, he wears purple pants."

From the talk page to the same article:

"This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Buddhism, an attempt to promote better coordination, content distribution, and cross-referencing between pages dealing with Buddhism. Please participate by editing the article Fin Fang Foom, or visit the project page for more details on the projects."

9:00pm: The danger of writing for anthologies.
So, last year, I started selling stories, and as a result, started paying more attention to lists of markets and so on. There was a call for submissions for this one anthology which wanted stories about zombie King Kong. "Ha, ha!" I thought to myself. "What a silly idea for an anthology! I mean, how many stories can you even find in that premise."

Then I wrote one, of course.

Unfortunately, I wrote a thousand word story, and the call for submission had 2500 words as the lower limit. So, I added bits and pieces, and came up with something. Which got rejected, and fair enough.

Unfortunately, I'm left with a Zombie Kong story; in theory, I could keep shopping it around, and maybe get someone who hadn't heard of the anthology (which is most people, I assume--no offense intended to the publisher and editor, but this is not exactly a heavily promoted offering from a major press.) to buy my story.

But, honestly, Zombie Kong is this other guy's idea, and I'm not sure that I want to try and sell a story whose selling point is someone else's idea. Also, it's a thousand words long, so there's really not a whole lot of money on the table here.

So, here you all go: ( Legend of Screen and Stage )

1:15pm: I don't really consider myself an expert, but.
Poking around online in an attempt to avoid writing, I came across an article about the recent European elections in the Guardian.

This bit stood out, for me:

For the past four years, the crisis has culled incumbents without discrimination, from the Republican George Bush and conservative Nicolas Sarkozy to Labour's Gordon Brown and the Spanish Socialist José Luis Zapatero, while the far right has advanced across Europe by preying on anti-migrant insecurities and posing as anti-establishment outsiders.

I realize that not everyone pays that much attentions to foreign elections, and that the US is quite a long ways away from Britain. I also realize that quite a lot has happened since the most recent American elections, and it's unfair of me to expect the details of these transatlantic affairs to stick in people's memories for so long.

And yet, even though it would have interfered with the balance and flow of that paragraph, I cannot help but feel that the author should have noted that George Bush's failure to continue as president after 2008 was not solely because of the state of the economy.

2:51pm: America, and so on.
As promised, we were in the US for a good chunk of April, and now we are back. It was nice to see those of you who we saw, and sorry about missing those of you we didn't get a chance to see. The trip was pretty great; Uriel has gotten interested in chemistry, and I got a new suit. A suit with a vest. It's pretty awesome, and now I need a pocket watch.

Also, on this trip, I sold a couple of stories. One to the Lovecraft eZine, which is forthcoming, and one to Redstone SF, which is now up.

For those of you keeping track at home, which is nobody, this is the forth story that I've sold to a pro market, and the second one to be published. I'm currently trying to work on other things, but unfortunately, there's this video game. . . yes, there is a connection between the story and not being able to think properly because of a video game. No, you do not need to point it out.

And now I must go level up Captain America. For those of you wondering when, exactly, Captain America throws his mighty shield, it is when he reaches level 6. Until then, he cannot throw his mighty shield, so, for the moment, many of those who chose to oppose his shield need not yield. For the moment.

3:03pm: I came to say, I cannot stay, I must be going.
For the last couple of days, I was on a hike up in the North. This was a fundraiser for Tsad Kadima, which works with kids with cerebral palsy, and while it's a worthy cause, I haven't entirely made the connection between "going for a nice walk" and "people should give money to charity." But if you'd like to give them money, I'm certainly not going to stand in your way.

Also, I lost my hat.

In other news, we have about a week to pack our bags and clean for Pesach, because we're leaving in a bit more than a week. And we all have passports, so we should be able to pass through ports, which is an exciting development.

Finally, Uriel was Iron Chef Chen Kenichi for Purim. ( here is proof )

3:08pm: Well, that seems ominous.
One of the things that gets done on Purim is that people give each other presents of food, often horrible junk food.

This year, we got something called "Maya Corn Cones" which doesn't really sound like a food, but that's not my point. My point is that if you look at the packaging, it says, "Keep away from sunlight" in bold letters.

This strikes me as worryingly similar to "do not get wet", or "do not feed after midnight."

In the final analysis, whether or not they're vampires, Maya Corn Cones are tasty, in a highly chemical flavored fashion.

3:50pm: Purim!
For reasons that I do not intend to explore at the moment, Purim is celebrated today in Jerusalem, rather than yesterday, as in most of the rest of the world. And, as I mentioned in 2006, one of the traditions of Purim is to say something that looks like Talmudic exegesis, but which isn't.

So here's this year's edition:

Many times, when you get gifts of food for Purim, you don't necessarily know if the food is dairy or not; as Orthodox Jews don't mix milk and meat, this can be a serious question. So, if you don't have information one way or the other, how do you treat hamentashen (Yiddish for "Haman pockets". In Hebrew, it's "Oznei Haman", or "Haman's ears")?

I'd argue that you should consider them to be dairy, because, as the book of Esther says, "vayimalei Haman cheimah"

(The actual translation there is, "and Haman grew angry," but it's within punning distance of "And Haman was filled with butter.")

2:23pm: Attention, people of New York! Soon I shall walk amongst you!
Assuming that everything works out with passports and travel and so on, Naomi, Uriel, and I are going to be in the New York area from March 29th until April 18th. If people would like to get together and do things, there are many days in that range where things can be done. I'm hoping to do a bunch of tourist stuff with Uriel—specifically, the Children's Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the Intrepid, at least one visit to the main branch of the NYPL, and so on.

For those who are interested in things which do not involve trying to wrangle an excitable child through crowded tourist spots, maybe lunch at one of the kosher Indian places downtown or something at dba, or maybe someone wants to volunteer to host a bad movie night perhaps?

Anyhow, my point is that this is probably the time to arrange things, for those of you with interest and time.

10:28am: Just for the record.
In one of the conversations about discrimination against disabled people that I've read recently, someone said something along the lines of wanting to live in a world where everything about who we are is accepted and celebrated.

I don't know if I've posted about this here, but I've had issues with recurring ulcers; they're mostly under control, but sometimes not.

Anyhow. Should the millennium wished for above come to pass, I'd like to state that I'd rather not have a "you have some problems with your poop" party. If you really feel the need to celebrate that part of who I am, maybe go with a card.

7:44pm: Signs that I am not a normal person
Way to spend a lazy afternoon:

Sit in a comfortable chair, and flip through Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Read the funny bits aloud!

5:06pm: News from a few years ago.
I don't think that I've ever mentioned it here, but there needs to be some record of my greatest achievement in scrabble and scrabble-like games:

There was one time I turned ART into FART and FISTING.

8:22am: Okay, one more.
Definition of putative

putative
adjective
Commonly believed or deemed to be the case; accepted by supposition rather than as a result of proof.
She was the leader of the rebellion.
Few things could be more than the rights you claim to have.

Hey, maybe you could get someone to pay you not to take the word you're defining out of your examples.

8:02am: ?
Definition of teaze

Supplemental Details:Sponsor an extended definition for teaze for as little as $10 per month. Click here to contact us.

Really?

1:45pm: Murder your Darlings.
It's a classic piece of advice, and while it's not for everyone, if you follow it, your prose might gain recognition as lasting as that of the guy who gave that advice, Arthur Quiller-Couch.

1:16pm: Copyfighting!

An Author writes a book, and there his labor ends. His task is done when the book is written. He spends no more labor on ten thousand copies than he spends upon one. A million copies can be made of it, without requiring from him the additional labor of a single hour. Is it perfectly clear, then, that he should receive for his labor a million times as much in one case as in the other? Must one who cannot see clearly that he has earned a million times as much, by way of compensation, be turned over to uncovenanted mercy?

The New York Times, April 24, 1852

9:00am: For those compelled to keep making that one joke.
Newts are amphibians. Lizards are reptiles.

9:55am: Dyspostia
So, here's something I've been thinking about.

Contemporary dystopias tend to follow the following basic format:

In a world wracked with global warming, our foolishness has depleted the world's supply of (Tungsten). As a result (Everyone over fifty) (is hunted for food.)

80s dystopias tended to go:

Largely Japanese megacorporations rule everything, and everyone has to live in decrepit apartments while wearing stylish sunglasses. There's a plot-line about an artificial intelligence, which doesn't actually change anything.

70s tended towards :

There are so many people! People everywhere! We will all live in tiny dormitories, and have to eat (krill), even decent white people, who deserve better. Behold, in sorrow, the world's last (butterfly).

60s tended towards:

There was a nuclear war. Now there are mutants with (psychic powers), who are also ugly. What was once the mighty United States is now a bunch of horrible little countries. (Cheese) is used as currency, and nobody remembers mid-list authors of the 1960s.

50s tended towards:

(Skunks) become giant and mutant! They are unstoppable! Only a (heroic scientist), (plucky reporter) and (small town cop) can save us all!

30s & 40s tended towards:

(Capitalism) is becoming increasingly monstrous. It will crush the nascent hopes of (Communism), which wasn't actually that much better.

I'll freely admit that there aren't sharp borders here. It's been a while since I've seen a classic post-nuclear mutant dystopia, but to some degree, and for some reason, zombies are standing in for giant ants in contemporary creature apocalypse dystopias. Also, if I actively liked reading dystopias, I'd probably be able to make sharper distinctions between the 30s and 40s.

But my point is this—why don't I have a model for a 90s dystopia? I mean, there were dystopias written in the 90s—Snow Crash, or Gun With Occasional Music, and so on—but they don't seem to feel like their own thing, in the way that a 50s movie about a giant mantis is clearly a 50s monster movie, and would be even if you made it today.

8:21pm: What's this? Two posts in one month?
But anyway.

Rather than posting about how I'm not posting, I wanted to say something about the things that I read online which I enjoy, despite not enjoying the things that they're about. There's probably a better way of phrasing that, but it's escaping me at the moment.

Perhaps it will be clearer when I give examples:

http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/

I don't actually like riding bikes. I have an exercise bike which I don't use as often as I should, and that's about it. And yet, I really enjoy reading this blog, despite it being largely about bicycles and the riding thereof. This is partially because the guy writing the blog really does like bicycling, and people writing about stuff they love is interesting even if I don't love the same stuff, partially because he's an amusingly snarky writer, but mainly because he hates pretension almost as much as he loves bicycling.

Which is great, because for one reason or another, pretension and bicycles have become very closely linked in recent years, and Bike Snob can fill me in on important news about that often hilarious intersection. And on general mockery of hipster-ish excess, like everything offered by "Best Made". To quote the snob in question:

you may remember the Best Made Company, whose founder, Peter Buchanan-Smith, paints the handles of $50 Snow & Nealley Hudson Bay Camping Axes and then sells them to complete idiots for $200 (not including the "axe sling," which costs these idiots an additional $195). (. . .)

Consider also Buchanan-Smith's own "axe epiphany:"

Then came the ax epiphany. When Graeme Cameron, a Canadian environmental entrepreneur and Mr. Buchanan-Smith’s best friend from summer camp, came to visit that January, the two embarked on a gastronomic adventure to prepare Mr. Cameron’s birthday dinner — a whole day spent gathering ingredients in Manhattan, like $200 worth of wagyu. But when they realized they wanted to cook that pricey steak on an open grill, they were stymied.

I find it simultaneously comical and horrifying that Best Made Company bedazzled ax(e) owner Matt Dorfman of Brooklyn, NY, "environmental entrepreneur" Graeme Cameron of Canada, and glorified fingerpainter Mr. Buchanan-Smith cannot among them muster the wherewithal to simply ignite some charcoal and cook some meat on top of it. It must be incredibly crippling to be "stymied" by your own pretense to this extent, and hopefully liberal arts institutions like Sara Lawrence and Oberlin address the problem by offering degrees in Modern Grilling.

So, anyway, if you like that, there's more there.

Next,

Unskippable

Mystery Science Theater 3000 has had something of a peculiar afterlife. The show itself ran 11 seasons, with several cast changes; when it was done, various cast members went on to do several different projects based on the idea of making fun of other things by talking while those other things are going. Well, and there's the guy who owns the shows trademarks and so own, who went on to make terrible cartoons which everyone in the world ignored. But I digress.

My point is, of all the successors to MST3K, the one I enjoy the most isn't actually by any of the former cast members. It's Unskippable, which mocks video game introductory cinematics. Part of this is because the cut scenes are short, which means that you don't get long periods of nothing funny to say, and part of it is because video game cinematics are profoundly stupid, even more so than movies. But mainly it's because those guys are just plain funny.

Because this is in video format, I can't quote quite so easily, but here's a recent episode which I liked.

Now, you might be wondering why this is a thing about a thing I don't like. After all, I like video games. And you'd be right, in a way. But the thing is that at the moment, I don't have a gaming console, and I'm running Linux on my desktop, and I don't have much room in the budget for new games anyway. So the sort of games I'm playing are mostly what are called "casual" games, which is to say, games which might be entertaining, but which are as far as you can get from the sort of spectacle that Unskippable is mocking, while still being video games.

Similarly, Grognardia is about tabletop roleplaying games, and I like tabletop roleplaying. However, his focus is on "old school" RPGs, particularly first edition Dungeons and Dragons, with occasional digressions into Traveller and Gamma World and so on, and I honestly don't care that much about what game I'm playing, let alone which edition. Which isn't to say that I prefer free-form roleplaying to using rules; I like the structure that rules give. But so long as the rules aren't obviously broken or excessively complicated, that's not the part of the game that interests me.

Despite that, I'm interested in what Grognardia has to say about rules; this is stuff that he cares about, and while his preference for old-timey D&D is a little peculiar, its still something that I'm interested in reading. here he talks about an alternate set of rules for unarmed combat, presented in Dragon magazine in the mid-80s. I freely admit that this is of no interest to sane people anywhere, but in addition to finding it interesting, I cannot help but agree with:

I find it baffling that unarmed combat rules so often wind up being much more complicated than armed combat. Why is it that we can accept that all it takes to adjudicate an armored fighting man's attack against an opponent is a 1D20 roll compared to a chart, followed by a damage roll if successful but we demand saving throws and percentage chances and so forth if he wants to throw a punch or wrestle someone to the ground?"

This is a pattern that I've noticed myself, and which I find equally baffling. Also, "why so many pole-arms?" but that's a different subject.

3:37pm: SOPA/PIPA
Y'know, it sure is a coincidence that the one bill which happens to be about something people care about turns out to have been written by legislators who actively refuse to understand the issues involved, and who are merely putting down what a lobbying bloc of large corporations has paid for, in as open a display of venality as something from the era of rotten boroughs in British politics.

I'm sure that the rest of what Congress does isn't like that at all.

3:31pm: It is up.
I'm not sure if this was my last publication of 2011 or my first one for 2012, but A Demon of Almansol is online at Abyss & Apex.

In other news, I got three rejections yesterday, which is a new record.

9:31am: Year in Review
So, 2011 was a pretty good year for me, publication wise.

To summarize:
In 2010, my publication history went like this:

"Rumor of Wings", Abyss & Apex.

In 2011, it's:

"Memory Bugs", Daily Science Fiction
"Justice Like a Mighty River", Electric Spec
"A Letter from Northern Niaro", Ideomancer
"The Chronicle of Aliyat son of Aliyat" in Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
"The Whitlow Affair" TQR
"The Difficulties of the Eight Quarters" in Assassins: A Clash of Steel Anthology (Forthcoming)
"Server Issues", Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (Forthcoming)
"Foreign Gods", Darwin's Evolutions (Forthcoming)
"If the Stars Reverse their Courses, If the Rivers Run Back from the Sea", The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Forthcoming)
"A Demon of Almansol" Abyss & Apex (Forthcoming)

This seems like moving in the right direction to me.

11:08am: Writer's Block: Checking it twice


I'm on his Jew list.

10:08pm: It seems like I post this every couple of years.
( But anyhow )

12:48pm: Words of Wisdom.

Writers for the Press will do well to heed these hints, viz:--use black ink; clear, good paper, written on one side only, in letters large and plain enough to be read like print; and, if you suspect defects in style, grammar, or punctuation, get a friend to correct it, and do not call upon the editor to do it. He has no time, and it is not his business.

The New York Times, April 21, 1852

12:12pm: The wit and wisdom of google.
"Teddy Bear Picnic" + creepy

407,000 results

So very true.