(1) A Tokyo department store is offering a $91,000 solid gold figure of the alien Baltan, a villainous monster from Japan’s superhero Ultraman TV series. The perfect accessory to go with the 2007 Hugo base, except none of the winners I know can write the check!
(2) Stephen Fabian, among the most gifted illustrators ever, and whose professional career was capped by multiple Hugo nominations and a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (2006), has put his gallery online. StephenFabian.com contains 500 drawings and paintings that he did for fan and professional publications beginning in 1965. Fabian includes autobiographical comments about each drawing or painting. For example, appended to his notes on the drawing “Born to Exile”:
And the greater wonder of it is, for me, that every once in a while I receive a surprise gift from a fan in appreciation of my artwork. In this case a fan sent me a beautiful copper etching that he made of my drawing that you see here, and that etching hangs on the wall in my drawing room. Other surprise tokens of appreciation that I’ve received from fans are; a miniature spun glass ship, a knitted sweater with an artist’s palette worked into the chest area, a neatly carved wooden figure of a “Running Bear,” that came from a missionary preacher in New Zealand, a fantasy belt buckle, and a miniature paper-mache sculptured “gnome” that keeps watch over me. I cherish them all, they give form and reality to that wonderful feeling of appreciation that comes from the heart.
(3) Enter a selfie by tomorrow for a chance to win a box of “Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms”.
General Mills announced the “unicorn of the cereal world,” Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms, is finally a reality — but there are only 10 boxes.
The cereal maker said the 10 boxes of Marshmallow Only Lucky Charms will be given out as prizes in the “Lucky Charms Lucky Selfie” contest, which calls on participants to post pictures of themselves holding “imaginary boxes of Lucky Charms” on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag, “#Lucky10Sweepstakes.”
Entries must be posted by Oct. 18, the company said.
(4) The Gollancz Festival ‘s “One Star Reviews” features Anna Caltabiano, Simon Morden, Sarah Pinborough, Joanne Harris, Brandon Sanderson, Aliette de Bodard, Richard Morgan, Bradley Beaulieu, and Catriona Ward on camera reading their most savage reviews.
(5) Then, Game of Scones is a Gollancz Cake Off with Jammy Lannister and fantasy authors AK Benedict, Edward Cox and Sarah Pinborough competing for the Iron Scone.
(6) Oneiros wrote:
I dream of the day that I’m libelled quoted by Mike on File770. Of course first I guess I’ll have to start a blog of some description.
I notice there is a lot of competition in the comments for the honor of being Santa Claus, but how many others can fix this up for you? While saving the internet from another blog? Merry Christmas!
(7) Mark Kelly journals about his Jonny Quest rewatch – a show that was a big favorite of mine as a kid.
So: the show is about Jonny Quest, his father Dr. Benton Quest, a world-renowned scientist, Quest’s pilot and bodyguard “Race” Bannon, and their ‘adopted son’ Hadji, an Indian boy who saved Dr. Quest’s life while visiting Calcutta. The episodes involve various investigations by Dr. Quest, who seems to have a new scientific specialty each week (sonic waves one week, lasers another, sea fish another, a rare mineral to support the space program on another) or who is challenged by alerts from old friends (a colleague who is captured by jungle natives) or threats from comic-book character Dr. Zin (via a robot spy, etc.)
(8) Accepting submissions – No Shit, There I Was —
Who We Are: Alliteration Ink is run by Steven Saus (member SFWA/HWA), focusing on anthologies and single-author collections, with over a dozen titles across two imprints.
Rachael Acks is a writer, geologist, and sharp-dressed sir. In addition to her steampunk novella series, she’s had short stories in Strange Horizons, Waylines, Daily Science Fiction, Penumbra, and more. She’s an active member of SFWA, the Northern Colorado Writer’s Workshop, and Codex.
Who: This will be an open call. All who read and follow the submission guidelines are welcome in the slush pile.
When: Rachael wants stories no later than 6 Jan 2016. No exceptions will be made. The Kickstarter will occur after the table of contents has been set.
What We Want From You:
Stories 2,000-7,500 words long. Query for anything shorter or longer.
All stories must begin with the line, No shit, there I was. It can be dialog or part of the regular prose.
(9) Childhood’s End starts December 14 on SyFy with a three-night event. Stars Charles Dance, recently of Game of Thrones.
John King Tarpinian says, “Hope they do not screw this up.”
I’m not completely reassured, because when I checked the SyFy Youtube channel today, this was the first video they were hyping —
(10) Today in History:
October 17, 1933: Physicist Albert Einstein arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
(11) Congratulations to frequent commenter Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on her award-winning photo in the Better Newspaper Contest sponsored by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association.
DSN reporter Laura Gjovaag came away with the Sunnyside newspaper’s only first-place award. She won the top award in the black and white sports photo action, or feature, category. The photo of Lady Knight softball player Jenna den Hoed appeared in the May 20, 2014 issue, and beat out all entries in the category submitted by all four circulation groups.
(12) Ultimately, Sarah A. Hoyt’s “Magical Thought” is about a particular anti-gun protest in Texas involving dildos, but on the way to that topic she writes —
The problem is that more and more — and unexpectedly — I run up against this type of thought in places I don’t expect.
We ran into it a lot over the puppy stuff. No matter how many times we told them we were in it for the stories, and because our story taste was different from theirs, they kept thinking magically. It went something like this “We’re good people, and we’re for minorities. So if these people don’t like the same stories we do, they must be racist and sexist.”
This was part of the nonsense that started Gallo’s flareup. She had some idea we’d get all upset at TOR publishing Kameron Hurley’s book. Because you know, we have different tastes than those primarily on the left who controlled the Hugos so long, so we don’t want them to … get published?
This only makes sense if the person saying it is inhabiting a magical world, where objects/people of certain valences are played against each other like some kind of card game.
This is not real. I mean sad puppy supporters might not — or might, I won’t because it’s not to my taste, but — read Hurley’s book, but we won’t recoil from it like a vampire from a cross. A Hurley book doesn’t magically cancel out a Torgersen book. Or vice versa.
On the good side, at least on that level, our side doesn’t act like that. We don’t say “ooh” at a new Ringo book because “Oooh, that will upset those liberals” we say “oooh,” because we’ll get to read it. Books are books and people are people, not points in some bizarre game.
(13) Umair Haque says he can explain “Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It)”.
Here’s my tiny theory, in a word. Abuse. And further, I’m going to suggest in this short essay that abuse?—?not making money?—?is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.
To explain, let me be clear what I mean by abuse. I don’t just mean the obvious: violent threats. I also mean the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.
We once glorified Twitter as a great global town square, a shining agora where everyone could come together to converse. But I’ve never been to a town square where people can shove, push, taunt, bully, shout, harass, threaten, stalk, creep, and mob you…for eavesdropping on a conversation that they weren’t a part of…to alleviate their own existential rage…at their shattered dreams…and you can’t even call a cop. What does that particular social phenomenon sound like to you? Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit. And while there are people who love to dive into mosh pits, they’re probably not the audience you want to try to build a billion dollar publicly listed company that changes the world upon.
(14) “3+1” — A funny claymation short by Soline Fauconnier, Marie de Lapparent, and Alexandre Cluchet.
(15) “(Give Me That) Old-Time Socialist Utopia: How the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction went from utopian to dystopian” by Ezra Glinter at The Paris Review.
Since they started writing in the mid-1950s, the brothers published at least twenty-six novels, in addition to stories, plays and a few works written individually. According to a 1967 poll, four of the top ten works of science fiction in the Soviet Union were by the Strugatskys, including Hard to Be a God in first place and Monday Begins on Saturday (1965) in second. For at least three decades they were the most popular science-fiction writers in Russia, and the most influential Russian science-fiction writers in the world.
Their popularity wasn’t without political implications, however. Later in their lives, the Strugatskys were characterized as dissidents—sly underminers of the Soviet regime. In its obituary for Boris, who died in 2012 (Arkady died in 1991), the New York Times called him a “prolific writer who used the genre of science fiction to voice criticisms of Soviet life that would have been unthinkable in other literary forms.” This is mostly true—their work did become critical and subversive over time. But at the beginning of their career, the Strugatsky brothers were the best socialist utopians in the game.
(16) Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom discovered the 1963 LASFS Lovecraft panel:
Briefly, and in October it’s almost mandatory, particularly for a lifelong horrorist such as myself, to deal with something eldritch, but I’ve finally read the August Derleth-annotated transcript of a symposium recorded on 24 October 1963 at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, a discussion of Lovecraft and his influence featuring a panel including Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, writer Arthur Jean Cox, Sam Russell, and Riverside Quarterly editor Leland Sapiro, along with some comments and questions from the audience. Given that Bloch and Leiber were both helped and influenced by Lovecraft early in their careers and were the two most important exemplars of how to take his model for approaching the matter of horror fiction and improving upon it, it’s useful, if not as comprehensive here as one could hope, to see how they thought about that influence and their respective takes on Lovecraft’s work and legacy. Bloch unsurprisingly seems most taken by the interior aspects of what Lovecraft was getting at in his best work, the questions of identity and madness and usurpation from within; Leiber, also not too surprisingly, is at least as engaged by the larger implications, philosophically and otherwise, of humanity’s not terribly secure foothold in Lovecraft’s universe. The notion that such non-fans of Lovecraft as Avram Davidson and Edmund Wilson had more in common with him than their experience of his work led them to believe is briefly if amusingly explored. Not as significant as some of Leiber and Bloch’s other considerations of Lovecraft, but useful to read, and one’s suspicions of what August Derleth made of what he was transcribing and annotating, particularly when it touches on his own involvement with Lovecraft’s body of work, are mildly telling.
Click the link for a copy of the symposium transcript [PDF, 24 MB file]
(17) Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is due in theaters November 25.
(18) If you click through the newly released archive of Apollo photos quickly enough you get something like stop motion animation.
[Thanks to Will R., Andrew Porter, Harry Bell, Karl Lembke, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peace Is My Middle Name.]
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Francis W. Porretto wrote this thing: http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2015/08/if-this-goes-on.html
@ Meredith: “I concluded that the Great Romance wasn’t much there but what was there in abundance was biting, meanly funny social commentary.”
I enjoy that aspect of Austen, but what I primarily get out of it (and this is not unrelated to biting social commentary) is terrific characterization. She had a very, very shrewd eye about people within her own world.
@Laura Resnick
I admit I was lumping those together. 🙂
Sigh. My bank balance is decreasing and my virtual TBR pile is growing ever larger.
This weekend, despite the distraction of a wee jaunt down to the Aegean, I’ve managed to read a good chunk of Ian McDonald’s LUNA: NEW MOON, which is also currently on sale. It’s bloody good so far. Lots of interesting ideas about libertarianism/feudalism and sexual liberation and plenty of epic drama.
Scrolled Acquaintance
Meredith: You got something entirely different out of Austen than I did, then. I concluded that the Great Romance wasn’t much there but what was there in abundance was biting, meanly funny social commentary.
It wasn’t that I saw the Austen books as like Harlequins because of “Great Romance” so much as it was because I just didn’t feel like there was any “there” there. I didn’t know about The Eight Deadly Words back then, but it’s a pretty apt summary to my reaction to Austen.
In the end I decided against Wolves, even though I really love the cover, because a review said it had the rivy nyovab trope. (Not sure how spoilery it is, so rot13’d.)
@alauda <<Francis W. Porretto wrote this thing: http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2015/08/if-this-goes-on.html>>
Well, ick.
It reads like bad William Johnstone “From the Ashes”.
I didn’t bother reading through his ‘rationale’ for that mess.
‘Bout what I’d expect from such a cheer-leader for that crowd.
Alauda – I wouldn’t say that Hoyt’s followers are the worst people on the planet; how many have the executed in cold blood or encouraged the execution of, or led the world into economic collapse?
On the other hand your other link is very unpleasant, with a bit like:
” Most of those exiles had been personally guilty of nothing. They’d merely abetted a race war. Some had promoted hatred of whites. Others, by their promiscuity and negligent parenting, had produced generation upon generation of layabouts and violent predators. Still others had done nothing but subsist on the handouts of a too-generous society, indolently declining to add to its riches. ”
Being a WTF moment.
re: Francis W. Porrento:
Holy shit, those people are all sociopaths. That’s white privilege taken to its ultimate revolting, horrifying conclusion.
More Songs about Pixels and Scrolls
I’m right now at Big Bad Con, which while it’s gaming, and not directly an SF&F con, did something pretty awesome (size from the food drive and the Doctors Without Borders events).
The con is in a food desert in Oakland, so, rather than depend on the overpriced hotel restaurant, they brought in food trucks. GOURMET food trucks. Gyros, thai wraps, eggs benedict, knish…
And everybody at the con is “OMG! Reasonably priced, good food, right in the parking lot! Why don’t ALL cons do this!”
Seriously, massive props to the con runners for this great idea.
I read those Blaylock books and concluded that he had a really bad case of women-as-distressed-damsels-and-rewards. At least The Paper Grail has a pretty good villainess.
@Rose Embolism: Oddly, Aaron and his wife Angela and I were at a local gaming mini-con this weekend, but on the opposite coast: DC Gameday in, well, DC. Not a food desert problem in our case. I played Numenera, Feng Shui 2 and the beta version of the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG. (In this I was Tachyon of course. Tachyon is best Sentinel. Aaron played Absolute Zero.)
A few weeks ago people were submitting stories from 1940 for the Retro Hugos. I think someone was collating a master page but I can’t seem to find it. If it’s of any use to someone, listed below are relevant entries from The New Yorker.
FICTION
Inflexible Logic – Russell Maloney – 3 February 40 (a fun story about monkeys, typewriters, probability, and reproducing the contents of the British Library)
Mr Skidmore’s Gift – Oliver La Farge – 23 March 1940 (man acquires supernatural gift of duplication)
Virtue and the Tiger – Sylvia Townsend Warner – 4 May 40 (fable)
The Magpie Charity – Sylvia Townsend Warner – 24 August 40 (fable)
The Chaser – John Collier – 28 December 40 (oft-reprinted)
RELATED NON-FICTION
Captain Future Block That Kick – SJ Perelman – 20 January 40 (parody of Captain Future)
Footnote on the Future – James Thurber – 15 June 1940 (pessimistic essay about the scientific prospects and man’s nature)
Why I Don’t Believe in Superman – E.J. Kahn – 29 June 40 (early overview of Superman with some humour about strip’s internal contradictions)
The Eight-Cylinder Shay – AC Spectorsky -28 December 40 (possible future decorative nostalgising of current technology)
@Matthew Davis
Thanks! The original is here and I’m keeping notes on things people recommend for a revised version nearer the time, assuming I don’t start up somewhere to keep it off-site.
Scroll and Scrollibilty
Pixel and Prejudice
Rob_Matic,
I hope that the weather in the Aegean was better than here in London! Also, thank you; if you can tootle around the Aegean from Istanbul then I can buy a large clutch in Burnt Red without angsting over it.
More broadly, it seems to me that there has been a ratcheting up in hyperbole leading to the present state of play, and I haven’t a clue how to dial it back to something more reflective of reality. For the avoidance of all possible doubt, I do not wish anyone to be dispatched to a concentration/death camp. My father was a slave on the Death railway, and he did not want the guards and commanders, who viciously tortured, starved and murdered vast numbers of slaves, to be sent to death camps. He wanted them to face justice…
how many have the executed in cold blood or encouraged the execution of, or led the world into economic collapse?
How many would, had they the chance?
@alauda
Judging people by what they might do isn’t usually a good idea – too much margin for error.
I’m all for hyperbole, but claiming that Hoyt’s followers are literally the worst people in the world is a huge stretch. Nor do I think, despite their bluster, there’s much evidence they really would execute people in cold blood. Heck, even what they say–bad as it is–is hardly the worst things said online.
Plus, moral luck counts for a lot. Even if some would kill others (and that’s a big if), the fact that they haven’t makes them much better than those who have.
It’s a good time for a reminder about people who show up here posting inflammatory links in attempt to incite an “let’s you and him fight”.
@bloodstone75 —
To be clear: Graydon, look how my assembling a pile of nonsense out of misquotes, scraps, utter malarkey, and unsupported “ideological” convictions does not magically transform that pile into a coherent argument, even though it comes from my sovereign perspective.
Is Hoyt’s argument described as incoherent, or is Hoyt described as a deficient or defective person?
Trying to stick “bad” labels on people’s the same system. Different inputs, different outputs, but the same system. One might well have a well-supported preference for the grape jelly over the unsweetened quince, but sticking to the same system is not a solution to “can we resolve arguments absent material coercion?”
I don’t know if Torgerson ever admitted that or if people just put 2 and 2 together from some conversations that were reported here. I do recall him claiming repeatedly that Wisdom from my Internet was justified as a nominee after Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail will be Graded was nominated.
Torgersen spent an awful lot of time evading saying why something was worth nominating as a work. I’m not sure we ever got a straight answer on any of the Puppy picks.
Really, JJ? Really?
@Jon Zeigler (edited to spell name correctly, oops)
“Aha, thanks to Mike for reminding me about the No Shit anthology. Seriously tempted to write something utterly unplanned and gonzo and see if it gets picked up.”
Hey, if it sparks an idea, go for it! If they reject it, you can use it somewhere else, right?*
Disclaimer: I’m not a writer and even if I had the chops to be a writer I don’t think my ego is tough enough to handle rejection or critics, so take any advice from me with ye patented “bag ‘o salt” (on sale, 99 pence).
We interrupt with this urgent bulletin:
Chanur’s Homecoming is now available on Kindle!
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.
I think a history of illogical, biased, unself-aware blog postings has led to a well-deserved label of “not going to get it any time soon.” Does the fact that her posts are mostly a waste of pixels make her a horrible person? No. But they sure don’t make her a nice one. Her perpetual outrage-based misapprehensions make her a crummy writer and lousy self-appointed arbiter of SF/F writing, too. I suppose it comes down to this: is she an ideologue chiseling facts down to pebbles to make her points, or a “true believer” clinging to her team’s narrative, unable to see that blog after blog is her projecting her own team’s flaws onto her “enemies.” Past a certain point, what’s the difference? She is not open to discussion; she’s stirring up her base, as can be seen in the comments.
Baloney. You earn a bad reputation. You earn a poor track record for writing illogical screeds that everyone can see is a self-portrait except yourself. You earn predictability by — get this — being predictable over time. More than six months of this bilge, and counting. And it’s beam/mote, all the way down.
And basically, your “nobody lives in world of facts” is sophistry that amounts to nothing, because sure, everything is subjective, but some brains apparently live in thicker, more isolated jars than others.
@alauda
“Francis W. Porretto wrote this thing”
That was so sickening. Not new, as I have some relatives with revolting viewpoints, but nonetheless, it made me nauseous to read it.
@Joe H
“Chanur’s Homecoming is now available on Kindle!”
Wheeeeeeee….uhm, wait, I can’t afford any more books. Aaaarrrrghh! ::second pause:: Hey, I can put it on my wish list! Wheeeeeeeeee!!
Thank you, Joe.
I’m currently listening to the audiobook version of Bryony and Roses by the illustrious (and allegedly marsupial of a rufous shade) T. Kingfisher. It was wonderful when I read it in print, and it’s possibly even more delightful read aloud. Highly recommended.
I kinda suspect Graydon of being a Markov chain robot. But to the extent that they seem to be appearing to attempt to make something resembling a real point — it is true that everyone has a subjective opinion, and everyone is prone to magical thinking, and everyone has kind of a terrible memory, because those are all characteristics of being a human.
(For example, I have, based purely on anecdotal evidence, a haunting superstition that the Seahawks only win if I watch the game. And I’m sorry, Seattle, but I just don’t have that kind of time to devote to watching football. You’ll have to find somebody else.)
However, just as certainly, we also have a long tradition of methods to attempt to keep our thinking more honest and accurate — for example, formally identified logical fallacies, to identify bad conclusions made from (possibly) true facts, and record-keeping and forensic studies to attempt to separate facts from non-facts.
Hoyt’s quoted text fails on both counts, being a poorly constructed narrative based on a dramatic misrepresentation of the facts. In this case, the facts are recent, and available online, so it’s particularly galling to see her misrepresent them. As with a lot of puppy rhetoric, I want to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, I’m standing right here, could you stop lying about what I said and making up stupid reasons for why I would have said it?”
Graydon has commented here for a little while. He’s probably best known around here for writing The March North which has, I’m reliably informed, Battle Sheep. Whether he’s correct or not – and the basic idea, that people should attack the idea not the person, isn’t totally off-base, it just doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone repeatedly demonstrating both bad logic and that they lie or misrepresent the people they dislike – doesn’t change that he’s a legit commenter and definitely not trolling or a Markov chain.
alauda, on the other hand, is definitely a troll and if I hadn’t wanted to bounce the point I was making into the conversation I wouldn’t have responded to them. As it is I probably should have left off the @ or left it for another time, since it was hardly anything groundbreaking. 🙂
Graydon is a real person who has been upfront about his real-world identity, and who has participated here in good faith for a while now.
While I totally disagree with the argument he’s been making in this thread, he has made it in a courteous manner, and I think he deserves to be treated with respect.
(6) was a really great start to my day, thanks Mike!
If “Books are books and people are people, not points in some bizarre game” then why do the Puppies insist on trying to hijack the Hugos every year?
junego on October 18, 2015 at 6:57 pm said:
@Joe H
“Chanur’s Homecoming is now available on Kindle!”
Wheeeeeeee….uhm, wait, I can’t afford any more books. Aaaarrrrghh! ::second pause:: Hey, I can put it on my wish list! Wheeeeeeeeee!!
Mount File770 is bad enough, but the wish list is worse.
I’m afraid to look at it.
But I don’t think a pile of pixels can collapse on me.
Right?
Oh, I know what you mean. Between here and Making Light, I’ve gathered enough recommendations to fill my Kindle and empty my discretionary spending fund.
Said discretionary spending fund took a great hit this summer, because I ordered one of these ( http://www.glowforge.com )…
Gosh, I’m so unhappy I’m not in that bastion of free expression, moral certainty and religious dignity with Hoyt’s followers. They speak so eloquently and persuasively on the issues.
Graydon exists, I have met him in the flesh, and while I am still not 100% sure he’s not an alien, he is definitely not a bot.
Also he got me a Long-Tailed Duck sighting, introduced me to Laphroig, and took me to a place that sold unbelievable raw milk cheddar. So even if he was a bot, it’d be one of those hyper-intelligent nanotechnology swarm kind, with unexpectedly good taste in cheese.
The other Nigel: Said discretionary spending fund took a great hit this summer, because I ordered one of these ( http://www.glowforge.com )
OMG, I have so much geek envy right now! You are a cruel, cruel person!
(I expect detailed reports on your projects.)
JJ on October 18, 2015 at 9:03 pm said:
The other Nigel: Said discretionary spending fund took a great hit this summer, because I ordered one of these ( http://www.glowforge.com )
OMG, I have so much geek envy right now! You are a cruel, cruel person!
(I expect detailed reports on your projects.)
He definitely wins Best Toy of the Day.
@The other Nigel
I expect pictures with those reports! 🙂
Seriously tempted but too much money for now. I should probably get the hang of the 3d printer first, though I have spent chunks of the weekend looking for sources for bits to make one of these as a starter.
@Lauowolf
“Mount File770 is bad enough, but the wish list is worse.
I’m afraid to look at it.
But I don’t think a pile of pixels can collapse on me.
Right?”
Mine’s gotten pretty big in the last 7 months and hasn’t collapsed yet. Besides, it’s at Amazon. I figure the worst that can happen is their site will crash.
@The other Nigel
“Said discretionary spending fund took a great hit this summer, because I ordered one of these (www.glowforge.com)…”
What a cool plaything. The sale price is amazing, too. (Well, until they’re so common you can get one for a couple of hundred bucks!) Wish there was some way I could rationalize getting one.
eta: Hope it works as advertized!
Wow… almost missed this one. Thank you Mike, for mentioning my silly little award (I can call myself an award-winning sports photographer now!) and thanks to all the folks that took the time to look at it and congratulate me. I need the boost this week.
Also, Rose Embolism, Emerald City Comicon brought in food trucks last year because the one Subway restaurant in the convention center had lines longer than for the biggest celebrity. It worked pretty well, I think, although I ended up with food so spicy I couldn’t eat it because I trusted my hubby to pick the truck we went to…
Dear Graydon, I’m sorry I thought you were a robot.
Also, Rose Embolism, Emerald City Comicon brought in food trucks last year because the one Subway restaurant in the convention center had lines longer than for the biggest celebrity.
GenCon also brings in food trucks every year. They even post a schedule of when which trucks will be there.
Graydon:
Grape jelly is wrong, firm red cubes of cooked quince floating in their own ruby jelly, slightly cinnamon-y and tasting of roses and mellow brightness, clearly, that’s the way. You can tell that’s the good and proper food, because of the hardship involved in its making, blunting knives and bleeding fingers. No? Ah well, more for me!
(Sorry about that, your post caught me in the throes of tasting the Fall’s first quinces in jelly.)
To your point, if I’m reading it right, that it’s no good to dismiss the person along with their argument: absolutely, and I think you’ll probably get little argument on the theoretical front, even if repeated bad arguments attacking one’s presumptive class of people do tend to resolve into a picture after a while or three, and I suspect that’s unavoidable.
Not just unavoidable, I suspect, because I’ve certainly felt that urge, that there’s a sort of phatic communication going on, that, say, having read one of Hoyt’s twisty angry posts about the evils of everyone else, because Marxists and because “the Portuguese soul”, one (by which I mean me) may need to both vent and reassure oneself that this is not, in fact, normal. But, of course, at the risk of the phatic working not in the affirmation of good practice, but in service of a negative, or worse, of defining others as less properly human, rather than just wrong in the instance(s). It’s the piling up of (s) that works against goodwill.
But your closing “is not a solution” makes me wonder, because I’m hopeful like that, do you actually see one?
@RedWombat:
Next you’ll be telling us he likes cat pictures!
Speaking of single malt scotch, peaty or otherwise, hubby and I just discovered something called Kilkerran which is … weird. It’s not one thing or the other, but a mixture of pleasant aspects I normally associate with disparate regions/processes. Smooth and sweet, a little peaty and spicy but in a warm rather than hot way, definitely interesting both in the mouth and afterwards. I think I need to have another pour of it, to try and figure it out.
It comes in a cylinder case that’s pink like Pepto Bismal. There was one that said sherry wood and another that said bourbon. We went with bourbon.