(1) DAYLIGHT STEALING TIME. Disney’s Alice Through The Looking Glass trailer investigates a time crime.
(2) TAKING INVENTORY. Bill Roper had some insights about being a convention dealer while doing “That Taxes Thing”.
One of the distressing things about doing the taxes for Dodeka is seeing:
– How many different titles we carry.
– And how many of them appear to have sold one or fewer copies in 2015.
Some of these are the result of having bought out Juanita’s inventory when she retired and having acquired various CDs that had been sitting in her inventory for too long. A few of them are the result of my own ordering errors.
The problem is that the boxes are large and heavy and the table is very full. But if you don’t take the CDs out to the cons with you, you can’t sell them…
Filk is an extremely regional business. And given that we’re in the eighth-or-so year of a sucky economy, I certainly understand people’s reluctance to take a flyer on something that they aren’t familiar with.
(3) BATMOBILE REPLICA MAKER LOSES. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a Ninth Circuit decision in favor of DC Comics, which had sued Mark Towle over his unlicensed replicas of the 1966 and 1989 Batmobiles, sold for about $90,000 each. So DC wins.
According to Robot 6:
Towle argued that the U.S. Copyright Act doesn’t protect “useful articles,” defined as objects that have “an intrinsic utilitarian function” (for example, clothing, household appliances or, in this case, automobile functions); in short, that the Batmobile’s design is merely functional.
However, a federal judge didn’t buy that argument… Towle appealed that decision, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wasn’t any more sympathetic, finding in September that, “the Batmobile is almost always bat-like in appearance, with a bat-themed front end, bat wings extending from the top or back of the car, exaggerated fenders, a curved windshield, and bat emblems on the vehicle. This bat-like appearance has been a consistent theme throughout the comic books, television series, and motion picture, even though the precise nature of the bat-like characteristics have changed from time to time.”
In his petition to the high court, Towle insisted that the U.S. Copyright Office states outright that automobiles aren’t copyrightable, and that the Ninth Circuit simply created an arbitrary exception. He also argued that there have been “dozens” of Batmobiles in DC comic books over the decades that “vary dramatically in appearance and style” — so much so that the vehicle doesn’t have the “consistent, widely-identifiable, physical attributes” required to be considered a “character.”
(4) SFL SURVIVOR. Andrew Liptak retells “The Adventures of the LA Science Fantasy Society” at Kirkus Reviews.
When he [Forry Ackerman] set off on his own, he founded the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. While every other Science Fiction League chapter closed—as well as many of the other fan groups—the LASFS survives to the present day, the longest running science fiction club in the world.
In the coming decades, the club became an important focal point for the growing science-fiction community. It counted some of the genre’s biggest writers as its members: when Ray Bradbury’s family moved from Arizona to Los Angles, the young storyteller quickly found the group. “A turning point in his life came in early September 1937,” Sam Moskowitz recounted in his early history Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction, “when poring through the books and magazines in Shep’s Shop, a Los Angeles book store that catered to science-fiction readers, he received an invitation from a member to visit the Los Angeles Chapter of the Science Fiction League.” Through the league, Bradbury quickly got his start as a writer, publishing “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma” in the club’s fanzine, Imagination!
LASFS is not quite the lone survivor of the Science Fiction League – there is also the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. Fancyclopedia 3 has more SFL history.
(5) ON WINGS OF STONE. You must keep an eye on these winged predators. BBC tells “How to survive a Weeping Angels attack!”
The Weeping Angels are scary. Really scary. They possess a natural and unique defence mechanism: they’re quantum locked. This means that they can only move when no other living creature is looking at them. These lonely assassins also have the ability to send other beings into the past, feeding on the potential time energy of what would have been the rest of their victims’ lives.
But how do you survive a Weeping Angel attack? Well, here’s our guaranteed, foolproof 4-step guide…
(6) TOP DRAWER. Peter Capaldi proves to have a flair for sketching his predecessors as Doctor Who.
#BehindTheScenes of yesterday's @DWTheFanShow!
Watch the video here » https://t.co/BISSjq1qgH#DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/VXcizMYQV9— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) March 12, 2016
(7) COINAGE. A horrible, fannish pun in March 12’s Brevity cartoon.
(8) MARIE WILLIAMS OBIT. New Zealand fan Marie Williams died of cancer February 27. She was a member of the board of Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ), and their announcement said, “She was a valued member and we will miss her thoughtful insights and interesting comments.”
(9) TOMLINSON OBIT. E-mail pioneer Ray Tomlinson died March 5 at the age of 74. The New York Times report gave a brief history of his development.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Tomlinson was working at the research and development company Bolt, Beranek & Newman on projects for ARPANET, a forerunner of the Internet created for the Defense Department. At the time, the company had developed a messaging program, called SNDMSG, that allowed multiple users of a time-share computer to send messages to one another.
But it was a closed messaging system, limited to users of a single computer.
Mr. Tomlinson, filching codes from a file-transfer program he had created called CYPNET, modified SNDMSG so that messages could be sent from one host computer to another throughout the ARPANET system.
To do this, he needed a symbol to separate a user name from a destination address. And so the plump little @ sign came into use, chosen because it did not appear in user names and did not have any meaning in the TENEX paging program used on time-sharing computers.
The BBC’s Dave Lee wrote “Ray Tomlinson’s e-mail is flawed, but never bettered”.
He is widely regarded as the inventor of email, and is credited with putting the now iconic “@” sign in the addresses of the revolutionary system.
He could never have imagined the multitude of ways email would come to be used, abused and confused.
Just think – right now, someone, somewhere is writing an email she should probably reconsider. Count to 10, my friend. Sleep on it.
Another is sending an email containing brutal, heartbreaking words that, really, should be said in person… if only he had the nerve.
And of course, a Nigerian prince is considering how best to ask for my help in spending his fortune.
Chip Hitchcock says, “AFAICT, nobody saw person-to-person email coming; computers were for talking to central data, as in ‘A Logic Named Joe’ or even The Shockwave Rider. The closest I can think of to discussing the effects of mass cheap point-to-point communication is the side comment on cell-phone etiquette in the opening scene of Tunnel in the Sky. Can anyone provide another example?”
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 13, 1981 – Joe Dante’s The Howling premieres in North America.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 13, 1911 – L. Ron Hubbard
(12) HUGO NOMINATORS: NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER. Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens reappears after a five-month hiatus, because it’s “Hugo Season!”
The annual SFF self-loathing theme weeks are here again — I feel (as I feel every year) like a total loser for not having read enough new science fiction and fantasy to make informed nominations for the Hugo award. I haven’t read Seveneves, haven’t seen Ant-Man, haven’t had the time for Jessica Jones, haven’t waded through a lot of short fiction.
Damn damn damn.
Then again, you’re always going to feel that way, no matter what. And it’s not football (which means “soccer”, in case you’re American), so whining doesn’t help.
And did I also forget Alan Moore's Crossed +100? Damn. #hugoawards #nominations https://t.co/8AKa1x2Zz8
— Spacefaring Kitten (@SpacefaringK) March 13, 2016
(13) BINARY BEAUTY. “Google’s AI Is Now Reigning Go Champion of the World”. Motherboard has the story.
On Saturday afternoon in Seoul, AlphaGo, the Go-playing artificial intelligence created by Google’s DeepMind, beat 18-time Go world champion Lee Sedol for its third straight win in a five game series.
The win was a historic one for artificial intelligence research, a field where AI’s mastery of this 2,500 year old game was long considered a holy grail of sorts for AI researchers. This win was particularly notable because the match included situations called ko fights which hadn’t arisen in the previous two games. Prior to AlphaGo’s win, other Go experts had speculated that ko situations could prove to be stumbling blocks for the DeepMind program as they had been in the past for other Go computer programs.
“When you watch really great Go players play, it is like a thing of beauty,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin, himself a self-proclaimed adamant Go player in grad school, after the match. “So I’m very excited that we’ve been able to instill that level of beauty inside a computer. I’m really honored to be here in the company of Lee Sedol, such an incredible player, as well as the DeepMind team who’ve been working so hard on the beauty of a computer.”
(14) PC OR BS? Ethan Mills of Examined Worlds asks “Has Political Correctness Run Amok? Does It Even Exist?”
… I’m tempted to call this “A Prolegomena to Any Future Discourse about Political Correctness.”….
- Is political correctness a cut-and-dried free speech issue? Why is it that many examples of the “political correctness has run amok” narrative involve cases where one group exercises its freedom to speak against ideas or to decide what speech they want to support in their space? Is this really a threat to free speech in general if it’s limited to a particular space? Is there a right to tell people what speech to support in their space? Does political correctness threaten free speech in a more fundamental way by making people feel uncomfortable to say certain things at all? How do we decide what counts as a threat to free speech in general? Are there some things that just shouldn’t be said in certain contexts? Should all speech be allowed in all contexts? If not, how do we decide when it’s permissible to limit speech? Is there a difference between limiting speech and simply asking people not to say certain things?
- What is the difference between political correctness and politeness or basic respect? Is there a difference? What happens if what one person calls political correctness another person calls being polite, civil, or respecting the humanity of others? How do we settle these disputes? Is it possible that this whole issue is really just based on the feeling that people don’t like being told what to say? Is it possible or desirable to change that feeling and thus shift the whole narrative on this issue?
(15) PI TIME. Are you getting into MIT? Then expect notification from BB-8. “MIT parodies ‘Star Wars’ for ‘decision day’ announcement”.
The video ultimately reveals that “decision day” for the class of 2020 will take place on March 14, which is also known as “Pi Day”, as 3.14 represents the first 3 digits of pi.
Hopeful applicants will be able to learn whether or not they’ve been accepted to MIT by logging onto the admissions website starting at 6:28 p.m. on Pi Day. This time represents another reference to pi as 6.28 is known as “Tau” or two times pi.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]
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So I had a conversation with Standback today in which, besides him mentioning how much he hated Grace of Kings, we both agreed that Ken Liu could be hit-or-miss in short stories. He has a real mastery of language, which makes him such a good translator, but his own stories can be overly simple and lacking in character depth. It seems to me that when his stories really work, he takes a simple idea, expresses it in beautiful language, and develops it out no longer than it needs to be. (So attempting a novel would be full of pitfalls, since it requires sustained multi-leveled structure and well-developed characterization. Short stories can stand on ideas alone, without characters; novels not so much.)
That said, I am enjoying Liu’s latest collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. It contains one original (2016) story, “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition”, which is quite good. Its premise is rather sophisticated by Liu’s standards, but as usual, what really makes it stand out is the telling, the style and language. A man (a scientist, it seems) is telling bedtime stories to his daughter; he is telling her about her mother, who left on a spaceship before the daughter could remember her. The story is in far, far too sophisticated language for a child, full of scientific details and metaphorical ruminations on memory and communication. I think the mother left just a book of pictures and the father is interpreting them for himself as much as for the child; he doesn’t expect her to understand much of what he says yet. That is a flaw in the story, I guess — parents don’t interact with their children that way, do they? Anyhow, the stories he tells are excellent for me as an audience. He introduces a number of alien species who have very unexpected ways of thinking and remembering; each species description is followed up by him talking about his memories of his wife, how he tries to understand why she decided to leave, and how he expects that memory will keep her connected to the family. It adds up to a very warm exploration of love and connection across time and space, strikingly told.
Mike Glyer o
So am I.
It’s a bit embarrassing.
However, I consulted the doctor, who is a family member whose job it is to tell me whether a story is remotely scientifically plausible, and the answer on Seveneves was emphatically no..
@Stevie,
I have a personal handwavium threshold that forgives “Seveneves” for the “epigenetic shifts”. I know enough about genetics to experience a severe case of eyerolling when I encountered it. Despite that (and a few other nits), I still think “Seveneves” a terrific read and nomination-worthy.
Most Science Fiction has at least one or two instances of scientific implausibility and if I can’t read past that, I’d be stuck with Mundane SF which would greatly limit my reading options.
[Best Graphic Story] I’m also looking to nominate Chew though I highly doubt it’ll get enough to make the final ballot. It’s the type of story that hits my sweet spot.
Reamde tripped me up very early on by totally ignoring the fact that the virtual world was operating as a financial institution that would have been subject to some heavy regulations.
And it was even worse afterward when I realized that I have read complete standalone novels that were shorter than the final chase scene and shootout. The early snide remarks about fantasy authors and their bloated books took on a terrible irony by the end of it.
Some of the stuff in the middle was okay. Overall, it was a less unpleasant experience than Anathem, which I too have long since decided will be going under No Award if it somehow makes the ballot.
@Viverrine
Now that you’ve seen Rev Bob’s TBR organizational triage try not to have nightmares or a major bout of jealousy. I had both. 😉
My current TBR triage method:
1. Hugo eligible read
2. Hugo eligible read OR something fun to recover from depressing or brutally well written #1
3. Books automatically downloaded because I preordered
4. More Hugo reading because people keep recommending stuff
5. Favorite author/series break
6. Browse 5-6k covers in kindle hoping one will call to me
7. While browsing across book I promised author to read 1-4 years ago – read
8. Library book comes in house and moves to top as they have return dates
9. Stares at growing pile of Kickstarter books and picks one/series to read so I can review, pass along, have room for next books coming in
10. Drink, close eyes, point at screen, read whatever book my finger was on
My method may induce drinking just thinking about the 6k+ and growing TBR.
@Stevie on March 14, 2016 at 5:53 pm said:
?? If this is in relations to my happy surgery date that’s April 14th. If it’s something else I need help decoding.
My TBR pile is tiny, I’m feeling rather inadequate…
@Vasha
How old is the child? I read things to both babies that were not only above their cognitive level, but possibly outright inappropriate (Terry Pratchett’s Nation) while they were in the crib. I could see a daddy holding out pictures to his baby and talking like that.
As they get older and more understanding, the stories got simpler, until they started getting more complex again in a different way. The elder son is old enough to need age appropriate materials. I could tell the baby stories about darn near anything if I wanted still, though he’s made some actual words now.
Chris S on March 14, 2016 at 8:43 pm said:
My TBR pile is tiny, I’m feeling rather inadequate…
I think we all know, it’s not the size of the pile so much as what you do with it.
@Chris S: My TBR pile is tiny, I’m feeling rather inadequate
Celebrate. Having a manageable TBR is a hard thing to do. Good for you.
There is no right size TBR. There is enjoyment of books. You seem to do fine in that category. Able to discuss books you like, dislike, what your looking forward to reading next.
America, again, is horribly bad at income mobility. It is a country where people are locked into class more than any other western country, even worse than UK. US does not do a decent job in any way. I do recommend you take lessons from Canada or Norway. Sweden, sadly, has fallen back the last years.
Hampus Eckerman: Actually we’re great at income mobility. We’ve got two major political parties who do everything they can to move the jobs overseas that used to produce the American middle class.
Actually we’re great at income mobility.
*snicker*
I was lucky to be working for a public utility – their jobs can’t go overseas. (They did send out some map conversion work, but it was checked at this end.)
@Mike Glyer
Another way we are good ate income mobility: We are also very good at taking money from the poor and middle class, passing it through the government, and giving it to the wealthy to promote job growth…
Income mobility individuals ability to move from lower/poor to upper/rich class. I often wondered what drugs my teachers were taking (and would they share) or if they were just out of touch with the real America as they seemed to believe anyone could move up through perseverance or down through laziness.
Mike Glyer:
He, exactly what Adam Smith warned about in The Wealth of Nations. Moving production will also move the wealth. Not that we are doing anything different here.
@TheYoungPretender
Apparently VD is willing to accept women with agency when there are literally no men left alive they should be subservient to. Mighty white of him, really…
@guthrie
One question that bothered me is Ubj jbhyq gur oynpxznvyref unir qryvirerq gur haybpx cnffjbeqf? Vs rnpu znpuvar nssrpgrq ol gur ivehf jnf rapelcgrq ol n qvssrerag cnffjbeq, ubj jbhyq gurl unir pbeeryngrq jub cnvq jvgu jung cnffjbeq arrqrq gb or qryvirerq?
I’m pleased to see most people taking my post on political correctness in the spirit in which it was intended: as a way to spur deeper thought on the part of everyone involved in the debate. I don’t have much to add, other than to say, “Good job!” to the fine denizens of the File 770 comments section.
Nonetheless, I feel like I should respond to this quip from The Phantom.
I’m not sure what The Phantom means by “shenanigans” here. I explained what I was trying to do at the beginning of the post. Maybe I wasn’t clear. So here it goes.
Of course I have some opinions about most of these questions. I never pretended I didn’t. But the very point of my post was that I didn’t think the internet needed more answers on this topic. For whatever reason, this topic tends to encourage a lot of dogmatic table pounding and talking past one another, which doesn’t help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help to produce anything like respectful and productive discourse.
For instance, The Phantom, your exchange with Aaron about this case at Harvard seems to have come to a stand off where you and he disagree about what counts as evidence in favor of the Task Force’s opinion and whether this is the outcome of a pervasive and harmful PC culture. This is why my question you originally cited about evidence is an important question that isn’t easily decided. While I don’t want to delve into the details of this particular case, I would also add that universities are complex institutions with large bureaucracies and multiple stakeholders that do things for all sorts of reasons, so there is undoubtedly far more going on in the background of this case than you get in the few hundred words of a news report.
Does this mean you’re wrong? Not necessarily. Does it mean this is a complicated issue that may not fit neatly into the “PC has run amok” narrative? I’m not 100% sure what to think about that question. Of course, I may be purposively dumb.
@Greg Hullender
I just finished Aurora yesterday and decided that I had to bump another book off my nominees list to fit it in. I also loved Seveneves.
Both novels had their flaws, but in my opinion, there were more than enough redeeming qualities in both, and I simply liked the breath taking world building ambition in both novels.
@Tasha: “Now that you’ve seen Rev Bob’s TBR organizational triage try not to have nightmares or a major bout of jealousy. I had both.”
Does it help if I point out that Stage Two currently encompasses no fewer than 600 books, and Stage Four is around 800 before I even factor the Ent graveyard into the equation?
It’s really a lot more chaotic than it sounds.
Seveneves strikes me as utter bottom of the ballot material rather than No Award.
The grammar is effective, and it has big ideas. Can’t say that about every puppy pick.
nickpheas: Seveneves strikes me as utter bottom of the ballot material rather than No Award. The grammar is effective, and it has big ideas. Can’t say that about every puppy pick.
Well, that’s the difference, innit? Seveneves (and likely Aurora) goes on my ballot under No Award. The average puppy tripe doesn’t go on my ballot at all.
The thing that blows up the moon at the start of Seveneves? It was concentrated Marmite.
That certainly gives a new slant to the phrase “Be a de(a/e)r and … ”
// Christian
Does this mean you’re wrong? Not necessarily.
In the case of the Harvard task force, it means he’s dead wrong, since he’s repeatedly misrepresented what the task force said, and why they said it. One recurring problem for guys like Phantom is that their simplified screaming narrative almost never matches the actual facts, and since the actual facts are usually relatively easy to find (like the fairly substantial amount of material produced by the Harvard task force), their warped version of events falls apart pretty quickly.
microtherion, I’m not entirely sure what your ROT-13 objection is. Ransomware is a real thing these days (I don’t know if it was when Reamde came out) and surely there’s a way they handle payoffs. (That hospital in the news managed it a few months ago.) Am I misunderstanding you? Or perhaps there’s some twist in Reamde (which I read but barely remember) that makes things more complicated?
For the record the Phantom passed on the following claims about the Final Report of the Harvard task force:
The task force argued in a new report that the all-male organizations, which have no formal relationship with the university, should be forced to accept women in order to fix the problem of sexual assault on Harvard’s campus.
The actual final report said:
The survey and our outreach activities have together persuaded us that the Final Clubs raise serious concerns (in terms of both culture and the well-being of our students) that require attention by Harvard. The increased and increasing presence of Greek organizations raise a related set of difficulties. We therefore recommend that President Faust ask the College for a plan to address the issues and express our strong support for those actions that would result in expanded membership practices that include all genders.
That’s quite a bit different, isn’t it?
Just deport them back to Greece.
@TYP
I’m torn between “thanks for illustrating my point” and “I think you are being a bit presumptuous about my experiences and opinions”.
@Cheryl
My point is that while there are certainly other hurdles to economic mobility, Americans have less of an issue with class when class is described as something akin to nobility or perhaps a rigid class structure as has existed in places like India. “Other hurdles” still being pretty significant. And “less” being well above “none”.
Regards,
Dann
Well, if that’s how you describe class the UK doesn’t have much of an issue with it either. I’m glad that after centuries of debate it turned out not to be a problem after all.
@Dann665
If you’d explained you were talking about caste type systems rather than class in general we would have had a different discussion.
I humbly request you define your terms in the future as it seems we aren’t speaking the same language even when we use the same words. Nothing wrong with that it just helps if you are using a non-normative definition share that at the beginning.
*social media tips brought to you from me in hopes of less misunderstanding in the future
Re: TBR triage systems – Thanks to everybody who responded. I was a little surprised to see some people considered it to be work, since for me having a process and structure to the pile makes it much easier for me. Without it, I dither over all the possibilities until I realize I’ve wasted an hour. But then, I tend to do better with a limited range of choices. Too many and not only do I have trouble picking, but I’m more likely to be dissatisfied and worry that I didn’t make the best choice.
@Joe H. – Interesting about always having a book in progress, but I’m nearly incapable of going to bed with a book unfinished. I have to be somewhere in the middle third for me to put it down overnight.
@Viverrine
I left a detail out. I usually have 3 books going:
1. Non-fiction which I can only read in short bits at a time
2. Anthology or magazine – great for that read right before bed or short waits when out running errands/waiting rooms
3. Main fiction book
Is there a best choice? If I pick a book which isn’t holding my attention I’m getting better at putting it back in the TBR to try when I’m in a different mood and grabbing another book to read. If the book is truly awful* I’m learning to DNF it then grab something new.
*hitting a lot of my triggers, or too many typos, or overused tropes, or IMHO poorly written
@Cassy B
IIIRC, the hospital was a targeted job (as evidenced by the high ransom), so the unlock password could have been predetermined, and would not have been hard to deliver.
It appears that other pieces of ransomware use custom apps to handle the payment and talk to a master server, so the link between payment and machine is established:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/12/destructive-malware-cryptolocker-on-the-loose
What I DON’T see how it would work is if they simply tell victims to drop money anonymously in some place, as was done in REAMDE. Even if they monitored the drop regions (which due to the overall chaos would have been hard to do), they would only know which VICTIMS paid, not what COMPUTERS these victims wanted to ransom and what KEYS they needed.
@ Aaron
I definitely take your point, and for what it’s worth, I agree with your assessment of that particular issue. I also think it’s pretty horrible to try turning an issue involving sexual violence (which actually harms people) into a debate about political correctness. Anyway, I was trying to be charitable to The Phantom in order to get him (or her? … Probably not.) to express his view of what he’s counting as evidence here. My sense is that some people don’t respond to direct contradiction, but may respond to questioning. Alas, I may be wrong about that.
My sense is that some people don’t respond to direct contradiction, but may respond to questioning.
The problem is that until Phantom starts dealing in reality, there isn’t much point. He, like many fringe conservatives, lives in a fact-free world in which the various hoax-as-news websites such as Breitbart are taken seriously. His counterfactual whining about the Harvard task force isn’t out of character for him – he’s shown a marked propensity to passing on lies, distortions, and misrepresentations throughout his internet career. There just isn’t a reason to try to engage him in a conversation until he stops lying all the time.
@Tasha,
Once I settle into enjoying the book, the worry tends to fade away (along with time and the ability to hear other people talking to me). But at the beginning, looking at how deep my TBR pile is, and knowing that by picking this book, I may never get to that book… and, sure, this book is enjoyable, but what if that book is even better suited to my tastes…
If I pick this urban fantasy, then I could recommend it to my mom, and we’d have a series we can discuss together, but if I read Planetfall I can go back and unrot13 the discussion over it…
I choose you, A Crown for Cold Silver! (which was technically in my “owned but unread” pile, if only for a few hours before being promoted to active book)
Thanks, Greg. Sometimes I have spoons to start a discussion but not to finish it. I’ll be okay.
Fixed It For You.
Here’s something approximating my TBR triage method.
Level 3 (deepest): Books that have been placed on the “to be read” bookcase in the fiction library (sometimes also known as the guest bedroom). It is highly unlikely that these books will be read any time before I retire.
Level 2 (middle): Books that have been placed in the bookcase that’s part of my bedframe, in the hopes that I will reach for one some night when I have insomnia. Most of these have a bookmark stuck in some interim position.
Level 1 (top): E-books. This have a hope of being read.
Level 1c (deepest): E-books that I have downloaded but have not actually installed on my iPad. These have a reasonable chance of being read at some point in the next year or two if I ever actually install them.
Level 1b (middle): E-books currently resident on my iPad that do not intersect multiple of my high-interest categories. This have a reasonable chance of being read at some point in the next year if I run out of Level 1c.
Level 1c (top): E-books currently resident on my iPad that intersect multiple of my high-interest categories. These are my go-to list when I start a new book. There are currently 25 unread books in this category. On the average, I finish one book every 1-2 weeks, depending on length.
Cassy B. said:
Oh, it absolutely had been for a while. Stephenson’s attempts to be tech-savvy have been about 5-10 years behind the times, lately. (Easy example from Reamde: Seattle described as swarming with computer geeks carrying PDAs, rather than smartphones.)
Ethan Mills on March 14, 2016 at 11:39 pm said: I’m not sure what The Phantom means by “shenanigans” here.
Oh please.
“For instance, The Phantom, your exchange with Aaron about this case at Harvard seems to have come to a stand off where you and he disagree about what counts as evidence in favor of the Task Force’s opinion and whether this is the outcome of a pervasive and harmful PC culture.”
Again, oh please. Aaron called me a liar.
To put it bluntly the Task Force has released an opinion that blames student organizations for being causal or contributive to crimes committed by individuals against women. The Porcelain Club et al -causes- or contributes to rape. It calls for them to accept female members, or have their members booted out of school. Aaron can rage on all he wants, that’s what’s being suggested.
From Aaron’s very own posting:
“…express our strong support for those actions that would result in expanded membership practices that include all genders.”
Meaning no all-male clubs. That’s pretty clear.
For Aaron to twist himself into his current topology indicates facts and figures are not at issue, and what people actually said is not important. This is a POLITICAL issue, where there is a pre-determined desirable outcome that has nothing to do with the arguments.
And furethermore I find it absolutely appalling and abhorrent that Aaron thinks closing a legitimate, traditional social club of any description, anywhere, will do a single damn thing to protect women from being raped.
You want to protect women from being raped, you do two things. You arm and educate women as a first line of defense, and you cause the wrath of the Law to fall upon any rapist like the very thunderbolt of Jove.
The difference between those two solutions is political correctness. It is politically incorrect to speak of arming your women so they can protect themselves. It is politically incorrect to speak of teaching them dirty fighting so they can get out of a jam. It is even politically incorrect to speak of punishing a rapist to the full extent of the law.
Obverse, it is quite -politically- correct to blame a a men-only social club for rapes committed by men who were not members of the club, at locations other than the club. And Aaron, if 47% of all rapes at Harvard really did happen at the clubs, there wouldn’t be one left standing by now. External realty check is your friend.
In Canada this week we have another politically correct issue, two of our soldiers got knifed by an individual at a recruiting center.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2016/03/remarks-made-du.html
What’s interesting is it has taken the police and the media quite some time to finally admit that it was in fact a terrorist attack. The guy is a Muslim and attacked the soldiers for religious reasons. There is no doubt, he’s still alive and is telling anyone who will listen why he did it. He was yelling Allah Akbar when he did it.
Why are the police and media screwing around? It is not politically convenient for the Liberal Party to admit there are terrorists in Canada. It is politically incorrect to ascribe motivation based on religion. It is politically incorrect to even mention the use of a weapon in an attack.
On October 24th 2014 Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was killed while on ceremonial guard duty at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was murdered by a Muslim terrorist.
He was from my old unit. I know a good friend of his. Canada is a small place sometimes.
Yesterday two more soldiers got attacked, and it took 24 hours for the authorities to admit is was another Muslim terrorist.
That’s political correctness.
Putting a wheelchair-accessible women’s bathroom on the second floor of a fire hall that has no elevator and no female employees. Washrooms for four genders in a high school. A year’s long lawsuit over the shape of the urinals in the men’s bathroom of a crappy bar, because some woman patron was offended.
That’s political correctness.
If you talk about Somali immigrants and drug resistant tuberculosis in the same sentence, you’re a racist.
That’s political correctness.
“This is why my question you originally cited about evidence is an important question that isn’t easily decided.”
The fact that you are pretending this is a question that is not easily decided is why I call shenanigans, Mr. Mills. You are looking at an elephant that just took a dump on the road in front of you and trying to pretend you need a taste test to see if that really is a steamy pile of elephant crap.
My mind is made up already, but if you insist I’ll get you a spoon.
My TBR sorting is fairly straightforward: first, I read the books I actually own. As a fast reader, this will take somewhere between a day and a month, depending on how many books I bought last time I went shopping, and how dense they were. Then (and only then), I decide which books to add to the books-I-actually-own pile based on what’s available and happens to catch my eye while I’m shopping. Which, in turn, depends heavily on where I happened to go shopping that time.
I don’t, and have never had, a huge pile of unread books. There are many unpurchased books I haven’t read and want to, but that’s not quite the same thing. I’m a (fanatic, insatiable) reader, but not a book collector. So the urge to get new books really only strikes when I’m out of old books.
Oops, forgot the ticky.
Digital books (and their digital marketplaces) have changed my book shopping patterns quite a bit. I never had much of a TBR list before. If I didn’t have a book to read, I went out and browsed a bookstore/library until I found several. And then I took them home and read them. No waiting!
Now, however, I’ve got a ton of kindle sample chapters of books that sounded interesting or came up on a rec list from somewhere (family, friends, filers, etc). These would be the “unpurchased, but want to read books” you mention, and since they show up in my kindle alongside my purchased books, they now get tracked.
I am also starting to build up a pile of owned and not read books for the first time as I pick up ebooks on sales even though I’m not ready to read them. Free or $1.99 deals are hard to resist.
microtherion, good point about dropping the ransom. I was going to say “but Bitcoin wasn’t invented yet”… but I see on a quick google that it had been available for two or three years when Reamde came out, so it was probably available while Stevenson was writing the novel. (I doubt it was a trunk novel, but you never know.)
@Chupik
Ah. Why do you call yourselves that?
Now consider what @Dravens statement is implying, if not outright saying, about the works that I’ve listed.
I do not consider the two answers to be significantly different from each other. YMMV, HTH, HAND.
….aaaand this is what happens when you have too many tabs open.
Please ignore my prior post, it’s part of a different conversation elsewhere. @Mike if you see fit to remove it, please go ahead.
ETA: Also, (Mar)/(Vege)mite – Eurgh.
@Xtifr
When I married my husband the books I owned but not read went from 20-50 (bag/box of pass around among friends) to 5-8k in never read book.
When I went digital shortly before my accident: author friends gave me their ebooks (lovely and a blessing), a book contest ran for me after I was hit by a truck (30-50 authors donated) to winner & me, my willingness to pick up free indie books, I somehow found myself with over 1,000 kindle books in under a year (I was never going electronic, never).
Since then I’ve learned to grab books when on sale as some have really high pricing for something I don’t own, can’t loan, can’t sell used, can’t leave to my heirs as I’m only getting a license to use. I pick up over 1k ebooks a year. Just never know what I’ll be in the mood for.
Thankfully ~3k of the physical books which are musty, water damaged, etc. are being passed on to one of our heirs this year (may it finally happen). I happen to be allergic to these damaged books. Severely allergic.
I’m working on passing more of the paper books on to declutter the house, share our joy with the next (unsuspecting extended) generation, and make future moves easier and cheaper.
This is how a non-book owner, but compulsive reader, became a book hoarder. 😉
Ethan Mills:
Thanks much for your willingness to respond here, and for your good-faith attempts to reason with unreasonability. 🙂