[Links]
[links] Link salad reads and writes
Nalo Hopkinson on why some stories don’t work — Good stuff, Maynard.
Solar eclipse on the horizon — Another striking image from APOD to follow on yesterday’s.
‘Nemesis’ and Orbital Change — Centauri Dreams on the sun’s alleged dark companion and Extinction Level Events.
A Scientist Takes On Gravity — Gravity as an emergent property rather than a force? (Via Dilbert.com.)
How Twitter Could Better Predict Disease Outbreaks — Social media is particularly useful for anyone who wants to track the present–or predict the future.
ROW 13: Why some airlines have it and others do not — This is probably unkind of me, but I don’t have a lot of patience for superstition. Once you’ve been trained by your church or your political party to accept blatant counterfactuals in the name of ideological “truth”, you begin to lose the ability distinguish reality from idiocy and lies.
We are all post-racial now — This from a group that still sometimes call themselves “tea baggers”? Um, no.
Obama and Illegal Immigration — While the Republicans scream about Obama allegedly wanting amnesty (frankly, I wish he did) and not caring about illegal immigration [...] the New York Times reports that the administration has significantly ramped up inspections and prosecutions of companies that hire illegal immigrants. As Ed Brayton says, “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Which is the Republican media strategy in a nutshell. Outrage motivates the base much better than policy, and the allegedly liberal media never gives corrections or retractions a fraction of the coverage of the original headlines.
?otD: What book showed you the way to being a better reader or writer?
7/15/2010
Writing time yesterday: 2.25 hours (revision, editing and WRPA)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 (interrupted)
This morning’s weigh-in: 231.0
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
Posted: 4:51 am Thu July 15 2010 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Cora
July 15th, 2010 at 4:42 pmA lot of hotels don’t have the room No. 13 either. This adherence to some people’s superstitions (and why am I not surprised that Lufthansa is on of the airlines who do that) annoys me, because it causes inconvenience to everyone. When I’m in a plane or hotel, looking for my seat/room, I expect the numbering to be regular. The number 13 exists, deal with it. Besides, why should some people’s superstitions be privileged above others? I dislike the number 26, yet no one is eliminating row 26 or room 26 because of me.
I had an extremely superstitious elderly relative, the sort of person who would yell at you whenever you did something that violated one of her superstitions. And most of a time, I didn’t even know that there was a superstition about e.g. opening an umbrella indoors or giving certain flowers. And she would inflict her superstitions on anyone in the vicinity. For example, this woman used to own an apartment building and she forbid her lodgers to wash clothing between Christmas and New Year, because that supposedly brought about death (everything brought about death in this woman’s twisted mind), and even went as far as cutting down clotheslines. And no one ever challenged her about it.
Steve Buchheit
July 16th, 2010 at 9:13 am“What book showed you the way to being a better reader or writer?”
Neil Gaimen’s “American Gods.” I got through that and thought, “Wow, you can do *that* with story? Kewl.” And promptly reread the book.
Jay
July 16th, 2010 at 1:28 pmThat’s precisely how I felt about Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
Eric
July 17th, 2010 at 12:42 am?otD — Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut changed the way I thought about reading and writing. I fell in love with the melding of historical fact and fiction, and the little blasts of chapters that seem to be shot at you rather than written. In a few hours of reading I’d absorbed a new religion, a pessimistic view of mankind in general and the end of the world. Before I’d read it my freshman year of college I didn’t know that books could do that.
Jay
July 17th, 2010 at 5:29 amWhat a terrific description of a book experience! Thank you.