Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad wonders what lies beyond the sky

Walt Disney Surrenders to Navy’s SEAL Team 6 — A glimmering of sanity over at the Mouse House?

Ceci N’est Pas Une Roquette — Hahahahah. Symbolism, ah symbolism. A snaky look at art and sexy magic through the ages. Very mildly NSFW, though mostly through coffee spit-takes on the keyboard. (Via David Goldman.)

Streamlining — 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia. Gnuh. Why am I not a multibillionaire so I could experience this in person? (Thanks to willyumtx.)

Cities as Software — A fascinating article on hacking urban infrastructure. (Snurched from rekre8.)

Goodbye, Spirit: An Explorer of the Red Planet — After three months of trying to contact the Mars rover, NASA is calling it quits. Rest in peace, little dude.

Turbid Waters Surround New Zealand — An orbital photo of the Cook Strait. Hey, I’ve been there…

How the Rise of Apple Is Just Like the Rise of Mammals — An afternoon in the National Museum of Natural History yields some unexpected connections. From the really odd metaphor file.

Harold Camping wrong again, but what if 200 million people did disappear? — Snerk. What if 200 million people were gullible idiots, how much money would Harold Camping make?

Federal government must not skimp in rebuilding Joplin — What, wait? The government can do something good? Rush Limbaugh to the news room, stat. The liberal media strikes again. (Via danjite.)

Franklin Graham goes the Full Olasky — Slacktivist Fred Clark on the conservative/evangelical myth of faith-based social services. With, you know, actual data and stuff. From reality. That surprisingly does not conform to the conservative viewpoint.

Scalia Misstates Facts in Dissent — Imagine that.

Medicaid a Big Deal Too — More on the wide-ranging human and family costs of the Republicans’ proposed cuts.

The Defeated — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on Palin’s new movie, and her presidential ambitions. Ah, it’s loon season in America.

Selective Outrage about War — This poster at reddit.com compares the various costs of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq to those of the UN /NATO intervention in Libya (which is not illegal in internationaL law) and asks you to guess which one Republicans are angry about. It’s not like either one of those wars had a damned thing to do with 9-11 or national security.

The Crazy, Inexplicable Demand for a Paul Ryan Presidential Run — That should raise some questions about how short conservative memories are, underscore how easily many conservatives are swayed by the right rhetoric, and remind everyone how remarkably malleable the GOP’s new heroes are when Republicans had unified control of the government.

Bush Policies Dominant Cause Of National Debt — Tell me again where the Tea Party was with their great concerns for fiscal responsibility back when we had a white conservative present creating the mess they’re so angry at Obama about?

?otD: Would you like to be Raptured?

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5/26/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (1,100 more words on a non-fiction project)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (fitful)
Weight: 232.4
Currently (re)reading: A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

Tags: cars, Culture, Funny, healthcare, Iraq, Links, Movies, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, Science, sex, Tech

Posted: 5:46 am Thu May 26 2011 | Comments(1) |

[sale] German rights to several novels

Through my agent Jennifer Jackson of Donald Maass Literary Agency, I have accepted an offer from my German publisher, Bastei Lübbe, for print, ebook and audio rights to Escapement, Pinion and Green. I am quite pleased.

Tags: Books, Escapement, Green, Pinion, Publishing, Sale

Posted: 5:38 am Wed May 25 2011 | Comments(6) |

[photos|travel] Sugar mill between Waimea and Hanapepe

Driving back from Waimea, we stopped to look at another abandoned sugar mill we’d spotted on the way out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Child, Kauai, nature, Photos, Travel

Posted: 5:33 am Wed May 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Wednesday moment of zen

Your Wednesday moment of zen.

Missoula, MT. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Montana, Photos, zen

Posted: 5:30 am Wed May 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad for a spring hump day

A reader reacts to Green — Generally favorable. I wonder that they’ll think of Endurance.

Think Like A Publisher #11… Electronic Sales to Bookstores — Dean Wesley Smith is really, really smart about distributing ebooks.

Female Magazine Fans Flock to Nook Color — Gender bias in ebook readers? (Via my Dad.)

A Rejection of the Power Semantic — A little bit of language neepery on pronouns, privilege and power, from Language Log. (Which reminds me some blog commentors who criticized me during the 2010 primary election season for referring to “Hillary, Edwards and Obama”, saying I was disrespecting Ms. Clinton by using only her first name. I had to point out that ‘Hillary’ was her own campaign’s branding, presumably to distinguish candidate Clinton from former President Clinton.)

How to spot a psychopath — Weird article.

Exclusive Area 51 Pictures: Secret Plane Crash Revealed — National Geographic with some fascinating photos and commentary on a highly secret 1963 aircraft crash out of Area 51. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Blohm & Voss BV 138 Seedrache (Sea Dragon) — Speaking of flying boats…

Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images — Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters — Can a booming “crypto-currency” really compete with conventional cash?

The dying of the light — Roger Ebert on projection problems in cinemas, thanks to proliferating Sony 3D technology.

Nasa picks deep-space astronaut ship — Nasa has confirmed that the vehicle it will use to send astronauts to places like asteroids will be based on its Orion capsule concept. “Orion”, your first name in design sanity since 1946. Really, they could have called it something else.

Apocalypse believers shocked after appointed hour passes — It’s hard to know what to say to this. I’m torn between deep mockery and sympathy for the deceived.

Older bin Laden widows think younger wife tipped off US

The Elephant in the Green Room — The circus Roger Ailes created at Fox News made his network $900 million last year. But it may have lost him something more important: the next election. Your liberal media. I was especially struck by the bizarrely ironic statement that Ailes “doesn’t want Fox to be seen as a front of the Republican Party”. The pretense in this article that Fox has ever been a real news organization as opposed to a political operation is both charmingly naive and deeply disingenuous. And if you think that’s just my bias talking, see the part about Ailes’ belief that Obama wants to create a national police force. (Via shsilver.)

?otD: How’s work?

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5/25/2011
Writing time yesterday: 1.25 hours (non-fiction project, plus more time on technical stuff as well)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (solid)
Weight: 232.0
Currently (re)reading: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Books, Cool, Culture, ebooks, gender, Green, Iraq, Language, Links, media, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Tech, weird

Posted: 5:29 am Wed May 25 2011 | Comments(0) |

[cancer] On the good week

Well, chemo side effects continue to affect my life even on the ‘good’ week of the cycle. The fatigue is more persistent in this early stage than I remember it being during the previous chemo course. Lower GI distress is about on par, and now that the nausea is gone (since sometime over the weekend, more or less) I can handle that. No fun, but I can handle it. My mental state is better, but my mental energy is impeded by the overall fatigue.

At least the food intolerances haven’t kicked in full time yet. I can still enjoy my meals, and I’m making the most of it.

Medical and sexual TMI Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Cancer, health, Personal

Posted: 5:56 am Tue May 24 2011 | Comments(1) |

[photos|travel] Waimea canyon

Past the town of Waimea, we turned off the highway and drove up toward Waimea Canyon. Mark Twain described this as “the Grand Canyon of the Pacific”, which is a pretty neat trick on an island 30 miles wide. As it happens, I agree with him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Child, Kauai, nature, Photos, Travel

Posted: 5:47 am Tue May 24 2011 | Comments(0) |

[photos] Your Tuesday moment of zen

Your Tuesday moment of zen.

Flower, Missoula, MT. © 2007, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: flowers, Photos, zen

Posted: 5:45 am Tue May 24 2011 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad dreams of flying over the ice

A reader reacts to Escapement — They liked it, quite a bit.

How to Hang Out in the Bar with Writers at a Convention — cathshaffer with some advice. Me, I just show and talk to whoever’s there (quite probably including you), but then I’m a pathological extrovert who has nothing to prove.

Automated Selectivity — Art Guru James Gurney on a fairly interesting development in the cognitive psychology of visual art. (I think I’ve got that right.) I will point out that as his commentary so often does, this piece has a strong analog in written fiction. We writers talk about the ‘telling detail’ as having much the same impact as visual selectivity.

Stop Organizing Your E-mail, Says Study — People who put incoming e-mails in folders are no better at finding them than those who simply use search. I adopted precisely this strategy when I moved to Gmail as my primary reader some years ago. It works beautifully.

Soviet flying boat MBR-2 over the ice fields. Northern theater of operations. — I absolutely love this photograph, but then I’m a complete sucker for flying boats. I do have to wonder how well they operate on ice, though.

Is Google Motors the new GM? — Cloud control to Major Tom.

Progress Toward the Dream of Space Drives and Stargates — Centauri Dreams on a topic near and dear to us skiffy types.

Existential angst about the bigger picture — Ben Goldacre on, well, rationalism.

Katyal Speaks of SG ‘Mistakes’ in Japanese Internment Cases — No one could possibly have imagined that the government would lie about evidence in a National Security matter. Look! Muslims! (Via Scrivener’s Error.)

Focus on the Family Head: “We’ve Probably Lost” on Gay Marriage — Looks like the bottom’s fallen out of part of the hate market. I’m surprised, it’s hard to go wrong betting on the bigotry of the righteously intolerant. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of Christianist assholes.

ACLU Debunks Creeping Sharia Delusion — ‘Creeping Sharia’ is another one of those conservatives causes (or maybe memes?) like Birtherism that makes it real hard to take Republicans seriously even on stuff they’re still rational about. Basically, anyone who can believe this stuff is self-evidently nuts; so even other-wise useful things they say are highly suspect. This is what happens when you build your political fortunes on enraging and terrifying your voting base.

Enemy at gate? Not in this case — In a one-sided standoff, a fugitive has holed up on his land for 11 years — but lawmen don’t seem to care. That’s the way you handle lunatics. Instead of, for example, electing them on Tea Party platforms.

Fantasy Island: Are Republicans losing their grip on reality? — One party, the Democrats, suffers from the usual range of institutional blind spots, historical foibles, and constituency-driven evasions. The other, the Republicans, has moved to a mental Shangri-La, where unwanted problems (climate change, the need to pay the costs of running the government) can be wished away, prejudice trumps fact (Obama might just be Kenyan-born or a Muslim), expertise is evidence of error, and reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.

“The Tea Party Itch Has Not Been Scratched” — Some political ‘inside baseball’ on the Republicans and Medicare. And the dangers of placing ideology over governance, as if that hadn’t been amply demonstrated over the past decade.

?otD: What did you dream last night?

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5/24/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (spent hours dealing with some technical issues on my writing laptop)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (fitful)
Weight: 233.2
Currently (re)reading: A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Tags: Books, Conventions, Cool, Escapement, gay, Links, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, race, Religion, reviews, Science, Tech

Posted: 5:42 am Tue May 24 2011 | Comments(0) |

[cancer|personal] Hood River, digestion and me

Yesterday the_child had her last lacrosse game of the season in Hood River, OR, a beautiful town that is a long way from here. They lost, but played well, on a field with a great sightline toward Mount Adams, which obstinately remained clouded, thus denying me any wonderful photographs of teen aged girls playing lacrosse with an enormous snow-capped volcano as backdrop.

So other than my morning walk and a couple of minor errands, I got pretty much nothing done. Especially given how exhausted I was when I got home. (Mother of the Child drove both ways.)

This is rather my own fault, because I’d taken an extended walk both Saturday morning (up and down Mount Tabor, a small, non-snow-capped volcano in the middle of Portland’s SE side) and Sunday morning through various neighborhoods. I burned my own damned spoons, thank you very much.

The lower GI rebellions of Saturday weren’t so bad Sunday, but by the time we got to the playing field in Hood River, I’d become stupidly hungry. Having brought only snacks with me, this was inconvenient. So I borrowed Mother of the Child’s keys and drove her car into town looking for food. As I drove, I got hit with another round of intestinal cramps so intensely painful I was screaming and crying in the car, searching for a fast food restaurant or any place else with an easily accessible public restroom.

That was profoundly unpleasant, and put a certain tenor on the rest of the day.

Post-game, the girls had their end-of-season party in a pizza joint out there. I wasn’t sure I’d have the energy to attend, but I did make it, and I’m glad I was able to do so. Came back and pretty much collapsed.

Now I’ve got a four-day work week, with chemo session two on Friday. I confess to dreading it. The vomiting and days-long nausea of the first session are really weighing on me. I’ll discuss this with the oncologist, of course, and ask for both advice and for stronger anti-nausea drugs. On the plus side, I seem to be less mentally vague on FOLFIRI than I was on FOLFOX. The oxaliplatin of FOLFOX blew my brain out as soon as it hit my veins. The irinotecan of FOLFIRI flattens me badly and upsets my GI more, but it does less to my brain.

For now, the day. As ever.

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Photo © 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Cancer, Child, health, Oregon, Personal, Travel

Posted: 5:53 am Mon May 23 2011 | Comments(0) |