Your Wednesday moment of zen.
Cell block at Alcatraz © 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.
Posted: 5:50 am Wed October 26 2011 | Comments(0) |
Sympathy for the Devil, ed. by Tim Pratt – Ray Gun Reviews — With a passing favorable mention of my story “The Goat Cutter”.
Steampunk Ebooks for $2.99 — Getcher Mainspring ebook on the cheap from tor.com.
Murakami on Fiction, Truth, and Lies
How translation software helped crack ‘unbreakable’ code in 1866 secret society manuscript
‘Android Dreams’: Time-lapse video of Tokyo set to ‘Blade Runner’ soundtrack — In case you needed some cool in your morning.
Why Names Matter — SCIENCE! It works, bitches. And a serious discussion of the same issue.
Time – and brain chemistry – heal all wounds
Panel recommends that 11- and 12-year-old boys get the HPV vaccine; now given to girls — I have a question for all you folks who oppose the HPV vaccine because “oh noes, kidz and teh sex!” We’re talking about lifelong protection here. Do you seriously want your children to grow up and never have sex? Stunted lives and no grandchildren is the logical result of your objections.
US dismantles most powerful nuclear bomb
NASA Is Considering Fuel Depots in the Skies
In, Through, and Beyond Saturn’s Rings — Another awesome APOD photo.
Hardiness Zone Changes — More liberally biased facts about climate change. Which is ridiculous. Climate change wouldn’t be a partisan issue if right wing ideologues hadn’t made it one. I can even understand why evolution denial, as fundamentally moronic as it is, has become an issue. But climate change denial? It doesn’t even make as much sense as Christianist tripe, which at least comforts some wilfully ignorant people who are scared of the future.
Rand retracts report on pot clinics and crime — Think tank says researchers failed to realize that data used in the study did not include LAPD statistics. It plans to recalculate its analysis. WHo’d a thunk it? Distortion and hysteria over pot use. I don’t do 420 myself, but I’ve never seen the point of criminalization of pot.
Chart comparing Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party — Heck, yeah.
Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund — Some seriously funny snark.
Islamic Law not a problem in Bush’s Afghanistan & Iraq, but a Problem in Libya? — If secular, communist Afghanistan was made fundamentalist by Reagan and Bush, or if the relatively secular Baath Party of Iraq was overthrown by W. in favor of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Call Party and the Bloc of Ayatollah Sadr II, that is unobjectionable and not even reported on. But if there’s a Democratic president in the White House, all of a sudden it is a scandal if Muslims practice Muslim law. Not a Democratic president, a Kenyan Muslim socialist president. Just ask our friends in the GOP and Your Liberal Media.
Televangelist Pat Robertson Calls GOP Field Too Extreme to Win General Election — You know you’ve hit rock bottom when one of the most radical, hate-spewing figures in America calls you “extreme.”
Michele Bachmann’s misstatements may be catching up to her — The Republican presidential candidate’s supporters seem to like her mastery of what she presents as facts — but they often aren’t. Hey. Someone finally noticed.
?otD: Ralph or Norton?
10/26/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 hours (solid)
Weight: 217.4
Currently (re)reading: Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
Posted: 5:39 am Wed October 26 2011 | Comments(0) |
My friend Chris W. Johnson has been experimenting with text abstracts and reconfigurations. His working goal was to have a Lorem Ipsum generator for English text corpii. However, he’s invented a rather Joycean text reconfigurator. I’ll have more to say about this later, when I’ve played with it a bit, but here’s my first effort, only the first 10,000 characters outputted from the text of my tor.com short story “The Speed of Time” through the application. The result is oddly poetic, I think. I do note that relatively large chunks of my original text survive in this sample, so I’ll have to experiment with letting the program break it down a bit further.
Probabilistic Text Generator version 1.0b3 [1] of 24-Oct-2011 by Chris W. Johnson.
Probabilities based on 9 character sequences. Unique 9 character sequences: 98,341 predicted; 11,542 actually present.
“The Speed of Time”
No, no. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium.
Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark.
Another thing she used to tell me was that everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.
It was as good a way as any heartbeat.
There is no t in e=mc2.
I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understand, Sameera bumped into a man she’d never seen before.
He was dark skinned, in that frame of reference. Likewise if we were mayflies flowing water would be glacial.
So much for the stars to slow down, their light to pool listlessly before my eyes.
And you? What are you waiting for the five daily prayers.
She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the careers of dozens of physicists.
In the end, they calibrated it to secretly attack the USS Fond du Lac on patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boson rifle’s firing plan, the submarine should have roughly tripled in mass, immediately sunk with a large quantity of hard currency, not to mention the lives of hundreds of meters beneath the blighted taiga.
A casual misreading of quantum mechanics, combined with Politburo desperation for a way out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was underway, except maybe to economists.
Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped for almost a hundred years.
* * *
Let me tell you a story about Sameera sought to pray in the dying power systems and cold-stored files and empty pairs of boots which can be found on every station, the deck of every ship, in the trajectory of that old Soviet weapon.
All you have to do is follow them, and find the crack in the world where everything went. One of these days, that’s where I’ll go, too.
© 2010, 2011, Joseph E. Lake, Jr. and Chris W. Johnson
Posted: 5:57 am Tue October 25 2011 | Comments(0) |
My one and only formal public appearance this fall will be for a reading and signing in celebration of the forthcoming release of Endurance [ Powells | Barnes & Noble ], the second Green book.
I’ll be appearing at the Powell’s Cedar Hills store on Thursday, November 17th, at 7 pm. As is usual, I’ll have an open dinner from 5 pm to 6:30 pm, at McMenamins Cedar Hills, at the north end of the same retail complex Powell’s is in. If you’re planning to come to the dinner, please do let me know in comments or via email so I can include you in the headcount.
Due to chemotherapy, I’ve cancelled all my other convention and workshop appearances, so if you want to see me on the hoof and Hawaiian clad, this is your only chance. Hope to see you there.
Posted: 5:48 am Tue October 25 2011 | Comments(2) |
Your Tuesday moment of zen.
Barred vent at Alcatraz © 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.
Posted: 5:40 am Tue October 25 2011 | Comments(0) |
Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense — (Via @lilithsaintcrow.)
The Trouble with Amazon — Amazon as publisher? Worry about it as a bookseller. (Via @angelajames.)
Cul de Sac on the awesome power of a blank sheet of paper
Is reading on the loo bad for you? — Filthy habit or blameless bliss? A public health study by Ron Shaoul lifts the lid on toilet reading once and for all.
Cosmic Journey aka Kosmitcheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella — A review of a very interesting Soviet science fiction film from 1936. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
markbourne
9 Chickweed Lane captures the essence of Internet comment sections
Creepy vintage portraits of vaudeville ventriloquists and their dummies —
Autistic children have distinct facial features, study suggests — We may be a step closer in understanding what causes autism, say University of Missouri researchers after finding differences between the facial characteristics of children who have autism and those who don’t. Guess what? It doesn’t involve vaccinations.
Real ‘Sybil’ Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake — (Via David Goldman.)
Ancient supernova mystery solved
Water Found in Planet-Forming Disc
Habitable Zone Dramatically Bigger Around Red Dwarfs — The zone that supports liquid water may be 30 per cent bigger than previously thought, say astrobiologists.
Giant amoebas discovered 6.6 miles down in Pacific sea trench — What could possibly go wrong?
Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber? — On political discourse at the grassroots level.
Chemical bomb tossed into Occupy Maine encampment — Looks like someone’s decided to use Second Amendment remedies against the dirty hippies. Hmm, wonder if the attacker might be a conservative. I wonder what the media reaction would be if someone tried this at a Tea Party gathering? Did you see this headlined anywhere in Your Liberal Media?
?otD: Who want to be a painter man?
10/25/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (fitful)
Weight: 216.2
Currently (re)reading: Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
Posted: 5:37 am Tue October 25 2011 | Comments(0) |
The good news is the Neulasta pain never materialized this past weekend. Given that it had been beyond outrageous during the equivalent point in the previous chemo cycle, I am deeply thankful. I have no idea if my prophylactic measures were effective (lots of Ibuprofen, heat and massage via a chair pad) or if the pain just found someplace else to toddle off to this go-round. Still, I will continue with the prophylaxis over the next four cycles, as Neulasta certainly is remaining on the menu. As a result, I was able to properly enjoy my daughter’s family birthday dinner last night at DeNicola’s, a favorite restaurant of ours.
As an incidental note, my continued emphasis on the BRAT(y) diet (with exceptions such as last night’s dinner), along with strategic deployment of digestive enzymes, Lactaid and Gas-X, has kept my lower GI fantastically calmer than has been my historical experience on chemo. It’s boring and a nutritional problem to boot, but the lack of extreme lower GI dysfunction is well worth the other challenges. I just feel starved for protein a lot of time, which is a bummer.
Coping wise, my inner negativity keeps bobbing to the surface. The current challenge is avoiding a sense of bitterness that threatens to flood me. This arises in turn from my sense of loss and limitation, which has been re-ignited by several recent life events. I honestly believe the negativity is being driven as much by my reduced cognitive and emotional faculties as I’m now in late-stage chemo as it is by my genuine emotions and worldview. In other words, it’s the drugs talking. That realization doesn’t keep the negative voices from feeling real in the moment.
Even my subconscious is getting into the act. Last night’s dream was about me losing my ballet career. (Ahem. There’s a childhood story behind that I’ll tell some other time.) A thinly disguised anxiety dream about my fears for Sunspin and my writing career in general, obviously. And about par for the current course of things inside my head.
Also, I note this article about Steve Jobs and the afterlife. I tell you right now that if I ever start talking about an afterlife, cancer will have swiss-cheesed my mind and robbed my intellectual integrity. I’ve spent my whole life, or at least the portion of it since I stopped being a churched Southern Protestant, recognizing that the very human wish to believe in an afterlife is blatant wishful thinking without a shred of objective evidence. (And no, the Bible does not count as objective evidence for anything except the existence of some ancient texts of dubious authorship.) Just because I am daily faced with the realities of the personal extinction of self is no cause to abandon reason. If considering the possibility of an afterlife was a comfort for Steve Jobs, I am glad for him, but that’s a road I’d only take after completely abrogating my intellectual principles.
Meanwhile, the week awaits. Chemo this Friday again, in the nonstop bumper cavalcade of fun that is my life with cancer.
Posted: 5:56 am Mon October 24 2011 | Comments(1) |
Your Monday moment of zen.
Watch tower at Alcatraz © 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.
Posted: 5:46 am Mon October 24 2011 | Comments(0) |
Where’s My Niche? The Unique Challenges of the Writer Blogger — Catherine Shaffer on blogging for the writer.
Some thoughts on death (my own) and cancer (my own), for those who were sensibly away from their keyboards over the weekend: Here [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] and here [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
Notes while watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” for the xxth time since childhood — Mark Bourne is funny and thoughtful.
In Montana, an old arcade game worth a fortune
Steve Jobs refused on/off switch for iPhone because he hoped there was an afterlife — Umm…
Annual Halloween rituals — Slacktivist Fred Clark on Christianist loon opposition to Halloween. He makes a good point about comparing Halloween hysteria to hysteria about the so-called ‘War on Christmas’. Also, this: I suppose the best way to get knee-jerk social conservatives to stop whining about Halloween would be to point out to them that all this free candy undermines Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity. Hahahahah.
GOP Candidates Wax Stupid on Religion — I quote the same Constitution the strict constructionists in the GOP all fetishize so much: no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. Hey, GOP, picking and choosing what’s convenient to your prejudices from your every-word-is-sacred Founders? Kind of like how your Christianist core treats the every-word-is-literally-true Bible, huh? Wonder if there’s a connection…
Climate Change Deniers Abandon ‘Befuddled Warmist’ Physicist Who Came Around On Global Warming — This is classic Republican thinking. When one of their own takes a careful, objective look at the facts on the ground and concludes that a cherished conservative talking point is wrong, instead of looking at the evidence, they attack the messenger.
W. enters my wife’s schoolboard race — Our family gets a close-up look of how big money has taken over politics — even at the local level. (Via shsilver
?otD: What did you read this weekend?
10/24/2011
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo fatigue)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (fitful)
Weight: 216.4
Currently (re)reading: Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
Posted: 5:32 am Mon October 24 2011 | Comments(0) |
Last night I dreamt that I’d connected up with my Norwegian professor from college and her husband. They were planning to spend several months homesteading on a tiny, frozen island in the North Atlantic called Ttk Ttk, which in my dream was the site of an old Viking outpost. This was something of a survivalist trip, and I was going with them as an observer, so there was a great deal of logistical stuff going on in the dream. Lots of prep work being undertaken in some snowy, unnamed city that might have been Bergen, Norway. Plus, oddly, something about black bears.
I think ‘Ttk Ttk’, or something like it, is the name of a methane-breathing race in C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books. I assume the whole island thing is my subconscious processing my proposed trip to Antarctica. I have no idea what the black bears were about, nor why I’m dreaming of a college professor whom I liked a great deal but haven’t thought about in a decade or two. Dr. Sverre was a Norwegian married to an American, and she had near-native fluency in at least four languages, and was quite a good teacher.
But still. Me, on a North Atlantic rock for months with no technology? Then I woke up to discover that the heat had turned itself off and my comforter had slipped off the bed.
Cold dreams, indeed. Jeg moret.
Posted: 8:03 am Sun October 23 2011 | Comments(3) |