[links] Link salad takes its place with the lord of the hills
The Adjustable Cosmos — An animated short film with certain affinities to my Mainspring trilogy. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1)
bedii.)
Early stop-motion with real insect characters — Uh…
Watch A Robotic Cheetah-Cub Run
Materials Scientists Build Chlorophyll-based Phototransistor
The Faulty Logic of the ‘Math Wars’
Global Attitudes toward Homosexuality — Generally, the more religious a country, the less accepting its citizens are of homosexuality: Ah, the magical link between bigotry and faith.
IRS scandal: Is partisanship overshadowing facts? — Is the sky blue? Is water wet? When you have one party explicitly dedicated to inventing its own facts regardless of objective reality, then by definition partisanship overshadows.
QotD?: Are you in neat little rows sporting canvas frills?
6/18/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (restoring dead computer)
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 247.8
Number of FEMA troops on my block installing Islamic footwashing sinks: 0
Currently reading: Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg; Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Books, Cool, education, gay, Links, Mainspring, Movies, Personal, Politics, Religion, Science, Tech, Videos, weird
Posted: 4:22 am Tue June 18 2013 | Comments(2) |
[links] Link salad wakes up with a JayCon hangover
No, That’s Not Too Much Jay — File 770 is both kind and funny about me.
Mainspring (Jay Lake, Clockwork Earth #1) — A review of my novel by a readeer who really, really didn’t care for it.
Superman: Flying to a church near you — Well, ok then. (Via shsilver.)
A Pocket-Sized Micro House Built To Withstand Severe Weather
Could a Surplus of California Milk Fulfill China’s Cheese Needs? — I was not aware that China had cheese needs.
Restoring Trees to Save the World’s Rarest Parrot —
South Africa’s Cape parrot needs more yellowwood trees to survive.
La Salle’s long-lost ship?
QotD?: Are you as stonkered as I am?
6/16/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (too many errands, not enough time)
Hours slept: 5.75 hours solid
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 248.0
Number of FEMA troops on my block leaking intelligence secrets: 0
Currently reading: Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg; Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Books, California, China, Cool, economy, history, interviews, Links, Mainspring, Movies, nature, Personal, Religion, reviews, Tech
Posted: 6:33 am Sun June 16 2013 | Comments(3) |
[links] Link salad’s lips move, but you can’t hear what it says
How Does Writing Affect Your Brain? [infographic] — (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)
Colors in Lord of the Rings — A palette of the movie images.
“The Falling Problem” — SMBC cuts it very close to home.
The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill — The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.
Earliest Evidence of French Winemaking Discovered
Bell Labs Invents Lensless Camera — A new class of imaging device with no lens and just a single light sensitive sensor could revolutionise optical, infrared and millimetre wave imaging.
Space-based clouds of atoms: Future gravitational wave detector — Timing laser light between atomic clouds to sense gravitational waves.
How Can You Tell a Fake Jesus? — This article is goofy on so many levels.
GOP governors’ endorsements of Medicaid expansion deepen rifts within party — What happens when reality meets ideology.
Young Republicans Aim To Revitalize GOP — In which a young Republican appears to genuinely appalled that young voters see the GOP as “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.” I want to ask this woman if she’s ever read a Republican party platform or listened to a Republican campaign speech or taken a look at the GOP legislative record in the House and Senate, let alone any of the states where they have legislative majorities? Because a contemporary conservative being surprised by those labels is like a bird being surprised by the sky being blue. Stirring up hatred, intolerance and fear is what the whole staying in business by generating angry white men thing is all about.
QotD?: Are you comfortably numb?
6/4/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.5 hours (revisions to “Rock of Ages” and “Hook Agonistes”)
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (feet hurt)
Weight: n/a (traveling)
Number of FEMA troops on my block creating tornados for political distraction: 0
Currently reading: Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Art, Christianists, Cool, Culture, healthcare, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, space, Tech, Writing
Posted: 2:47 am Tue June 04 2013 | Comments(1) |
[cancer] Field Notes from Cancerland, midwestern BBQ edition
Regorafenib Side Effects
I’ve been taking the new medication for a week as of this morning. Side effects started showing up around this past Thursday, about four days in. The most noticeable is the early stages of hand and foot syndrome. Right now this expresses itself as a sharp heat intolerance in my hands and a mild heat intolerance in my feet. This makes it hard to take a shower. I am also experiencing soreness and pain at any pressure. This makes it hard to carry anything weighing more than a pound or two, as well as open jars and bottles, as my grip has already degraded almost completely. Not to mention walking is becoming painful.
I am at risk of becoming chair and bed bound from this, and of losing most of the use of my hands. I can cope with a fair amount of that, but not the loss of my ability to type, or read electronic and paper material.
I’m also becoming hoarse and losing my appetite, which are probably Regorafenib related as well. I expect pathological fatigue soon, though that hasn’t appeared yet, and possibly a number of other issues.
This is only the beginning. I have seven more weeks of this regime before we evaluate progress with another CT scan. We’ll see how sharply I decline over the coming weeks.
Return of the GI Follies
I am having GI issues which are almost the opposite of Regorafenib’s stated side effects in that area. Things are binding up and slowing down in my lower GI. This is unusual for me, given the architecture my multiple surgical interventions have left me with. Erratic, fast and loose is far more my everyday experience. I’m not sure if this isn’t just some transient dietary thing or what. We shall see.
Writing Progress
garyomaha asked me yesterday over dinner if I was still working on Original Destiny, Manifest Sin. My answer was yes, but not right this moment. I’ve had multiple event interruptions in my writing (Gaslight Gathering, Nebula Awards Weekend, Rio Hondo) while being focused on the METAtropolis: Green Space project, that has a final due date in two weeks. Plus the “Hook Agonistes” collaboration with Seanan McGuire. I’ve actually been getting a fair amount of work done, but much of it has fallen under my generic category of WRPA (writing related program activities) rather than the advancement of wordcount on specific manuscripts.
Given the advance of both cancer and Regorafenib, I am very mindful of having a short fuse on all of this. I expect to be back on Original Destiny by this coming weekend, if not a bit sooner, and will be focused on that until I’m either done or am confronting an interruption too critical to power through.
Business Issues and Interviews
I’ve been pursuing several parallel tracks of business issues related to disability and estate planning. When those reach a point of fruition, I will discuss them here on the blog. Some things need to happen at their own pace, in confidence, before they can be outlined in any detail. That coping with cancer should involve Sekrit Projekts is both annoying and inevitable. On the plus side of Sekrit Projekts, The Oregonian will be running another in-depth interview with on Sunday, June 9th. I’ll link to the online version of that interview when it becomes available.
Star Trek Into Darkness
This isn’t at all cancer related, but it’s interesting and entertaining. My recent comments on Star Trek Into Darkness [ imdb ] have provoked quite a set of responses.
Some are here and here on my blog, but the majority are on Facebook here and here. See also this thread on the Facebook page of Nikki Nmd which riffs on some of my remarks.
Fascinating, the range of reactions, not to mention the depth of passion behind those reactions.
Tags: Books, Cancer, health, META3, Movies, ODMS, Original Destiny, Personal, reviews, stories, Writing
Posted: 4:19 am Sun June 02 2013 | Comments(8) |
[movies] Star Trek Into Darkness
Yesterday, Lisa Costello and I went to see Star Trek Into Darkness [ imdb ].
How you can make such a terribly bad movie with Zachary Quinto, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban and Benedict Cumberbatch is beyond me. It wasn’t just bad. It was gratuitously bad. Stupidly bad. Intellectually offensively bad. Sort of like that recent movie that someone who stole Ridley Scott’s name claimed to have made. $190,000,000 spent on this dog and they couldn’t get a scriptwriter with minimal competence at science, science fiction, plot, suspense or dialog? I could have written a better script. Drunk.
Lisa’s first flying snowman came six or seven minutes in. I think I lasted ten minutes before my first flying snowman. After a while, I lost count. I eventually wanted to retitle the movie Star Trek: Lens Flares vs Flying Snowmen. If nothing else, that would have been truth in advertising.
I’ll admit this much: it was kind of fun. Stupid, boring, annoying fun, but kind of fun. Seriously, though. Wait for the DVD release. Or Netflix. Or a junior college interpretive dance performance of the script. At a minimum, watch it at home with the sound turned off while listening to old Cheech and Chong routines.
And this movie was made by the man who will make the next Star Wars films? Based on what J.J. Abrams did to Star Trek Into Darkness, I predict an all-Jar Jar cast in a Busby Berkeley style musical about political infighting in the Imperial Senate.
Tags: Movies, radiantlisa, reviews
Posted: 5:09 am Sat June 01 2013 | Comments(34) |
[links] Link salad is always questing
Kyle Cassidy reads steampunk in the original Klingon
A quiet scene from The Matrix demonstrates how to make exposition compelling — (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)
Ghost War — Electronic and physical deception during WWII.
Asteroid Mining Company Kickstarts a Space Telescope — Just think carefully about that headline for a moment. I love living in the future.
Awesome Time Lapse Video Shows 281 Days Of Roving On Mars
Scientists poke frozen mammoth, liquid blood squirts out — A variation on the age-old “poke it with a stick” method revives cloning hopes.
Volcano nerds will love Oregon’s Newberry Monument
Holy Land for sale — Wow. Weird.
Police: Maine man staged kidnap that killed girl — What is the matter with people?
I was a liberal mole at Fox News: From Bill O’Reilly to Roger Ailes, here’s all the inside dope — (Via shsilver.)
Americans Underestimate How Many Other Americans Support Same Sex Marriage — This is in line with the fact that most conservative positions poll much worse than politicians of any stripe believe. Viz the recent votes on gun control in the Senate. Strangely enough, Your Liberal Media significantly overrepresents the socially marginal ideas of the GOP as being a balanced part of the American zeitgeist. Think about this: Why aren’t the core GOP stances of evolution denial and climate change denial laughed right off the newspaper page and television screen on the face of it? In any rational society, they would be. Like many if not most GOP positions, these aren’t debatable issues among intellectually honest people with a grounding in reality. Conservatism has become a religion.
Health Care and Social Justice — Look at which states have rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion — and see how “color-blind” public policy can produce bigoted effects. Ta-Nehisi Coates on ObamaCare and race.
Gun Deaths Outpace Motor Vehicle Deaths in 12 States and the District of Columbia in 2010 — Because guns make us all safer. And unlike automobiles, there is absolutely no reason a sane society that values the lives, health and safety of its citizens would register or regulate firearms. Just ask the GOP and the NRA, they’ll tell you.
This Is How the NRA Ends — A bigger, richer, meaner gun-control movement has arrived. We should ever be so lucky as to get those vile, death-worshipping NRA bastards out of our political system.
Top Ten Michele Bachmann Goofs on the Middle East — Well, she is a Republican. As such, there’s no political or cultural expectation that her statements should correspond with reality or those liberal “facts” and “data” in any way. Certainly Your Liberal Media doesn’t hold conservatives accountable for their Reality Gap.
QotD?: Can you remember what you forgot?
5/30/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (revisions to “Hook Agonistes”)
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 248.2
Number of FEMA troops on my block scamming disaster aid slush funds: 0
Currently reading: Thud by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Cool, gay, guns, healthcare, Links, media, Movies, Oregon, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, steampunk, Videos, weird
Posted: 5:20 am Thu May 30 2013 | Comments(2) |
[links] Link salad can still taste the momos
Relay For Life — Robin Silver raises funds to fight cancer.
Kicked out of the mall — for an anti-cancer hat — The most insensitive mall cops ever aggressively escort out two teens who just lost their mom. That’s family friendly, alright. (Via shsilver and others.)
The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie — Interesting. (Snurched from Andrew Wheeler.)
German software firm recruiting autistic workers — German software firm SAP is recruiting autistic workers. To help the company hire autistic workers, SAP has hired Specialisterne. Together, SAP and Specialisterne will recruit individuals with autism that can work as software testers, programmers and data quality assurance specialists.
Pavlof Volcano, Alaska Peninsula — Oooh, pretty.
What the State Birds Should Be — Seven cardinals but no hawks? Come on! (Via JL)
Bitcoin Hits the Big Time, to the Regret of Some Early Boosters — The first major conference for the digital currency suggests it is gaining legitimacy, but in a manner disappointing to some early enthusiasts.
Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD — (Snurched from Freakonomics.)
Tornadoes and Global Warming: Is There a Connection? — Will the future bring more twisters to Oklahoma and Tornado Alley? The science isn’t clear yet, on account of unlike politics, science doesn’t make up its mind in advance of the evidence.
Portland, Oregon rejects drinking water fluoridation by wide margin — Public health measure goes down amid vague concerns about safety and purity. Even progressives can be idiots.
Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics — Why does any religion get to claim the good done by non-believers. Christ really didn’t die for me, or for anyone else who isn’t a Christian. While I surely appreciate the gesture of tolerance, it encloses a spike of arrogance. (Thanks to Danny Adams.)
Atheist lawmaker opened with Carl Sagan quote instead of prayer — (Via shsilver and others.)
Ken Cuccinelli Loses Petition To Uphold Anti-Sodomy Law — Yeah, pushing for a ban on oral sex is certainly one way to make the GOP more popular.
Dear Oklahoma: We Feel for you, we love you, but do us some favors — Shorter version: As you sow, so shall you reap. Unfortunately, the rest of America also reaps what you sow. So, sow better.
Reaching the ‘weather weapon’ stage — [T]he guy raising the specter of Obama using “weather weapons” to kill Oklahomans is the same guy helping influence several Republican policymakers in 2013. Another of the many reasons why rational human beings everywhere think American conservatives are absolute lunatics. The GOP and its politicians embrace this kind of mind-melting insanity instead of rejecting it out of hand. (Via shellyrae.)
QotD?: Eaten Tibetan lately?
5/23/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.5 hours (WRPA editing, otherwise on workshop time)
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid)
Body movement: n/a
Weight: n/a
Number of FEMA troops on my block scamming disaster aid slush funds: 0
Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Cancer, climate, Culture, healthcare, Links, Movies, Personal, Photos, Politics, Portland, Religion, Science, sex, Tech
Posted: 5:40 am Thu May 23 2013 | Comments(1) |
[links] Link salad checks in from 10,000 feet up in the mountains
Abandoned Stars Wars sets in the desert — Are these meta-artifacts? (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)
Divide & conquer makes quantum light a breeze to detect
One-Time Pad Reinvented To Make Electronic Copying Impossible
The Brick Testament — The world’s largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible. Mmm, Legos. Something I think I’ve featured before. (Thanks to seventorches.)
Beware Social Nostalgia — An essay that cuts the heart out of one of the core impulses of conservatism — the Myth of the Golden Age.
Lesbian forced from partner, two kids by Texas judge’s ‘morality clause’ — A lesbian woman has 30 days to evacuate her home after a judge ruled only relatives by ‘blood or marriage’ can be around her partner’s kids past 9 pm. Compassionate conservatism strikes again. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)
Washington Gets Explicit: Its ‘War on Terror’ is Permanent — Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the ‘war’, in limitless form, will continue for ‘at least’ another decade – or two. We have always been at war with Eurasia. (Thanks to tillyjane, a/k/a my mom.)
QotD?: What’s the highest altitude you’ve ever been at (not counting flight)?
5/20/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (con time)
Hours slept: 7.25 hours (fitful)
Body movement: n/a
Weight: n/a
Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0
Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Cool, Culture, Funny, gay, gender, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Religion, Tech
Posted: 6:17 am Mon May 20 2013 | Comments(6) |
[cancer] Field notes from Cancerland, heading out of town tomorrow edition
Generosity of Spirit
More generosity flows my way. @howardtayler has done some amazing things for me this week, with an able assist from his colorist Travis Walton. Howard teases his work here. Suffice to say this will be public soon, and you can all marvel at Howard’s skill and wit, and understand how impressed and humbled I am by his support.
Airline Mileage
Yesterday’s airline mileage appeal was a bit of a fiasco. I’d not checked into the airline policies for a while, and they have both monetized and restricted mileage transfers between private individual. Thank you so much to everyone who made the effort. Another reader found points.com, which I will be investigating today or tomorrow in hopes of arriving at a more useful solution. In the mean time, the original Big Project has proceeded down another path. I have several other Worthy Projects in mind, so if I can get this straightened out, the appeal will continue, albeit on slightly different terms.
Regorafenib
I’ve been told that my prescription for Regorafenib has been approved. This drug is a specialty pharmacy item, which means it falls outside the usual infrastructure of pharmaceutical benefits. This includes pre-approval letters and me dealing with a designated mail order pharmacy for my medication supply. It also potentially included a whopping co-pay, but it turns out my carrier’s pharmacy plan treated this as simply being at the high end of the formulary. Which is modestly annoying, but that’s same $50 co-pay I have for Celebrex, Levitra, et cetera.
My Next Scan
I have been corresponding with my oncologist about my next CT scan. Those are supposed to be eight weeks apart right now. That’s the minimum spacing recommended for clinical benefit. I also believe there are significant radiation exposure concerns with excessive scanning. In my case, I won’t live long enough to experience that set of problems, but nonetheless the health and safety guidelines exist. The problem is, they want me to have the next CT scan eight weeks after I start taking the Regorafenib. As I am going out of town tomorrow for eleven days — the Nebulas in San Jose, then Rio Hondo in northern New Mexico — I won’t be able to start taking the Regorafenib prior to May 27th at the earliest. And even that date assumes the specialty pharmacy comes through in a timely manner. Which puts me to eleven weeks or longer between CT scans. And creates the situation that we have 3+ weeks of tumor growth prior to the beginning of any hoped-for effects from the Regorafenib. I think we’d have both a growth rate assessment and a clean baseline for evaluation the new medication if we did a scan shortly after May 27th, but that is far too soon per the generic clinical guidelines. No answer yet, but it’s one of the things I’m worrying about.
Tasking All the Things
Remember that big list of mine, of things that need doing before I die? [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ] Well, it’s grown. And we’re doing them. So an enormous amount of administratrivia is happening around Nuevo Rancho Lake. So far, most of the customer service reps, managers and whatnot we’ve dealt with have been very gracious. I feel like Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle in Brazil [ imdb ] being consumed by paper. Still, progress is being made.
My Coping
I’ve had several people note that I’m pretty cheerful lately. The not very hidden subtext is them wondering why I’m not wailing and rending my garments. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m not wailing and rending my garments. I suppose because there’s no time for that sort of thing. I don’t have much life left to live, especially in something like normal health, and I have too much to do. Love my child, write my stories, be good to Lisa Costello and Jersey Girl in Portland and mother of the child and my family and my friends and my fans and my co-workers and and and. It is true that my current good nature is a very thin veneer, subject to cracking at even a glancing blow. Beneath that is a bubbling stew of anger, grief and terror, spiced with a catalog of other negative emotions. Nonetheless, here I am. And forward is the only direction for me.
Thank you all for reading, for caring, for reaching out.
Tags: Art, Cancer, Child, Family, friends, health, jerseygirl, Movies, Personal, radiantlisa, Travel, Videos
Posted: 5:48 am Thu May 16 2013 | Comments(17) |
[links] Link salad knows there’s no love inside the icehouse
Rick Novy interviews me
The Canadian Who Won’t be Returning From the Stars — specficrider on a joint project of ours.
Will insurance cover genetic testing, preventive surgery? — Women who discover they carry a hereditary gene mutation that dramatically increases their risk of breast and ovarian cancers face big decisions and the possibility of tens of thousands of dollars in medical costs. This story is a version of what I went through.
12 Tips from 12 Years Sick — Yep. I’m only barely into year six, but, yep. (Thanks to Lisa Costello.)
Star Trek: The Search for Science — The Bad Astronmer is much with the hilarity.
The secret laser-toting Soviet satellite that almost was — Here’s a little Cold War alt.hist for you.
Billion-Year-Old Water Found in Canada Holds Clues About Ancient Life — You really need to read the expiration dates on those gas station water bottles.
Hunting Pesky Pigs in Paradise — Ham sandwiches on the hoof, where they don’t belong.
Terahertz Image Reveals Goya’s Hidden Signature in Old Master Painting — Darkened varnish obscures Goya’s signature in a 1771 masterpiece, according to a new analysis using terahertz waves
The Spies Who Blundered — Alleged undercover CIA agent Ryan Fogle is one of many spies to bungle the job.
My Despair — Another of those sad, strange posts on Feminist Mormon Housewives where someone of apparent intelligence and progressive sensibilities finds their common sense and observations of the real world in profound conflict with their faith. If I were a faith-holder, I don’t think I could tolerate that much cognitive dissonance.
When did you choose to be straight? — Heh.
Christian denominations and marriage equality: A simple quiz — Slacktivist Fred Clark makes a point that many anti-gay bigots in pietist clothing would prefer to ignore. Christianists find it so much more comfortable to hate inconvenient people than to actually pay attention to their own morality.
What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’ — In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn’t hold up. Ta-Nehisi Coates is far more elegant than I ever could be on this topic.
Tullahoma father being reckless when baby daughter shot, police say — Because guns make us all safer. Without the smiling protection of the NRA and the GOP, this dad wouldn’t have been able to exercise his theoretical defense of essentially liberties by blowing away his own child.
QotD?: Can you remember getting any older?
5/16/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (0.5 revisions on my novella for METAtropolis: Green Space, plus WRPA)
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 248.2
Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0
Currently reading: The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett
Tags: Art, Books, Cancer, Christianists, climate, Funny, gay, guns, health, healthcare, interviews, Links, Movies, nature, Personal, Politics, race, Religion, Science, stories, Tech, Videos, weird
Posted: 5:20 am Thu May 16 2013 | Comments(3) |
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