lifecollage had the lovely idea of putting together a food basket of stuff inspired by my writing for the Blogathon auctions, and she suggested polling the audience to see what ought to be included. Ideas? I'm thinking of the berries/wine from "Unruly Harvest" and lemon curd from "Politeness Counts". What other foodstuffs can we think of?

Administration
Happy birthday to iroshi!

Hello to new readers aliseadae, notadoor, and robling_t!

Medical
Had another night of meh sleep. This can stop any day now, really.

Blogathon
Thanks to new sponsor dormouse_in_tea, we're up to $483.34!

SPONSOR ME TODAY!

Auctions go up at blogforbarcc on Monday. Which means I really have to know like now if anyone who intended to make something won't be able to, so I can make up the shortfall. See here for details!

And don't forget to help spread the word! Read all about it!

Link Soup
* jimhines is auctioning a copy of The Mermaid's Madness to benefit the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Go Jim Go! Click here to bid.
* Verb Noire needs your help!
* Great posts about fandom, both Readercon and not: AAMcNamara, AzureLunatic, CoffeeAndInk, MNFiddledragon, and SatyrBlade. Lots of food for thought.
* Ten Animals of Folklore.
* Art Saves!
* Volunteer opportunities for teens!

Daily Science
A new study has revealed the origins of tiger stripes and a subsurface ocean on Enceladus- one of Saturn's many moons. These geological features are believed to be the result of the moon's unusual chemical composition and not a hot core, shedding light on the evolution of planets and guiding future space exploration.

Daily BPAL
Tomoe Gozen: Red currant, golden amber, blackberry, honey, and pink pepper.
In bottle: Ooooh blackberry honey. *swoon*
On me: Blackberry honey and oooh, there's the currant. I am spiky-sweet delicious!

Zenobia: Orris, clove, costus storax, patchouli, hyssop, frankincense, balsam, and saffron.
In bottle: Ooooh. Interesting. Balsam and saffron with a sprinkling of clove. Orris like dry bone beneath.
On me: Mmmmm. The primary notes on me are the saffron and clove. Which sounds odd, but smells wonderful. Oh, I totally love this. Of course it's an LE. *headdesk*

Plans
feste_sylvain is back in town! And I get to spend the day with him!

After I pay bills and figure out how many things I need to make for Blogathon. And I'll see how much editing I can get done on "My Empire for Ashes"; I've printed it out and have a green pen at the ready.

There's a statement on the Readercon front page addressing next year's con. Aside from the false claim that the flier with misinformation was only distributed on Sunday (it was distributed as early as Friday), it's generally a good statement, especially this chunk:

Readercon 21 will have at least one guest of honor, two tracks of panels, readings, discussions, kaffeeklatches, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, the Rhysling Award Poetry Slan, the Shirley Jackson Award, Meet the Pro(se), and as always the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition.

In other words, next year's Readercon will be a Readercon.

(Note that does not address the fact that they're actively hostile to minors, nor many of the other issues they need to address, but it does put them in a position to begin to attempt to rectify these issues.)

Yay! It's back.

This show will eventually cause me to forgive Dean Devlin for Godzilla. It really is that damned good.

There's a saying that goes "Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug." Today, work has treated me like the bug. I give up for tonight in hopes that tomorrow will be better.

In other news, I went to the doctor's office today. My blood pressure hit a new personal record of 150/88. Too bad that's the wrong kind of record to be setting.

"I always enjoy taking care of Alheli.  She is one of the sweetest. "


Aww, yes she is... Food, a stick, and belly rubs, and she is happy!

The latest trigger for the latest greying-of-fandom flareup = a flyer distributed at Readercon titled "This is your father's Readercon!" (Read all about that here. Then come back.)

This flyer, and some subsequent behavior, pissed rather a lot of us off. You can see some of that going on in the comments of that post, so I do recommend that you read. And then read this and this.

What I said at Diesel yesterday, to roozle (herself the mother of some kickass younger fen): "I don't want my father's Readercon. I want my daughter's Readercon."

I don't want SF/F cons to shrink in on themselves and wither and stagnate. I want them to grow. I don't want to be part of an exclusive snotty club. I want to share what I love.

And you guys, I want new conversations, and much as I do truly love next year's memorial guests of honor (Philip K. Dick and Ted Sturgeon), that's not where the new conversations are. That's not where the growth is. I want to talk about stuff that's going on now. I want to speculate about what the future of SF/F will look and feel like.

I want my con. And my daughter's con. And I think a lot of us want that. Because dude. Writers. If you're not reaching out to younger fans, how are you going to maintain a career?

So what I want to look at is not just what alienates younger fans - because I think we already have a textbook case of that in the Readercon flyer issue and subsequent comments by the head of programming there. I want to look at how to welcome younger fans. To show them that this is their place, too. To make a space for them at the table.

Because they're not just our future. They're our present.

My daughter is 14. She's been a panelist at Arisia and Pi-Con. She's participated in fandom charity auctions (she made a piece based on yuki_onna's Orphan's Tales books). She writes and draws - she and her friends have a fantasy shared-universe comic/story. She reads broadly, and not just YA. She's passionate and articulate and hella smart, and SF/F fandom is a big part of her world - all her friends are geeks! And I feel like she'll be excluded at next year's Readercon, due solely to her age (note: she attended and enjoyed it last year).

So let's talk about how to welcome younger fans. I'll throw this out there for ideas and opinions. Elayna's at Explo through Friday night, but when she returns, I plan to interview her and some of her friends about this. If you know any teen fans, I encourage you to discuss this with them. Because it shouldn't be about us deciding what Kids These Days want. It should be about what they genuinely want.

EDIT: For reference, the infamous Boskone letter that this is reminding Boston congoers of. (This is why there's an Arisia. I'll leave it to people who were there to give more history on that.)

Yesterday, it was math trolls.

Today, it's an entire site dedicated to presenting scrambled Wikipedia articles.

Administration
Happy birthday to cafenowhere!

Hello to new reader autumns_lioness!

Medical
Slept marginally better. Marginally.

Blogathon!
Still at $433.34. Sponsor me!

Feeling Quite Accomplished
I actually accomplished everything on my to-do list yesterday. For the first time in *ages*. *crosses fingers for continued capability*

Free Will Astrology
Uncle Rob sez: "Long-standing myths are on the verge of mutating. Stories that have remained fixed for years are about to acquire unexpected wrinkles. The effects may be pretty spectacular. I suspect it'll be the equivalent of Sleeping Beauty waking up from her long sleep without the help of the prince's kiss, or like Little Red Riding Hood devouring the wolf instead of vice versa. There's something you can do, Pisces, to ensure that the new versions of the old tales are more empowering than the originals: For the foreseeable future, take on the demeanor and spirit of a noble warrior with high integrity and a fluid sense of humor."

Sounds about right.

Daily Science
Usually when physicists talk about quantum teleportation, they're referring to the transfer of quantum states from one particle to another without a physical link. Now, physicists have investigated a slightly different form of teleportation, in which they teleport a quantum field, or an entire beam of light, from one location to another. This kind of "strong" teleportation is required for some quantum information applications, and could lead to the teleportation of quantum images.

Daily BPAL
Boadicea: Amber, fig, vanilla flower, oak, patchouli, vetiver, dragon’s blood resin, leather, and neroli.
In bottle: Sweetness and resin, with that touch of leather.
On me: Same, with the resin rising above the sweetness. Nice.

Semiramis: Red musk, pomegranate, orange blossom, and melon.
In bottle: Red musk and melon is a weird intersection.
On me: Yeah, there's some odd dissonance there for me.

Plans
Must pay bills, if Adam finds time to balance the checkbook before he goes to work. Other than that? It's a day to whip my office into shape and update the corkboard that tells me what stories I'm supposed to be working on. "Happy Hour at the Tooth and Claw", "Maxfield Parrish Blue(s)", and "I Am Thinking of You in the Spaces Between" (fantasy, SF, and SF respectively) are all equally ready to be jumped on, I think. And I have those poetry dares...

And since it looks (tentatively!) like I'll be able to Get Things Done more days than not, it's time to do a master to-do list again and do a few things every day. Next pain-in-the-butt thing: Putting all of the unsold BPAL up on eBay - so if you'd been pondering that sale post, today's the day to hit it!

First Yahoo! Music, and now Pandora???

I just got an email from it saying that I was getting closed to the newly established monthly three limit of 40 hours.  It said that my music will stop as soon as I reached the limit...

WTF???

The Washington Blade article adds a few more details. Edit: The Washington Blade is our GLBT community rag, in case you're wondering why the article is so up-front about the sexual orientation of everyone involved.

Story is this: 10 people on a boat, including Desi and his new boyfriend, J'aime. (Yes, J'aime. I don't know what that's about; never met the guy.) The boat docks sometime Sunday evening--the article doesn't say where, but it must have been Baltimore's Inner Harbor, where Desi's body was found this morning. Desi wanders off by himself, and when he hasn't returned to his friends on their boat by 11:00, they call the police. It appears Desi fell in the water and drowned.

The article I linked in the previous post said Desi's disappearance wasn't reported until Monday. Maybe it was in error, or maybe the police simply didn't consider Desi "missing" until then.

In any case, it's just...weird. How does someone wander off, fall into the bay, and drown without anyone noticing?

Really stupid and persistent math trolls.

(Ganked from trochee; also, all three links refer to the comment threads, not the posts.)

What is one of the most important characteristics in a friend?
Aii. Just one? Trust. Honesty. Loyalty. Yes, I'm cheating.

What do you do when following your bliss is financially scary?
I don't know that I'm the best person to answer that one! I'm in the unusual position of being free to pursue what I want to do because my physical issues prevent me from doing a day job. If I *could* work, I don't know that I could have felt okay about leaving a paying gig to follow my bliss. Anyone else want to take this? kythryne, sihaya09, coffeeinhell?

Would there be anything in your life that you'd like a "do over" card for?
No... if I did anything different, I wouldn't be the same me. And I've screwed up plenty of times, and had nasty stuff happen to me... but all of it has shaped me, and I like who I am now.

If you were 13-in-body, what would your Explo "course load" look like?
Oooh. I'm assuming I'm going both sessions, which means four classes and four workshops. Hm. Mythbusters, Actor's Workshop, RPG Design, Short Story Workshop; workshops would be Circus Skills, Iron Chef, Stage Combat, and Swimming.

What do your cats write?
Mostly stuff like "e76476587zzzzzzzxd". Very experimental.

( Read more... )

I just found out that my friend Desi died over the weekend.

I saw a mutual friend's Facebook status update that mentioned Desi's death, but at first I thought perhaps that friend was making a tasteless joke. A visit to Desi's page, with all his friends paying their respects, confirmed the sad news. Someone had linked the article above on Desi's wall.

Desi's last status update was about looking forward to the boat trip on which he would die.

From the article: "Deschaine was in Baltimore for a social outing with friends on a private boat Sunday, according to sources, who said Deschaine's disappearance was not reported to police until Monday" (emphasis mine). WTF? Someone's got a whole lot of explaining to do.

I recognize that what he's doing is illegal, scary, and dangerous, but I also completely understand what this man is doing, and I find myself profoundly unsympathetic towards his targets. I find the discussion of the street in the interview reminds me of the cars in Fahrenheit 451, and that's an image that's stuck with me and scared me since first reading the book.

Administration
Happy birthday to Max!



Hello to new reader mer_moon!

Medical
Took it easy yesterday, and managed a brief nap. Didn't sleep well, thanks to The Itchening. Can't get in to see my allergist til the 22nd. :( I'm thinking I need more tests and possibly shots; I'm getting just a few uses out of any given anti-itch stuff before it starts to give me hives. Fie.

Blogathon
Still at $433.34. Please sponsor me!

Many thanks to the donors who are sending me their photos and info!

More information for donors: a) You'll ship to the winner, not me. b) Remember, you can probably claim shipping, the cost of materials, and the cost of your labor on your taxes - BARCC is a registered nonprofit!

And I'll e-mail people today; never got around to it yesterday.

RIP Charles Brown
I was stunned yesterday to see that he passed away in his sleep on his way home from Readercon. I was just on a panel with him on Friday. He didn't seem *healthy*, per se, but in no way did it seem like the end was that near.

Tectonic shifts in fandom.

Writing
I have come away from Readercon with poetry dares and story requests! Today is.... maybe my third day alone in all of July, not counting the brutal-withdrawal days. So hopefully I'll be able to get back on the stick today. I do look forward to using most of August as a writing month - it's easier for me to write when I'm out of my house and not distracted by the dishes and the mess on the coffee table, so Florida will be good for that.

Florida
Did I mention that I'll be in Florida starting August 10th? I will. Mostly South FL, but I'd like to wing up north and see morenasangre, farren, and haikujaguar, if I can swing it.

My husband has an LJ!
It came up this weekend that people were unaware that Adam is on LJ, because I refer to him here by his real name and not his LJ name! He's yendi. You should read him.

Disability
This may be the best post on disability that I've seen. Read it. Please.

Link Soup
* "Have fun at dinner!" As the site says, "There's so few genuinely subversive acts out there anymore that when we actually came across one, we were stunned silent."
* New Weird Al song!
* CPR certification... on the Wii?
* New site for teenage feminists!
* I can totally see Adam doing this.

Daily Science
We've been peeling bananas wrong our whole lives.

Plans
Well, I do have to contact item donors, and I have to see what else I have to write for the Blogathon. (If I can't split a story up reasonably, I'm writing something else to go with an extra item; I have three Persephone items and only two Persephone poems, so I'll write another.) Also I need to answer the rest of the questions from the question/secret poll. And a certain editor wants to see some of my flash, so I have to pick a few favorites and ship them off to him.

I may or may not be at Diesel tonight. I'd like to go, as I haven't seen y'all in a while, but it depends on how much I get done.

The movers came yesterday and took all of our belongings... all of our furniture and all of our boxes of crap. I'm sooooo glad I didn't have to try to load that truck myself. Even though we got rid of a lot of stuff, it was still TWO trucks that it took to get it all. I'm hoping that once we move in somewhere in Massachusetts we can go through it again, this time with Dan's help, and sell/donate a bunch more stuff.

There were two fairly major downpoints to yesterday. First, our landlady, who decided that right as the movers were leaving would be a great time to schedule an hour and a half of walk-throughs for potential renters (despite my saying that Tuesday would be MUCH better) came by with several families. Dominic and I bailed to my friend Meghan's house to chill out, eat something, and be in a non stressful environment. (You know what a house looks like after the movers come... trash everywhere, little bits of packing foam everywhere... random things you decided to throw away still laying around until you can take them out for the trash...)

Anyway, she calls me up to tell me that the movers had taken her toybox. This was a large wooden chest that was in the basement that she said we could use while we lived here, but that it had been hers as a child and she wanted it back. We've used it to store the giant bags of cat food so the cats don't tear into them. Anyway, the movers had specifically been told that wasn't going, but somehow it ended up on the truck. So the landlady is without her toybox and we're without catfood. Fortunately I called the company and they're going to bring it back. Because the trucks are being unloaded into storage for the next 2 weeks before going to Massachusetts, it helps.

Anyway, we got home from Meghan's at about 11:30. Seems like we were there a long time. We ordered pizza and started watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which Dominic had never seen. I was exhausted and kept nodding off. Finally I flat out fell asleep over on the corner of the couch. When we got home, the plan was that Dominic would sleep on his sleeping bag, and I would sleep on an air mattress. Now, Rob had run to Target the other day to pick one up along with another collapsible cat carrier for the drive. I hadn't actually looked at it until we took it out of the car at 11:30pm. Well it turns out that the pump has to charge for 12 hours before the first use. And no, it won't work while it's plugged into the wall "charging"... so I had no air mattress. We'd bought the thing because we figured it was cheaper than a hotel room... but honestly, the Sheraton down the street has a special deal with the podiatry school and the rooms are nice with big fluffy beds and only $59/night. So we went there and I'm going to try to return the air mattress.

Today Dominic has an orthodontist appointment and we have a woman coming to "deep clean" the house. I hope to be able to leave tomorrow to head to New Hampshire with Dominic and the cats. We have too much stuff for the car at this point so I'm considering shipping some of it by FexEx Ground (light stuff--my wedding gown, some pillows and bedding, etc), which is going to suck. :(

For the Kindle owners, you can grab free books including Joseph Finder's Paranoia (thriller), Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon (fantasy), Rachel Vincent's My Soul to Lose (teen horror), and Stephen Baxter's Manifold:Time (science fiction).

Here's Al's latest song and video, Skipper Dan:



ETA: For those wondering, this is not a parody, but has enough Weezer-esque elements that I think it could safely be grouped with "Germs," "Twister," "Dare to be Stupid," and other songs that ape a group's style.

ETA2: And yes, the animator missed two hyphens in the name of the Mamet play.

2009 wine plan

Going to edit this as I go along and remember what I want to make and determine what I can make depending on what I can get/afford. This year we're supposed to have a glut of zinfandel so I will probably buy lots of that.

1. A big, California-style Zin, will probably be the bulk of the wine I make this year- ~500 lbs
   
2. If I can get more of the Sleeping Cat Cabernet Sauvingnon I will make a single varietal Cab (TBD, might be blended with the Merlot from last year if it turns out good) - ~250 lbs
   
3. Another nouveau style Zin, since it was loved last year - from main batch
   
4. A wild fermentation Zin - from main batch
   
5. A port-style Zin, made by stopping fermentation early with Everclear - from main batch, need 15L barrel
   
6. Also want to look into doing a batch or two of Bordeaux blending wines like Petit Verdot or Malbec (maybe Chilean/Argentinian in the spring of 2010) to possibly blend with the Cab or maybe even a single-varietal Cab Franc - ~100lbs each