Words are inadequate

Cripes, is it Friday already? (No, not quite, I guess.) Work's been stupid busy all week. Probably was last week too, but I wasn't around for that part. Will write about the rest of Los Cabos later. Have some other stuff in the meantime.

Glass viruses. Beautiful.

Brink Back Postal Banking: "Americans should have a public option for simple banking that could shield them from the most predatory practices and extend saving options to all reaches of society." This... is an idea.

Teach the Controversy t-shirts: so much awesome.

YOU HAD ONE JOB!: like Failblog, but amusing.

The Game Over Tinies. "E is for Ecco, and he was delicious / F is for Frogger, who got too ambitious."

Should men be allowed to vote?: classic snark from Alice Duer Miller, an early twentieth-century suffragist.

Pad Thai: "In between surviving multiple point-blank-range assassination attempts and a failed kidnapping in which he emerged alive from the burning wreckage of a battleship his own air force had just bombed, Pibulsongkram decided that Thailand needed noodles that would advance the country's industry and economy."

We Found Our Son in the Subway: "The story spread like an urban myth: You're never going to believe what my friend's cousin's co-worker found in the subway."

Allan Calhamer, designer of Diplomacy, 1931-2013. No word on whether he was found with a knife in his back. In all seriousness, Dip is a game that I admire greatly, enjoy reading about, and will never, ever, play again. This is not a game to play with your friends unless you are tired of having friends.

(With apologies to Kieran Healy)

What will I not do?

Argue politics on the internet.

With whom will I not argue politics on the internet?

Those with whom I disagree about consequences, also known as idiots.

Whom else?

Those with whom I disagree about first principles, also known as evil bastards.

And?

Those to whom I am related, on the rare occasion when they do not fall into the previous categories.

In what circumstances may I argue politics?

When I am talking with people I respect and who respect me.

When will these circumstances arise on the internet?

Not at times when I feel an urge to argue politics.

What will I not do?

Argue politics on the internet.

First and foremost, I/we have ESTABLISHED A PLAN by which, once the immigration stuff is done and the income situation is a bit more stable, I can take some unspecified amount of time off. Said time will be used primarily for actual vacation, and also writing, and generally recuperating from burnout. Downside: this is at least a year away, and probably more like two.

This morning I donated to the Chicago Teachers Union, who've gone on strike as of this morning. I have no kids; I'll never have kids; I still think that education "reform" is among the worst things to come out of the last ten (or thirty) years. Bonus reading: Why the Chicago Teachers Union is striking; Everything You've Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong.

In running news I made it around Lost Lagoon and back home today, for a total of 1.8 miles according to GMap Pedometer, without stopping to walk. 20 minutes running. "Running," rather, not much faster than a walk for the last five-plus, and I remain a crap runner of the "gasping for breath the whole way" variety. Still. It's a thing, and it's faster improvement than I've seen before.

And I clicked the button to list myself as "Going" to a local [REDACTED] event tomorrow night. Eep.

What the hell, Readercon. (tl;dr: con's stated harassment policy of 'zero-tolerance, offenders banned for life' is changed retroactively to 'offenders banned for two years if they're Really Sorry and/or Big Name Fans.')

I don't care how sorry the gentleman in question is, or whether he's learned from his actions, or what. There was an existing policy in place, and choosing to not follow that policy renders suspect any other policies the board may implement.

Not to mention that a harassment policy isn't about punishing or educating the harasser, which is what the board seems to be saying. It's about providing a safe and harassment-free environment for the con attendees.

Be interesting to see if anything changes over the weekend. Based on prior experience with one of the board members (Mr. Van showed up in comments to Genevieve Valentine's original report of harassment and did an excellent job of Not Getting It) I don't really expect it to, but maybe the loud and instantaneous outcry will have some effect.

If not, well. This does make next summer's con choices a little easier.

Uncle-in-law C--: "I really liked living in Vancouver, but, you know, you're paying like 40% of your income straight to the government, you never see it."

What I said: "Yeah, and I'm also getting full health care for two people for $110 a month[1]." At which point, irreconcilable differences having been expressed and acknowledged, we went about our business.

What I did not say: "You, with your giant house and your three cars, complaining about taxes while taking public transit to and from work, are half of what's wrong with this country, and the main reason why I will almost certainly never live there again if I have any choice in the matter."

What I also did not say: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody."

How sad is it that I cannot remember the last time someone prominent stood up and argued that in public?

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[1] Fudging a bit: there are things (such as drugs, or chiro, or psychological outpatient counseling, to name three I've run into in the last couple of weeks) that the provincial[2] Medical Services Plan doesn't cover. I'm also enrolled in a supplemental insurance plan that covers a lot of what the MSP doesn't, and the supplemental is paid entirely by work.

[2] In Canadian this word lacks the same overtones of "backwards and country," as in Canadian "province" means "state." Note that "territory" also sort of means "state," except for the ways in which it doesn't.

The Sean Bean Death Reel, via mariness, who adds, "Back when a certain piece of casting was announced, a friend of mine who had not read Game of Thrones grumbled, 'Great. Now I know the ending.'" (Warning: contains gore, violence, and, well, death.)

For silmaril, The Art of Failure 2011, a slide show of "surreal and spectacular chip failures."

To a Medical Center in Fresno, on the superiority of American health care. Best read as a companion piece to An Eye-Opening Adventure in Socialized Medicine.

A Kickstarter for a promising RPG, and a forum thread full of overreactions and case studies as to why it's needed. (As the author says, Heartbreak and Heroines is not the game where you play womyn from the land of Herstoria, fighting against the evil forces of The Patriarchy. That would be [warning: PDF] this game.)

A Small Observation Regarding Words and Releases: "Look, I’m a New York Times bestselling author and I sell perfectly well, thanks for asking, and by the end of its first week of sales, it’s entirely likely A Dance With Dragons will sell more hardcover copies in the US than I have sold of all my novels, in every printed format, since Old Man’s War came out in 2005." That's... impressive. I've heard rumors that ADwD was in its sixth printing a couple of weeks ago... before any books had shipped to customers. Yow.

Just under six and a half years ago, I'd been quietly talking about fleeing to Canada if Bush won a second term. An acquaintance posted something to the effect of "hey, all you people talking about how you'd move to canada if bush won: put your money where your mouth is and shut up about it and just go do it."

"Fine," I thought (but didn't say), and started thinking more seriously about the idea.

It took some doing but in less than a month I will have pulled it off.

... just in time for the Conservative Party of Canada to have won a majority government after being found in contempt of Parliament, thanks to stupid awful first-past-the-post elections with one right-wing party running against three and a half left-wing ones.

The Liberal Party has lost more than half their seats, and the Bloc is essentially finished (down to three, I believe). Congratulations to the pinko commie socialist New Democratic Party on their amazing hundred-plus seats, and to Elizabeth May for winning one for the Green Party.

The trouble is, the collapse of the Liberals (and the Bloc) moves Canada much closer to being a two-party state. And coming as it does after a Conservative victory that appears much more decisive than it actually is (40% of the vote, 55% of the seats), I fully expect the NDP to tack more to the centre. They'll need to absorb the last of the Liberal supporters; in addition, well, where are the more left-wing voters going to go? In another twenty years Canada will look like the US with better health care.

(Of course, I'm very likely wrong on this. All I know is what I read on the internet. I'm just in a rather bad mood, and finding it difficult to see any silver lining at all.)

A Conservative majority also ensures that there will be no election for another five years. I suppose I might be able to vote in that one, at least. But really, what the hell do I do now?

Phantoms in the Snow:


Everything I Know I Learned At A Very Expensive University: of more than passing relevance to the current budget "debate".

Unicomp now has a keyboard designed specifically for Mac. Bother. Anyone interested in buying a barely-used Space Saver 104?

With our powers combined, we are...

Zarf is inevitably... drawn into the games-and-art thing.

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We're all aware that the government is about to be shut down over stuff that has no business being in a budget fight, right? Bastards.

(I generally don't listen to the radio unless I'm waiting for the traffic report to come on WTOP. Is that godawful "97% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions!" ad typical for them? Because I am perfectly capable of raising my blood pressure in traffic all on my own, and don't need any help from the radio.)

ETA: And of course, per vvalkyri it turns out that the ad is not only false but entirely backwards. Tripe like this reduces me to incoherent frothing rage in short order. WHY IS THIS EVEN AN ISSUE I JUST DON'T ARRRRGH.

(Misleading source for misleading 97% number in ad.)

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I dunno. I seem to have hit a depressive slump for most of March. I'm kind of dragging myself out of it now but it's slow going.

Off to Blacksburg this afternoon to say my goodbyes to the place. Yeah, last weekend would have been better, but scheduling intervened.

This kid I once knew: post-canon Calvin & Hobbes, in which "Daniel sends their whole improv group an e-mail saying 'check this out its fun1!1' and a link to a web comic called The Adventures of Spaceman Spiff." Very very good. Between this and Goodnight Room I'm seriously considering doing Yuletide next season.

Clash of the Pteridophytans.

That Dhimmi Kid: "Ignorant right wingers threatening manufactured teen-idols based on fake news. I think that says it all."

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In contrast to Xmas, New Years was ridiculously full of family.

Friday was really quite pleasant: slow-ish morning, then wandering over to John K--'s ABG New Year. I'd planned on going from there up to Laurel but by ten I was already struggling with tired, and it's an open question as to whether I would have made it back home afterwards. So we played a couple more games, saw in the new year, and went home and collapsed.

If it weren't for the family bit we could have stayed in Laurel, I guess, but we needed to be presentable and in Rockville by noon for xmas-replacement uilos-family dim sum. Which was tasty and Not So Bad as these things go: I only really resent it for taking up perfectly good sleep time. More gaming after that: spent most of the afternoon/evening trying to learn and teach the four-player version of A Game of Thrones. It dragged on unnecessarily, in part due to being a first-time game, but also from way too much unnecessary extra chrome layered on top of the base game.

Woke up again Sunday morning (though not so early) and trekked down to Burke for Xmas with my family. (Originally scheduled for 18 December, and postponed when the Senate voted to cancel Xmas[1].) I still sometimes (around 5%, I'd say) think about spawning. Being around my sister's two helps a lot with that. It's not that they're bad kids: just very very attention-intensive. Other than that it went off without any major disasters. I gave my two-year-old nephew the DVD of Where the Wild Things Are because I believe firmly in scarring kids before they get too old to know better, and my five-year-old niece a copy of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (to be read to her by my sister). From my parents I got a handful of things off my Amazon wishlist, for what may be the first time ever. (They got me Half A Crown [book 3 in a series] instead of Ha'Penny [book 2, and out of print in hardback], which is only a little awkward; I went ahead and ordered Ha'Penny this morning.)

And then we came home and collapsed and did Not A Damn Thing for the rest of the day. I think naps were involved. There were definitely pancakes.

Happy new year. I'm curious to see how next Xmas season shakes out.

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[1] Dad's been working on the START treaty for about the last two years. For those of you who are unaware of the stupidity surrounding this, it's a nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia, and the last of the details were hammered out back in April. It should have passed the Senate then with no problems but the Republicants have been more interested in keeping anything good from happening on the Democrats' watch, so it's been stalled. Dad had to go in to work on the 18th to try and put something together that they would agree to. Which, eventually, they did, so yay for our side, or something.

@feministhulk: "DON'T MAKE ME CRITIQUE YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE. YOU WOULDN'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M CRITIQUING YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE." It's things like this that may eventually force me to break down and get a twitter account: not for the posting, but for the reading.

Honoring the fallen: "[T]he best thing we can do for the troops is to not send them to pointless fucking wars where a lot of them become the fallen and many more become physical and psychological wrecks."

From matociquala, a Periodic Table of Fabulous Writers (warning: PDF).

At the bottom of this review of the iPad's camera connection kit comes the revelation that you can use the USB dock that comes with the kit to connect a low-power USB keyboard. Such as, say, the Neo. This makes me immensely more likely to pick up a second-generation iPad next year.

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It's about now, having been doing this off and on for, oh, four years now, that I ought to accept that I'm a crap runner. Seriously. I sweat to the point where I can't even see where I'm going, my lungs complain loudly if it's colder than about 50 or at all humid, and between my wide feet and my weird stride it's a wonder I can run at all. And that's just the first mile.

So, I get tired out pretty quickly when I'm running. At first it was mostly 'lungs tired,' where I can't get enough oxygen out of the air to keep going, and my chest starts to hurt, and I have to slow down and gasp for awhile. Eventually my lungs started to get the hang of this whole 'working' thing, and I got a new experience: 'muscles tired.' I didn't even recognise it at first: I can still breathe, what do you mean I need to stop and walk for awhile? But at the point where my legs are having trouble moving me forward I really do need to walk for a bit, even though I'm still processing air okay.

Today I found out about a third kind of tired. It's what happens when the heat and the humidity leach all will to live, much less move, out of me.

I can handle the gasping, and at this point I expect the rubbery feeling in my legs. This humidity, though, may be what drives me back indoors for the duration.

And it's only barely June.