But ask me if I care. The website’s up at last:
The first one, anyway. (chuckle) Wonder what the others will be called?
“Virgin has signed an agreement with pioneering aviation designer Burt Rutan to build an aircraft based on Rutan’s SpaceShipOne vessel, Branson said.”
Woo!
That an essay of mine was published in this anthology, instead of this essay, which is endlessly better.
(mutter) Anyway, thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.
Well, I read this yesterday, actually. But it’s at least two days’ worth of heroism.
(chuckle) What was that line that Lewis quotes in The Screwtape Letters? Something about “the prowde spirite…” that “cannot endure to be mock’d”?
Truly I love it. Here are some “stations” I listen to:
Mixing of Particulate Solids Radio (Bratislava)
Cryosleep: Zero Beat Guaranteed
Voices From Within
Wolf Lair Radio (only when cranky with the world)
Lounge Radio (Sounds for Couch Potatoes)
BellyUp4Blues (The Only Ass-Kicking Blues Rocker)
Go FM (“No rules! We just play stuff!”)
Magnatune.com (“New Age, direct from the artist, no major labels”)
^ Kawaii Radio ^
WGTB 92.3 FM: Georgetown University Radio (I used to work college radio, once upon a time. Ah, the night shift…)
Frank’s Radio San Francisco
Prairie Fire Project (Winnipeg)
Secret Agent: “The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life”
Radio Rivendell (“The Fantasy Station”)
Radio Stad den Haag (“ITALO DISCO EURO DANCE HI NRG 80s”)
KCRW
Global Pop Conspiracy Radio
SwissGroove (“groovy jazzy funky trippy 24/7”)
Die Radio 4 Oldies
Radio That Doesn’t Suck (I love some of these names…)
Japan-A-Radio (“Anime music and J-pop”)
Yabiladi Radio (“100% Maroc”)
Caraibe Radio
And so much more….
Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
“Plane maker Airbus, which carried out the research, said the positive result paved the way for the widespread use of mobiles on aircraft.”
…And while this is going to be convenient, my feelings about it are strangely mixed. Planes have been relatively peaceful until now, except for the roar of engines and the air sliding by. But the call of the custom ringtone will be up there soon enough, it seems…
The cockroach reference mentioned here was an extended metaphor, not a direct comparison. Here’s what I said:
“Before someone asks: how do I feel about other people writing fanfic in my worlds? Hmm.
“Used to be I didn’t care for it. Some aspects of it still make me twitch, slash in particular. (And I go back far enough to remember a time when “slash” meant only one thing: K/S. Boy, have I now dated myself: were dinosaurs ever walking the earth then.) And of course it depends on which characters are involved. Writing Herewiss/Freelorn slash seems like a waste of time. We *know* they do it…though I prefer that the lights be turned off, as it were, when I venture into their bedroom. …And so on. But then…Kit and Nita? When I have my own plans for how things are going to turn out, and the characterizations of both seem to me to have made it plain that they’re not going to be ‘going there’ just yet? Hmm.
“Yet you can’t stop people thinking about it…or writing about it. Truthfully, it’s kind of like going into a Manhattan kitchen where there is as yet no gecko living under the fridge. You turn the lights on, and Things scurry away under the cupboards and into every crevice. You can try to stomp on all the ones you see. But they’re fast, and clever at hiding. Then you turn the light off and go away, and out they come again and get back to doing what they were doing before you turned on the lights. They don’t care that you pay the rent on the kitchen. They’re there to party. Only dragging in the exterminators will stop them. But (chopping the metaphor off) do I really want to do that? Is it, perhaps, something of an overreaction?…
“The nature of present reality would seem to indicate that there’s some other, more affable, more enjoyable, possibly more mature way to deal with the situation. I’m considering one or two. We’ll see how it all works out…”
And so far it’s working out pretty nicely, as we see from the second round of “Wizards On Call”, for which you can see some details at the fanfic’s gateway page (as well as at the main YoungWizards.com page). I’m presently thinking about what my next contribution will look like. Anybody can join the party: you don’t have to write a segment to vote on one. Drop by and have a look. ETA: this project was later abandoned by necessity, as the web utility being used to write it was bought, disastrously repurposed, and then shut down.
Oh, and for the FanLib participants: For the time being, I think this particular scholium of YW fiction is going to remain noncanonical, even though I’m playing in it too.
I don’t, usually.
(sigh) But that last batch! Boy, remind me to stay out of political mode with you guys. Or go a lot further into it. No, I like the first option better.
What I was commenting on in that last post (and perhaps I should have made this clearer) was the sort/quality of the language. Invective, yes: unquestionably. And there’s been some pretty florid invective on both sides of the, er, what are we going to call it? Societal divide? (I’m trying to think of the buzzword sometimes used for it in Northern Irish politics — which US politics, to my eye, is coming uncomfortably to resemble of late. …The specific term is eluding me at the moment. Never mind.) I stumbled upon the original material by accident, and after that I rummaged around briefly for some nice Republican –> Democratic invective too…and then suddenly remembered that right then I was really supposed to be writing a movie, and got on with it. (sigh) See what happens when you get distracted and don’t follow through?
But as for the sentiment of the quoted material itself: If anyone who reads my work seriously thinks I would be in unequivocal agreement with it, especially as regards the personalities…of such a person I can only say, with the little bird, “He don’t know me vewy well, do he?”
And a word of more general advice in passing: if anybody here thinks they can correctly deduce my personal politics from what I post…all I can say is: Hmm. Don’t be too sure. I might surprise you. (Especially as, without warning, I may be running on “Lord Gro’s Principle”, which Lord Juss analyzes thusly: “Ever (s/)he perversely affecteth the losing side of a quarrel.”) My novels would be a better guide…but still not all that foolproof. Too many characters, too many points of view, how will you ever know which one is really me? — the only valid answers being both “All” and “None”. Like all novelists, I practice serial cathexis. (But I do wash my hands afterwards.)
For everybody’s information: “A splendid flow of language…” is a quote from a book. First one to correctly identify which book gets a cookie. (It’s not one of mine. The book, I mean.)
Now then. How about those Mets?
I really would say “splendid”, but that would be, uh, judgmental. 🙂
“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown shirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, N.M., little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”
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