Have to play with that a little and see what it’s good for.
And when in the US only:
I don’t have to ask what that’s going to be good for. All kinds of things!
Thank you, Colm!!
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A POX upon the month of January, already the crappiest month of the year. Snowed in with diseased roommates without internet access while being forced to imagine Abraham Lincoln and SpongeBob making whoopee was not Giblets’s idea of a good time. Giblets does not have high expectations for February.
I really do love Fafblog, but I wish they’d find some color besides that particular shade of green for the background. After reading anything much, it takes many minutes before any other colors look right again…
(Oh, yeah. And this:)
A POX upon George Lucas and those who worship George Lucas! You’re worse than God! At least God didn’t cast Jake Lloyd in Episode I!
(snort)
Now that the restructure of YoungWizards.com is almost complete, I’m starting to install some rather different material here.
One of the problems of writing a long series of books (at least to my eye) is that all these little bits and pieces of info start piling up, and as often as not there’s no room for them in any given book: if you stuffed them in regardless, they’d bring the narrative flow to a screeching halt and your readers would rise up in revolt. (And rightly.) The other problem with a long series is that you start losing track of details. What’s Kit’s birthday? Where is the “Battle of the Trees” mentioned? What’s the whales’ name for Caryn Peak? (And who the heck was Caryn?)
About two years ago now I started trying to gather all the scraps together in one place, some of them just as annotations to other business, some as short essays in their own right. It struck me last year that online is as good a place to keep them as anywhere else: this way I can get at a much tidied-up version of my notes from wherever in the world I happen to be working. (And so can anybody else who’s interested. Which seems to be a lot of you. I can’t believe the web stats for Akagane at the moment: we should start her up a fanclub of her own.)
And sometimes, while polishing the notes, things happen that surprise me. I didn’t previously know anything about this, for instance:
He was also one of the wizards who collaborated in the TIME MANAGEMENT STUDIES of the 1930’s through the 1950’s. Much of this work was highly theoretical, and much more of it turned out to be useless for its intended purposes: but one very useful practical result of the Studies was Avery’s involvement in an extremely dangerous rescue mission. Avery and his colleagues were forced to use previously untested and as-yet unstabilized AMELOSTASIS routines to “patch” a badly deranged timeslide accidentally initiated by scientists working for the US Navy who had been attempting to invent INVISIBILITY. Though the patch worked, over long periods some fragmentary memory traces from “before” the patch have emerged in the minds of the rescued — resulting in some very garbled “conspiracy” websites and at least one truly terrible movie (THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT, q.v.).
Heh.
One thing leads to another. Sometimes more so than usual.
I went over to Matt’s blog at No-sword to see what cool translation things he’s up to at the moment. And while I was there I saw this.
And that led to…
And then that led to…
this. And tears of laughter.
I love the Web. I just wonder, sometimes, what Tim makes of some of the things it’s turned into…
The White House has eliminated funding for a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope from its 2006 budget request and directed NASA to focus solely on de-orbiting the popular spacecraft at the end of its life, according to government and industry sources.
And here’s what really gets up my nose:
That budget request, according to government and industry sources, will not include any money for Hubble servicing but will include some money for a mission to attach a propulsion module to Hubble needed to safely de-orbit the spacecraft with a controlled re-entry into the Pacific Ocean. NASA would not need to launch such a mission before the end of the decade to guide the massive telescope safely into the ocean.
So at this point I have only two questions.
(a) What’s the difference in cost between the servicing mission package and the mission to attach the propulsion module?
and,
(b) Where do I donate?!
As for the rest of it — even expats have congresspeople and senators, and can re-elect them…or boot them the hell out. Time to hit the fax machine and remind them of the fact…
A court in New York has ruled that the 82-year-old creator of Spider-Man is due millions of dollars in unpaid profits from Marvel Enterprises for the success of the Spider-Man franchise and other Marvel Comics-based films over the past seven years.
Lee began with Marvel in 1939, and served as writer, editor, art director, head writer and publisher for the company before effectively retiring from active duty and becoming chairman emeritus. He filed the lawsuit in November 2002, pointing out a clause in his contract that entitled him to 10 percent of TV, movie and merchandising deals, an amount he thought was significantly higher than the $1 million-per-year salary he currently receives. Marvel tried to find a loophole in the wording.
But it seems that Lee has prevailed. “In short, the first sentence of [the contract] is not ambiguous,” Sweet said in his ruling “It provides that Lee is entitled to share in the results of Marvel’s arrangements for movie and television productions involving Marvel characters.”
“Focus on the Family is up in arms about a music video created by the We Are Family Foundation that shows the popular porous cartoon character and several other kids’ favorites dancing to the Sister Sledge song, ‘We Are Family.’ The group claims SpongeBob & Co. are promoting a ‘pro-gay agenda.'”
Like Neil Gaiman, I know next to nothing about finding agents (my own hunted me down shortly after I sold my first book, and I’ve been with him ever since), so when people come to me and ask, I frequently don’t know what to tell them.
The question came up on Neil’s blog just now, and he turned to the talented and wise Teresa Nielsen-Hayden for advice. The advice is so good that I have to link to it here: every word rings true. Read and learn.