--Yes, post-spamming my own blog, but a few short takes while I'm working on longer stuff means that I at least get stuff out before I forget it, and if I do several then I feel less bad about posting nothing for a couple days, altho' it really doesn't work that way, I know.

Someone on my flist linked this review (sorry, I don't remember who and I ( Read more... )

So randwolf mentioned & recced the current issue of Ansible, and I went to see what was going on there, and in the midst of its sober and ponderous commentary (it's not that it's easier to type with a straight face, it's just that on the internet, nobody can tell if you're sporfling) I hit a reference to, and parody inspired by, a piece on SF over at Slate ( Read more... )

As those of you on my flist already know, I was laid off about a fortnight ago. It isn't as dire (yet) as it could be (or has been) - I received enough severance pay to pay this month's and next month's rent and electric, and have a little bit left over to buy cat food etc; and I should have enough coming in next month from a current freelance job ( Read more... )

--as it happened, I had to take books back to the library yesterday morning and on the new book shelf by the desk was...the sequel to Melusine. Ouch. Everything that was just slightly "off" in the first one was stunningly amplified in The Virtu. We're not talking Talyn-Celebration-of-the-14-Points-of-Fascism-bad, nor yet even Norah Roberts-bad, but ( Read more... )

Oy. Gewalt.

I was trying to stay out of this - that is, I only wrote like 7 pages of a rant and didn't get close to what I was trying to say about Poetics and Mimesis and the Ion and Truth-telling and the Cave and Narrative Power and gave up (yes, 7p counts as giving up for me) - after one brief snark, because there's just WAY TOO MUCH to deal ( Read more... )

or, Trust Me, You Really Don't Want To Go There--

"...What sentence does such a person deserve ( Read more... )

A superb post by an amateur paidhi, cutting through the fog of BS about China and debunking the notions of monolithic mindless servility no less than Oriental Cruelty™ and the Robin Hood Syndrome attitude that their lives are so wretched that if their culture is not changed it would be better off euthanized.

Although we are not likely to go to hot ( Read more... )

Nearly twenty years ago this summer there was a tragic incident, in which a Syrian warship cruising in the Mediterranean and engaging in periodic skirmishes with neighboring countries' gunboats while both navies were patrolling under the pretext of intercepting smugglers and spies, strayed into Israeli territorial waters and shot down an El Al ( Read more... )

I don't have a "croggled" icon, but obviously I need one. Downtime for sundry personal reasons for a few hours, and all hell breaks loose.

You might have seen this via flister anne_jumps already, who linked to someone called Pesky Apostrophe who spotted something on Salon and the schadenfreude just writes itself, really - on the day after Michael "Horseshow ( Read more... )

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

( pity )