From a place of wrath and tears

!January's rant!

2012-01-18T14:38:00.000+01:00

Promise to self and digiblips: at least one rant per month!

Because I ended reading this in an attempt to put off studying for my Russian exam tonight, I'll lift out some random replies.

"This is really not a positive representation of women with agency."
I've commented here before on discussions I've had on the theme of women, the cliches and genre elements surrounding them, especially in "epic" fantasy. Most of such discussions end in women not speaking to me, and helpful men trying to tell me that She is right, and I am wrong. Right there's the paradox in Female Power, you see, my dearest digiblips, because female power works like Bush's Axis of Good: you are either with them, or against them. It's a game women folk play, dear gents, and in the world of chickens, it even has a name.
Anyways, the last couple of years there has been much ado about the place of Woe-man in fantasy and science-fiction. To some points I agree: there is no reason why female authors, nor female characters, should be given less consideration and care. These are mainly issues of marketing and . But I draw the line when the solutions seems to point to More Strong Female Characters All The Time and such nonsense. When I'm in a quaint but happy mood I see in it a plot of Emancipated Caucasian Chicks Inc. putting their hands together with Men who like Two Strong Female Characters for all the obvious reasons. Let's not turn every fantasy story into "Xena and Gabrielle", thank you very much. But mostly it makes me afraid of what Emancipated Caucasian Chicks Inc. will say upon reading my stories.
Seriously, in Dreams of Cold Stone there's only 4 females. Two are simply extras, and two aren't really there (one exists only in memory, being the deceased wife, and the other, a goddess, is an even vaguer female presence).

"If Sullivan desired to invent a dialect, he should have done so. False archaism is sloppy and lazy."
OH YEAH BECAUSE WHAT FANTASY REALLY NEEDS IS EVEN MORE IDIOTS THAT CAN SPEAK IN TONGUES ALL DAY.

"Heavy handed criticism can do wonders when it comes to the too easy habit of letting authors write disposable, unmemorable fantasy/fiction in general."
Yes, because the world absolutely and urgently needs an agency to mark people that dare to write, so a proper quality control of their produce can be done all the time. And here I thought the book-trade was a market regulated world, where--however lamentable or painful this sometimes is--if there are enough people out there willingly to buy shit, writing shit is A-ok.

Ceci n'est pas procrastination.

2012-01-03T16:27:00.002+01:00

Oi, stop looking at me like I'm a good fer nuthin' dachshund. Amongst other things, this is what I've been doing:

images for chapters - Dreams of Cold Stone

font sample - Dreams of Cold Stone

Procrastinating is in the eye of the beholder after all, my dearest digiblips. So *you* tell me, hmm?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzummmmmmmmmmmmm

2011-10-16T19:11:00.001+02:00

Oh my, September came and went for sure. Outside we have our protests, but autumn , so it always felt to me, is a season for introspection.

Maybe, someday, I'll share what I've found.

Meanwhile, as the French say, excuses are made to help yourself, so here: since the beginning of September my dad moved in with the hubby and me. All's well, though maybe a bit small in the housing department. Let's give it at leas two months more before making purse-changing decisions about size and modalities of housing.
Between this new way of living and the new fencing season, in the club as well as in the fencing federation, I've little energy left to type. So I'm niggling away at the things that I always wanted to do with Dreams of Cold Stone, with images and font.

Who knows, one day I'll run out of excuses and I'll have no choice but to luluize the bloody manuscript.

And the smoke from the fire is still rising

2011-08-13T10:50:00.001+02:00

For years it's been creeping up on us, not by loony right-wing landslide wins, but the inch-by-inch but nevertheless solid shift from left to center, where even treehuggers who should look under every stone for any and all solution to this troubled Earth's problems cling to one Holy Writ and proclaim all other freethinkers heretics. Too much energy spent on climbing up to the next level, instead of pulling others less fortunate up to ours.

1984 and other horrendous mirrors were all the buzz last decade (another decade already? oh, how time flies!), and we've had a good laugh and patted ourselves on the back: look, with such messages abound in our culture we've staved off the dangers for sure.

But all the time it's been creeping, lads, not in our faces like 1984, but inch-by-inch like it always goes. And one day we'll wake up to find ourselves arrived at that next level, staring out our window at the "blessed" Morec spire and gathering each morning at the apartment block's warden unit to submit to the routine social check government demands of us. Are our shoes neat and shiny? Do we make enough money to live where we live? Do we toe the government's line?

Inch-by-inch, is that how the 80s happened? Reign of fear and apathy, rule of propriety and hypocrite cleanliness? Then where are those who'd protect our rights, every thing our ancestors obtained, remind those idiots of their promises, hold them to the law? I search the left for signs of renewal, but only find career opportunists, nobody willing to rock the boat.

I live in a little peanut country not exempt from riots, on that line where businesses seek cheap rent only to poke their leased C300s in the faces of families of at least 5 trying to survive on 2 paychecks (and lo and behold they are surprised when they get mugged and need to hire bodyguards!). I look out from this little peanut country into the world and hope people so hurt by the system, so insulted by the unabashed flaunting of riches*, find the energy not only to lift a brick from the pavement, but in the end to be the source of something new, a left to the left-which-is-now-center. Doubt we'll find many Caucasian faces amongst them, but that's okay. You don't need to be pasty-faced to jape, to blow up Parliament.

And look it has already begun...

*as if all bling comes with the guarantee of invulnerability and unstealability. When exactly did Modesty crawl into the corner of the room to die?

P.S.: Did you see that lot, how the other flinched but spoke no less honest of the flatscreens he pinched; did you see how he timidly glanced at his 16-year-old fellow who pinched nappies and a whole set of Johnson's for his kid? Ha, and they say there's no honour among thieves. In all that violence and destruction, all the yelling of pro and con, of Law please protect our Greed, of opportunists grabbing a quick buck (what and we don't cheat the hell out of taxes?), of bricks flying from one side to the other's glass house, there at least one blinding flash of sense: she lives and breathes yet, Modesty, hoorah!

Of mice and men

2011-05-14T09:18:00.001+02:00

Cow Watching
Don't ask me how, for I honestly don't know, but I found this article on escape characters while strolling through Wikipedia:

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters.

I couldn't help reading it as a writer (In writing, an escape character is...) and immediately something went "aha!" Into the the baby's toy bag it goes, for somewhere, somewhen I'll actually start working on the New (and as of yet still nameless) Project.

Sockbooze
Last month two stragglers stumbled into my gmailbox, a year after the sockbooze was sent. Both made me laugh:

Analysis of the first (one year later, nearly to the day): opens with a polite but impersonal greeting and explanation how the sockbooze got lost and why the necessity of the impersonal answer (fair enough) and then style-breaches right into a warmer and more personal explanation why it's a pass (schizo much?)

Analysis of the second (13 months later): three short lines that rollercoast from sorry > spam > catching up > resubmit whenever open again ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME? HAHAHA

Anyways, with all my sheep returned, I find it's nearly a year after I said "I'll wait till summer and then we'll see..." The sockbooze returned Dreams of Cold Stone to my attention, and I'm weeding through it for the last time (Really. Promise!) Cutting down some more kudzu. Fluffing up and patting down the eiderdown. And then we'll see for real.

Stuff of life
Two weeks ago changes were in the air.
I quit my job (but I've already landed a new job, I start on Monday, wahay!)
But more importantly: my dad had a thrombosis-stroke, which all-in-all could have turned out far worse for a 75-year old. For now he lost the left hand side of the world (irremediable), and processing speed (remediable). We're all happy/lucky there are no mobility problems. And while after revalidation he probably could live independent (with some ambulant care), we (his not-living-in-girlfriend, my brother and me) have decided his place is too far away and too big to let him return there, to live on his own.
Factoring into that story, is how my dad always has had a thing of finding stuff in the street and keeping it for when it comes in handy, a bolt, a screw... A cute and quaint little tick, you know? Dad always had a thingy if you needed a thingy. And economic household tips, like keeping a couple of water kettles on the stove during winter, which means you don't have to spend extra gas/money on warm water to do the dishes. Cute and quaint, but he was born in 1935, after all, and the war and the consequent scarcity must have made a serious impression on a child who'd become the eldest of seven.

So, two weeks ago we went to his house, mainly to clean out the fridge, since he wasn't going to return soon. For me it had been some time ago, see, I usually see dad when he and I are visiting my brother's. My parents divorced ages ago, so it's sorta, I keep an eye on mom, and my brother keeps an eye on dad. After we decided he wasn't going back to the house, we kept on going to start cleaning up and putting some order into his affairs. From the first day we've been utterly baffled by the OCD levels of hoarding, and how extreme a weakness he has for promotional sales. Seriously, you could keep whole battalions going for months on the clothing, food, wood and tools we've found there. You could stock a nuclear cellar for a large family, cheap shirts and sheets still wrapped in foil included. It shames me, in a shoulda woulda coulda way and makes me feel horrible horrible horrible. So there, that needed off my chest.

boots :: walking right out of this valley of the shadow of death

2011-05-09T12:27:00.000+02:00

Breakfast with Violent Femmes was just what the doctor ordered, and while I'm not quite at that point in time and space where Charlie the Antipope is, I've decided to kiss off the grownupseriousbusiness world for the day, pull on my boots and get out my machete, and deal with some literary kudzu.

Random stuff

2011-05-09T00:50:00.000+02:00

Sometimes betrayal comes blowing in like a super tornado, unexpected and from the one corner of the universe you thought yourself safe from.

No wait. People are who they are, me myself included. The world nowadays is a lot about change, and evolution and transformation. Maybe to forget we're just a bunch of meatpuppets coded to use each other as punching bags.

You know... I was going to say a lot of stuff here, about how events shape people and people shape events, and delve into the Strange History that Shaped My World, but then I realized, my dearest digiblips, that it's non of your business anyway, and people will still be dying of hunger in Africa or some such.

So there. The end.

Booyah!

2011-05-06T15:44:00.000+02:00

So, I'm back, dearest digiblips, from a wonderful long trip in the underbelly of the world *shrug* what can I say, I fell off the edge. Very super short update?

- even if it's still spring, it's actually summer. fleas and ticks, and pollen, and it's a jungle out there
- reading, reading, reading like a maniac
- still no government in poor old Belgium, while politicians are still at it, beating the zombified horses
- the world remains a scary place, even if Al Qaeda lost its sugar daddy: North Africa and the Middle East are on fire, causing bewilderment in Europe, while the massive emigration movement causes cracks upon the cracks the banking crisis left; the Big One or his little brother caused a nuclear disaster in Japan, just in time for Chernobyl's anniversary; and it's okay to shoot bad people if it's in another country than your own; God's own vacuum doing overtime during a super tornado outbreak, and it's not even 2012!
- I quit the job, because that certainly was not working for me
- fencing-wise, I've been engaging my medial shin muscle in excessive amounts of eccentric muscle activity, and now I've got periostitic shin splints, yay!
- I got tired of getting lost with the car when I don't have my flesh-and-bones tomtom along and bought a GPS. I changed the voice settings (the default chic and smart Flemish or Dutch "named" voices are annoying, sounding too much like *I* am the idiot). Now it talks like a robot woman with half a brain, and who can't decide whether she's from Holland or France. Which is just poifect to my Belgian senses!

Oh, and while I haven't been talking much to the Cow Watcher, I've got this funny feeling he's decided the solution to the Barynn (monster) trilogy is actually simple: make it FOUR books *headdesk*
*mumbles* and I wasn't even working on B *headdesk*

nothing says spring like

2011-03-15T15:18:00.000+01:00

toad porn on the kitchen floor

Spring means the return of the fleas, and other things

2011-02-18T17:03:00.000+01:00

Did some rewriting of DoCS this week, mostly adding/tweaking scenes I'd made notes about since last summer. Needed to really break in the netbook I bought a while back. About thirty percent of what was in the notebook (the pen and ink scribble scribble kind of notebook) was actually already in DoCS, which goes to show that I least remember some of the things I write*, and also that you do not actually need your notebook (the metal & plastic electrodigital kind) to revise a novel. Ha.

The reason I bought the netbook (ASUS eeepc) had more to do with the incompatibility of WinXP with Win7** networks*** than me needing a replacement. My trusted MSI Notebook might look like it's all duct tape and loose screws, but it still performs admirably for a well-traveled, all-banged-up "old" (about 6 years I think) notebook, but the batteries were simpering out again and those don't come cheap.
So: [ new batteries]+[win XP > 7 update]≈ [ASUS eeepc], et voilà.

So far it's turning out an okay thingie, though I still have some peeves I need to either overcome, kill, or learn to steer around.
It really freezes up Word a long time while saving, which isn't so bad when I decide when it saves. But 5 seconds is long when you're in the middle of an amazing sentence and the things starts autosaving. On the other hand, disabling the autosave is not an option for someone who writes.
I really miss the Numpad and dedicated keys like Home and End and Page Up. The limited space on the keyboard means they have been demoted to "function" keys (which makes me wonder whether it are only indjut writers like me who use them). Half the time I'm ending up at the start of the novel (ctrl+fn+home) when what I meant to do was select everything from cursor to beginning of the line (shift+fn+home), and I was drawing looks on the train yesterday while trying to select everything above the cursor right up to the start (a cat-spastic: shift+ctrl+fn+home) for deletion.
Something else I obviously did not give enough thought during the buying: arrows. On normal keyboards arrows reside in an upside-down T constellation (seriously, that was already the case in C64 days). On the eeepc they are reduced to the space of 3 keys in a row, with Up and Down being half-keys, conveniently placed underneath Shift. Imagine: you intend to go up a few lines, find yourself going down (not really a case of sausage fingers, but half of a tiny key is even tinier, okay?) and try to restore the error by tapping the correct key (obviously above the one you were), you end up tapping shift 3 times and wake up some annoying "helpful" key-shit proggie (Dorothy boobytraps I call those because they do sort of work like "click your heels three times" and before you know it you're standing in some field in Kansas and you did not want to go to Kansas at all, okay?). It means serious retraining of fingerspitzengefühl. Changing keys around like that, tch.

Nevertheless, today I did some more work on the second UTA novel, mostly plotting and choreographing, since it is going to be a complicated dance: I've got background stories about Conway's past, then 3 consecutive story arcs, and they all need to get mixed up and taken out of their chronological order and put into some phantaspasmodyllic roller coaster of a storyline. It's starting to look like doable, instead of "what the hell did you think when you thought up this mad scheme?"

Also bought some more books today, mostly because last week I was hit by a spell of friendly idiocy and allowing The Heroes to go with a friend since I was still finishing reading Loups-Garous which, of course, I finished within two days and since I'm not sure The Heroes will be back tomorrow... Mainly bought sequels: Jemisin's Broken Kingdoms (because I'm just so much in love with the woman's voice), Asher's Brass Man (because Line of Polity was not of the same level as Gridlinked, though the writing is good enough to give his agent Cormac another chance), Tchaikovsky's Dragonfly Falling (because even if Empire in Black and Gold didn't get me in an obsessive reading trance I could do with knowing how things evolve), and Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, mainly because it got onto the to-buy list, and it still looked good, or even more so, in the flesh. Erm, paper. And in sticking links to titles I notice that I paid too much in Waterstones, and could even have had them delivered to my door for even less. The things you do to support your local bookstore...

*seriously, sometimes when I'm reacquainting myself with one of the books I wonder who has added a scene here and there. The wonders of writing in bits and pieces and hopping between stories I guess. That and writing on the train after work like a zombified meatpuppet.

** I'm not a total dweeb with computers, yet it has cost me some study to figure out how to KILL homegroups, but even then no talk between the dysfunctional family members. Besides, with MS every step forward is two steps back. Our USB printserver is also not compatible with Win7, and I refuse working with wireless [don't ask me why, perhaps part of Laumer's Long Twilight (yes, the one that ultimately led to a movie called Highlander) planted a seed in my brain about stuff being beamed through the air, and Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan probably didn't help either] so currently I email my hubby the shit that needs printing, but hubby don't print because he is a lousy secretary. Good thing I'm not his employer because he would be so fired.

*** the mobile writing desk gets to link and update often to the immobile one, as back up as well as making sure all versions are the same. NB: I bought a GoodSync licence for that and it's still one of my most beloved programs ever.°

° talking about helpful proggies: about two months ago I managed to get confused about whether I had updated the shit, and had 2 different versions of a document. Not something you want to happen when you're talking about 100K+ text, and not quite knowing *what* had been changed between the two. Snagged a program called Diff Doc from the web which was great help, though working through such a shitload of words was still painstaking and long.

Roller-coaster

2011-02-12T15:33:00.000+01:00

Sometimes life is like a bucking bull. And no amount of clinging on is going to make him change his mind about throwing you.

So, today I figured out that trying to deal with old men, as they play at immovable object in a board, is pretty much like dealing with prissy bitches back in my catholic high-school days: what's important is not the work that needs doing and whether it gets done, but the holy sanctity of the pecking order. Everything is a popularity contest, and I never won those way back when, and I don't see why that would change now.

I really can't summon the energy to deal with grown people on that level anymore. So I'm getting off this crazy bull's back and look at things of neglect that are staring sadly at me with lopsided grins from the corner of the arena. Spring's in the air, after all, and I've got plenty of trees in my garden that need killing...

21 days

2011-01-23T15:31:00.000+01:00

21 days later
I've got this ear infection bug pretty much conquered, no matter the allies it brought along (renewed sinusitis, flu and the common cold as finalizer).
In between the reading and sleeping and dragging myself through the days, I've managed to renew my efforts on the Barynn Companion. Some while ago I had decided on the form (geographical data, with history, biology and whatnot attached), and now I'm about half-way with gathering all the bits of data from my notes, digital or ink&paper, and integrating and checking all that into a single document. What makes this job huge is not the amount of data but the alertness I must display for typos (since part of the job consists of rebuilding the dictionaries for the spellchecker) and misidentifications (which was one of the main reasons to have a Companion). While I'm happy of the progress, I must admit that the pure administrative side of the job is terrible boring. Poke-yourself-in-the-eye boring.

Meanwhile ideas flit in and out the dark recesses where the Cow Watcher watches the Dungeon-Crawlers, throwing helpful hints in my face that will help delete over 20 pages from Barynn 1 while I'm dead-set on not working any further on any Barynn until the Companion is finished. Scritchyscratch with the pen in the little notebook and hope I remember to check my new set of notes before I start editing.

Belgium, the inventors of redundancy in politics.
And while all this happens, Belgium is still the political faerieland it was, with nothing moving, nothing changing, politicians trying to put the holy fear of bankruptcy in our hearts (to gloss over the fact they stockpiled debts to bail out banks that are now back to their regular business of golden handshakes instead of helping the small and medium business survive), and the people being mostly to busy calling each other rotten fish on facebook and other online media instead of thinking before they speak, and picking up the good ol' pitchfork and show them idjuts what democracy means.

otitis

2011-01-02T09:23:00.000+01:00

some of the bugs that were playing hide and seek between larynx and sinus decided to make a last stand in my ear. as a kid, ear infections weren't my thing, I did tonsillitis and larnygitis in all forms and colors.
how better to start the year than with a brand new experience!

nameless child (sonogram)

2010-12-30T18:25:00.000+01:00

Been reading up on stuff (1000+ posts that need sorting out in my demonfeeder), and upon flipping through Whatever came upon a post interesting enough to want to click through to the comment (this post which is a blog-to-blog discussion), Cow Watcher snatched a thought here:

#23 by Doc Rocketscience on December 29, 2010 - 1:22 pm
John, as a result of this I just read the original post from 2006 for the first time. I have some questions. I note that comments are still open there.Would you prefer that I contribute to that (albeit quite dusty) discussion, or this?

#24 by John Scalzi on December 29, 2010 - 1:23 pm
Either is fine but if you want people interested in that particular essay to see them, it’s probably better to put them there rather than here.

See how that works, where with all the crossing and linking possible, between computers, information, platforms, programs, whatever, in the end the thing that is our master remains time. No matter what we invent to help us link, we remain linear creatures and must make linear decisions. Will there come a day where we can develop split personalities for every moment we have to spin off our digital self into old parts of the digital world, or will we develop a sense, a social ritual or handshake to indicate we're visitors from the future and that at the same time allows us to instalink to it. A rollerdex of spinoff blips or something. Am I making sense? I don't mean developing some sort of digital agent to do the job for us (because it's a SF idea and besides I'm already using that idea). Usually, when we humans change the world (as the abstract place the world is after processing by our brain), it's by using old tools. Tools we know, inside and out, and use on new problems. In the same way the first ever smiley (click for archeological reference) changed the language we use to communicate, turning us into embryonic Bester* machines.
Anyways, sense or not digiblips, into the New Project container it goes with other thoughts on digiblippery and networking. Note to self: the baby still needs a name.

On the topic of instalinking and moving from one world/workspace/headspace to the next, my mind finds tabs mightily difficult to sort out the last few days. It happens once in a while, and I don't know how to fix it. At work I was totally lost between the running programs/groups in the taskbar and Excel tabs, always flipping the wrong things to the surface. It's not even a "clickspaces being in the same area" thing, since the Firefox tabs are currently also annoying the crap out of my digital-spatial senses. Like working in a cramped office on a cluttered desk. It only exists in digispace and yet it is so cluttered I can never seem to find the right piece of paper and I'm muttering to myself about "where did I see/put that thing?".
Why is my mind so confused? Is it working on stuff and not communicating, or is it the yello-boogers' influence (sinusitis yay!)?

* I don't mean something made by Bester Machine Enterprise Co.,Lt from Japan, which makes "printers machinery for cup noodles, ice cream, pudding etc." whatever that actually might be. What I meant was actually the way in which reading Bester (specifically Golem100) teaches your mind to think differently about the tools we use to express language, the ink on paper, the characters defined after centuries of convention. And suddenly a semi-colon is not just punctuation but a reduced image of a set of winking eyes, and math and language are not so different...

from Alfred Bester's Golem100

meep meep

2010-12-29T19:38:00.000+01:00

haz work changes: roster will change to 3 days a week, since it's no use going for a half-time job and sitting the other half of my time on a train or in a station waiting for one. yay!

done some writing on train/lunch break. with pen and paper !gasp! and also a bit on laptop. editing Barynn 1 to make voice and shtuff fit with Barynn 2. this might be a never-ending-cycle, digiblips. thought about that while thinking of some ideas I had to fiddle a bit with Dreams of Cold Stone, and realized editors must be like cameras: it's only when the manuscript passes through their lenses that it becomes immutable, capturing the moment.

started Palmer's Version 43, stuttered. He does annoying characters a bit too well.

picked up Abraham's 2nd omnibus Season of War and breezed through that instead. hooked hubby on Stross, hubby went out and bought all the Stross he could find. now I need a ladder to tackle my to-be-read pile. methinks whenever vampire/Moscow nights runs out of steam, there will be Laundry universe waiting.

hubby also bought all the Le Carré he could find for rereading. keeps telling me I really should read some. I eye the TBR pile and make non-committal noises, or mumble something about him really needing to finish the beta-reading of Tiger of Opal and trying not to sarcasnap about how Le Carré is the new Pynchon in the house.

it snowed. thawed a bit. snowed some more. and some more. making that going to work thing just that little bit more interesting.

some of the flux (not work) imploxidated all over the place. my head turned itself inside out and is now in a much better place. picked up Version 43 again. and finished. note-to-self: need to put a cnepur backup on laptop so I can prep the blog on train (or in station).

started Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief. like the story sofar though it took a while for the narrative to hold my attention, in spite of all the interesting new words, because you see, I don't like your similes, sir, no siree, don't like them at all.

meanwhile still no new government in Belgium:

good point: apparently not having panicky egos at the helm helped to stabilize the economy, though they keep telling us that's a fluke, an illusion that won't hold until tomorrow, don't believe the hype pretty please
good point: since the ship doesn't sink, it dawns on the sailors that maybe they don't really need that many captains, mm?
bad point: during the slow but steady negotiations (they're talking about really big reforms, so give them time and space) it becomes more and more apparent that Europe is like a nirvana and all the serious, experienced politicians of this small but confusing country have transcended the last couple of years leaving only the idiots in this quagmire of communities, languages, and egos. we're left with the dregs, damnit
bad point: some minor routine stuff running afoul, for instance the signatures needed to hand social institutes the money they've been alotted in budget need to come from areal/ full government. so some governmental social institutes had to loan money from real banks to pay the needy (at stellar rates of course, like as if society ever did something for the banks, innit just so?), meaning said institutes will have less to hand out to the needy, or need more of my tax euros than foreseen which I would be okay with if it wasn't simply to hand some more tax money to the banks. they've already got their fair share for the next century or so, I'd say.

In all: all Belgium seems to need is a Harry Tuttle.

whirligig

2010-11-30T00:08:00.000+01:00

One that went down some rapids. That's how I feel. Things been moving fast, all things, in all directions, but things are finally looking up. Short and quick update:

I haz work, 18h in 4 days. Transport to and from work is the absolute epitome of what makes Belgium Belgium, which means for what is basically about 35km in distance I can go by car (1h30 drive in morning traffic if it goes well) or public transport: 2 buses, or 2 trains, or 1 or 2 trains and a bus, or 3 trains, all combinations averaging in principle on 1h, which I can live with if not for the fact that the 2nd train is ALWAYS late, and the either/or choice means the season ticket becomes expensive in case I don't use the bus, and I don't want to use the bus anyways.
See, I'm a "cured" car-sickness person. As a kid, mom or dad always put some anti-emetic in me, and it was no silly ritual. I remember being yanked out of the car at high speed and being held over the gutter so I could safely puke my guts out. Nowadays I only get carsick 1% of the time, and I can on good days even read! Buses tend to have a lower success rate, because of the being packed, usually too hot and smelly, the weird turning motions, not to mention speed bumps and roundabouts.
But trains I've solidly conquered. Only in 0.0001% of the time I might get a queasy stomach, so I prefer the train for transport any day: at least I can write and read without having to take drugs. And if I'm going to lose time by being shuttled from one place to another like cattle, I prefer to do something useful at the time, and somehow trying very hard not to blow chunks in the driver's neck is not what I deem useful. The driver might have another opinion of course.
Anyways, the train route to and from work is something that belongs in Alice's dreamworld or a Brazil bureaucracy: coming and going ain't the same. Even the hour makes a difference in at what station I have to make the connection with the second train. And then considering that with every passing year trains are riding less punctual, you can imagine that this shifting world needs some adapting to before I can slog the laptop along.
But! Cow Watcher has been busy, and with rewriting Barynn 1 no less, and also kicking around some new ideas.The incubator is running at full speed, digiblips, and this is good news!

Anyways, meanwhile I had to content myself with books that other people wrote. I finished Palmer's Red Claw (*love*), struggled through Charlie Stross' Atrocity Archives (struggle was my own head's fault: shifting world, getting up at silly hours to go to work, getting head filled with new important information about what job entails, waiting long time for trains that may or may not come, and then being just the halfbreed nerd that gets stalled on the technobabble because I know too little or too much), breezed through Daniel Abraham's Shadow and Betrayal in 4 days so much did I love it. I'm considering what to pick for the train tomorrow, but I think reading 600-some pages in 4 days has sprained my reading muscle. I'll see what entices me come morning.

Oh, and we're having a polar week, snow included. And guess who once again forgot to buy salt to ice-proof the pavement and bicycle lane in front of the house, mm? Tomorrow morning is going to be interesting indeed...

Paris

2010-11-09T17:18:00.000+01:00

was fun, exhausting, and it was great to see that even on the scale of a world championship event organizers can manage to screw up pretty big. But there was great fencing to see, and quite some surprises.

Things I'll remember of Satur/Sabreday: the American Homer who was up against a French opponent twice in a row (first Apithy, and what a match that was!, then Lopez), which means having the whole of the Grand Palais, as in hundreds of Frenchies cheering their fencer on and pin-drop silence when you score a point, and just marching on. That's quite some mental strength there. And of course the beautiful final: the German Limbach (who's 194cm but uses this length with surprising elegance and explosiveness) against the Korean Won (who can jump impressively high, probably over Limbach if he really wants to) and Won won.

Spent Sunday in my favorite Parisian museum, l'Hotel National Des Invalides, though the expo on the Tsars was a bit thin. But for all you digiblips that like to see weapons of all sorts, real fighting ones to beautifully inlaid hunting weapons and honorary sabres and uniforms and half the collection of Vauban's architectural models (the other half is kept in Lille) and also a good expo on the world wars: get there early, and you can easily while away a whole day in whatever period you like, and your ticket remains valid for the day (so you can leave and do something else if you're the kind of digiblip that could actually get enough of weaponry).

Monday was Epee day at the Championships, and though not my weapon, saw some great stuff too, even if our favorites managed to shoot themselves in the foot whenever they could. Had to leave before the finale to catch our Thalys, and then found out that the finalists we predicted did everything the other way around. Silly epeists...

On the writing front: on the train to the international station of Brussels Cow Watcher handed me an excellent solution for a problem that came out of something it thought up for part 3 in the Barynn trilogy and which has been bugging me for a very long time. Alas not an easy and simple solution, but damnit, a good one.

flux continued

2010-11-02T14:20:00.000+01:00

this week running around to get what's needed done to get this job which already had me running around for the last two weeks. Yes, a job! Ain't that cool?
And of course, now also running around to get the stuff done I kept postponing since the life of the jobless stretched out into infinity and well who cares when this or that trash finally gets brought to the recycling center? Well it doesn't stretch into infinity, not really, so...
And this weekend we're off to Paris to see some World Championship class Fencing, which means some more flux, as I'll need to plan the packing carefully.

I've got this feeling this month, even if it's only just starting, is going to be over in a blink of an eye.
But the good news/job prospect has Cow Watcher singing with joy. I mean seriously, soon there will be trains again, and cows, and no way to avoid writing.

Meanwhile I've finished reading Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, currently into Palmer's Red Claw.

Tired

2010-10-22T12:52:00.000+02:00

of people who should know better, since writing is what they do, than to contribute to the easy pegging of names/words to people, whether the issues are racism, religiously inspired dumbassery, feminism, and all other sorts of morality based judgments. We've got enough crap like that going on TV and the blogosphere as it is.
of people who should know better twice-over, since writing Sfaich is what they do, than to contribute to reigning and ever-growing dumbassery that everything can be reduced to one simple word, one single issue. If world-making is already such a daunting task, why not learn from the experience and deduce that the real world is an even more daunting place to describe accurately?
of people who should know better thrice-over, since they have hands-on experience on dealing with readers who may or may not give the whole extent of their lifework but a casual glance before making an easy single-word judgment based on a paragraph or even one book out of many. If you're not prepared to read up on the complicated field of ethics, don't make simple judgments based on an article or two, and especially don't parrot others who were obviously just as lazy.

Or, to quote my man Marcus:

Word after word, every one by itself, must the things that are spoken be conceived and understood; and so the things that are done, purpose after purpose, every one by itself likewise. And as in matter of purposes and actions, we must presently see what is the proper use and relation of every one; so of words must we be as ready, to consider of every one what is the true meaning, and signification of it according to truth and nature, however it be taken in common use
~Meditations, Book VII.4

d'oh

2010-10-20T12:06:00.000+02:00

Yup, still alive a good beating with a sabre and a flu-now-turning-into-snotfest later. Been a naughty girl with the digiblippery, I know, I'm sure y'all missed me heaps. Promise I'll do better. Soon. Too much things in flux right now.

and yet...

2010-10-08T12:34:00.000+02:00

Just had to share this cool thang I found through Global Guerrillas: mycelium as near nanotech assemblers.

Seriously, Capsule Corp ain't that far off.

Radio silence

2010-10-08T11:39:00.000+02:00

Sshht, I'm way too busy with this to keep up with my imaginary and virtual audience, dearest digiblips. Yup, that's how low you rank in my life, how I'm doing in your ranking?
I'll be back to normal after the weekend, if the body craptastic holds up during the beatings I will be enduring and handing out.

And hopefully my judgment of distance has improved since this picture was taken.

Shtuff

2010-10-04T18:09:00.001+02:00

Alrightie, finished reading Sykes' Tome of the Undergates. Did laundry, cleaned windows. Filled 3/4 big weight salvage bag with crap from the garden and shed and whatnot. Got one non-review up.
Now gonna cut the last grapes off the vines and perhaps round up some apples, and then I think I've been quite productive enough for an asthmatic person disabled by a cold-that-simply-won't-break-through-but-still-festers-in-the-airways.

Wish Cow Watcher would stop chasing real devils and having imaginary conversations with real people, and occupy itself with stories and fantasy people.

proot

2010-10-02T17:50:00.000+02:00

The problem of brainfarts is that they beget brainfarts and not even if you wrote day and night would you be able to write all those damned stories.

Cucumbers

2010-10-01T09:34:00.000+02:00

So while I play All's Quiet at the Waterfront, let's not drown this blog in silence. I know how much you missed my non-review, beloved digiblips, even if that was a secret promise to myself and not to you (like duh, if you hadn't figured that out yet). You certainly missed the weekly adventures of my alter ego, not to mention my witty insights into whatever is hot news in Belgium.

To cover your pain I'll just copy paste three little items from my "something to talk about when it's cucumber time"-file. Cucumber Time equals what you English folks call the Silly Season now, but apparently at some period of time your English tailors also used cucumber time to indicate slow season. Now wondering whether it has something to do with the fact that pickling cucumbers/gherkins is not like, preserving the most nutritious or tasty foodstuffs, so not really working on surviving winter (imagine having to live on pickled gherkins all winter!). It's really not a heroic work either, not like fitting a couple of pumpkins into a jar or making chutney or sumfin.
Anyways, for your pleasure I'll trot out some brainfarts, like news is wont to do in such times, with stories about a Taiwanese dog helping old people crossing the street, or quaint medieval left-over habits of some village you have never heard of even if it's somewhere in your own country...

_________________________________________________

SF/F/H in my mind sounds as Sfaich.

Meatball: Oh you write then? And what sorts of stories you write?
Me: Sfaich

I know, correctly pronounced it should be Esefefaich. But that sounds as if you've got a mental disease. But then, what do you write again?

_________________________________________________

On "blogging community": Half the time I don't even read the crap you spout into cyberspace, digiblips, I just mark that shit read and move on. I can only follow two or maybe three blogs in depth, because there's also real world and news and silly stuff like that out there. And let's be honest, 2 or 3 people does not a community make. The whole format is also wrong, since you can't give and take on the same level. You yell something at the world, and maybe some of the world yells back. Is that valuable communication? Is that relation building?

_________________________________________________

What everybody seems to have forgotten about in light of e-readers:
Suddenly it's all-okay to be staring at a lightbox for hours on end? The bad for the eyes has evaporated (true enough, we've got LCD instead of CRT now, but how is LCD less demanding on the eyes, especially on handheld devices, out in the open, with reflections assaulting the screen?). They truly are miraculous machines, aren't they?
Makes me kinda grudgy against all those years people nagged to be careful with me eyes (by me mom, me teachers, Concerned Parents Inc, and the government) when I was watching television and playing computer games for hours on end.

_________________________________________________

In less brainfarty news: Mega-Evil-Beta Reader, whom you know as "hubby", dearest digiblips, started reading Tiger of Opal. He's making agreeing noises. Asked me about some of the noir stuff I put in, so obviously that's working. So far, at least, but allow me to go Weeeeeeee, even as his angry red pen scratches away at my beautiful baby.

Talking to walls

2010-09-28T11:55:00.000+02:00

or thin air for that matter is a hobby of mine, dearest digiblips. So really, I'm not offended by the silence when silence is what I not only expect but partly also hope for.

In real life however I'm not so keen on silence, especially when silence is what I expect nor hope for. Also not so keen on people who support you all the way except for that last step. No stomach for that "yes yes go kill that dragon we're right behind you, really!" sort of situation, not when you're the finding all those supporters lacking when the dragon puts its beady eye on you. But, as a writer of unpublished shit, I'll give it a bit of spin and pretend it's a learning experience. And it is true, in yesterday's meeting of the fencing club direction I've learned quite a bit about group dynamics, about the courage of men, of how things are discussed and decided before and after the meeting but not during (what kind of crazy expectations is this silly blonde having anyways?), of how easy history is rewritten and how easy it is to get from SNAFU to FUBAR.

So, FUBAR got all over yesterday's non-review and it won't be for today either. We'll see. I must now take time and pour energy into separating those mountains that I can move, and those mountains I'll only ever be pretending to be moving. Because after yesterday's meeting it was clear that all the time and effort I've put into the club the last couple of months comes down to me desperately trying to fill my empty life and that honestly not where I thought I was. Stupid enchanted forests.

What difference this day makes?

2010-09-24T19:02:00.000+02:00

Well, this:

What you see here is the end result of a hard day's work and half a pumpkin, 5kg grapes and 3kg blackberries: Pumpkin Chutney (very fragrant and spicy stuff), Grape Jam with Rosemary (excellent with lamb), Grape Jelly with pineapple and pecans (smoked chicken here I come!), and Spicy Blackberry Jam (spicy with a drop of Strohrum, should be excellent for patés, and meatloaf and homemade Christmas pudding).

With the jam and jelly genius I am, it's hardly any wonder I just don't seem able to shake those kicking the nicotine habit pounds. Ach well, such is life.

Tomorrow I'll finish off the other half of the pumpkin, and then next week I'll work through more grapes and blackberries.

Jitterbugs

2010-09-22T19:00:00.000+02:00

There's still some fallout drifting past from someone's misinterpreted brainfart, like snow or dandruff. Little things bug me in what people say in their fierce condemnation of said brainfart, because while most comments or open letters about said brainfart are quite thoughtful, some of those thoughtful people proceed to run into the same fail. Not race fail. Not religion fail. Word fail. Thought fail. In a discussion about morals and ethics, I consider that pretty bad shit, digiblips.

This afternoon, a bug bit me when Shaun Duke/SMD over at his blog, World In a Satin Bag, added some more beating of the dead horse by beating someone else beating a dead horse. But then I figured, hey, enough dead horses already, and who's going to eat all that?

Yet I couldn't refrain from skimming the reactions, where another huge bug but me while I read Dave Baxter's comment:

I still disagree with you, SMD, that Moon displayed politics worthy of a boycott (though they were faulty, I still fail to perceive the majority of stances you claimed she'd supported with that controversial post), but yeah, this guy's "If you boycott, then we'll boycott you" is the beginning of a Middle East style never-ending sense of victimization on all sides.
"Middle East style never-ending sense of victimization on all sides"? Does the Middle East have sole right, or enough right to make it a style, to "never-ending sense of victimization on all sides"? Why could he not have made that statement without adding "Middle East style"? Or supplant it with, oh, myriad of choices here.... Belgian style (Flemish-Walloon)? Irish style (Protestant-Catholic)? Eastern Europe style (Balkans, anyone?). Central African (ehm, go ahead, close your eyes and put your finger on a map of the area; I'm sure there's a story that makes it a perfect fit)... How about Cold War style?
Considering the context I think "Middle East style" is a really really really bad choice of words to voice your thoughts. And fuzzy: what Middle East we talking about? Israel/Palestine? Bahrain? Egypt? Iraq?

Then, closer to home: in the cached and saved and widely spread around comment section of Elizabeth Moon's post, a bug bit me in the ass when I read Rhipowered's comment:

The line-up confuses me. What do France, Belgium and Switzerland have in common, and, by omission, have not in common with the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, UK...?
Seeing how later on France's burqa ban is mentioned, I'm left to assume it's about veils and burqas. But even then I don't see the logic of the line-up. The discussion on a burqa ban has been raging in the Netherlands since late 2005. As far as I can see, the Swiss are also "just talking" about the issue. What about Denmark? They have partial bans in place...

True, the Belgian law concerning face-obscuring wear, still in the making I think due to the whole having no real government and overall there being more of a political jihad between Flemish and Walloon for over quite some months now, has in the media always been called the burqa law (and boy do I love the media!). I trust the senate to make sure there's no slanted letter or word in the law's make-up that could make it even in the most LSD infected interpretation a law against burqas.
The law is in fact the federalisation of what local law has been saying from olden times: your face must be recognisable in public. This ties in into Belgium's concept of privacy and public security, which might be difficult to understand in a country that goes apeshit each time something along the lines of an ID card is mentioned. See, in Belgium, the street is considered a public arena. As a citizen I have rights and plights in that arena. One of the plights is: I have to have my ID on me at all times. This is the means by which I can prove to the cops that I have rights as a citizen. I do not have the right to be drunk in public. I do not have the right to run around naked in public. Not sure about fornication in public, but in any case, the rule of thumb is: don't do things in public you don't want your mommy to find out, right? If your neighbour sees you humping someone who is not your wife in public, you cannot sue him for invasion of privacy, all right? I do not have the right to ask a fellow citizen for his ID, that's privacy at work, and if you catch me standing on a box to try to peek in through your window to see what you doing with that woman who is not your wife, you can sue me for invasion of privacy even if I'm standing in the street. However, I do have the right to be able to identify any and all people hanging around in the public arena. That is my security against burglars, rapists, and all sorts of people that hide their face in order to do wrong.
Sadly this upsets a handful of people that have no evil in mind. Some are burqa-wearing Muslimas (I've seen estimations of 30 to 100, this on 10 million Belgians), who will probably be confined to the house if and when the law becomes active. It will probably upset a biker or two who in his haste to buy cigarettes or sumfin' might catch a cop in a bad mood. That is the price they will pay to keep our public arena safe and equal. They might be asked for ID. They might be asked to explain themselves or get a fine. Just like drunks might. Or not. And yes, the public has to keep a really close eye on the workings of the federal police, because yes, there are sadly far too many incidents that smack of racism.

So, all this considered, I'd like to invite rhipowered to do his own homework: I'm sure in the UK that all people are equal, are treated equal, that classes are in more than just name a thing of the past, and everybody lives the happy and carefree life of equal citizens: not afraid from fellow citizens and not afraid from government or its servants.

And then I'll raise you a veil-wearing MP. Where's yours?

Wednesday = Alter Ego Day

2010-09-22T12:49:00.002+02:00

So there, go here.

Bloodsuckers

2010-09-22T05:26:00.000+02:00

There's nothing so annoying as having to wait for sun- and hubby-up so you can organize the hunt on what surely must be the last of the summer mosquitoes.

Last of the Summer Wine

2010-09-21T17:25:00.000+02:00

Good news: I'm not a drunk!
Turns out I mistook the beginning of a sinusitis for a hangover. Haha, ain't that funny.
See I'm laughing, so I'm neither as depressed as I thought I was.

Anyways, I figured I'd tackle this sinusitis thing before it swamps my head with all kinds of snot by being productive. First I went and plucked the last of the blackberries. It's not much, but they're real ripe and juicy.

And then you can go here for a non-review on Midwinter.

I considered being so productive as to post a thoughtful comment over at Mark Newton's Forgotten Tomes post, because, you see, I am terrible with books. I think it has to do with the way my brain makes stories. Finishing a book is to my brain as much catharsis as a nice dream with a solid ending. And then *poof* the story goes. When the stories are good, stuff sticks around. A name or two. A really good scene. Atmosphere. But nothing solid enough to be able to give someone a recap of what the book was about.

But since I've now written all I really need to say on the subject, why should I bother, dear digiblips? Reread the previous paragraph if you're addicted to my usual logorrheic self. Me, I've got a kitchen to clean, preserve pots to get up out of the cellar, some more fencing club stuff to sort out, and a ton of grapes to process. No really, I think I've still got 2 more tubs on the vines, but these will keep me busy all evening as it is:

Pickled brains

2010-09-20T13:46:00.000+02:00

Sort of sucks, since I don't remember drinking that much.

That's bad, innit?

This means I'm going to postpone my non-review till tomorrow. I guess by then I'll have figured out which title to tackle.

Snipping off all of my beautiful grapes that won't be ripening much more in the weakening sun: also for tomorrow. We're talking a whole lot of grapes. And since they'll probably be somewhat sour with all the crap weather of August, it'll mean the official start of preserve season. Together with the giant blackberries from the freezer, and the pumpkins people tend to send my way. Need to clean kitchen first. And lots of pots. And the oven.

Also, I postponed reading Kiernan's Red Tree because a story about a depressed writer all alone in the sticks is not quite working for the current headspace. I'll get back to it when I feel more solid about being depressed. Or solid about being less depressed. Or shtuff, or sumfing.

Some good news during the weekend: the dishwasher was just acting up and not really broken.
I think. Could be my magic touch, though. See, sometimes I just touch broken tech and it works. It runs in the family. But since it's not a constant power, it can be quite infuriating. And, by touching things one doesn't learn as much as actually taking tech apart and putting it together again. Although, I could tell you some funny stories about that too...

The frizzled main computer has been replaced, because you know, I used all my touch&fix mojo on the dishwasher and the old motherboard I'd laying around for emergencies sort of died over the years. Or it's a power problem, and since it would be the third power supply to frizzle I'm quite right to consider the whole box jinxed. All I still need to do is salvage ram and whatever else is still useful for this computer. That's on hold though until my mojo's been replenished.
The prefab from Packard Bell wasn't even as expensive as I thought. It comes with Windows 7, hence I was all set for the required wrestling match with Bill Gates' spawn to get it all configured to *my* preferences. Even that turned out a breeze. Just the regular "I'm not talking to my older brothers" attitude that, let's be honest, anybody dealing with microsoft is well used to. Somewhere this week, when the pickled brain is over and other stuff that needs doing is done, I'll start the the maddening quest for a working peer-network.

Read through the Tiger of Opal draft. I'm a genius. Some spots still need polish, and the end needs some more work, I think. Wondering if some of the cryptic shit isn't too cryptic. Needs beta-reading.

Was also going to say something about devious digital blips, but I forgot what exactly. Sun hurts eyes. Need to soak brain in mixture of hot water and scented salts now.

ASSociations

2010-09-17T10:26:00.000+02:00

In the Not So Serious Blogs that I follow, a post over at Grab a Pen led me to a title on Amazon called Birth Control is Sinful [...], and Amazon was so kind to show that title right there in my history next to Palmer's Debatable Space. Which I found extremely funny. Ex. Treem. Ly.

This might be an effect of the sleep-deprivation-brainshrink I'm still subject to. Now, knowing Tahereh has a certain fondness for crayons, I figured maybe I could come up with a funny word involving crayon for her contest.
I could not.
This is, evidently, also due to the brainshrink.
So I asked google, because mainly that's what google's for.

Google led me Yahoo Answers (which, considering I currently live in a world of animism, involving omniscient but dumb technogods [seriously, why do AIs always have to be that much smarter than us?], the referral is in itself also mildly funny). But, back to Yahoo Answers, which asked and answered:

How many words can you make from crayon?

Acceptable scrabble words are
1 1 letter:A
11 2 letters:AR AN AY AN NA NO ON OR OY YA YO
13 3 letters: RAN RAY ANY ARC NAY NOR CON CAN CAR CAY COY OAR YON
7 4 letters: ORCA CYAN CORN YARN RACY ROAN NARY
5 5 letters: CORNY RAYON CARNY CRONY ACORN
1 6 letters: CRAYON

1+11+13+7+5+1=38

Actually, I logged on to post my er... Surprise? Disbelief? Disdain? to discover someone actually spent time and effort typing that out. Who does that? What for? People who have nothing else to do in life, no work, no friends, some poor sleepless shmuck with brainshr--

Oh *cough/shrug* well, who am I to laugh at idiots like that?

And yes, my ethical awareness about intarwaste is sound asleep.

DO YOU TASTE ME BRED

2010-09-17T04:25:00.000+02:00

I'll have you know I was supposed to win the lottery Wednesday evening.

But by Thursday noon I merely had a broken dishwasher and frizzled up main computer.

Last week the submersible pump in the cellar crapped out, after 10 years. It makes me think that there's a universal statutory limit of 10 years on object in this house. What else did we get ten years ago? Must make list.

"Conceptbericht opgeslagen op 4:17"

Well look at that timestamp. Excuse me for the obvious case of brainshrink.

loose-handed priests

2010-09-16T15:57:00.000+02:00

The endtimes crawl closer on that quirky entity called Belgium. But if we're lucky enough the mediahounds' and plebs' attention will be drawn away to more important matters (our very own Catholic Church & pedophilia! With extras content and extensions!) long enough for the political nitwits do get down to real business again.

Catholic Church issues always make me feel quirky. People commenting on Catholic Church business makes me even more so, and with our very own pedophile priest scandals spread all over the news, people are coming out of the woodwork with opinions of what the Church should do. Not that they ever go to church, except for on the important Church days maybe, like a wedding in white or a baptism or two. Of, once more, people that do not regularly go to church.

It's the fallacy of Western thought that someone not subjecting him or herself to the Catholic rites has the right to be heard by Mr Chief of the Catholic Church. It's the collision of everyday socialist/democratic values and what is the very core of the Catholic Church: the Catholic Church is in no way intended to be by the people, for the people. Previous pope helped muddy that issue, current pope would rather have a clear line drawn. It's his call, it's his church. Complaining about how the church ain't doing what you, the people, think it needs to do, is like demanding Tesco to sell Asda Smart Price items because that's what you want. Can you hear the big honchos go: Come again?

And let's be honest, with only 1 Catholic, not even necessarily a church going one, against 10 from regions where people actually do attend mass and wholeheartedly support the church, you really think your opinion matters?

Pfah, the question in such issues is never what the church should or shouldn't do. The real question is: why is the police not hauling pedophile priest's ass to the interrogation room with about the same respect as they would a suspect imam's?

Digiworld abuzz and other thoughts

2010-09-15T15:27:00.000+02:00

Oh no! It's the end of an era, like a death of the party, the community is dying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What's all this talk about death of an era? Don't you silly digiblips know that if you hang around long enough in cyberspace everything comes back, even when it's supposed to be dead?

First I believed this was because in this new millennium even retro is retro-recycled. We do retro so well we're remaking shit before it's made!

Then I thought, maybe it's because the community keeps bits alive like zombie raising necromancers.

But now I understand: cyberspace's got a hell of an echo.

NB: I'm sorta reacting to this and this and this and this ...

Interjection of random silliness: whenever I click through to Larry's blog I think of Gonads & Strife. And my mind associates this with the death of an era, and somehow quite fittingly, the fall of two towers. Maybe one day, I'll talk about that. Gonads & Strife forever, man.

Anyways, there's been some hissyfitting over some dude (no offense) writing an article on fantasy and postmodernism, with all sorts of people (also no offense) commenting whilst trying to be so much wiser than the previous blogue(r) about the value of the article and postmodernism.

Seriously? Are you kidding me? Here I thought we were safely moving away from that old dead horse and entering the newer, though obviously not quite so imaginative, era of post-postmodernism. But maybe this *is* post-postmodernism at work: everybody's so stuck in/on postmodernism that the only way forward is to keep reinventing what it means to be postmodern. Ad infinitum. Fire up that retro-recycler dudes.

The way I see it, six decades and counting is a whole lot of time to react to modernism. The only place where postmodernism isn't dead is in philosophy, any kind of taste in philosophy. All the rest is resisting and rehashing what came before, which is a natural mechanism in any kind of movement, in any kind of creative act, whether it is in body and mind postmodern or not. Just like modernism reacted to what came before. I, for one, am done flogging a dead horse over and over again. Let's just skip the whole P-mod and move on.

So anyways. Here I am thinking about that Bruce Sterling quote on cyberspace cuz it came up in a convo with the hubby yesterday ("Cyberspace is the 'place' where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones.").

And I'm thinking of how people are always so surprised when people die in train stations or other busy transit nodes without anybody noticing; it doesn't surprise me, train stations are perfect for spies to meet, thieves to earn their living, terrorists to plant bombs: not because there are too many people packed upon each other for any one to notice something strange, but because there are too many people on automatic pilot zooming through this non-place, this haven of anonymity.

And then I'm thinking maybe it's not so much the anonymity, but the fact that a train station has to the people in the daily commute transit as much no real physical existence as cyberspace. It's that place where mind does one thing, while meat somewhere else does something else. That place where strangers meet, spend daily hours together for months on end, and then suddenly the "community" falls apart as all participants walk away, as if they were living in some collective hallucination. Very faerie adventure like. It's a weird fractured and fractalised reality. X-nay on the P-mod, 'kay?

And whereas in faerie-tales there would be a source, or a lady of the lake, or a burning bush marking the border of the here and the other place, there's no tollbooth except for the simple everyday items, like a keyboard or a ticket dispenser. Not sure if things would be different if there were things like ladies of the chips and stuff. Like nine sisters.

And this makes me want to watch Avalon again for the nth time, but I loaned out the DVD and I can't recall to whom. Ain't the real physical world a bitch like that?

Wednesday = Alter Ego Day

2010-09-15T11:24:00.000+02:00

So: clickety.

Sun's shining and subsidy stress is under control, so I'll see if I can activate this lazy ass and do some very needed jungle-clearing work in the garden.

Soundbites

2010-09-15T00:08:00.000+02:00

Ka-me-ha-me-haaaaaaaaa!

Sadako!

Kiri kiri kiriiiiii!

Monday came and went

2010-09-14T11:20:00.000+02:00

and there was no post.

Now I fully comprehend that you don't really care, beloved digiblips. But I do, so I've punished myself for being late on a promise I never made and by making myself write up two not-reviews.

How's that for woman's logic, 'ey?

In the meantime my last spending spree at the Bookdepository has materialized, which means it's a good thing the end of subsidy stress is in sight so I can finish the last book of the previous spree (Kiernan's Red Tree) and get on with that fresh mountain of books.

who needs sleep?

2010-09-10T07:23:00.000+02:00

Certainly not me once past 4 a.m.
So, just to prove to myself I haven't unlearned writing fiction (though in how much writing up policy plans for subsidy requests isn't fiction...): I just finished 500 decent words that fit into the 2nd UTA novel. Not much reason to make backflips, except I actually used the elaborate backgrounding and restructuring of the 3,5k I've done. So consider me backflipping y'all.

I grow up and drag along in my suitcase...

2010-09-09T17:03:00.000+02:00

With all the Is A Crisis, Is Not A Crisis* going on in Belgium the last couple of months, I figured it must be a really strange country young Belgians live in. Literally all of their life they've been seeing politicians shout and behave like adolescent shitheads or have talks that seem to go nowhere about things only politicians comprehend. They grow up in a Belgium where politicians continually polarize any problem in the country into something from one or the other side of the language barrier.

* sung on the melody of Soul Coughing's Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago

That train of thought got me thinking about what subjects from Belgium or international politics pierced the shell of my oblivious childhood years to leave a lasting influence on my then naive, nay, unformed view on the world outside.

World politics were incomprehensible. Absolutely. Bernard Benson's Peacebook offered a solution quite as simple as letting a little boy ask why big mean old people don't kiss and make up and then have them realize the kid is right. Can I have a collective "Awww that's so kewt"

And while harbouring that Peacebook dream all warm and fuzzy inside, I notice people digging out nuclear shelters in their backyards, even in little old Belgium. Mad Max beyond Thunderdome (1985) only fuels the easily titillated imagination of a child: this is what the end of the world looks like!

Then, 1986, cherry on the pie: spending lunchbreaks at school looking at the sky to see if you can see the poisonous cloud that's blowing in from Chernobyl.
Wait for the icing on this childhood's cake, darling digiblips: SEEING WHEN THE WIND BLOWS DOES NOT HELP OKAY??!!

Damn the world was a scary place back then!
But it did prepare me for whatever shit the world throws me now, from tsunamis in faraway countries to global warming and being an actual jinx for England whenever I visit (terrorist attacks, major strikes), to the End of Belgium. Nothing short of the true Apocalypse can rattle my cage, heh.

On the smaller--Belgian--scale, politics were zzzzzz boring, and televised debates were a contest in conservative fashions and nasal mumblings.
Nonetheless there was some scary shit going on!

Scariest mofos from childhood are the Nijvel Gang/Brabant Massacres, brutal gangsters active from 1982 to 1985, killing, torturing and plundering whatever they came across. The news speaks of pursuits and shootouts with police but on television it still looks like a contest in conservative fashions and nasal mumblings instead of CHIPS. The only exciting piece is the getaway car: a white Golf GTI. Suddenly, EVERYBODY wants a GTI. Dude, the cops can't catch up!

Then there's the very confusing (for kiddies) terrorism of the Cellules Communistes Combattantes, CCC in short. They were EVIL, I mean communist, bombs, links to all those other and certainly more deadly redski terrorists like Rote Armee Fraktion and Action Directe. But let's be honest: if you're turning in your own bombs, and giving the public services enough time to clear the area, you're way nicer than the *real* European terrorists. In the end the only deaths involving a CCC bombing occurred after an error in communication between public services, and this error may or may not have been deliberate, given the unexplained issues that surround both cases.

Good horror only functions if some of it is unresolved and left to fester.
Growing out of '80s childhood I find myself nearly trapped in that nightmare scene from American Werewolf in London: with the Gulf War the Mad Max reality can't be far behind, Chernobyl is on fire, and
legal prying and journalist investigations into unexplained issue and mysteries surrounding the CCC as well as the Nijvel Gang offer links with US stay-behind politics against communist influence. This brings the idea home of what a Cold WAR means. Nothing can be proven, though; it's all out there in the same fuzzball as Gladio, P2 and the fuzzpluzz which may or may not be named Echelon.

All in all, I guess my cold-hearted, cool-headed and sometimes acidly sarcastic worldview is not a surprise after all. Seeing all the truths and lies and love&rockets going on on my TV screen, I wonder what the world will look like to them kids when they're all grown up...

DO YOU SMELL ME DED?

2010-09-08T09:00:00.000+02:00

You know, yesterday I was getting all stressed about the tons of serious but rubbish words I've been typing out lately for the fencing club's paperwork, feeling quite miserable about the timeflippingsink it is. Today's silver lining: well, at least this work earns money! Alright alright, it's all for the club, but it's money, right?

So, as stress relief I started sorting through my memory box (see piccie below: yes, it a big shiny black box and it gots all kinda memories inside) and came across my first rejection in life. It included the reader report of my far too short and supershitty work of art (hey, shit happens when you're 16). The reader ends his or her short report with a remark that, while my piece was too short for publication, I'm one to be watched.

I might go hardieharr (with black stuff oozing through the teeth) at that particular line now, 20 years later and hung over from all the recent sockboozing. But it does sort of warm the cockles of my heart that there is ... something. Whether that something can ever become something marketable, well... That's a whole different story.

No, the real funny thing is that my brain is a paranoid misanthropic bastard, so for years I never really *saw* that letter when I came across it. I just saw NO THANK YOU and TOO SHORT and NEEDS WORK, instead of QUITE ELABORATE STYLE AND THEMATICS FOR A 16Y OLD, GOOD NARRATIVE SKILLS.
And, it's not like the tealeaf reading I could be doing with the recent rejections; no no, those words are actually there, black on white.

Really, who needs a brain like that?

Black Box

Hunting

2010-09-07T05:37:00.000+02:00

I'm up, because my brain insists I have other things to do at 5:30 than sleep. Hey, what do I know, right? But I got tired of hunting after Mr. Sandman and decided that I *do* have other things I could do.

Also there's a dead mouse starving under some piece of furniture in this room. I know, because its withering little body leaves quite the stink.
Aaah (though not inhaling too deeply)! The joys of having 3 fun-loving cats...

Must find the smelly little bugger.

word up!

2010-09-06T11:16:00.000+02:00

I gave my insomnia-induced review of City of Ruin some more thought. Then I thought some more on all the books I've been reading lately. Then I figured I might want to keep track of some of my thoughts on the things I read. That's a whole lot of thinking thunk, my dearest digiblips! Then I thought (even more!) on the way to do this without spending too much time writing full reviews, because that's not Ze Plan.
And so then this happened: Ceci n'est pas une revue. Ze Plan is to have a bit on every title I've bought over the last months, which are listed in ... The List.

Well then, all that thinking has left me short of time. Subsidy deadlines still looming and Belgium is on the verge of destruction. I need to do some real work, hence I leave you with another Loire trip piccie, this time from the castle of Blois.

Stonebiter

PS: yes, it is quite possible I'm addicted to creating blogs.

Spending money

2010-09-02T18:53:00.001+02:00

Ahah! Finally the credit card cycled clean.
Immediately charged an obscene amount on it for books, and what did I buy?

Philip Palmer's Red Claw because if you read A, you should read B

Stephen Deas' The Thief-taker's Apprentice, because if you read A, and you can't refrain from B, then you should also read A'

Sam Sykes' Tome of the Undergates, because if you read from A's hand, and you read from B's hand, you should read from C's hand. And because I checked him out in Watertstone's where I decided I wanted to read it but the tome was far too pricy in Brussels (without taking in account the cost of the train ticket). Turns out I can have it delivered by the mailman straight from the UK for 75% of the price, go figure.

Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Loups-Garous, because they waz on the list yo.

Pablo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl just to prove I don't really live under a rock, no siree.

Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, because I can't not believe the hype y'all.

And then I nearly forgot, well no, actually I did forget so I had to log back in and make a second order for:

Neal Asher's Line of Polity, because I hadn't had so much fun reading an SF thriller since Hamilton's first Greg Mandel book. Just finished Gridlinked and 't was like dreaming of Mandel while watching the end of Akira on repeat and munching on Science and Technology Studies articles laced with LSD.

BE = headdesk

2010-09-02T17:48:00.002+02:00

My words of last week were hardly spoken or the shit hit the fan. The last week following the news on the preformation was severely *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

Luckily for les petits Belges, everybody outside Belgium is looking the other way (tsktsk-ing at le Sarko in France, or trying to figure out what to make of the Middle -East talks) or staring at their own navel (tomatoes for Blair & Labour infighting, the Dutch are busy with their own government formation, and in Germany they're busy booting a racist from the Bundesbank board). It could have been a terrible embarrassment.

Without wanting to add oil to the fire, but extremely nauseated by dimwitted online comments from countrymen, I do however feel the urgent need to explain the following:

If Flanders goes independent we'll take Brussels with us (why1: because it's *ours*; why2: if we're not going to take it with us, then why make such a damned fuss over BHV?).
If we take Brussels with us, we'll be taking all the French-speaking inhabitants of Brussels with us (we can negotiate on foreigners like EU or US citizens). This French-speaking minority in New Flanders will have all the rights that go with that status. This means giving up all the small annoyances our Belgian law now let's us heap onto their heads: apparently we're not supposed to harass minorities. Unless, of course, when we do kick out those EU foreigners and don't accede as New Flanders to the EU. Screw the lot of 'em.

Nutshell: more rights for the French-speaking inhabitants in New Flanders. And we still end up having to pay for Brussels, but without the help of the Walloons this time. How is this the solution to the problems you define?

Anyways, < / rant>. I'll leave you lot with two snapshots from architectural ornaments in Tours I feel are quite appropriate:

Man tearing a Lion in half & Man showing his Butt and airing his Klokkenspiel

Promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep

2010-09-01T17:26:00.001+02:00

What's that? Wednesday again? Well I guess it's time for the alter ego again. Read up on Comrade Yaroshka's adventures here.

And hence I leave thee, with another piccie from the Loire trip:

Stone dog from Loches

< / weekend trip>

2010-08-30T19:08:00.000+02:00

Back from the yearly weekend trip with the inlaws, and in time for the club-management meeting tonight.

I read. I wrote. I splurged all sorts of crazy ideas onto white pages, sadly all for the trilogy that comes after the first trilogy and the hexalogy. How's that for being prepared?

For once I did not take my camera along, seeing as how I'm still wading through French castles and architectural details, and I still have tons of fun pics from previous trips to Ardennes. So I'll leave you with two little snaps of around the village of Herbeumont from a few years back:

Beautiful pine and moss, though we didn't see a lot of that this year

I love the light in those forests...

Dramatic skies, because I like them, and we had quite a bit of that this year. Luckily it was just not too wet or windy to have a couple of nice long walks in the wilderness.

Confession

2010-08-27T14:11:00.000+02:00

I didn't like City of Ruin, sequel to Nights of Villjamur.

I read it, beginning to end, no skippage. But I don't like where MCN is going with this, neither style-wise nor plot-wise.

And this, my digiblips, makes me feel like an alien.

Paradoxically, in a bid to prove I'm not an alien, I might have proven I am: I spent the last 10 hours writing down what I didn't like, why I didn't like it, from the point of view of the wannabewriter trying to figure out why the reader was disgruntled. That's far too much time, dudette.

It's saved in my posts list as is, but seeing as how this started out at an insomniac 4 a.m. and it's now 2p.m., it might be over 3000 words of crap. So, instead of posting it right away, I'm going to sit on it over the weekend and see how it looks on Monday or Tuesday. Especially since I'll be gone for the weekend, and I don't want to make grown men cry and then let them stew in it without a chance for ripostes. Because that would be impolite. This ain't fencing after all.

But still I did not like it.

So! On that little note I wish you all a nice weekend, and I leave you with a very appropriate picture. An example of the cute little gifts Pipsqueak leaves us, now August is coming to an end. Usually at the bottom of the stairs in the living, between the cat-hair tumbleweeds and dirt, or worse, in the bathtub...

And along came a cat...

In the land of Beer and Fries

2010-08-26T15:04:00.000+02:00

74 days have come and gone since the elections. The same elections that shook Belgium on its foundations, the one where -whatever your political interest or inclination- as a Belgian your only response -in whatever tonality, joy or glee or desperation- was: OH CRAP!

To the north: landslide win of Flemish Nationalists, whose leader saw (strangely intelligent for a Nationalist) that victory coming well enough to tone down his discourse on tearing apart Belgium

To the south: comfortable victory of Walloon Socialists, a party that has been lead by an amiable looking man who loves his fellow man (as in homosexual), but who nevertheless has shown resilience, authority and unforgivingness worthy of his Italian roots when dealing with scandals in his party.

The stage was set for a civil war!!!!!!!!

Well, at least for nuclear government formation talks, that's if the Flemish Nationalist leader, a staunch republican (not in the American sense, but as in: all for kicking the royals out of the palace and into the street) would not mess up protocol. Because, after an election, the Belgian king invites all party presidents and appoints the informator amongst the victors, who then has to find out what alliances are possible. (→ gleegleeglee)

But, the man had a good little talk with the king over coffee and cookies, met up with his co-victor of the Walloon Socialists and had some more coffee and cookies.
Nobody died.
~~(→ gleegleeglee)~~
They then decided together (it's a duumvirate!) to invent something like preformation talks: all political parties engage in a discussion that's padded by groundwork laying committees and all, on the 3 hot irons in Belgian politics (laws concerning complicated finances between federal Belgian state and the regional governments; Bey-Hash-Vey ; revaluation of the Brussels region) to come to a form of understanding before deciding on which minister gets what post. Meanwhile the old government continues, but of course with the new parliament.

What's this? Can we allow a government, that filed for political bankruptcy with the king, to continue to rule a country? Is Belgium some quaint Third World country?

I hear you, and it are all viable questions, but then you don't know Belgians. We have fries. We have beer*. We have chocolate. We are a resourceful people mostly interested in our own backyard, with a profound wish to simply lead our lives with too much interference by neighbours or governments. So they wanna have some more talks before starting with the actually elected government? *shrug* Why not? As long as I can continue to do a little moonlighting left and right while they're busy talking, all's well.

The only questions or remarks Belgians had was: Would having MORE talks on the 3 irons solve anything? Would all that blahblah finally lead to some results? Give it three days. Give it five. It'll all implode, you'll see, and then what? Civil war is just around the corner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Prepare your bunker/weapon/escape route!!!!!!!!!

Ah, but as it turned out, it was a good way of doing things. We've now had had 74 days of preformation talks, in an atmosphere so serene you can nearly hear angels sing. Well, okay, there's a hiccup now and then, but really, there's an amazingly small amount of press leaks, name calling, and general blundering about in public. It's so refreshing to have our Belgian tax-euro pay politicians to actually silently do their work, instead of producing an idiotic media circus. Apparently the only stick behind the door that will keep these ill tempered and foul- or loudmouthed politicians in check is the knowledge that if they do not succeed this time, the only future is:
having another election (bà-à-ààààd: not only: as if that's going to change things!, also: and risk complete fucktwat politicians to grab the steering wheel?) that will very certainly will have distrous results, ending in having to request Europe (or the UN, god forbid) for aid in creating a dialogue and fix this Kafkaesque country.

* and we keep the best brands for ourselves, trust me on this. Stella is just the shit we sell to tourists! At stellar prices too Muahahhaaa!

And so, I leave you yet again with a sample of our French vacation. And here you thought Lost was the shiznit. I bring you: The End is Nigh!

Apocalypse: this way!

The apocalypse is available for man, woman and disabled, in several languages (English, French and German), and if so desired, an introduction is available in a specialized area to help you prepare.

Cross your heart & cross your fingers

2010-08-25T18:02:00.000+02:00

I've promised myself to get some order in my life, including this blog; order is the order of the day, okay?
Or does that sound too much like I'm trying to convince my lazy, all-over the place, jobless self?
So, like, I'm not going to say up front what kind of organisation I promised myself, because that's setting myself up for having to call myself a liar. No lying, lying bad, okay?

Anyways, for now, let's start with this simple rule: Wednesdays are Alter Ego days.
Ergo, click here for a newly published part of my vampire existence.

And thus I leave you with a sample of our Loire-trip, an example of free thinking medieval France as seen on the outside of the Amboise-castle chapel. Imagine having this over your door...

Eve & the snake

YAOK or NOYAOK?

2010-08-24T10:52:00.000+02:00

Stephen Deas is looking for YA readers and will throw free copies at them (not literally; the exact reasons and manners can be read on his blog) in a search for the essence of YA.

While I have yet to read the Thief-taker's Apprentice (damned maxed out credit card!), I think Deas makes an excellent point about how subjective the picking of a hero is, and that our childhood heroes are often completely different from those we pick as adults. All you have to do to confirm this is reread a couple of your favourite childhood novels, and you'll easily find that your beloved hero turns out to be a naive git, and that the boring guy is a far more intriguing character.

Only yesterday, whilst conversing with the hubby on *issues* (or -isms as they are or are not present in books or movies; this mainly prompted by our processing of Newton's City of Ruins), we came upon the subject when he reminisced on having heard about heroes and examples in popular culture from his 18y+ students. A bunch of worldly-wise, free and outspoken young women amongst them nominated Druuna as their female heroin and champion. Seriously, if you have no idea who Druuna is, click on the link and you'll see how this is a quite baffling choice for emancipated women to make. NB: I am not judging the choice here, only illuminating that it really is not as easy as it seems.

So I think Deas is engaging in an interesting experiment here. I know I've always been confused by the many ways you can define a genre, and in the end it *is* marketing that decides (as Adam Christopher wonders in his comment), for the same reason that readers of Dark Romance are considered (by marketing dudes) to feel more at ease standing close to the Thrillers and SF&F section than the mainstream Romance.

I'm one of those crazy kids who was reading adult fiction of all genres by the time I was 13, and most of the YA novels I continued to read were either emotionally quite hefty and thought provoking, or SF&F, where the only difference with the adult stuff was the difference in language. And as it happens, one of the definitions of YA zones in on the language used (as in the actual grammar and words) and whether it is on a YA level, which is already pretty vague if we're trying to define a box, if you ask me. Yet, it's the only definition I've found that holds up cross-genre (fiction, thriller, SF/F,...).

I regularly check reviews or comments about YA books, since I'm not averse to reading a YA book once in a while. But I often wonder why adults find a story more easily not-YA-okay (NOYAOK) when it's SF&F YA (based on the -isms or violence or dark and disturbing stuff the story deals with). As if SF&F for teens must always deal with cute ETs and nice unicorns, while mainstream YA fiction can go further without its YA-okayness being questioned.
Well, unless you're asking your Catholic schoolteacher if you can read Aidan Chambers' Now I Know for your book report. Ah, if only she had known that I was also reading and working through Dante's Divina Comedia, verse by verse, as my serious lecture that year. Ah, good times, good times...

Bummer

2010-08-24T09:28:00.000+02:00

Maxed out my credit card in France, so now I'll have to wait until the card has cycled through its automated payment day. Hope it is soon, because I need to buy more books to read, dammit.

Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?

2010-08-24T09:02:00.000+02:00

Slowly picking through the far too many pictures taken during the France trip and that need cleaning up (pictures: oui, flash: non), a pack of work I have to do for the fencing club (deadlines looming for subsidy dossiers), and of course the gazillion posts my feeddemon had on offer upon my return.

Below my less concise response to Mark Newton's most recent post in which he comments on a NYTimes article "E-Books Make Readers Less Isolated". Let's start off with a song quote (title comes from the same song):

The thoughts of all the lonely people

Makes you cry

Cos you're lonely

You're lonely too inside

~Poison Girls

The act of reading and the act of having a meaningful conversation cannot exist at the same spot in space and time, that's about the only thing I can agree with in that article. The rest is all wild tangents about how the e-reader will rehabilitate a supposedly ostracised group.

Having a shiny new e-thingummy people want to ask everything and more about might lead to some socialising, granted. But the point should be made that while you let others fondle your e-reader, you are very certainly *not* reading. I myself find the price of an e-reader still too high to use it as a conversational icebreaker. And having been a Lone Reader in public for years: people certainly do approach to ask about what you are reading, usually people who are Lone Readers themselves but currently out of books to read. Just as the *e*mproved Lone Reader will mostly be approached by people thinking about getting an e-reader (not to ask him out for dinner or engage in a thoughtful and meaningful discussion). Or am I to believe e-readers are enhanced with special pheromones to attract people?

Same goes for the Lone Reader who can now connect online from his corner table (as if he couldn't before through laptop or phone if so desired). The question is, can we still consider the Lone Reader a Reader if he's not reading but having a conversation (in the physical or the digital world)?

Aha, I have unearthed a dark and devilish plot! This is merely propaganda for a so-called miraculous piece of technology that will supposedly change the social habits of the Lone Reader. The Lone Reader, who with his strong attention span and ability to read, has not yet succumbed to the addictive lure of social networking. But now the internet will be slipped into his book, cunningly like a Trojan horse, and Lone Reader will stop reading and start chatting away, and then everybody will finally be equal: unable to read more than 500 characters at a time. Muhahaa!

Also the unknowns who are allowed to declare for or against how socially cool reading whilst commuting/travelling is are both completely beside the point. People do not get onto plains, trains, busses and undergrounds to socialise. They do so to get from point A to B, and most of them, especially when it's a regular commute, look for things to occupy their minds so as not to have to stare at each other like idiots for the duration of the trip (especially the same idiots every day).
So they read (newspapers, books, some stuff for work they forgot to read in the evening,...), listen to music, do their nails, watch a movie, tap away on their iPhones at lightning speed and connect (with people probably sitting in another train), count cows, sleep...

I'm sure that if they ever invented an e-reader that would watch traffic for you while you read a book or browse the internet, to use on bicycles and cars, you'd really see the sales shoot up.

The return of the not so thin white duchess

2010-08-21T10:10:00.000+02:00

Here I am, back from France, head still reeling with the impossibly complicated history of Europe, with a gazillion pictures to sort out. History is written by the victor, and then rewritten and rewritten some more. So if you do go to the region, a bit of historical background certainly helps to put things into perspective. It also helps you to avoid sounding like a total idiot; actually overheard in one castle:
"Well, they certainly have a lot of things from Brussels and Flanders here"
"Didn't I read somewhere that the owner of the castle Belgian?"
Ack! We're talking about a period long before Belgium existed, I mean, hello, France wasn't France yet!

But anyways, history is just a big noodle puzzle of facts and you can twist the story any way you want it. Just to give some impression of the noodles: there's this large part in European history where the king of France had the Île-de-France (part of modern day Paris, and mightier persons (Duke of Orléans and Maximilian of Austria) had all the rest. Some of these mightier men also had England, like one of the most beloved kings of England (if the Robin Hood story is to be believed): Richard the Lionheart. But if you look at the facts (king of England from 1189 to 1199, hadn't set foot in England yet by 1194) it's easy to see why he would be beloved: what's better than to have a king who doesn't meddle in local affairs!

It was good fun, informative, thought-provoking, and I had plenty of good ideas even if I didn't do one jot of writing. Ha. And now for some fencing!

Dreams

2010-08-09T19:38:00.000+02:00

One day I'm going to be sickly famous and stinky rich. So to prepare for my neverneverlife, I'm going to shop for habitat ideas for about ten days in the valley of the Loire, because if anybody knew how to be rich and famous and live large, it were the kings of France, and their queens, ministers, mistresses, dogs and other assorted appendices.

Magic Dice

2010-08-03T12:08:00.001+02:00

So, Scalzi's taking a long break and Whatever will become the playing ground of plenty of guest bloggers. Kate Baker showed us her dice and asked about ours, which is actually a great trick to break the ice, isn't it?
Unlike the topic of game systems, dice are a safe conversational subject. And the answers can tell you plenty about a person, game system, and preferred game play. You've got your mixed bag D'ers, 20-D'ers, 10-D'ers, 6-D'ers, even no D'ers.
Just by showing your dice, you're telling something about the game system you use.
And it got me thinking how there's two kinds of people in anything, even in rpg-dicing. You have those who do the cold math of risk calculation and you have those who always end up blaming the dice. Some of us believe in statistics (well, duh, you only had 12% chance to succeed in that roll) and some of us simply love the un-randomness of random.

I'm firmly in the latter pack, because dice are dice, and even if you have 4% chance of fumbling that one roll, you've got plenty enough chances to succeed, and plenty of chances to fumble again in the next. Trust me.

So as a player, you cannot but end up developing fetish excuses, like "Cold Dice Always Fail", or "Rolls on Soft Surfaces Always Succeed". In this animistic view, dice live up in a metalevel of roleplaying, become part of a character and characters on their own. It leads to buying new dice when you change characters*, and punishing them when they act up. Threaten them that they will be replaced.

Which is not an idle threat in my case. Over the course of 18 years, I've gotten quite the collection, and they all have stories. Going back over my most recent dice history, we have:

Manon de Brissot, daughter of a colonial landowner with noble roots, should have been a princess to be married off. But despite her parents efforts, she never lived up to that, the tomboy. Her dice were the classical rounded d6, in pink pearl with black pips, and mauve marble with black pips for the damage she dealt (and boy did she deal damage).

Sandre de Brissot, little brother of Manon, though with certainty a little indiscretion of her mom's with tonton Sevestre, a blond pirate and cursed adventurer,n and not the fruit of de Brissot's loins. Sandre was into forbidden knowledge, alchemy, magic and demons, and ended up a brilliant strategic in the army too. Sharp edged, dark purple with gold marble and golden integer. Always dancing with the devil, he was.

Aron (a.k.a. Captain Lonny, that's what you get for having Asian blood and teaming up with a damned redneck) had rounded d6 of metallic coloured plastic, which were lighter than normal, which irked me somehow so I ended up not liking them. The two damage dice of real metal with blue dots, however, I loved to bits. I'm thinking of getting more. Eventually I started using the red marble dice with gold pips I bought for the current game for Aron too.

So currently Yaroslava works with dark red marbled with gold pips for regular throws, Sandre's magic dice for powers, and the two heavy damage dice for punching people's lights out.

Hmmmm, all this talk about dice has made me want to shop for some new ones...

*I should add here that we usually spend around 3 to 4 years immersed in one world, and sometimes manage to stick to one character. I can see that if you play short story-arcs and often switch world your dice might just remain tools, simple as is, or as an extension of you, the player, personally.

Reaping what you sow

2010-08-02T18:27:00.001+02:00

I'm wading through all the digital clutter that has piled up while I was busy in the flesh and slowly getting back in touch with the here and now. The business has also meant I did not work as much in the garden as I wanted to; I only had time to pick some fruit today, which in the blueberries' case means at least a kilo has been lost to utter over-ripeness and other decay. But not to worry, the yield is more better than usual, and as this picture shows they only become more gigantic. That blackberry's over an inch tall, y'all. Poor little Yaroslava should know better than to face this dark-skinned danger in daylight.

Speaking of Yaroslava, I've created a blog for my alter egos. Chances are that I'll have the time to write up some of her adventures when I'm on vacation in France.

Do digiblips dream of electric trees?

2010-07-27T11:49:00.002+02:00

I'm in ignomode, because I've got special visitors and special things to do this week, so I'm ignoring the digiworld. Just quickly checked the feeddemon, and the feeddemon has simply too much feed after five days. 100+ posts? There's no chance in hell I'm ever going to read all that (if it were real feed I'd be supersized in no time!).
It's also on moments like this I realize that only a very small amount I read actually makes some sense--to say it disrespectfully, most of it is just a waste of digital paper, which is okay until you think about the poor people out there that have to grow all the digital trees from which to make this paper.
You laugh, madam? Do I hear you chuckle, sir?
Well, think about it. The intarweb doesn't exist out of thin air, not really. Whatever we do, our whole online digiblippery needs real world silicon chippery to exist. And while intarwaste might be infinitely more easier to recycle, you still have to wonder about that whoopee let's fill all this free space with crap because it's okay mentality (and yes, I'm just as guilty). I wonder how many more servers are put online each year because we write too much online crap and the intarweb just grows and grows and grows?
Even if they start making servers from wood and other natural resources, a little historical sense and perspective should caution us for this mentality. After all, burning oil and rubber didn't hurt anybody either in the early days (or so they thought time and again), and progress never starts out as industrial and financial malicious intent. But by the time we realize we've put ourselves on the same list as other (over)specialized animals, we can't easily go back and extract the progress from the industry that feeds us and the finances that take care of us in our old age.
And, you know, who's to say that within a century we won't find out that filling digiworld with crap has a disastrous effect on nature or our own chances of survival? It's never the thing you expect that gets you in the end.

Jungle fever

2010-07-22T18:14:00.000+02:00

Too little sleep because the damned birds are too noisy at 5 a.m.
Now, birds are always noisy in the morning. First light, they all do their interpretation of "Good Morning Vietnam" in their racial twitterese.
Loud, happy, chirpy twitterese.
Then they decide they're hungry and go hunt for worms and stuff and quieten down.
That's how things should be. But nowadays they are so damned chirping noisy, for so long, that I'm wide-awake come 5:30.
And I think it's my own fault too. You see, last autumn should have been Serious Pruning time. Not just a little snip here and there, but the real tree-killing work that's needed once every two or three year. But silly me, I managed to sprain my thumb real bad with fencing (a sports injury bearing the frivolous name of "ski thumb"), and so no snipping and sawing and hacking that season. This means my garden, a long overgrown tunnel of 4,5m wide and about 65m long, becomes the safe haven for all sorts of noisy birds, who feel safe from the three clawed hunters and thus make some noise.
I was going to tackle the overgrowth in spring, but I don't really know what happened to spring. Came and went, and now I'm here with jungle fever.
So today, since it was dry enough, and much much cooler than the last couple of weeks, I got out the axe and the saw and got to work. One third of the trees and bushes I needed to tackle are done. I'll continue Saturday if the weather keeps up, so my poor blistered fingers and still sensitive thumb can rest some. Also, tomorrow we've got visitors, which means I'll have another kind of cleaning to do.
I only hope that I managed to keep free of phototoxic juice, but I'll guess I know for sure tomorrow...

Nothing says summer like

2010-07-19T18:04:00.000+02:00

food poisoning! Soup left outside the fridge for a day might turn bad. I've never ever ever had a problem with this, but statistics/Murphy (strike-through what doesn't fit your world view) caught up with me. Alas this was also after convincing bad-eating-habit-hubby that he too needs his vitamins and home-made soup.
Murphy's double whammy. It's gonna take some time to live that down.

Anyways, now the stomach has been tamed, I've been doing the good job of straightening out the Barynn calender so I can finally and definitely know which moon is up when. Shouldn't be too hard you think, but then of course there's this idiot part of my brain that thought up a Barynn day of 20 hours which means you either have to make a conversion to stupid 24h Earth days, or figure out the algorithm for each body's rising and setting, to come to a set of tables from which you can read what bodies (sun and 3 moons) are up in the sky at a given time. I went with the latter, but I'm thinking I might recheck the results with a conversion table.

Nothing says summer like

2010-07-17T11:30:00.000+02:00

BLACKBERRIES

These are thorn-free blackberries, which are supposedly less tasty, but not mine. Maybe the trick is that they grow against a wall that gets a lot of sun and heat on the other/neighbor's side (so they don't suffer the sun's onslaught), and they also get a whole lot of cat pee for vitamin (and if that makes you go Ewww: must I remind you of the egg and its origin?). They're über-delicious, and gigantic (for size comparison: that's a 20 eurocent piece and my current rpg alter ego of 25mm).
This is the first week of the harvest, so with over three kilos in a week it's promising to be a very good year again. Which is good because my yellow plum tree's on sabbatical (exacerbated by the drought and heat wave into three yellow leaves and two shriveled plums).
It's obviously too much to eat (yes, the weeks after this harvest will still see a harvest of about a kilo a week), so plenty goes into the freezer.

My biggest turnoff this millenium

2010-07-17T10:56:00.000+02:00

has certainly become the persistent idiocy of people going "This is the new Joy Division!" with every band that stands a bit stiff and standoffish on stage, whose harmonics consists mainly of bass, and has a singer who sings low and with disinterest. It's not because you look and sound like JD you are anything more than early New Order. What you need to be the new JD is the brilliance of Curtis' lyrics, and I haven't seen those in any of the cases. What's wrong with the eurotrash scene? I didn't hear anybody try and explain how 50 Cents is the new Public Enemy when he was debuting, so *exasperated* why? How? Do these people even listen to music/the songs? Or has the constant barrage of information affected people even worse than simply their ability to focus on a book; can't they even focus on one song--music and lyrics included--anymore?

A bit of procrastination a day keeps boredom away

2010-07-16T09:19:00.000+02:00

Through Anne Allen's blog found some new procrastination, in this website you can enter your text and it tells you whom you write like.

The opening pages of

Barynn are written like David Foster Wallace
Tiger of Opal are written like James Joyce and the second chapter as David Foster Wallace
Dreams of Cold Stone are written like Dan Brown, the second introductory chapter like Ursula LeGuin and the first chapter of the main story as Lovecraft. But if I enter those chapters all together, it reads like Douglas Adams. Go figure.
the continuous part I have for a lame cyberpunk novel results to Joyce, as does a chapter of Lumen, and a long scene from Jayce Wolfram comes up with J.D.Salinger. I'm one diverse writer oh yeah behbeh. Or something. And Shtuff.

2010-07-15T14:20:00.000+02:00

In his You Tell Me, Nathan Bransford asks:
What is it about writing that makes people put on the blinders and fail to recognize their limitations and makes the talented unable to recognize their own goodness?

After 195 comments we had in the answers:

1)    lots and lots of: writing is subjective and personal, tastes differ. It's really no different than any other art (painting, music,...). Then add: but what's good enough to get published might not be so subjective, but then as hanna@14th-10:38AM pointed out and Dave@A Writer's Look@14th-10:43am expanded, you also have to take into account that bad writing gets published and sometimes sells way better than good writing, and that Nathan gets cranky when you push that stream of thought to its limits (only $$$ matters to the market). Anonymous Bill@14th-12:29pm sidesteps this nicely, and concludes that what's important to the discussion is not that bad writing gets published, but *why*: "These are the surface characteristics, not the true nuances that make for lasting success. And recognizing the less recognizeable, IMHO, is the key to differentiating the amateur of transient brilliance from the lasting professional talent."
2)    Mentions of the Dunning-Kruger effect abound, which IMO sort of comes down to "we're basically unknowable about the things we don't know so we don't know but naming it Dunning-Kruger makes it sound posh".
3)    Jaime@14th-10:52am encapsulates what others said before: it's language, everybody uses language, so it can not be difficult. Add trent@14th-10:37am's that writing doesn't need a great deal of capital before you can start. Add to this it's a learning process (you can always learn more and better language), everybody "thinks" s/he's a good writer until they try. Also, not everybody is taught what good writing/literature is, which sort of ignores the whole point of the subjectivity of "good writing" in #1 (. Though I agree that benchmarking is an important part of the learning process.
4)    Some of the fingers pointing at subjectivity do not limit it to "good" or "bad" writing, but how basically you can compare titles. An apple is not a pear, though both fruits, right? And yet our so low-cost writerly tools (trent, above) only help to create deception; as Kerry Gans@14th-1:43pm puts it: "Maybe because my typed Word document looks the same as everyone else's typed Word document [...]you can see that you can't jump as high as the NBA guys [...] But my words typed on a page look pretty much the same as JK Rowlings'".
5)    Also, abundant variation of the theme "there's always idiots". Our egos get in the way of clear thinking. Or more softly put: everybody likes their baby, even if it's a misshapen heap of flesh without a brain. Writing creates a high, and you need your distance to be a good judge. Nancy@14th-7:02pm phrases it nicely with "Most writers don't realize they have substituted quality for euphoria in the act of creation. It takes years of practice and learning to discern the difference. What we see as a talented writer is one who constantly goes through this process of discernment, and probably has a worn out delete key." We delude ourselves links nicely with:
6)    Imagination (Travis Erwin@14th-1:36pm). To write we tap into our imagination, and it's a land where we're kings and live in huge sprawling palaces with 100 bathrooms with golden taps and not once in that bit of fantasy we stop and think about who the hell is going to keep all those bathrooms clean. As C.J.Atsvinh@14th-1:46am puts it: "when we dream, man do we dream big." From this naturally follows what Ghost Girl@14th-10:46am says: "it's kind of like hearing our own voice; it sounds completely different outside of our own head." And James@14th-12:12pm links it closer to language: "People imagine writing is especially easy because it is the only art form that is expressed in our minds - or seems that way. This creates the illusion that we have created what we are reading", and Brant@14th-1:52pm continues in that line: "That process translates into me having a qualitatively different experience when reading my own work than someone else will. For everyone else, the text has to stand on its own merits." Ink@14th-3:20pm elaborates the idea that words are at the heart of a work's subjectivity: "part of every text comes from the reader, from how they translate these symbols into a vision they see and hear and feel [...] for the writer, we already have the vision in our head. We have it there as we write, or even before we write. "

IMO, it's not simply that words can and will be interpreted by the reader even when the author has great skill or craft or talent or luck in guiding the reader's eye and mind (go too far on that post-modern path and you'll soon be proclaiming the author dead, and trust me: not where you want to end up as writer). That everyone carries their own experiences in words with them is only part of the problem.
But words are the tools of our mind, not simply of our imagination or memory. We think in words to define our reality, it gives form to the formless reflections of light that fall into our eyes. And while through imagination we create a new reality with words (as writers and readers we experience how that works), we often fail to see that even the real reality in which we sit behind the computer writing is in a way a construct of our brain (but let's not go off into the deep-end of solipsism). We easily get fooled by our own high because what we write at that moment simply *is* sublime. By feeling/thinking it, we make it so, to us at least. And without drifting off into solipsism: who is to say it isn't?
And that's why it's always such a good advice to put something in a box or drawer for a while when you think you've finished. Not simply because somewhat later the high will have worn off, or we'll have learned new tricks, can sift out errors we've newly learned to identify, but also because our words themselves, the meanings and associations and experiences behind them, have changed. When you look at your creation again after a long time of doing something else completely, it will be with almost literally new eyes.
And then, of course, the trick is to keep that distance, not get sucked in by your own imagination or high again, so that you may actually see things for what they are...

Damned never-shrinking reading lists

2010-07-13T19:18:00.000+02:00

So the hubby come home with another addition for the to read-pile, though I highly doubt it will get there. Between you and me, however enjoyable Debatable Space is, nothing beats MPD Psycho.

The Void strikes back

2010-07-13T13:48:00.002+02:00

Mark C. Newton had a comment inspiring post today, where he thinks about writers thinking about gender- or racefail issues.

There are those pro-female-emancipation warriors that feel all women must stand up for themselves, walk all over men in doing so (how else show that you're strong and independent), and in doing so also walking all over other women. But hey, you can't win them all, besides they are intelligent and strong, so they know best. Shut up. Also, they preferably look pretty while doing all this. Or not, but then they need another great character trait like be super generous, unbelievable handy, or of course be supernaturally smart. Which is a far more balanced view on women than the stereotypical serving wench and whores.

See, sometimes things are what they are. Me, I like to cook but got nearly expulsed from French discussion class in high school for saying so aloud. This first encounter with Emancipated Caucasian Chicks Inc. certainly left a mark, seeing as how it has spurred my bullshit detector to grow a specialized antenna for female emancipation crap. And I learned that some women can certainly do with some less emancipation, especially when their emancipation infringes on my rights and freedom to be the kind of woman I am or want to be. (Or, as was suggested in the comments of Newton's post: the kind of fiction I want to read).

In the minds of those emancipated chicks, the world would be a better place when women are like them: free, big mouthed, usually short sighted, with little empathy for anything outside the One Thing that matters. In my mind, the world would be a better place if they weren't all so sensitive to one single issue. I'm not for female emancipation, I'm for emancipation, the end. To me the issue is not limited to gender, but goes into the same box as homosexuals, immigrants and other people from other races, sweatshop kiddies, and even battery chickens. That sounds disrespectful, doesn't it? Well, just suck it up, wimp, because in my world those things are the same: issues that need special attention and special action, but with care not to disrupt the world surrounding the subjects. You can't change reality overnight, not because reality will fight back, but because there will be plenty of other issues crawling out of the woodwork as soon as you magically fix the problem. And most of those new issues you'd never thought had any link with the first issue.

In the end, if you go through life swinging a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. The discussions always dreg up Conan, but nobody mentions Tolkien. But seriously, what do female hobbitses do all day except cook, clean and produce more hobbitses? Damned misogynist of him, if you ask me!

And now I have this terrible urge to reread Cerebus again. All of it, especially the "terribly misogynist" parts. Ah good times.

But first finish cleaning (and especially putting order into the mess) my study, reading Palmer's Debatable Space (my God is that a fun story) and Newton's City of Ruin (which will have arrived by then).

Edited to add: aaah, digital blips *le sigh*

In the dead of the season

2010-07-12T15:19:00.000+02:00

So we're well into a fat heat wave, here in Brabant. They promised cooler temperatures today, but the heavens don't oblige. Had a dash of refreshing thunder and rain and a drop of 2 degrees Celsius so far. Now it's clear skies *and* tropical humidity. Let's just hope this breeze keeps up and dries the air a bit.

Duplicity

2010-06-30T15:33:00.001+02:00

So, once in a while my mind produces an ethical brainfart. I'm thinking it comes from a cousin of the Cow Watcher, since the idea/question comes to me in the same way as most of Cow Watcher's ideas for plots, stories or characters: not quite out of the blue, but finding a basis in a strange concoction of unrelated subjects occupying my mind. I can usually trace down pedigrees or roots of such light bulbs (or halo spotlights in the face interrogation style, depending) but most of the time I don't even want to.

The latest ethical brainfart is:
So, Stephanie Meyer. She's famous. She earns lots of money with crappy writing concerning a subject she confessed (or self-proclaimed) to know nothing about.
I can see where an agent and/or editor grasps the novelty of her ideas with both hands, but surely at one point one of those "professionals" must have also grasped the ideas that while the books are aimed at a public that will easily forgive crappy writing and the novelty would easily make the series a major hit (ka-ching!), the backlash at Meyer's creation and person would be enormous. Let's not forget that the backlash was already huge on J.K.Rowling who at least is a better writer.
The main ethical problem being: agents and editors are all about their darling authors and how they really like to treat them well and have long relationships with them and such, but the Meyer case seems to prove duplicity in motive. While I do find some amusement in the ridicule surrounding Twilight, some part of me wonders about Meyer: Is money enough to ignore (or pay the shrink bills or medication needed to get to the point of being able to ignore) that for every loving fan you have a hateful fanatic? That for every website expressing total love to your creation there's two finding all new ways to mock it? Loving fans are already an image from nightmare hell to me, hating fanatics are ten times worse. How does she get up and/or look in the mirror every morning? Somewhere along the line, one of those professionals that love their author so should have explained the dangers of being a bit of a deluded twit to Meyer, methinks.
Yup, duplicity. Not unlike the duplicity of the claim that they really hope to find excellent authors of novels that will survive the centuries (a formidable task considering the enormous slushpile), but they are simply forced to settle time and again for whatever sells. And this methinks is the logical consequence when you have agents work on commission whilst unable to dictate the market. Or something. It's a bit of a complicated brainfart anyway.

To blog or not to blog: questions of POV

2010-06-30T13:40:00.001+02:00

So, another one of those: I'm going to take someone's quote and formulate my answers here and not in the original blog because I stray off-topic or some such and anyway, I'm just a digital blip and what I say here is more interesting to me than to you. And if that makes you feel all-important, remember: you're only a digital blip too.

Marshall Payne wrote (28th June):

First person narratives have their own problems. Have you ever noticed (and I'm sure you have) where the overuse of the word "I" snakes down the page like a testament to the Me Generation? Often you have to accept this as a convention of first person narrative, but as a writer it's something I try to watch out for.

I haven't, because most books out there aren't 1st but 3rd person, preferably multi-headed because in this day and age of internet brainshrink, nobody seems to be able to stick to one head.
N.B.: everybody now blames the internet for the brainshrink, but I remember the early 90s when the internet was still far too clunky to influence young brains and Google wasn't even invented: everybody blamed TV, couch-potato zap-culture and MTV's blitzkrieg on young minds (incidentally this is also before neo-R&B or urban pop or whatever you wanna name it made music channels, videos and artists uniform. It was a real blitzkrieg, like Celine Dion followed by Metallica => *head explodes*). And I still think US-styled advertisement littered television holds more responsibility in brain-fatigue issues than the internet. From experience I know that when I haven't watched BBC or a rented DVD for a while but stuck to whatever's on the tube, I notice an increase in brain-fatigue while watching a movie ("where's that damned ad break?"), and the added quirk of a conditioned bladder ("dude, pause this shit because I really have to pee").

Now, back to that remark on 1st person: As a writer I feel more at ease with 1st person than 3rd, I don't like the limitations and the choices you have in 3rd. I understand that you can do 1st person badly (and I'm certainly not saying that I do 1st person particularly well, or write well at all), but considering the "I vs. s/he ratio" in published stories/novels, for every one done badly in 1st person I can show you three done badly in 3rd person (where probably the same error, of overusing "s/he", pops up).
Now one of the main difficulties of 1st person is the need to establish your character's identity separate from the reader's identity, while or just because a reader naturally identifies with your main character. This might require some more "I" than a 3rd person character would demand. Another difficulty is that reading being an individual business, the reader is geared to the self. So if the 1st person ticks off the reader's internal critic (who'll become confused between the real and fictional "I") your story/novel is screwed. That's the problem this new main character that popped up for my new project poses: 1st person and extremely unpleasant. That's gonna be real difficult.

As a reader I like 1st person, even done badly, better than 3rd person. It's one of the reasons that kept me glued to Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms:
a) the first 1st person I've stumbled across in a long time
b) it was done well
c) I really liked the voice

and a + b + c = love on first page

I'm certainly no fan of multi-POV, because in most instances it's used as a simple device to create tension, switching heads per chapter and having cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger. It's good for one book, maybe two, then I tire of the carrot. Which is one of the main reasons I've fallen out of love with Peter F. Hamilton: too much carrot, not enough real content. Still read him, though, sort of like thinking fondly about the good times you had with an ex.
Multi-POV is also overused, in my opinion, because it is what sells in this brainshrunk market, which means stories that do not even need the reader to be inserted from different angles or different places into the story use multi-POV. Sometimes it is done well, usually when the rigidity of structure goes.

For instance, the first head-switch in Newton's Nights of Villjamur had me frown my annoyed frown and sigh my annoyed sigh (over the last 15 years, I've seen a surge in the use of multi-POV in the genres I tend to read, so it's become some sort of nervous tick). But by the second switch my nervous tick had gone to sleep, and by the end of the book I was under the impression of having read a single POV, which is how multi-POV should work: tell one story, highlighting different angles or places, but stick to one story that flows nearly continuously. Don't be tedious and have the different heads do stuff simultaneously unless it has a function ("Oh no, dude's gonna be in the corridor that other dude's about to blow up!" Agony! Tension!). And keep those instances short. Why?
Well, long chapters with different heads all running around doing stuff (near) simultaneously ("Dun dun dun! Meanwhile ...") work the first time you read it. Next time you pick the book up, you skip everything you know wasn't either super pivotal to plot, or described or characterized extremely well.
Or maybe that's just me. But there's this choir of extras in my mental background ready to yell "Oh get on with it" whenever I even come close to thinking "'Oh no, we're switching to that stupid git/annoying twit again". I can't help it. Tad Williams and Peter Hamilton love to work with this kind of multi-head tale, and somewhere during the reading I always get this feeling the story gets subjected to the rigorous structure they've set up.
I've reread everything of Hamilton a few months ago and must say there was much skippage once past the Mandel stories. Same for Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. I've been toying with rereading Otherland, but then I figured I could better keep my forces? patience? for the rest of Shadowmarch.
And I do like rereading and finding new nuggets of beautiful language or ideas or themes that I glossed over the previous read. I don't like rereading and having to plough through superfluous pages and go SKIM! and SKIP! And I believe most of those superfluous pages are created by using another head when it's completely unnecessary.

Another recent multi-POV that I was extremely pleased with as reader was Stephen Deas' The Adamantine Palace. The slightly more structuralized POV-switching certainly had the potential of making this a wall-collision book (as in "Not again! Harrumph!" and book colliding with wall), but Deas made it work by keeping the reader's interest on what might happen with characters while you're not following them, instead of trying to write up every little bit that happens to them MEANWHILE or working with explicit cliffhangers. If I remember well (and see, now I'm thinking of rereading a book I read only a few months ago, how about that?), he even plays around with the POV enough that you're not really head-switching: you're camera-switching, and sometimes following one character, then another, in a particular setting/group. And right up till the end I was sort of wondering/hoping/fearing (all confused) that the next switch back to the mercenary, the scene would be one with the mercenary absent and the dragon belching.

I'm having difficulty with finishing Eric brown's Necropath (I still have 5 chapters to go). The mystery is solved, what's left is a bit of thriller loose end (will Vaughan manage to find the Vaith before his nemesis finds him?). The set-up with the multi-POV has kept Vaughan at a distance, and it is clear that the nemesis will find Vaughan through Sukara, so I don't feel particularly involved in the resolution. The only reason I push myself to finish the read is because I want to find out if there is anything in the ending to justify the use of multi-POV. Up until now I have the feeling the story would have been better and stronger when told simply from Vaughan's POV. I'll come back to this when I do finish the book.

Edit 5th July: So, to conclude my reading of Necropath, I stay with my initial opinion: the story would have been stronger if Brown had stuck to the 3rd person POV.

Sonogram

2010-06-25T17:18:00.000+02:00

I've been reading up on networking and computer models for social studies, ending up in some weird corners of philosophy and science history, all to feed Cow Watcher the fodder it needs to create some order from the chaos of dungeon crawlers.

Meanwhile, in between the menial jobs of the jobless housewife, I've put some thought in characters for this new project. No great hurry with it, I'm just reading stuff, gathering ideas, grabbing some balls Cow Watcher tosses me. I've come to some short notes on possible characters; there's this man, and there's this woman. I'm jotting down some ideas on *what* they are and how they fit into *non-existent plot*⁽¹⁾, and then all of a sudden in walks a real character. Not quite sure if I like him (a goddamned misanthrope if ever there was one), but his voice and attitude tell me he's important. Which makes me wonder if I'll be able to stand him long enough to be the main character.

And so the realization follows that I'll be changing POV in this project, switching from the Misanthrope/Mover&Shaker, to the two who actually live the plot. Not quite sure yet how I'm going to swing that, cuz problem is: Misanthrope is definitely "I", while the two others are "he" and "she". Ack!
Well, that's a problem to be solved later. Or not. Rules exist to be broken or some such nonsense.

So, the excitement is definitely on!

Now I have to make up a real working title; since it was quite embryonic I dubbed this project "embryo", but hey, I can see hands and feet forming: this thing needs a new name asap.

⁽¹⁾ Now, if you try to work like that in Excel you'll get the circular reference error: by fitting these stick-men characters into a non-existing plot, the plot emerges. I love it when a plan comes together!

ooOOOOoooOOOooo

2010-06-21T11:25:00.000+02:00

Came across an article on cyberposses, which led me to look up some things I've been storing for later, which lead me to look up some more recent articles and papers on identity theft, social network behavior, viral memes, and so on and so forth. Think Cow Watcher is readying to launch some balls on the digital bliphood story thingie. So excited.

Shtuff

2010-06-16T16:39:00.000+02:00

So, while the Belgians all wait to hear who's going to be leading the informative round of the government's formation, I've been using my day of unemployment and the beautiful weather to finally get some taming done in the garden.
After having abandoned it for many months (saber priorities), it had turned into a jungle worthy of the African continent (except: no bananas!). I've been running around with the machete (well, pruning shears simply doesn't sound as adventurous), dodging extremely dangerous insects (giant woodwasps aren't really dangerous except to the sudden scare they can give you by suddenly zooming past), and working until crippled (luckily, since I'm no longer used to the hard garden work, I got a blister before the body craptastic had something to complain about).

Also, I got some mild sunburn. That'll teach me, hiding indoors for weeks on end.

So, now I'm going to rest by trying to get the Barynn Companion in enough shape so I can actually put my office in some order.

Question the media

2010-06-14T15:08:00.000+02:00

It's always interesting to look up foreign news articles on Belgium, because they usually convey more about the foreign country/news service than Belgium. Sometimes they're also somewhat funny, and sometimes they are shockingly wrong. For instance, after the train crash in February, AP sent an article into the world which gave the name of our king as Baudouin. Two days later (17 Feb) they corrected it:

AP - In a Feb. 15 story about the collision of two Belgian trains, The Associated Press erroneously reported the name of the Belgian monarch who visited the crash scene. His correct name is King Albert, not King Baudouin.

Now good old king Baudouin has been dead since 1993. Sort of like saying Clinton is still the US president... I don't quite know if I should be troubled, annoyed or saddened by such things. Shouldn't reporters of reputable news agencies double-check their facts? Has that new culture where speed is more important than correctness, as we know it from the internet and tweethood, corrupted journalism through and through?

But anyways, without much further ado, some notes on foreign "insights" into the NVA's landslide win and the future of Belgium:

NY Times:

But it is likely to take months to negotiate a new coalition, raising the prospect that Belgium will be struggling to assemble its own government at precisely the time it is supposed to be steering Europe out of a deep crisis

I don't know where journalists first heard this, and why they keep perpetuating such overblown fears. Believing this, is completely ignoring the Lisbon Treaty, and presuming that the presidency of Europe has more power than it actually has. A country can certainly give accents to certain issues during its presidency, but let's not pretend that the presidency of the council is anything like heading the European Commission, or that Belgian politicians will actually have to do so much more than play host. And playing hosts we Belgians can do amidst whatever internal crisis. We've got fries, chocolate and beer, for chrissakes. What else do you need for a party?

In addition to Mr. de Wever’s party, which got nearly 30 percent of the vote, Flanders gave 12.5 percent of its vote to the far-right separatists of Vlaams Belang and about 4 percent to another populist party, meaning that nearly half of the Flemish electorate voted for separatists. Mr. de Wever’s success appeared to come at the expense of the Christian Democrats of the current prime minister and his Liberal allies.

I resent this half-assed number game with half-assed deduction. As I said in a previous post, a lot of the NVA votes came from the parties they mention, and hence were already voting far-right and separatist. It's more a restacking of vote in the right wing than a gain in right-wing voters.
The most important numbers are those of the Chamber, not the Senate . After all, the Chamber has more power than the Senate over the government and actually makes the laws. It's also probably why people give a vote for the senate quicker to the NVA (or Vlaams Belang) than for their vote for the Chamber.
And then you have to take in account that two cartels in the previous elections no longer exist (SP.a-Spirit and CD&V-NVA).

The numbers are:
Vlaams Belang: coming from 12% they lose 4,3% ending up on 7,7% (Senate: -6,6% ending up on 12,3%)

LDD: coming from 4% they lose 1,7% ending up on 2,3% (Senate: -2,2% ending up on 3,3%)
OpenVLD: coming from 11,8% they lose 3,4% ending up on 8,4% (Senate: -6,8 ending up on 13,3%)
Groen: coming from 4% they add 0,2% ending up on 4,2% (Senate:+0,4% ending up on 6,3%)

The SP.a-Spirit cartel dissolved without too much trace (mostly due to the election threshold): the SP.a back on its own loses 1,3% against its cartel position of 2007 ending up on 9% in the Chamber and a loss of 0,9% in the Senate brings them to 15,3%.

The CD&V-NVA cartel split, but last elections they had 18,5% together in the Chamber and 31,4% in the Senate. The math [CD&V now: 10,9% in Chamber, 16,4% in Senate and NVA now: 17,3% in Chamber, 31,7% in Senate] ends up with a big win for the former cartel, ending in 28,2% for the Chamber and 48,1% in the Senate.

If analysis of those numbers can teach us anything, it is that the unrest in the Flemish liberal democrats, between their own left and right wing, still exists. It's a problem which has been troubling the VLD from their reform in 1992 (they used to be PVV), and has peaked in recent years with party members leaving and starting their own parties (LDD for instance). As long as they cannot make a coherent whole, they will always have big chops of swing-voters they lose when they become too leftist or too rightist... And, it's mainly due to that big chop of voters that the NVA gets its monster score.

Few symbols of Belgian unity remain, other than the royal family, the cartoon character Tintin and Brussels itself. There is a national soccer team, but it did not qualify for the World Cup.

That's a pitiful statement. All symbols of Belgium unity still exist (flag, king, hymn, and I think Jacques Brel is a better symbol of unity in Belgium than our beloved reporter comic who has turned in a money carousel for the heirs (and not for Belgium), and, with the risk of sounding like a snarky Flemish nationalist: who's known all through the world by his French name. We have our great artists, musicians and fashion designers, all them more interested in Belgium and the big wide world than in that little, economically developed but emotionally stinted Flanders... In sports there's Cleijsters and Henin, more balanced you cannot make your representation in sports, linguistically speaking! The only thing that should change is in fact the national soccer team, since they haven't had results in ages, and the only reason we have to have a national team is because eveybody just lurves soccer.
Bah, stupid sport.

Also, his name is Bart De Wever, not Bart de Wever. In Dutch Dutch all "de" in names are "de", in Flemish Dutch, "de" in a name written without capital means nobility. And nobility he ain't. It's a small detail, but don't let all this discourse on how the Flemish are pitted against the French-speaking lead you to believe that the Flemish love the Dutch more.

BBC world:

The result would be a significant loss for Premier Yves Leterme's coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals and Socialists.

While strictly not untrue, I'd rather see "Christian Democrats and Liberals on Flemish side, and Liberals and Socialists on French side" or some notation that actually represents an important nuance. Nearly all Belgian parties are individual entities on either side of the language barrier; while of course, let's say, the Flemish and French socialists wouldn't have a lot of problems working together, their way of doing things, of thinking, the solutions they offer... can be quite different. One of the biggest differences exist between the Flemish Christen democrats (center right) and the French (center left). Chucking them all on one heap as Christen Democrats, without taking note of the language group, is rather flighty journalism.

Belgian governments are required to be made up of a bi-lingual coalition of at least four parties.

That's the first I hear about that, though seeing how in high school history classes we managed to cover WW1&2 three years in a row and never actually got to modern day Belgium, I could be mistaken. The only coalition that needs to be formed legally is between one French-speaking and one Dutch-speaking party, so bilingual, yes. But four parties? Strictly speaking, if there would be a French-speaking party with 50,5% of the French-speaking votes, and the same on the Flemish side, those two could form a legal federal government.
However, it is true that usually a wider coalition is looked for, mainly because if you want to make constitutional changes you need a 2/3 majority in parliament, and for most important constitutional reforms also a 1/2+1 or 2/3 majority in both language groups within the federal parliament. So, it makes sense to form a 4 party coalition to make sure the changes you want to make actually will pass parliament.

De Volkskrant:

Anderen zijn hoopvoller gestemd. Zij denken dat de Franstaligen onder druk van deze uitslag bereid zullen zijn tot een staatshervorming.

Translated: Others are more hopeful. They think the French-speaking will be pressed by this result to the reform of the state.

This is a rehash of what a lot of Flemish parties have been saying for months: we need to force the French-speaking politicians to reform, because they don't want any. It's always no no no. Now they can do naught else!

Lies, I say, lies and confuzzelation, and the media is complicit in this scam. After the previous election, during the difficult formation of the coalition, it was decided, mainly by the CD&V-NVA cartel, that as a solution of the ongoing debacle, they were going to start with coming to some agreement on the split of BHV before starting talks on the reform of the state's structures. This is problematic because to propose that the only solution to the BHV problem is the split of the electoral district (in which the French-speaking stand to lose) is looking for difficulties. However, all other solutions would demand deeper state reform (expansions of Brussels, or making federal elections federal by dissolving the language barrier for those elections and of course the parity rule that rebalances the Walloon and Flemish vote for the Chamber), which you've just excluded from the table. That, I do not call negotiating.
Because the Walloons stand to lose by a simple split of BHV, they are not motivated to cooperate. However, this is something different than not wanting a state reform. They wanted rather a state reform that included (if it really has to, *sigh*) than a solution for BHV. They windicated often enough they would compromise on their wants and give up their stance on BHV, if for instance an expansions of Brussels could be put on the agenda. It's only logical the French-speaking parties would not formally commit to a split of BHV under those circumstances.

Hence my belief that the previous winners did not truly want to negotiate, and seeing how Bart De Wever (NVA) changed his tone towards the Walloons as soon as it became obvious that a win was a serious option in this election (also: this time, no Flemish lion flags in the NVA victory party yesterday evening!), I'm assuming he's not only showing good will, but also the will to compromise and come to a good and long-term solution for all Belgian levels. Let's just see what the next days bring...

The people have spoken

2010-06-14T06:55:00.000+02:00

From the first tentative results yesterday afternoon it was clear that the Flemish Nationalists, NVA, would do at least as well as recent polls suggested. At the end of the day, they did better.

Looking at where they got their votes (a clear view on shifts in voting behavior is only one of the good points of a representative (and obligatory) voting system as it exists in Belgium) it's not as disastrous as it sounds. The result is mainly a restacking of the right, seeing as two big "losers" are the Christian Democrats, CD&V (who had grown the last couple of years through an alliance with the NVA that turned out unworkable in the end, and now the nail in their coffin), and Vlaams Belang, Flemish Nationalists and xenophobe party. I'm heartened to see that the free-fall the left was in the last couple of years has halted. That was one of my biggest fears, not to wake up in a Belgium where Bart De Wever was the biggest man, but where the socialists and greens shrunk ever more.

I'm annoyed that on the Flemish news site they only give results of Flanders, you even have to dig for articles on Brussels or Wallonia. It were federal elections, and as a Belgian me I'd like my tax-euro subsidized news giving me a view on how Belgium, and not only Flanders, will be today. In Wallonia it was rapidly clear that the Walloon socialists were recuperating nicely from the punches they got in the last couple of elections, as polls had suggested.

As one French-speaking twitterer said yesterday:

Bart De Wever doesn't acknowledge the existence of the Belgian king⁽¹⁾, and the king doesn't acknowledge the existence of Bart De Wever⁽²⁾: that's Belgian surrealism.

Today will be a very interesting day. Obviously, it's De Wever's turn, but how will the king handle it? Will De Wever, with his monster score, accept that he'll have to work with the Walloon socialists?The CD&V hope they'll be working together again with NVA, but then De Wever will be working with the party that screwed everything up; the only big party not involved in the debacle of the last three years are the Flemish socialists. But that's like screwing over the rightist swing-voters that delivered his monster score. Ah, politics, definitely more thrilling than football.

⁽¹⁾ he's fervently republican
⁽²⁾ the king left him out of talks before, but what else can you do with someone who doesn't acknowledge your existence?

Marcus knows best

2010-06-10T12:45:00.002+02:00

Some thoughts on boycotts for Gaza

What annoys me is that boycotting was so much easier in the Apartheid days, perhaps because it had an easy name. Perhaps we need some marketing dudes to get their asses on this.

Now, recently there has been a spade of cultural boycotts (since boycotting Israeli product most likely will only add to the suffering of those few Palestinians who still have the permit to work outside their "borders"^(*), naming a few:

Israelis won't be reading new Iain Banks material in Hebrew: but wouldn't taking steps to actually making sure no titles in whatever language are sold in Israel be more productive as boycott? Won't they just buy English? Unless of course he's planning another Feersum Endjinn
Flocks of artists have canceled concerts in Israel, amongst others, Gorillaz (wtf? is this the man that tried to get music fans' conscience back on tracks during the acceptance of Gorillaz's first MTV award in 2001?) and and The Pixies (whose ethics apparently need a bit of blood before action is called for).

Then there is Elvis Costello, who was well ahead the game when he canceled his dates.

All in all, who am I to criticise? Every good deed done is one good deed done. All you can do in the crazy muppet show the world is, is stand your own ground, friendly and without arrogance, understanding full well that a man is worth as much as his deeds ⁽²⁾.

Belgian elections
Don't do it if it's not fitting, don't say it if it isn't true. Always keep your own purpose and resolution free from compulsion and necessity. Consider the true nature of everything you see and hear, dissect it in cause, matter, meaning and intent, and ponder upon its expiration date. ⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾

So, Sunday is the big day. I've looked at party statements, and am saddened by the absence of real important stuff. Comparing statements of (verbal) communications is sometimes clearer: CD&V (Flemish Christian democrats, never get my vote FYI) talk about keeping retirement pay manageable, SPa (Flemish socialists) talk about having worthwhile retirement pay. It's the little stuff like that that makes the difference.

But after studying all the talking heads, I must conclude that I'll stick with the socialists this time, even if I'm greatly vexed that they're more concerned about making life a breeze for mums and children (hello baby-boom? Is that really what we need? Again? Isn't that exactly the cause of the current retirement pay problem?) instead of real structural changes. Like most parties--left, center or right--they have become terribly complacent. I agree with Peter Singer on this: the left hasn't really evolved since the 19th century, unlike then ideas of the right. Perhaps I should buy a box full of copies of his on a Darwinian Left and send them to lefty parties for free. It will be too late for this election, but it is never too late to change the world.

Wildheit @ Psychoshop
So the site is somewhattish back on its feet a bit, and this time I've made sure the SQL database gets automatically backed up. Murphy proof! Or so I hope.

There was this stuff I wanted to add to the site but I got completely lost in my terribly well-organised bookmarks ==> procrastination of the worst kind!

One cool design aid link: Online Color Scheme Designer

But all that getting lost in digiland made me think of what some smart ancient dude⁽¹⁾ once said (or hath sayeth or something):

Be not deceived; for thou shalt never live to read thy moral commentaries, nor the acts of the famous Romans and Grecians; nor those excerpts from several books; all which thou hadst provided and laid up for thyself against thine old age. Hasten therefore to an end, and giving over all vain hopes, help thyself in time if thou carest for thyself, as thou oughtest to do.
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book III.14

So there, Marcus knows best, and I'm off to continuing some work. It will be hard, because as my recent false starts with the new books I bought prove: Cow Watcher is working on SF, so I can't read SF. So I guess I better find something fantasy amongst my projects that needs working on in the mean time...

^(*) bracketed because the Israelis don't seem to grasp the definition of "border": when its between them and the Palestinians its their border, if its between the Palestinians and the world it is their border (and not the Palestinians). That's like agreeing to the border between Belgium and France, but saying Belgium has a right to intervene on France's border with Spain, because it's our border too. Plus: agreeing on a border is agreeing to stop changing it.
⁽¹⁾ intentional use of ignoramus phrasing
⁽²⁾ a rephrasing of: Public shows and solemnities with much pomp and vanity, stage plays, flocks and herds; conflicts and con tentions: a bone thrown to a company of hungry curs; a bait for greedy fishes; the painfulness, and continual burden-bearing of wretched ants, the running to and fro of terrified mice: little puppets drawn up and down with wires and nerves: these be the objects of the world. among all these thou must stand steadfast, meekly affected, and free from all manner of indignation; with this right ratiocination and apprehension; that as the worth is of those things which a man doth affect, so is in very deed every man's worth more or less ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VII.3
⁽³⁾ a rephrasing of: If it be not fitting, do it not. If it be not true, speak it not. Ever maintain thine own purpose and resolution free from all compulsion and necessity. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book XII.13
⁽⁴⁾ a rephrasing of: Of everything that presents itself unto thee, to consider what the true nature of it is, and to unfold it, as it were, by dividing it into that which is formal : that which is material: the true use or end of it, and the just time that it is appointed to last. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book XII.14

To blog or not to blog

2010-06-10T09:54:00.002+02:00

Somewhere in May, when I followed an SFtidbit link to the Blog of the Fallen (in response to amongst others Nextread's post on the death of SF), I jotted down some remarks on blogging and debate and so on, but apparently never came to actually posting. Which makes the futility of pondering and formulating questions and responses over here rather than over there less of a futility. Ha.

So, more as an exercise of thought than anything else: to blog or not blog? what is blogging?

Quote from the blog self:

And I'm left thinking, "What the hell is being argued now? That one can hold an opinion unsupported by evidence and that one shouldn't be called out on it?"

Of course! 99% of your daily opinions are unsupported by evidence, or at least evidence that works outside of your skull/body.

Everyone has the right to hold opinions [...]

This might be reading between the lines, but in your starting statement seems to be hiding some value judgement about people who cannot support their opinions by evidence: in your world, they don't exist.

But at the same point, having an opinion, strong or weak or indifferent, does not give that opinion holder shelter from others' skepticism.

Of course not, but then, naming it skepticism doesn't mean that it is anything else than just another opinion.

Sometimes, the blogger has to provide evidence that s/he is well-grounded in what s/he is trying to argue or else just be silent for a spell and try to listen to the points another is making.

Well, that's sort of saying that you have to listen to all a Jehovah witness has to say when he comes ringing your doorbell. I believe it is no different than in the real world: as a commenter you also have to know your blogger. If you go to a house party of a colleague, of whom you know he doesn't talk shop outside of the office, then everyday etiquette is: you don't talk shop. A Jehovah witness sure knows that since it is your door, you can do as you please with it.

And: I'm not sure opinions need to be validated by evidence. Good old inductive argumentation requires some factual statement, true, but let's not pretend a factual statement is anything like solid proof. In debate, your listener may always dismiss your factual statement.
But then, apart from watching too much Holy Grail in childhood, I had favourite jokes like:
   - What's the difference between a blackbird?
   - Between a black bird and what?
   - What's the difference between a blackbird?
   - Errr, I dunno?
   - His legs are of the same length. Especially the left one.

Or as rahkan said in the comments:

It kind of depends on what kind of conversation you're trying to have. And who you want to have it with. Everyone on the internet is not necessarily trying to talk to everyone else.

Then Martin said:

Gav, I don't know why on Earth you would think that you have to just take or leave opinions. That isn't how newspapers work and it certainly isn't how blogs work (it also completely goes against your conclusion that blogging is about expressing an opinion). Why would you have comments enabled if this was true? As for the idea that an opinion's authority is based on your view of the commentator, do you really not think the opinion itself plays a part?

I like the analogy of a newspaper's opinion piece and blogging (with comments off). You could write to the newspaper with your counter-arguments if you don't agree, but writing a thoughtful, well-argued response is just as much work and just as time consuming as doing it online. Most people don't: hence opinions are there to take or leave. Besides, in the world as it is today, you'd go crazy (and certainly would not get much written that should get written as a would-be* author ) trying to come up with counter-arguments for every opinion you don't agree to. So, while the writer of an opinion piece could see getting counter-arguments in response as the prime intent of voicing said opinion, s/he will only get a select few of counter-arguments: those people that can actually be bothered.

Having or not having some valid base for the words you utter, adhering to some form or another, using whatever channel you want: even if your words have as much power as you can muster (arguments, factual statements, proof, whatever), they will never have the absolute power of coercing a response. You cannot make the deaf hear.

All in all, the conversation in the comments of said post only illustrated to me that I really and truly don't buy the illusion of blogging.

What illusion?

Well, the old adage on opinions and assholes holds, and the illusion of blogging is that a blog is a platform for debate. It's not. It's a soapbox, only good for giving your opinion, with that change that you can make sure nobody can come and throw rotten tomatoes because they didn't like your opinion or the way you voiced it.

Giving an opinion and having discussion going on in the comments is not a debate: you are not on equal footing. Twitter is perhaps a better platform for real debate, except that it's an even shorter form so there's even less space for thought and tact.

What's more, the question: do you twitter?, makes me want to shout: No! I'm not a frigging bird!

Plus: God forbid that I'll have something else/new to take my mind of the things I should be doing.

Plusplus: Switching from one Twitteroo to another and trying to filter out the idiots that swish past strafing off a few words on another topic you're not interested in (sort of like trying to have a discussions in a noisy bar or dancing club) is making me cross-eyed. But perhaps there's some integrated Twitter reader I haven't found yet that makes this easier? If not, someone should go and invent it NOW!

But wait. Hold on. What am I asking?

a public platform
input should allow a decent length for thoughtful responses
integrated, so as a public, whether you want to join in or not, you can at least follow the debate without getting a headache

Does this sound familiar to you? IRC anyone?

Blogs are a soapbox, made to shout out your opinion, not made for real debate. So, debating on debate etiquette or nature in blogs is *head explodes*

Since the blogger can adjust for mood whether s/he will allow a response, you as a commenter are subordinate: the whole format of blogging dictates that you are not equal to the blogger.

As a commenter you have as much power as when you'd ring somebody's doorbell to inform them they have a very nice garden. The garden's owner may strike up a conversation on azaleas with you, they may just nod and make the finger at temple for crazy motion once they've closed the door, or they may worry about safety and call the police. So, if you as commenter really want to use blogs for debate: know your blogger.

Nothing in the nature of a blog holds the promise that you could actually come to a real debate. And no factual statement ('but most blogs allow comments to have a debate') can change this: it's not because you or any number of people use a spoon as shovel that a spoon was not originally made for eating soup.

It seems to me that with every progression of technology, the basic characteristics that work best for a technology are abandoned for looks and comfort.

I'm not conservative, or somehow scared/confused/bedazzled by world-changing technology. My first computer was a ZX80 and I was something like 8 years old. Since then I've witnessed lots of changes, in technology and in the meatball response to that technology. Some are good, some are bad, most of them are here nor there. But like I said in a previous post on the value of innovations, whether ethical or social or financial: are innovations really world changing if they cannot do your laundry and ironing?

* haha: at my first attempt I wrote "wood-be". Damned Flemglish. Need more coffee!

grrr Murphy's stupid law

2010-06-08T11:30:00.000+02:00

And then I find out that I didn't even save the copies of text I had for all that shit.

So I'm starting over...

:*(

2010-06-07T17:54:00.000+02:00

Great, I just managed to delete my sql database for my website *le sigh*

Hexed

2010-06-03T12:58:00.000+02:00

is what I am. I've been wearing sports tape on my ankle on and off for weeks during saber season. Sunday, the strips I'd left on for some support on Sunday (as I've been doing for over two months) started itching. Shit happens, so I took them off.

Since then I've been wearing virtual sports tape, in the form of a swollen and red strip of skin where the real deal used to be. But that's okay, that's just looks. And I know I am sensitive to some stuff, like some types of bandages, or the stuff they use to glue silver or gold to cheaper metal in jewelry. Things like that = hello skin rash. But zinc oxide tape is supposed to be okay, damnation.

This thing itches like a motherfucker, worse than the series of spider-bites I once contracted on my leg (series as in spider doing walk-walk-gnap-walk-walk-gnap on my leg).

See, every time you think things can't ever be worse, the universe will prove its limitless possibilities.

Sleepless

2010-06-03T05:32:00.000+02:00

There's something wrong with the time between Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I wake up insanely early, for weeks now. What is it my sleeping mind is hearing?

Though... I remember years ago when they changed the bus schedule in weekends, effectively scrapping 4 of the earliest stops on Sunday. During the first weeks of the change I kept waking up at 6:20 and 6:50 and 7:20 and 7:50 without a clue.

So my question could just as well be: what am I not hearing around 4 on Thursday morning?

Gobble

2010-06-02T15:28:00.001+02:00

One of the books I picked up in Waterstone's in the last batch, Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was amongst it. I started reading yesterday evening, and I'm done now. I haven't read like that since mmmmmm Latin class. That long ago. Finishing a novel under 24h is exhilarating. Wish I could stay longer and describe what and where and how this novel worked for me, but Cow Watcher is banging on drums, acting like a spoiled brat. Must go before more unmarketable novels are cooked up. Lord save me from myself.

Politics

2010-06-01T17:57:00.001+02:00

Some remarks on the usual, rather hallucinant Israeli rhetoric:

1) the soldiers were unarmed and nearly barefooted. The poor shmucks always end up getting spat at, clubbed, knifed, stoned,... It is so not fair. They come in peace and see what you get for your troubles.
2) saying "not armed" and saying "armed with non-lethal weapons" is not the same thing. Not ever.This is one of those instances that words do matter.

3) soldiers have a dangerous job, they must be kept safe. AT ANY COST. I mean, we're talking LIVES here.

But what we silly Westerners should read between those lines is: please stop sending aid. We don't want the Palestinians to suffer. But if you keep feeding and healing and helping them, shucks man, it's going to take for ever!

Closer to home: 12 days until elections. 12 days to make up my mind. Flipping Flemish nationalist are going to win anyway, because I am surrounded by morons.

über-meh

2010-05-31T01:59:00.001+02:00

Sometimes I wish the internet never was invented. Too much like having your favorite bar in house, with your favorite barkeep who knows all your favorite drinks and plays all your favorite music, but nobody talks to you, and you're hanging around the big boys like a fourteen year old not quite realizing the dangers of the game. It's all about the cake and what you want with it.

That said, I'm still out of a job, the sockbooze is still not quite passable as vodka, and hey, it's 2 a.m. on a Sunday*. What better to do than write *another* novel?

* which means it's Monday. this whole a.m./p.m. thing just isn't workable for mainlanders, dude.

Note to self

2010-05-20T15:28:00.000+02:00

Dear self,

I'll agree 3 books in 1 is a bargain, but next time you think that spending a week with a book of 840g sounds good, think of your body craptastic, and remind yourself it's no way to help your shoulder recover from saber season.

Rejection Rant

2010-05-19T13:59:00.002+02:00

And then some; the subject is the nth iteration of the Famous Rejections, and the repeated remarks/comments they get. It started out as some thoughtful responses, I swear.

Rejections build character!

Rejections build character?
Serious *snort* now!

I'm not averse to character building. I suspect that forced revisions and editing (AIIEE MUTILATION OY SHARP KNIVES CARVING THE FLESH FROM MY SOUL!) will be far more character building than an impersonal note from either editor or agent. I frown upon the idea that being denied something that you want and know you should have because you are worthy should be seen as character building, how the hell did those people ever get past their fifth birthday? That ever first no I had to swallow as a toddler prepared me well enough for: no, nyet, nope, nada, nix, nougat-balls, and just because, you figure it out.
It doesn't help finding it not fair (oy Calimero) that my genius is denied; it's not like I can wait until mommy leaves the house and sneak into the cupboard and take the cookie I so deserve.
An explanation would help making me bristle less at the no--we all have that same child still with us, and as everybody knows, some children are louder or more stubborn than others; I must confess to having a very headstrong and petulant child within, but I cope nowadays without pouting and stomping my feet and crying in public. But my character was built enough way back when to deal with an unexplained nope (mind you, not until I figured out that mommy notices cookies disappearing and it would do me no good ignoring that no). I'd like an explanation, but I can live without. But without explanation you don't have anything to build whatever with.
Now, if an agent would send me some flaring remark (what kind of drivel is this, you idiot, with which you disturb my most exalted thoughts?) I might not be happier, but at least I'd have something I could call character building.

I look at the digital stack of impersonal form rejections (stack, pfeh, let's not be overly dramatic: I only have like 9 or 10); I accept why these must be such, though I'm not fully convinced by the arguments (see later). But since I don't have to do that work, who am I to object? No is a no, and stomping my foot ain't gonna get me cookies.
Now, said digital stack of rejections first and foremost remind me I'm a storyteller, nay storyfinder. I can't look at them and not have Cow Watcher award those impersonal words voices, give them faces, and have them speak in a certain tone. When another incarnation of the List popped up on the Rejectionist's blog, I commented that at least those rejections are personal. My digital impersonal stack simply make me feel like a leper trying to sell skin lotion. Thank you but no thank you and have a nice day! Leper moves away from door, with difficulty negotiating the two small steps to the path, then the flagstones towards the street. Before reaching the next door, arm drops off... Oh no, whispers the lady in the next house, Quickly children, hide behind the couch. It's that leper from last year again!

But honestly, I was looking for a short explanation of my feelings when making that comment. What the stack really does is make me feel like a girl scout making her cookie-selling rounds and getting met by kindly smiling faces and a chipper: "Sorry! Not today!" and "Oh how awfully sorry, but I can't."
Brave Girl Scout will not be persuaded by a little adversity like that, but after wandering through many streets, she grows weary with the chipper folk. More and more she has to bite down on a slightly evil grin so as not to blurt out "You're awfully sorry, I know. Bye!" as soon as the door opens.
Surely there are better ways to use/lose time, she feels. It's such a lovely day, and if nobody wants these cookies, what's she trying to prove? But no, she's committed, she's hard working, she'll do this, the right way. So she soldiers on, no matter that her feet hurt.
But Girl Scout is also mere human, and hence prone to petulant inner monologue. She knows slinging cookies through people's front windows will not help the sales, but wouldn't it at least make her feel better? Her fingers are starting to hurt from knocking on doors and pressing doorbells, and pain is hard to bear if you cannot see its reason.
Being somewhat paranoid of nature, Girl Scouts ends up wondering if those chipper folk are all too kind to mention they bought cookies from another Girl Scout, and well, lovely as the cookies are, people have to think about health and diet and money these days. What she would not give for someone to say: "Oh no chocolate, I can't have any says the doc." At least then she would know that the cookie-selling-route-snatching-bitch-that-spoiled-her-day is only a figment of her dark side.

Another recurring remark/sentiment is the one that states it's a rite of passage. I find that one even more disturbing. At least a tribal rite of passage has rules for the ceremony that are clear, or I should say, that clearly state what they're about. In preparation for your rite you won't be told you need to show courage during your test, and then dropped unprepared into a pit with a hungry lion. No, you'll be well warned that you'll have to fight a hungry lion to show courage. To say those two things are the same would be showing a lack of intelligence, or of common sense.

A comment in Bransford's post on the list mentioned that every failure is a step towards success:

a reminder each time, that you are a submitting writer ever one step closer to your goal.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret that. Failure can teach you many things, but failure itself is not getting yourself any closer to whatever goal you've set. And without a teacher, a mentor, a direction or even a glimmer of an idea what causes the failure, how can you learn? Or should I cherish impersonal form rejections for another reason? Is this person perhaps hinting at the greatest secret in the publishing industry there is: might there be some wizard, some AI out there, that counts my form rejections, and if I reach the right number without blowing a fuse or letting slip a petulant remark, the doors of heaven will open and I will be taken up amongst the Angels of the Art?
Well... Crap on the Holy Cow. If only someone would have told me that years ago...

Bransford gives his reasons for finding fault with such lists; I'm slightly disappointed that all remarks and comments in whatever blog on the subject so rarely point out that comparing those rejections with current ones is comparing apples with pears. Why will nobody of our shepherds say out loud: those rejections have nothing to do with how the business is run nowadays. Why not slap down comments like "rite of passage" and "character building" like the fluff they are? Instead their silence only reconfirms the mantra: queries are the pain you must suffer, the ablutions you must do before being deemed worthy to the inner circle of the craft. So, write some more, it's good for your character, it's good for your soul.
You know, carrots are also good for you, but I'm no donkey, and I know when I'm strung along.

Those dear shepherds of the wannabe-writer masses pussyfoot about while they'll write page after page of detailed and thoughtful advice on queries. However, they won't say that the business has changed over the years, that their business has changed along with it, and that while they would love to find the next great artist writer they won't get his books sold. Perhaps even worse, that while they would love to find the next great artist writer, they no longer look for him.
Craft, they mutter, you must learn the craft. But it's not craft, it's not the potter forging beautiful dishes. The publishing industry is about factories copying the design and cranking out as many they can. Nay, it's not craft you must learn, it's industry. It's neither good or bad, but it is what it is and I feel more should be said about it.

Craft? Piffle. And this does not come from my frustration as querying wannabe-writer, but as reader. There's good stuff being written, but in the field of SF/Fantasy I haven't seen the likes of great storytelling like LeGuin's, or Zelazny's yet. Doubt we'll ever see something like him again and this makes me sad; I'll steer clear of questioning they would have broken through nowadays (which is like trying to argue whether aliens will like us or kill us when they come). No, honestly, I'd rather buy and read the next Zelazny than get my own stuff published. The system isn't broken because you need to rack up piles of form rejections, the system is broken because it fails to mention time and again it's first and foremost about selling copy nowadays, and less and less and even less chances are taken. It's sensible, logical, but not quite talked about as much as how it is about style and voice and craft.

It's not about writing, and it's not about craft, but about whether you can carry a platform. Will you go out and talk and do things having nothing to do with writing, and everything with selling? Will you humor fans? Do you understand what makes this business tick? Will your title sell enough within a short amount of time (and too short an amount of time to make a success of most of those writers mentioned in those lists), to make it worth it? I was just about wondering whether it might come to big boops being assets in getting published, but then this happened making it all too clear what the industry is about. Oh laugh at it, mock it, sure, but me, I'm laughing green, because I understand quite well who this particular joke is on, and illustrates so well why I'd better give up now. It's not about writing, it's about the person. And instead of giving me hope and courage, strengthen me in the idea that I simply must have an agent, simply must have an editor, simply must have a publisher, to do this the right way, they make me question if this is the right way. I'd like to get famous and rich overnight just like the next person, or whatever approximation I could ever dream of befalling me, but I'm not sure I want to pay the price. I just want to tell my stories, whether the world will buy them in masses, or not buy them at all. Just like proving courage and being chucked to lions or doing it the other way around, there's a difference between editing geared to making a manuscript into a better novel, or into a more salable novel. It is what it is, but is it what I want?

One of those things that makes me bristle when the shepherds speak of queries is the advice to personalize. I get that when thanking people when you do get published, you name the people that have helped you, whether they were paid for it or not. It's only polite, and makes perfectly sense. Just like writing a story is more than stringing words into sentences, jobs done with heart and good effort are more than something you can pay for with money.
I also understand the need to get a name right, the genre, and perhaps the preferences too. But why should I agonize over personalizing what should be an objective polite request to a stranger, while the addressed is perfectly aware that whatever I say is just a sugar-coating ploy. Something small, like "I like your blog!" or "loved that book you sold" in my weird head always get said in that immortalized tone of: I can see Russia from my house! Surely such fake sentiment will not help my book getting published? Couldn't we just go all out then and turn this show into America's Next Bestselling Author?
Another test of my character then perhaps: can I lie and fake interest in their person even if they promise their response (being 90% to 99% of the time the negative kind) will be an impersonal form rejection?

It annoys me and then some. I'm not a great people's person. Especially when strangers are involved. I pick and fuss over my words, lay awake at night wondering about certain glances, certain expressions I noticed. I HATE making telephone calls if it's my business, but I'll call to wherever if my job demands it, no problem, and I'll be polite and outgoing and not such a bad people's person but it's mostly FAKE. Why do I need to pretend to like strangers if they do not show me the courtesy they expect from me? N.B.: only a third of my rejections use my name in the response. And that simple little effort, an objective polite courtesy asked and returned, makes me feel less like a leper or a Girl Scout who can't get rid of her sodden cookies.

So all in all I'm wondering hard and deep now, reminded of the promise I made myself over Dreams of Cold Stone. I'll wait till summer and then we'll see...

Done!

2010-05-12T17:20:00.000+02:00

Especially the latest changes still need much polishing before I'm noting it down as [completed] in my WIP wordcount list, but I officially declare Tiger of Opal as a complete first draft. Saving it as v.1.0 and doing a quick victory lap in my study.

Excellent, I think this deserves some alone time in the tub with Paks.

Verbose Off!

2010-05-12T11:32:00.001+02:00

I was going to blog about very interesting stuff, like my confrontation in the Waterstone's in Brussels with !even more categories! fragmenting the landscape, but I find myself losing time by being logorrhoeic in MCN's comments and I still need to finish that first draft of Tiger so I can finally move it up from v.0.x to v.1.0 and feel all good about myself and channel all my verbosity into the second UTA novel.

But in short: for SF+F+H (and SF/F spin-offs) Waterstone's had shelf-space of about 12m (I think, I'm very bad at judging distances. In my defence: I'm short and short legs ≠ 1 yard/meter, and half the time line of sight is hampered by taller things. Shelf-height is about 1,5m since I know I'm facing the top shelf directly). Now they've added about a meter for dark romance, but impacted the 12m for SF/F/H with a meter for *memory crapping out but insert a label for vampire à la Laurell K. Hamilton*. Does adding categories really help sales? Is it logical to keep Dark Romance in the Fantasy vicinity? I feel they're already acceding to the point that Dark Romance readers don't give a crap about SF/F by making a separate category. Wouldn't it be better to put Dark romance with Normal Romance? Do they have Normal Romance in Waterstone's? I honestly can't remember but if not, a Dark side version wouldn't make sense at all. Will check it out in a next visit and someday answer these questions.

For now it's Verbosity Off!

SF/F Contest over at Guide to Literary Agents

2010-05-12T09:46:00.001+02:00

The focus of the fifth Dear Lucky Agent contest over at a Guide to Literary Agents is Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and there's a critique by Roseanne Wells from Marianne Strong Literary Agency to be won. Running from the 12th till the 26th of May.

So there, I'm game!

Entering the first 200 words of the first Barynn book now.

Drat

2010-05-10T10:36:00.000+02:00

I've got one or two hours work left to finish the first complete English draft of Tiger. Too bad I now have an appointment in Brussels, a meeting tonight for the club, and a test on that social law course tomorrow.

Sometimes it would be so handy to be able to freeze time just for a bit, or jump back a while. Or clone yourself. Stupid life always interfering when I can miss the annoyance like a damned toothache *grumble*

Lika whoa.

2010-05-07T12:49:00.001+02:00

Finally finished with all sorts of non-writing related crap (read: course on personnel law, information folders for fencing club), and looked at Tiger, scissors, hammer and chisel at hand. I gave the parts that need deleting a quick glance and started thinking about what information bits absolutely need to stay, and how I can recycle them. And like WHOA do I know how it's going to look. I just love it when...

Quick placeholder notes added to the text, because first I need to dash out for some quick groceries. Nothing helps fleshing out scenes like fighting over melons.

PS: You've got a dirty mind.

Yes, you.

You know who you are.

To hell in a basket

2010-05-06T08:48:00.001+02:00

I wake up and find this waiting for me: *drool* and YAY!

So I scurry over to Amazon, jump hoops (no, don't need no software with my mp3 because I don't use *i* or MS shit for my music KTHX) and then come to that moment where my hate for Amazon is confirmed and I realize Trent has his moments as an ass:

We are sorry...
We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

*headdesk* always apologizing aren't they? I hate them because I want this, but hate them more when they make me lose my time. They can read where I am from my IP addy, they can sluice me ads related to whatever is in the cookiebox, but still they let me add stuff to my basket of which I will only be averted that I can not have it delivered to Belgium when I jump the actual buy hoops. What's up with that?

Furthermore, half the time the apology arrives not because A) the store limits shipping to a certain territory, or B) law (or copyright) restrictions. I've had it happen that I could not order an item (from cool rpg dice to books) through Amazon from a certain storefront, and when fed up with Amazon's antics and switching to the store's own online presence found that there was no restriction at all. What's up with that? Is it quirky programming in Amazon's database, or an intentional skewing (skewering?) policy?

EDIT 12th May: and now there's an iTune link too. And I don't do iTune. Ah well, let's just wait for summer...

Rant on order and queries

2010-05-05T11:05:00.004+02:00

The part of query guidelines that always gets my brains turned inside out is when the demand is made to indicate the market. How am I supposed to know the market? I'm even loath to consider it part of my job as writer. When I can put a stamp on my manuscript, like "science fantasy" or something along those lines, I'm already humongously content with myself.

I don't wake up with the need to fill a certain niche, not even when it's a hot niche. I get ideas for stories, not ideas for things to sell. My brain soaks up words and then spits them out in some sort of order, mainly to the Cow Watcher's beat.

I know that this attitude (is it merely an attitude?) hurts my work's saleability tremendously, I know. It sucks. I get that a lot of writers have this ability or skill (or aptitude?) to take a story idea and then spin it in a totally different direction if that's where the market is going. I even picture it working like that for me in a handful of years. Okay, more like both handfuls with perhaps some help from the feet. See, there's a long list of projects I have been dragging along since ... ever, and I can't concentrate on new stuff until at least one of those dungeon-crawling monsters is out.

Why? Don't you know that every writer has The One that stays in the drawer for years but comes haunting? Or don't you get new ideas for new stories then?

That's the sad part: aaaaaall the time. But the Dungeon-Crawlers are vicious beasts, and Cow Watcher won't let me forget. Can't really blame the sucker, because CW and the DCs share the dark recesses. But whenever I seriously work on something new, it's like having John Cleese's BBC Announcer stuck in my head. "We interrupt this programme..." or "And now for something completely different." Come to think of it, a disproportionate amount of criticism voiced by the Inners sounds like Monty Python. Another favourite is the "Oh, get on with it already!"(1)

So, why can't I concentrate on new stuff? Simple: Cow Watcher won't let me be. Even at night I wake up with CW whispering to me: KILL KING MARGOR AND THAT SOLVES THAT NO?, or, THE HORSES COME ALIVE TO THE ROAR OF THUNDER (I know: wtf, right?), or, THE PROBLEM YOU HAVE WITH CYBERPUNK INVOLVING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES AND ALIENS IS THAT BOTH SERVE AS HOLY GRAIL AND NO STORY CAN HAVE 2 HOLY GRAILS (like, dude! Let me sleep already!),
And then there's those moments I really hate: WHY DOESN'T HE KILL HER WHEN HE HAS THE CHANCE?, with Cow Watcher laughing at little imbecile me, shaking its head and making me want to weep because it is sooooooo obvious a plot problem that undermines any inkling of logic, which I totally glossed over in the months if not years, the gazillion times I've gone over the draft to add, rewrite, reshuffle, and if I can't figure out a reason why Evil Guy doesn't kill the Heroine that one singular moment he can, I'll have to rewrite like 700 pages. And then I'm set for a night of no sleep and a lot of tossing about.

Most of those whispers get scribbled down by the light of my mobile or simply in the dark, and end up looking sort of looking like this:

And all my notes are like that. Some scribbled, some typed, some with little pictures or very expressive exclamation marks. Some not legible at all come morning (writing in the dark can do that), others don't make sense in first light (or ever). But they make sense to Cow Watcher, and I keep them about as talismans against the powers of the Master of the Dungeon-Crawlers.

No, order and categories get my brains twisted inside out alright. For years I've been trying to compile a Companion to the Barynn project, first to keep track of names and dates but then also of affiliations and alliances and historical background, and even there I break my teeth on categorization. I have a deep-rooted problem with categories. I understand why some people find them more important than others, going from economic ease to finding yourself at the short end of an -ism. But I don't *get* them. It's weird, because categories are simply a stronger form than labels, and I use labels all the time. It's like having all these little labels lying about, but all the boxes are missing. I guess that psych test test(2) that detected schizoid tendencies wasn't that far off the bat, hmm?

It works something like this:
Let's say, you have this nice box with 24 colour pencils and after using them with fervour and panache, you need to put them back into the box. And since parental units always complain about order and discipline, let's try to put them in some order (see, already compromising here and not saying: exactly as they were. We're not super-extra-rigid on discipline and order, okay?)

So, "easy" you think, right?

From white, over yellow, over orange, to red, purple, blue, to finally black. D'oh, where do I put my greens?

Okay, start over.

From white, to yellow, over orange to red, to brown, and... Green?

Zeus! Don't try this at home, you'll be at it all night!

The most helpful invention would be a 3D box for colour pencils. Multi-layered matrix of colours. Seriously, I would be drowning in my own tears.

(1) I blame the lonesome mornings spent at my father's, when everybody was still asleep and simply had to entertain myself (from somewhere 6am till 10am) with VCR or a commodore64. Lots of mornings were spent with the Holy Grail. Lots. Obviously too many lots.
(2) as in, helping out a friend's brother who was devising a test for his university thesis in psychology, so a test of a test

Shtuff

2010-05-04T10:06:00.004+02:00

I came back from a busy weekend to find my feeddemon overflowing (135 posts to read? Are you crazy? Don't you people have a life?), so I had to kill some blogs I was following.
Part of the deluge however are the NIN teasers on the How To Destroy Angels project, which sounds like yumyum and more. Can't wait till summer.

On the 1st I met up in Planckendael zoo with ex-colleagues. We had a pick-nick the other visitors were jealous off, caught up with each other's lives, and discussed and laughed about the miserable state of Belgian politics. Since the party was mixed French and Dutch-speaking, hilarious scenes ensued when we started yelling at each other. I was actually pretty glad to see the shocked and horrified reactions of the nameless masses around us, when part of the group was lagging behind and I yelled (in Flemish): "Always the same with those Walloons, always have to wait for them lazy asses!"

The day after I had another tournament. In the elimination I came up against the same woman that whooped my ass during the Championships but this time I kept my cool and managed to use my superior tactics. I conquered her, but then came up to someone who's been in the top 3 for years and years and years. I did my best, but the dying went quickly. I ended up 6th (of 11).
The problem with senior women's saber is that mid-list hurdle: the group is quite small, and the top of the group are those women who have years of experience and youth going for them, and the difference between lower half and upper half is actually quite extreme. But I'll get them, slowly but certainly.

Also, I applied for a job that seems invented just for me, so cross your fingers!

Today I hope to finish some of the document I'm preparing for the club, so I can finally turn my attention to Tiger again and clean that mess up.

Who watches the Cow Watcher?

2010-04-27T21:22:00.002+02:00

Well hello, didn't see that one coming: notes are made for tomorrow, when Tiger will be losing about 20 pages of bloated noodles: the juice will be recuperated for the next soup, and this broth just gets to keep the shitakes and the shrimp, all lean and yummie.

Shtuff

2010-04-26T10:25:00.003+02:00

Championships:
did better in the poules than I expected. It is becoming a habit to scare women who are way better than me, physically and tactically, and then struggle against those I should be able to turn into minced meat with my eyes closed. And then I did it again in the elimination, which is stupid, because I was really well placed after that poule and had a decent chance of getting through 2 rounds. Some things you learn in training, and some you learn on tournaments. I've got a pretty good idea where I went wrong, so I won't be doing those things again next Sunday, on yet another tournament. At least, I will try. Because you can rationalize all you want after, reason don't help much when you're facing your opponent. So I learned great stuff and managed to keep my body in working order, which is a victory in itself.

I did some more work on Tiger on Saturday, between the bouts of the hubby's epee fencing, so also yay.

And Belgium still exists, though the air of cabaret and circus remains strong. We'll see what the week brings: more clowns, some good old-fashioned pillories, or off with their heads?

Split or Bust: the circus continues

2010-04-23T11:55:00.002+02:00

Something more that you need to know about BHV:

It is only a problem insofar that the political parties want a negotiated solution. The Flemish parties can put the split on the agenda of the Chamber, and except when Brussels slows the process down (the last possible delay of a vote in the Chamber), the split gets voted and then the Flemish win. Because the whole keeping things 50-50 between a 60-40 population seems to break down at that point. More Flemish in the Chamber, they vote, and it's F: 1 - W: 0

Now, what bugs me is that the keeping of the old electoral districts in the Brussels-Brabant area did not come into existence without the say-so of Flemish parties themselves. But they're suddenly all defending the right of a couple of idiots living in Walloon-Brabant because land is cheap there and actually don't give a rats ass that they can't vote on Flemish parties. But we mustn't say this. Flemish rights are violated, so let's use our predominance in the Chamber to make it happen! The way Flemish politicians are posturing, it's like boys boasting before a fight. Of course those Frenchies don't wanna see that happen, hey, now, do they? Hmm? Hmm?

Speaking as a Flemish person, seeing as how the Walloons have already scored points in Europe on the protection of minorities (some grounded, some a bit far-fetched), I don't think it's something to gloat about. They are a minority.

Hence, for many years all parties have ignored deadline after deadline in the negotiations on BHV. Deadlines, up until now, never really mattered. But the Open VLD (Flemish liberals) have a new leader, a young guy burning to prove his worth, so at the passing of the latest deadline he pronounced to have lost their confidence in the current government, which you may read as: we're tired of the clowns making up our majority. So that's why premier Leterme had to hand his resignation. And he was smiling upon returning from the king. Remind me to ask my saber trainer what they put in the coffee at the palace (so yes: governmental crisis again, equals missing one saber trainer, again. Stupid frigging politicians, don't they know the Belgium Fencing Championships for seniors is THIS weekend?)

Now, all parties agree this tragicomedy of a country needs a serious reform. BHV was chosen as the easiest of The Insurmountable Problems to solve, sort of a toe in the water. Alas, nobody really agrees on where the reform should stop, and the rub begins with nobody agreeing on what problem should be addressed first. As the debacle has proven: not flipping Bay-Hash-Vey!

I say: we've come to a point where sadly it would not make much difference whether we have democratic elections, have the king chose whomever he wishes amongst the politicians to have as ministers, or have a lottery amongst all citizens to pick a few who get to govern for a few years. It just can't get any worst. Governing on the federal level has been one long terrible show of electoral posturing the last few years, and politicians, no matter their poker faces, are really bad actors.

Comical note of the day: after Open VLD felled the government, the French-speaking parties vouched that they were still willing to work on a negotiated solution. Then Open VLD announced they too were still willing to negotiate, on some terms.

WTF? How the hell can you defend a twist like that if it's not solely political posturing? I want a lottery, and I want it now.

Split or Bust!

2010-04-22T11:29:00.005+02:00

Yay! Political crisis in Belgium! Again!

A few months ago I would have whooped at the mention of the government (especially the conservative Christian Democrats) handing their resignation to the king, not to mention it's the same guy over and over (well, poor Leterme's gonna be slurping antidepressants for some years I think). But see, most of the Belgians are somewhat stunned by this strange race of people that come and tells us what the important political issues are and then start fighting about it until the government implodes. Again. I'd rather pay to watch WWE on cable. Because, when it comes to the crunch, you have these two items in the list of recent news: "The King considers [the government's resignation]", and "1.5 million Belgians in poverty" (and there are about 10 million of us). Well, that sort of eats up all my glee-energy. Because really, this political war that is raging in Belgium is just that, and the rest of us have other frigging problems.

But no, the media will blow their trumpets and make sure you hear it, trust me, throughout Europe the siren song will be sung:

There's a war going on and it's the end of Belgium!

Now this war rages between the Walloon part (French-speaking Belgians (FS)) and Flemish part (Dutch-speaking (DS)). Point of contestation is a reform in electoral districts, the logical consequence of a series of modernizations of the state that turned Belgium into this weird haywire democracy with complex layers of government. We have the federal state, spread over three Communities (French-, Dutch- and German-speaking), and three independent Regions (Wallonia, Flanders, Brussels), which gives us six parliaments (Federal, Flemish, Walloon, Brussels, French and German), and then there are still the local and provincial councils (luckily we don't get a vote on the provincial level, Mein Gott!)

N.B.: See! It is evidence itself that we deliver Europe its first president. We're all about simplifying government! :-]

This democratic haystack means we have to vote for local government (city councils), regional government (Flemish parliament) and federal government, leaving European elections out of consideration for now. All these elections are a logistical nightmare for a small country like Belgium. More modernization was needed. We're a country of logic and reason after all [Excuse me, we are? Thought that was France, or maybe England. We're fries and beer, no?]. Laws were adapted, electoral district borders were redrawn to coincide with provincial, except in 3 cases: Walloon Brabant (FS), Flemish Brabant (DS), and Brussels-with-an-expansion, better known as BHV [or B-H-V; pronounced (but go easy in the diphthong) by Flemish as Bay-Hash-Vey (Oy Vey!), and by Walloon as Bay-Ash-Vey]

Now Bay-Hash-Vey is one of the many Insurmountable Problems Belgium has, and most of The Insurmountable Problems find their origin in a language border being painted from east to west over the Belgian territory. This happened in the time when women burn their bras and students were killed for peace. Flemish students fight for the right to have education in their own language, which is okay I guess. It lead to the FS university elite being kicked out of the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain in French), and they built a new one in Louvain-La-Neuve. See, we're very creative people, us.

The language border leads to laws concerning democratic rule, since there are less Walloons than Flemish people , and some sort of correction has to be enforced in federal elections else you end up with a Walloon minority. That's how bilingualism works. You can't have one FS or DS politician too many, even if they are perfectly bilingual. Plus, we Flemish are very good at playing the underdogs because that's what we were for a long time and now we have this habit and pretend we only act this way because we still have some quota left from the past.The French owe us, dude.

Everything got split in Belgium, and divided, and every euro going to Wallonia has to have its counterpart going to Flanders. Tiresome, I hear you think, but you haven't got the faintest! We have French political parties. Dutch political parties. And only in the true bilingual part of Belgium it's possible to vote for French or Dutch parties "as you wish": Brussels.

With expansion of the Brussels district, this means that people from a small part of constitutional Flanders (Halle, Vilvoorde) can vote for French parties and that's not fair for the two districts of Brabant, but certainly to the Walloon part because the Flemish living there can not vote for Flemish parties. Hence, the Constitutional Court decided BHV had to be solved. DS parties, lead by the Flemish nationalists, read this persistently as: has to be split. FS parties don't like this idea of splitting without getting something in return (like for instance an expansion of Brussels to include the problematic municipalities "with facilities" surrounding it).

The!Au!dacity! We only ask for LAW being applied. Plus, expanding Brussels is a ridiculous idea: it would create a corridor from FS territories direct to the heart of Brussels, which still suffers from more than a century of Frenchification. You don't want to make it any easier for those Frenchies to take over your capital, right? I can see them already, those damned frogs, lining up with their hastily prepared suitcases, ready to march right in!

You are entitled to go "Huh?" right now; it is what most Belgians feel after a decade of debate and political arm wrestling and deadlines and compromising and as long as the politicians can keep the show up none of us will start wondering whether paying that legion of idiots (six parliaments, I tell you!) is really the best way to spend our tax-euros. 1.5 million Belgians in poverty anyone?

Now, adding a little note about that number of elections: they have different intervals so whenever we vote federal there are people who leave the seat they were elected to in a regional election to "move up ". It is an annoyance. A crying shame according to many parties, who when it is their turn, do more of the same. Except for the Flemish Socialists who manage to not even give their guy with the most votes (and the best track record ever, and universally named as the most competent politician in Belgian history ever) a seat in *any* of the governments. Because the party knows best. Besides, if the other parties can shoot themselves in the foot and gain votes, surely socialists can do better! Another reason to not really applaud the Belgian crisis: for the first time in my life I wouldn't know who to vote for and that's a big problem in a multiparty system.

Back to BHV: my main concern is not about language borders or that it leads to annoyingly boring debates about them versus us. But the bad government it brings on instead of leading to actually improving politics. A lost chance for politicians to justify the need for our myriad of governmental levels, by making the difference clear: you have your people for local government, regional government and federal government. Not that there can never be any linkage between them, but seriously, the distance from Belgium to Flanders should be as big as to let's say Antwerp. It means that some parties won't exist on all levels (which is already the case), and that parties are forced to think about what they are going to do when getting to the federal level, instead of saying whatever swings the vote. Like: BHV will be split! Tomorrow! Trust us!

The solution to BHV is quite simple, though it does not translate to the endless promises Flemish politicians made in the past about The Split: let Belgians vote for any politician, no matter what side of the language border they come from, in federal elections. (N.B.: in European elections, a level even higher up, language is even less important). This also sounds to me like the best way to ensure the most competent people get into the federal government, and it will force parties to take the different levels serious. The federal level IS bilingual. We have griped in the past about our Flemish federal ministers being bilingual and their Walloon colleagues not, and the FS are studying hard to address our sensitivities. There's no better way to motivate the FS politicians to learn Flemish than making it important to be understood by voters. Federal level, bilingual, anybody's vote.

If politicians can't make such a divide between levels clear and workable, I don't see a reason to keep it all.

WHOA! Loaded remark here in Flanders! But no, I won't trade my capital Brussels with Antwerp (Flemish nationalists sport the idea of " Belgium bust" and separation): if this circus goes on I'd prefer to revert to 1830 and be forced to fill out my taxes in French, over reverting to some mythical Flanders of 1302. Not simply because I'm contraire like that but because anybody not from the provinces of East- and West-Flanders understands those truly and historically Flemish dialects.

Explanation of 1302: The Battle of the Golden Spurs is the national holiday of the Flemish community, because that's when the poor (but not financially so) people of Flanders won against the king of France! With pitchforks and cunning passwords, as the persistent folklore goes: when a francophone tries to say "Schild en vriend" (shield and friend) he'll betray himself easily ("skilt en frint"). Sort of like the TH in English; you get it with your mother's milk or never. Now, the importance of 1302 in the war of the languages in Belgium is highly overrated: the idea that it was French-speaking against Dutch-speaking is a myth invented by Flemish nationalist historians of the past, and novelists. And who says literature ain't important?

In reality, large parts of modern Flanders were the county of Namen and the duchy of Brabant back then, and those two fought on the side of the Frenchies. While dialects from Flanders, Brabant and Namen all had commonalities that are still reflected in the modern day dialects (French as well as Dutch-speaking dialects!), it wasn't a real language issue, but, as it usually is, one of economics, and helping to drown your neighbor to take over his market share.

Put like that, if you look from a distance at my beloved country and look really well, you'll see we're not so different from the Balkans. Our lands are just more fertile and our neighbors bigger and scarier.
And we have fries and beer.

Oy vey, enough already about this idiocy. I leave you with the modern day Jacques Brel, the incomprehensible-to-Dutch-speakers Flemish dude who sings in Flemish, French (knighted by the French Order!), English and anything in between... The universally adored Belgian artist, Arno, who said it best with: Nous sommes quand même tous des Européens!

GREEN!

2010-04-20T19:38:00.004+02:00

is the color of my envy when I read Juliette Wade's entry of today on how she manages plot complexity (and "jinx" please!), the sort that makes me snort and mutter: "sure, that how *you* do it," in the same tone I would mutter "Well, who wants a fire-engine red car without no fixed roof anyway". Not that I'm a car buff or anything, even if I'm not an idiot techwise. Cars are things with wheels that get you places, and that's sort of where it ends. Though, I do love my little Yaris, hm... Well, it's complex, in a lacking a penis way, I guess. Anyways, cars have nothing to do with Juliette Wade's entry.

I'm envious of people who can plot before they start. Or even those who plot while they write. Plotting is the territory of Cow Watcher, always nattering on no matter what I do. Like a thread on your pullover hanging loose: you know you should leave it well enough alone, but before you know it you have a ball of yarn and no pullover. With echoes of Bauhaus' In The Flat Field* playing on the background.

What she notes as point 1 (a written, pretty vague outline) and 2 (worldbuilding) happen inextricably while I'm writing. Quite annoying, because I have to try and figure out what goes where and why it would be better if X gets killed *after* Y makes a decision at the same time of typing words and words and some more words. In between I scribble something down; my writing notes are messy heaps of paper with post-its all over the place and little scraps of grocery bills I used to quickly note something down on while out of the house and not sensibly equipped for writing. This MO involves lots of Oooh! and Aaah! and Excellent! (with the requisite hand-wringing and evil grinning) from which I derive my basic writing pleasure, which is probably why I'm loathe to change it.

On the other hand, the complete clutter I end up with leads me to bouts of basic writing despair and lots of pouting at the computer screen.

But to tell the truth, I've always been a gall of clutter. Seriously, you should talk to my mother! Or the hubby, because things haven't changed that much. Most of the time when I lose things, after all these years of practice at clutter-free life, is when I'm forced to clean up the mess. As a kid, everything had its place in my disorder, and whatever you needed that was supposedly somewhere in my room (did you take the big kitchen scissors?), I could hand you within five seconds with a satisfied grin on my face. Untangling plotlines gives me the same weird fulfillment.

Cleaning up a plot (hey, I've come a long way to acknowledge that sometimes, yes, cleaning is a good thing!) is a somewhat delicate mission for me. Too much cleaning will confuse my sense of the storyline. How many times haven't I lost something after I cleaned up and put it in a very logical place! And, Cow Watcher makes it impossible to stick to an outline, and rewriting outline after outline without actually getting to the writing is ... silly. Silly silly si-ley. But it doesn't change the fact that it also makes me frumple my face and mutter in envy.

* where's the string that Theseus laid, find me out this labyrinth pla-ha-hace

Writing!

2010-04-20T17:52:00.003+02:00

And then some; working on getting Tiger of Opal into an "official" first draft and I'm about 2/3 of the way. The translating is annoying because it fracks up any sense of actually getting work done I get out of a wordcount. Near the end there are still some pesky paragraphs to translate, but I need to straighten the plotting first.

What I realized while doing just that: I need a personal assistant to clobber me next time I have cutesy ideas about convoluting my plot. Seriously, I'm not organised enough in life to keep up with all the convoluting. I need to learn to write something that has a nice and simple plot and ignore the little voice in my head that goes "boring boring boooooring!"

I'm tracking the plot of Tiger to hunt down inconsistencies and it's giving me a damned headache. Which is probably why I've kept pushing this on the long haul. But clones and identity changes will do that to a person, and I need to be anal retentive about this so as not to confuse the reader, at least not without intent.

From a place of wrath and tears

!January's rant!

Ceci n'est pas procrastination.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzummmmmmmmmmmmm

And the smoke from the fire is still rising

Of mice and men

boots :: walking right out of this valley of the shadow of death

Random stuff

Booyah!

nothing says spring like

Spring means the return of the fleas, and other things

Roller-coaster

21 days

otitis

nameless child (sonogram)

meep meep

whirligig

Paris

flux continued

Tired

d'oh

and yet...

Radio silence

Shtuff

*proot*

Cucumbers

Talking to walls

What difference this day makes?

Jitterbugs

Wednesday = Alter Ego Day

Bloodsuckers

Last of the Summer Wine

Pickled brains

ASSociations

Acceptable scrabble words are1 1 letter:A11 2 letters:AR AN AY AN NA NO ON OR OY YA YO13 3 letters: RAN RAY ANY ARC NAY NOR CON CAN CAR CAY COY OAR YON7 4 letters: ORCA CYAN CORN YARN RACY ROAN NARY5 5 letters: CORNY RAYON CARNY CRONY ACORN1 6 letters: CRAYON1+11+13+7+5+1=38

DO YOU TASTE ME BRED

loose-handed priests

Digiworld abuzz and other thoughts

Wednesday = Alter Ego Day

Soundbites

Monday came and went

who needs sleep?

I grow up and drag along in my suitcase...

DO YOU SMELL ME DED?

Hunting

word up!

Spending money

BE = headdesk

Promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep

< / weekend trip>

Confession

In the land of Beer and Fries

Cross your heart & cross your fingers

YAOK or NOYAOK?

Bummer

Are you happy now? Are you satisfied?

The return of the not so thin white duchess

Dreams

Magic Dice

Reaping what you sow

Do digiblips dream of electric trees?

Jungle fever

Nothing says summer like

Nothing says summer like

My biggest turnoff this millenium

A bit of procrastination a day keeps boredom away

Damned never-shrinking reading lists

The Void strikes back

In the dead of the season

Duplicity

To blog or not to blog: questions of POV

Sonogram

ooOOOOoooOOOooo

Shtuff

Question the media

The people have spoken

Marcus knows best

To blog or not to blog

grrr Murphy's stupid law

:*(

proot

Acceptable scrabble words are
1 1 letter:A
11 2 letters:AR AN AY AN NA NO ON OR OY YA YO
13 3 letters: RAN RAY ANY ARC NAY NOR CON CAN CAR CAY COY OAR YON
7 4 letters: ORCA CYAN CORN YARN RACY ROAN NARY
5 5 letters: CORNY RAYON CARNY CRONY ACORN
1 6 letters: CRAYON

1+11+13+7+5+1=38