It tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the Internet, popular technology and the thought processes of the geek tribe that when BoingBoing posts a link to a slinky on a treadmill, it seems a natural, right and inevitable thing. Because if you have a slinky, and a treadmill, and a camera, and YouTube, why wouldn't you? It's some kind of Darwinian thought selection. The niche exists, therefore it must be filled.

Also, while inevitable, it's also bizarre and wayward enough to make me seriously happy. And the video is, for some reason, mesmerising.



I am working happily at home today, with rain drumming on the windows, a cat and a heater on my feet, a continuous cup of Earl Grey, a blissful lack of student interruptions, and a consciousness of the rearguard action all this is fighting against the sinus infection which is bumbling around somewhere in the middle distance, plotting its takeover. I have sprungclent my inbox, answered about forty emails, written a review of a paper, taken an Advil, and am about to play a righteous half-hour of Mass Effect over my lunch-break before I write up notes from three different meetings. All is right with the world.

I don't like to rant on the Internet.  I prefer the surgical strike.  Precise.  Cleansing.  But sometimes a lady just gets all pissed.

( Read more... )

So the Cartoon Art Museum has a new show up, a retrospective of the history of MAD.  Thanks to the generosity of many lenders and the hard work of the museum's tiny staff, the show includes Kurtzman cover roughs, classic Elder parodies, Jaffee Fold-Ins, Spy Vs. Spy strips by both Prohias and Kuper, one of the two covers ever drawn by Sergio Aragones, and work by present-day contributors like Keith Knight and Chris Baldwin.  Andrew, the curator of CAM and my main squeeze, says it's the best show he's ever curated, but he says that a lot.

I wrote the wall text for the show; I do that for CAM shows when the staff is swamped.  While I was at it, I also wrote up text for a set of extra labels, just fun facts: how many issues Sergio Aragones has appeared in, this funny thing Al Jaffee said, etc.  One of the common criticisms the museum gets on places like Yelp is that we don't provide enough context for the pieces, and I'd like to correct that by giving visitors a little bit of inside information.

Yesterday I noticed that Andrew hadn't included my little factoids in the show.  When I asked him about it, he confirmed that, no, the museum didn't print them.  Because it couldn't afford to.  The Cartoon Art Museum is on such a tight budget that it can't afford the cost of mounting a half-dozen extra labels on foamcore down at the copy shop.

This goes on all the time, of course.  CAM survives by cutting its operations down to the bare bones.  But that doesn't make each penny pinched any less painful.

So you can imagine my delight today when I learned that webcartoonist Scott Kurtz is busy trying to convince people not to donate to comics nonprofits.

To be fair, Kurtz's post isn't directed at the Cartoon Art Museum.  His primary target is the Hero Initiative, an organization that pays the medical costs of cartoonists who lack health care.  Many of the Hero Initiative's beneficiaries are older comic-book artists who, to put it bluntly, got screwed over by their publishers.  Kurtz is opposed to the donating to the Hero Initiative because...

Okay, I don't know.  I'm not sure if he even believes half the things he posts on the Internet.  I hate responding to him at all, because, when he dismissed giving to the Hero Initiative as "slacktivism" and sarcastically mocked the people who do so, it's likely that the only thought going through his head was, "Holy shit, some people who aren't me are getting attention!  And frankly, they're getting attention because they're better people than me!  To my blog!"  By acknowledging his little online asshole dance, I'm just giving him what he wants.  So I'm a sucker.  Sue me.

Kurtz doesn't like that a small online movement has started encouraging people who enjoyed the movie "The Avengers" to give to comics nonprofits--mainly the Hero Initiative, but also groups like the Cartoon Art Museum, MoCCA, the Cartoon Research Library, and the Pittsburgh ToonSeum--as a gesture of support for the artists who created the Avengers, because Marvel and Disney have been adamant in their refusal to do so.  This little movement isn't telling people not to see "The Avengers."  It's just saying, "Hey, the companies that made the movie aren't supporting the original writers and artists, so let's step up and support them ourselves."

Kurtz is mad about that.  Because I don't know.

I don't get the mindset that makes people write this stuff.  I just don't.  I mean, okay, sure, sometimes we all think things like, "Man, I hope the artists I admire die penniless and suffering, and no one reaches out to them in their moment of need."  But most of us, before we share this thought with the world, stop and think again, and we realize, wait, no, that's awful.  If there's one thing the Internet has taught me, I guess, it's that some people don't have that crucial second thought.

Comics nonprofits run on the thinnest of shoestrings.  They're not a popular target for grants or large donations.  They live or die on the generosity of individuals who love the art form, people who can't give a lot but somehow manage, together, to give enough.  Telling people not to give to these nonprofits--actually mocking people who do so--is rotten behavior.

Kurtz visited the Cartoon Art Museum a couple of years ago--in fact, at the same time the museum was putting up a show of work by artist Ed Hannigan, who has multiple sclerosis, to benefit the Hero Initiative.  Kurtz seemed to have a good time.  But maybe he was thinking what a shame it is that we get just enough help from fans to stay open, and hoping he could change that situation.

Or maybe he doesn't think about a blessed thing that pops into his head before he posts mean-spirited crap on the Internet.

Anyway.  Rant over.  And here's the Hero Initiative website again.

so the most stressful part of my day wasn't driving my dad from Maine to home (he's not home to his house yet, but he's two states closer, and he's in my town). The trip was smooth and surprisingly easy.

The weirdest part of my day was when I helped keep a severely impaired kid from driving. He couldn't walk, couldn't talk smoothly, staggered and halted when he was moving. I hadn't seen him go in, but I wondered about his way of moving when he came out. And then the kid behind the counter said "he's tripping balls" and tried to talk him out of driving anywhere until he'd come off it, at least a little. I joined the counter kid, and finally just wound up holding the door open to the tripping kid's car. We offered to drive him, counter kid offered to drive him in his car or accompany him in my car. I guess if he'd managed to start his car and drive anywhere I would have called the cops on him.

I had a bunch of really bad moments because I kept wondering: is this kid normally like this? am I harassing the handicapped? am I missing some other clues and I should just knock him on the head and take him to the hospital? I was grateful to counter-kid who said tripping-kid was a snowboarder, an athlete, usually spoke clearly and ate half the menu - without someone else's previous knowledge I wouldn't have had the courage to stand there and keep telling him NO when he wanted us to let him drive away.

Eventually a parental person arrived and yelled at him, and thanked us, and assured us he'd get the kid home, and we drifted off, back to our usual things. I went home and ranted to my kids, and also thanked them for not pursuing that particular form of stupid, and they hugged me, even Aerin's Young Man, until I stopped shaking.

It seemed really, really important not to let him drive. Should I have done something different?

Or perhaps the Goat Locker. Or, at least, somewhere in the forward compartment of the USS Miami (SSN 755) - which, fortunately, was (and is) undergoing an overhaul at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. From an official statement released by RADM Rick Breckenridge, Commander Submarine Group TWO:

Late yesterday afternoon, USS MIAMI experienced a fire in the submarine's forward compartment.

Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Fire Department and Ship's force, along with mutual assistance from several other area fire departments, immediately responded and successfully extinguished the fire on USS MIAMI. I repeat, the fire is out.

The fire and subsequent damage was limited to the forward compartment spaces only which includes crew living and command and control spaces. The nuclear propulsion spaces were physically isolated from the Forward Compartment early during initial response.

The Portland Press-Herald reported further comments from RADM Breckenridge:

He said it was premature to say whether the Miami, which cost $900 million, was salvageable or is too badly damaged to be repaired and put back in use. The Miami is in the third month of a planned 20-month overhaul.

Seven firefighters received minor injuries while fighting the fire.

Breckenridge praised the repsonse of firefighters from communities in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts that responded to the blaze.

"As I stand before you today, there are a lot of heroes who worked together to save the ship," Breckenridge said. He said local firefighters worked inside the submarine in conditions of high heat, smoke and cramped quarters.

[ ... ]

Breckenridge said the high heat and difficulty extinguishing the fire, was largely because the fire spread to insulation. The fire also was fueled by cabinets and lockers in the living quarters and command area.

Nobody was killed - that, to me, is the most important point. And, as RADM Breckenridge points out, there's no nuclear risk involved.

It's way too early to speculate on what exactly went wrong, although my immediate assumption is that somebody screwed up badly while grinding or welding. Any sort of "hot work" is supposed to include preplanning, covering all exposed and potentially flammable areas, and dedicated fire watches with full charged extinguishers to stop any sparks that do escape from doing any damage. Back on the old Ustafish, during our time at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, one of the shipyard grinders managed to ignite some oily rags that had fallen into the bilge - the fire watch had that out in about ten seconds. (Just how the oily rags got into the bilge in the first place ended up being the focus of the ensuing investigation, IIRC.) I'd strongly bet that a whole lot of safety precautions were blown off or went awry leading up to this mess.

Of course, if you're going to have a fire in a submarine at all, doing so at the beginning of an overhaul is probably the "best" time.

Originally posted at http://edschweppe.dreamwidth.org/148551.html - comment wherever you please.

1. How did you and Nala come together?

Nala waited for me in an animal shelter in Espanola, New Mexico in 1998. I went there with my not-serious boyfriend Dave, and I wore a green velvet tank top -- quite low-cut, the kind with an almost straight-across neckline and spaghetti straps. They would only let one cageful of kittens out at a time. When I walked into the kitten room, some other batch of kittens was out, but I looked and saw two tabby kittens in one of the compartments I was charmed. "Can I look at the stripey ones?"

Both were female. I thought one was definitively cuter than the other -- she had more distinct markings -- but she also seemed more psycho and less personable. I was delighted when the calmer, less cute one of the two made a huge leap up to the compartment she came from. I went and picked that kitten up and held her to me. She looked up and put her paw down my green velvet cleavage... and that was Nala.

The tip of Nala's tail is black, and in that black tip one can feel a crookedness where two bones are fused together. I always assumed she had been hurt before I ever got her, although it never seemed to cause her pain. One day years later I realized she was probably just born with those bones fused, and had never been hurt at all, and my whole body flushed with relief.

2. Are you a movie person? If so, what kind of films do you go for?

Well... I like some movies. Movies have such incredible power to transport, to portray and to evoke that most movies I watch fill me with a sense of wasted potential.

I like my movies smart. Action scenes generally bore me, and I don't find slapstick humor to be funny. I have a high capacity for dark humor, but can't handle a lot of violence (and I'm okay with that -- people shouldn't be numb to the sight of other people in pain). I don't like movies about infidelity, and man, there are a ton of those. And to top off all this, I sometimes just don't follow movies as well as some people since I didn't start watching them often until I was an adult.

I notice that animated films are often more thoughtfully made, maybe because they're so labor-intensive that the makers have time to think about every fraction of a second.

I very much liked The Crow, Pleasantville, Waking Life, Spirited Away.

Dislike: A Fish Called Wanda (couldn't follow it), Face-Off (way too brutal), Pushing Tin (cheating).

I feel neutral about most of the big blockbuster movies. I see them and enjoy them, then forget them.

3. What is your opinion on bow ties?

They look best on tall, skinny people.

4. Do you want Boston to be home forever or is there another place you want to try out?

I am in love with Boston and have no urge to explore living in other places -- I've had enough of living in places I don't belong, and I want to stay here where I do. The only other place that ever calls is Manhattan, and it's easy enough to visit Manhattan.

Under no circumstance do I want to live outside a major city ever again.

5. How did you get into yoga? What method do you prefer to practice?

I first did yoga from a book when I was 13 years old. I had always wanted to be more flexible and more relaxed. Then I did other things for a long long time, but in my early 20s I bought a lot of copies of Yoga Journal, and some of my best pencil drawings were of people doing yoga. In some part of my mind I was saving yoga for last, and I was also afraid that maybe it wouldn't be all I hoped, and then I'd be disappointed. I wanted to be a martial artist first, and I tried that. But when I was 27, I became tired of my tae kwon do school, and I started yoga at a local studio... right about then I stopped buying the Yoga Journal magazines.

I like vinyasa and ashtanga yoga, both of which are sometimes called "power yoga". I don't like them because they're more athletic (although they are), I like that one does the transitions between poses in a graceful and mindful manner. There's less ungainly scrambling between postures, no collective losing and gaining focus. It's much more meditative than a hatha class where you do poses statically with scrambled little breaks in between. The word vinyasa means "flow".

If you would like me to ask you questions, reply with "Too much of a good thing is wonderful".

timprov is having a print sale--his photos are 33% off for the rest of May. He's been taking all sorts of gorgeous new things. Go check it out!

So, I've become superstitious about discussing my writing, because every time I say something I seem to hit a patch of quicksand and have to flounder my way back out. But it dawned on me that if talking about how well the writing is going jinxes me, maybe saying something when it isn't going so well will have the opposite effect?

Anyway, here's the status report (for my own record, really, as it's likely to be hideously boring to anyone else):

This book began as a short story several years ago ~ the first short story I attempted as an adult, actually. I entered it in a contest and won honorable mention, but every single judge said (and I paraphrase, obviously): We love the idea and the writing, but it's not a short story. It feels too rushed, as if you've skimmed the surface of something much deeper. And I was hurt, because it wasn't my fault the story was too big for 3500 words, right? :D So I stuck it in a folder and noodled around with other projects, but it kept tugging my attention. I dreamed about it. Over and over and over again. I tried re-writing it as a short, but failed miserably because it really *was* too much story to squeeze into a short structure.

I slowly realized maybe it was meant to be a novel. Maybe a novel *I* could write.

So I sat down and slowly pieced together an outline. I slowly scribbled out a very, very, very rough draft ~ which was, honestly, just a glorified outline and synopsis with a few pretty scenes strung along as placeholders. 

And then I sat down and started to *really* write the thing, from the beginning. I am now just shy of 50,000 words in, and 5/8 of the way through the story. 

I love it. 

And I kind of hate it.

This is, for reasons I couldn't articulate but which any of my close friends will recognize, far more personal than anything else I've ever even attempted. If anyone were to point to something I've written that speaks about who I am, this would be it. The thought of letting anyone read it leaves me raw and shaky and a little bit sick to my stomach, and yet the idea of seeing it one day in print is the most intoxicating daydream. 

It's the kind of story I would love to read. The sort of thing that sings in my soul and burns the back of my eyelids when I try to sleep at night. It's so real to me, and so much fun to write.

But it's also sooooooo difficult because I just can't get it right. I've written the first chapter five times. The first three chapters four times. I've written chapter six three times. I'm about to write chapter seven for the third time. Chapters eight and nine are in my notebook with giant red Xs through every page because I hate them. I know - I KNOW - I should just keep writing. I should worry about fixing everything at the end. But every time I think of an adjustment or an addition, I feel compelled to write it right then. I've tried ignoring the urge, but then I can't write at all. At least fixing things as they occur to me keeps me going, I suppose, but it's such a long, slow, agonizing process and it's driving me crazy.

I *want* to sit down and write a linear draft. I want to finish it, and then revise it, and then move on to something else. Instead, I'm stuck in this recursive, circular, chaotic process that feels like trying to shove smoke in a box or a rainbow in a jar. I can see it so clearly in my head, and yet when I try to write it the scenes lose their shape and focus and I'm so intensely frustrated. It's at the tip of my fingertips ~ why WHY why can't I just _write_ the darn thing?

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.