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The blog team asked me to explain my reference to the “damon knight Toad Theory.” (That’s the way he used to write his name, all lowercase, changing to the conventional capitalized form when he got his first editorial job.)
Damon’s theory was that all current sf writers had been toads when they were young. [...]
Here are some cool mashups for various Star Trek series, creating new title sequences set to the theme music of other shows:
First Set
Second Set
Enjoy!
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com
- Mood:
accomplished
2050 words on "The Unicorn Evils" tonight.
Mean things include jurisdictional disputes and mass murder.
Sleep now.
- Mood:
working - Music:Ramasutra - Kwaidan (Radio Paradise - DJ-mixed modern & classic rock, world, electronica & more - in
I am frustrated and disappointed by the general resistance to crowdfunded projects, as if there's something wrong with creative folks wanting to get paid for their hard work. It's clear that what we really need is a site to promote cyberfunded creativity in particular, with our own listing of projects and creators and donors, supporting resources, awards, and whatever else folks think would be useful. I really wish I had the programming skill to build something like that, but alas, I don't.
- Mood:
frustrated
- Mood:
busy
In addition to containing news of upcoming comics, that issue also reported on the death of Syd Shores on June 3rd, the upcoming move of DC Comics (still being referred to as National) to 75 Rockefeller Plaza on July 27th, and the fact that Phil Seuling's legal troubles for allegedly selling underground comic books to a minor was still unresolved.
But back to that cover. Click through several times so you can take a good look.
Now that you've studied the image, can you tell me which future comic-book writer and editor, not at all known for being an artist, provided the illustration?
I've erased the signature so as not to spoil it for you.
The only thing further I'll say is that it wasn't Paul, and it wasn't me.
Any guesses?
- Mood: busy
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek.
There are two challenges that people face when choosing to live a more simpler life: owning little and wanting little. Yet people fuse these challenges together into a larger “live simply” goal. Unfortunately, they’re two different beasts that need to be tamed in their own ways.
Owning little requires a practical approach – systematically decluttering your life and eliminating the unnecessary. Wanting little on the other hand is focused on the way in which we think, a far more blurred aspect of simplicity.
Sincerely wanting little is difficult. It goes against our firmly rooted desire for certainty, for ownership. To cut through this psychological attachment requires more than step-by-step processes or following a list of tactics, it requires a shift in your thinking, a shift in the way you approach your day to day life and how you make decisions.
1. Have a vision for your life. Goals are somewhat useful tools to get from point A to B, but they often lack depth, emotion and meaning, and without those three things there’s a deficiency of purpose and drive.
Think about the lifestyle you want as a whole instead of simply focusing on your desire to want very little. What do you want to own? How will you spend your time? Where will you be? Be specific.
This outline acts as a funnel. Desires for more may attempt to flood your life, but because you’ve clearly defined what matters to you, only the things conducive to your aims will make their way through this funnel. It becomes much easier to say “No” to something when you’re certain it’s not apart of the bigger picture.
2. Find your motivation. What is your why? Why do you want little? Because it’s trendy is unfortunately not enough to quench your lust for stuff. Personally, I want little because I have dreams of traveling the world for months on end, and stocking up on gadgets and gizmos doesn’t exactly gel well with that.
Here are some other common reason why’s:
- Saving money – for retirement, travel, charity etc.
- Eliminating stress.
- Freeing up time from the offset of being able to work less, clean less, and maintain less.
Don’t be meaninglessly minimalist. Be purposeful and deliberate in your quest to want little.
3. Experience the benefits. No matter how many times you hear the benefits of wanting little, or visualise your motivation with all the intensity in the world, experiencing an uncluttered lifestyle will always be the best way to switch from a “want more” to a “want little” mindset.
Aside from simply throwing out everything you own, there are a few ways to go about this:
- Plan a short vacation where you take as little as possible, including no technology or fashion accessories. Only pack the essentials.
- Pick one room in your house or apartment that you want to transform into a no-stuff zone. Dump as much as you can from that room into a spare room or garage. Notice the difference in tranquility as you walk between your regular rooms and the no-stuff zone.
- Visit locations that are inherently uncluttered. Buddhist temples spring to mind as being places with the bare minimal.
4. Be noncommittal. Decisions become scary when they’re set in stone. In other areas of life a little fear could indeed be a good thing, but it’s unnecessary and undesirable when striving to eliminate the desire for more – the challenge is difficult enough without adding further resistance.
There’s no line to cross with attachment to stuff, no mountain you must overcome. It’s a lifestyle you can back out of anytime, a mindset that in no way restricts your ability to choose. Wade through the shallows before diving in the deep end.
5. Understand the psychology of influence. Marketing and sales are apart of this world and it’d be silly to chastise those sectors because in reality we’re all marketers and salespeople – all livelihoods are fuelled by being heard and mutual exchanges. But that doesn’t mean you need to fall into the trap of cheap psychological tricks.
Start by reading about how marketing weasels will try to manipulate you and for more depth pick up a copy of Robert Cialdini’s classic, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Other books on the topic that I’m yet to read, but you may want to check out include:
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely
- Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, Martin Lindstrom
6. Grow into it. Start with small victories. Be mindful of all your purchases and desires and regularly ask yourself “Does this fit into my vision?” You will stumble, it’s the nature of the beast. The world wants you to want more, and the world is a mighty challenger.
Be persistent with your quest for less and surround yourself with positive influences – classical works of literature like the Tao Teh Ching and Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, plus like-minded individuals who want to cut themselves free from the leash of things.
7. Lose yourself. Purchasing is a process we lose ourselves in. First something catches our eye, then there’s the inner conflict (should we buy it?). If we convince ourselves that we should part with our money, there’s that little buzz you get of claiming ownership. You take the product home. And then you use it.
It’s an exciting sequence of events – full of uncertainty and possibility – that we get swept up in. But the problem is, it mostly ends with buyer’s remorse, a dented bank account and all the other costs of owning stuff.
What you need to do is learn to get lost in activities rather than acquisition. Instead of being strung along by the latest gizmo, learn to transplant that process into an outlet such as writing, music or drawing. Focus on doing interesting things rather than buying interesting things.
8. Crunch the numbers. It’s likely that you have a passion that has expenses (like travel or reading) or, at the very least, you would like to put away some money for a rainy day. One simple trick I use to avoid acquiring things is compare the cost of the particular thing in question, to the expenses of my passion.
For example, backpacking through Thailand is something I dream of doing. Now, say it costs $25 per day to live in Phuket. If I were to see an Xbox game selling for $50 I’d ask myself “Is that game worth sacrificing two days in a foreign culture?” Most of the time the answer will be a resounding “No” and it’s in those instances where you’ll be dodging a purposeless impulse buy.
If the answer comes back “Yes,” nothing is wrong with that. Wanting little isn’t about depriving yourself of what’s important to you, but eliminating all the clutter that makes its way into our lives. But make sure you’re being honest with yourself.
Read more from David at his blog, Adventures of a Barefoot Geek, or subscribe to his feed.
Older middle-aged widower (Michael McKean, who is terrific) owns a dying donut shop in Chicago that was opened by his father decades earlier. The play opens with two cops who frequent the shop there before it's open because it's been vandalized. Ambitious next-door neighbor wants to buy him out and expand his electronics biz. Young African American kid comes looking for a job and brings trouble. Female cop flirts with the owner, thugs threaten the kid, the owner is all angsty over being a draft dodger during Vietnam. I enjoyed it, although as my theater companions pointed out, a fight scene was utterly unconvincing and unnecessary. Definitely worth seeing before it closes in a few weeks.
Last weekend and this weekend I started watching the Buffy spinoff, Angel, with David Boreanaz. First disc with four episodes left me doubted I'd continue (jeez, I loathe Cordelia). But...since I had the second disc home I figured I'd give it one more chance, as I remember that Cordelia grew on me during Buffy. And yes, the next four episodes hooked me, especially with Buffy playing a prominent (and very moving) role in the 8th episode. Tears fell. ;-).
Last week I also watched the french film I've Loved you So Long, which features a brilliant performance by Kristin Scott Thomas that should have won her an Oscar, yet didn't even get her a damned nomination. Woman (Thomas) gets out of prison after serving 15 years for murder, and moves in temporarily with her sister and the sister's family. It's utterly riveting and moving as the viewer sees Thomas's character slowly move back into the world. Highly recommended.
Last night watched Sunshine Cleaning about two sisters who in desperation to earn a living, open a biohazard removal/cleaning service-ie. they clean up after violent and non-violent but messy deaths. I enjoyed watching Amy Adams and Emily Blunt and appreciate that the story is about the working poor trying to make a go of it (rather than the usual middle and upper middle classes) but it's only ok, not great. Worth a look.
And I finally saw Juno, which I liked quite a bit. It really is a smart, sassy little movie, just like its heroine. Good acting.
During the two movies, my DVD player started going weird. Power shut off and I had to replay fast forward to get to where I was--at first I thought it was the DVD but nope, it happened with both discs...and then the damned thing turned itself back on...uh oh. A DVD gremlin. I managed to watch both movies, with the interruptions but have just ordered a new DVD player. The old one lasted 6 1/2 years, which isn't too bad.
AllRecipes Leftover Turkey Page
Southern Food Leftover Turkey Recipes
Simple Recipes Leftover Turkey
U of I Turkey Leftovers
How to Use Turkey Leftovers steps with video
Turn Turkey Leftovers into Jambalaya video
Freezing Turkey Leftovers
How long are turkey leftovers good?
Turkey FAQ
And of course, save the turkey carcass after you have picked off as much meat as possible. Use it to make stock. *wist* Which I'm not getting this year, because we ate Thanksgiving at someone else's house, and I put that set of instructions in their cookbook, so they already had plans for the skeleton. I'm pleased it made such an impression, though.
- Mood: busy
I'm sorry winter is such an unrelenting downer for you. We get to your Colorado every few years during the winter, and the brisk ice and snow are a bracing tonic for our subtropical sensibilities. But we always get back to the sunshine before the chill reaches bone.
My really cold winters in Alaska are colored with the optimism and fun-seeking of childhood. Building igloos, sledding down long slopes, battling from behind snow forts with unlimited snowball ammunition. Playing with my black cocker spaniel, who would roll in the snow and wind up looking like some animated confection.
Even the twenty-below cold of Iowa in graduate school was not without pleasure. I don't mind walking when it's too deep to drive, and still love the creak and whistle of snow, walking when it's too cold for mammals.
Yesterday got up at 4:30 to be at the hospital by 6:00 for a routine procedure, removing a tube that drained the pancreas and replacing it with a smaller tube. The predictable happened -- I lay in a hospital bed for hours (having had nothing to eat or drink since midnight) and finally was wheeled into the operating room at 10:30. Wheeled out at 11:30, after a five-minute procedure. Lay in a room for another hour or so, but a kindly nurse brought me an 8-oz. Diet Pepsi and some graham crackers.
Gay fixed me a huge leftover turkey sandwich when I got home, though, followed by a slice of Becca's good peach pie. So even though I had a new bag depending from my abdomen, to match the ileostomy on the other side, the world became all right.
I mostly slept the day away, still fuzzy from the sedatives they gave me for the procedure. Roused myself around dinnertime for one of my favorite meals -- post-Thanksgiving casserole. Joel had bought the DVD of Sergio Leone's epic _Once Upon a Time in the West_, the director's cut, almost three hours long. I had a hankerin' for it, as we aficionados say, and because I'm sick the others went along with it.
Well, it was sort of like a Sergio Leone western with a lot of air blown into it. The bad guys in long coats, the dusty pseudo-realistic western town, the beautiful woman and the complex not-so-good guy. A thousand pregnant pauses. Two minutes of Claudia Cardinale admiring herself in the mirror with a troubled look that slowly mutated into a troubled look. Several massacres and a shoot-out. A really mangy bad guy with a sawed-off lever-action rifle hanging from a string around his neck. A harmonica tying everything together, sort of. Cool horses, kind of scruffy. Good railroad stuff.
Symbols galore. Water. Money. Bullets. Hats. Lanterns. Facial hair.
Water was especially interesting. The bad guys wanted the beautiful woman's land because the railroad's a-comin' and her land has the only water in fifty miles. (You might wonder why they didn't put the town there, instead of several miles away.) At the end, after a bad guy dies just inches from water, she takes water to the assorted minorities who are working on the railroad in her front yard. She evidently performs a Jesus-class miracle, because she takes care of a hundred semi-legal immigrants with less than two gallons of water.
Henry Fonda enjoys playing a really really bad guy, a smooth-cheeked child-murderin' rapist who cheats at cards and throws away parking tickets.
I did like it, though. Made in 1968, it pointed toward a genre that may not have a specific name -- dramas set in a late-19th century West that attempts to be historically accurate in terms of background and quotidian details, and that are more or less realistic in terms of blood and gore, but retain the dime-novel fantasy tropes that have characterized the movie genre from the beginning.
Of course the take-home exam is to think of a sciencefictional analogue to that mixture. For me it was a large part of the attraction of the original _Star Wars_ movie -- rusty robots and homesteaders scratching out an existence on an alien planet, looking kind of ragged and dirty. Then it got all flashy, unfortunately. I guess some cineastes might have a similar problem with the Leone movie; oil and water.
Joe
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ozarque has posted about this holiday season and included a link to a previous list of her recipes, filk songs, poems, etc. for the holidays.- Mood: busy
* Putting the first coat of wood sealant onto a large fly-through bird feeder. I actually got this last year with some Midwinter money, but by then the weather was too bad to work on it outside. This summer I sanded it, but never got around to sealing it. So I'm doing that now. I'm going to hang this in a tree on the south side of our house. That will help give the birds a bit of a fly-around for when the cats are staking out the hopper feeder on the east side, which is just outside the kitchen window.
* Dumping the old potpourri out of a glass globe, removing the dead string of miniature holiday lights, and replacing both with fresh supplies. So now it lights again, and smells spicy.
* Wrapping the first batch of presents. I still need to find a place to store them, though. I usually make a pile of presents somewhere, once they're wrapped.
- Mood: busy
To my astonishment, I seem to have won the Endeavour Award!
Space Magic was selected over worthy competitors Anathem by Neal Stephenson; Ill Met in the Arena by Dave Duncan; Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Stories by Ken Scholes; and A World Too Near by Kay Kenyon by judges Joe Haldeman, John Helfers, and Sarah Zettel.
Thanks to the judges, everyone who read books for the award, members of the Lucky Lab Rats crit group, mkhobson for suggesting I try to get a collection published, wheatland_press for publishing it, and kateyule for love and support.
The award comes with a $1000 check and an engraved glass trophy. I really did not expect to win it.
I have been a mighty, mighty bear tonight. 3080 words on "The Unicorn Evils," and 700 words on a review for Tor.com.
Darling:
It wasn't that Solomon Todd hadn't seen this sort of thing before.
It was that he had.
Phew. And I get to get up in the morning and do it again.
- Mood:
lethargic - Music:I'm a loser at the top of my game.
The cast and the narrator (who read the stage directions) did a great job, but the script had been redacted (to my surprise) with the vast majority of the stage directions omitted -- which might have been fine if the actors had actually been fully acting out the scenes, rather than just by and large reading into microphones on stands. Maybe as author, I'm too sensitive, but I think a lot of what was going on emotionally in the scenes that was there on the page was lost in this process. For instance, here's the beginning of Act III as written, but only the parts in boldface were actually read to the audience:
EXT. OPEN FIELD - NIGHT
There's a mostly full moon, providing light. Hannah and Bryce walk through the forested margin at the edge of the road and emerge in an open field; a stand of additional trees is twenty metres ahead of them.
Things are still tense between them. They're not holding hands; there's physical distance between them; they're looking in opposite directions.
Bryce looks up at the sky and traces an imaginary line with his index finger.
THE NIGHT SKY - CONTINUOUS
The Big Dipper is clearly visible, as is the North Star.
There. Polaris.
Hannah turns around, getting her bearings. She nods.
So I was right.
They're in the middle of nowhere, but at least they now can head in the correct direction. They're relieved, and the mood starts to turn. Hannah moves over to Bryce, and slips her arms around his neck.
(smiling)
Right as rain.
HANNAH
(smiling playfully back)
Just so we're agreed...
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com
My great friend and inspiration Phyllis Gotlieb passed away earlier this year, and today Mauril Bélanger, a Member of Canada's Federal Parliament, rose in the House of Commons to speak to that loss:
Hon. Mauril Bélanger (Ottawa—Vanier, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, this past summer, Canada lost one of its pioneers in science fiction writing, Phyllis Gotlieb, born Phyllis Bloom, in Toronto, in 1926.
The Sunburst Award, an award given annually to Canadian writers of speculative fiction, is named after her first novel, Sunburst, published in 1964.
Thanks to our parliamentary library, I have now had the pleasure to read that novel. I am truly happy to have discovered an author who gives us great characters and an intelligent storyline. I look forward to reading more of her novels.
Some have called her the mother of Canadian science fiction; others, it is grandmother. Robert J. Sawyer, Canada's most successful author of the genre, settled it by calling her “the grand dame of Canadian science fiction”, and I concur.
I wish to extend to her husband, Calvin Gotlieb, her son, Leo, and her daughters, Margaret and Jane, our condolences, but also our gratitude for her legacy.
Pictured: Phyllis and Kelly Gotlieb at my home.
Many thanks to Barb Collishaw for this news item.
Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
and WakeWatchWonder.com
ladyqkat. This may help reduce corporate interest and restore voter influence.Lobbyists pushed off federal advisory panels
New White House initiative to curb influence could affect thousands
WASHINGTON - Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.
- Mood: busy
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