eveninghawk’s links

Today In Alternate History

I took a gander and was extremely amused.

I checked my email this morning and noticed that rts updated. Joy! More of Part 3 for me. Seriously, I know the comic doesn’t update regularly, but I like it so much that I could care less. I’m just happy to get more.

An interesting board game was mentioned over at Boing Boing, which is pretty neat. It has me thinking about boardgames I have played and loved, and I am sure that will lead to a post later. Why? This would be because a friend has had me thinking of things that make me happy. Board games, silly as they may seem, can make me happy. Besides, I like silliness.

I also stumbled back across a Royksopp CD yesterday, and have been listening to it on my MP3 player, meaning I can walk around and do the laundry while jamming. I’ve been particularly enjoying the tune eple. I think it’s worth checking out, as is Poor Leno (and be sure to check out the Poor Leno video).

I’m in a joint venture tech company’s office this evening catching up on my global news, and stumbled across some neat summaries of what Shanghai is from Michael Rogers:

• The China Puzzle
• China’s Mixed Message
• If You Can’t Beat ‘em…

Anil has made a modest proposal for the arranged marriages circuit, and while amusing as anything, I also find myself taking pause to think. This is the nature of much of Anil’s writing, and certainly one of the things that makes me read his journal.

I do know a small handful of people in an arranged marriage, and they are happy. This is strange to me, since it seems like such a breech of personal freedom, but there you go. This is not the same as a friend of mine who just sat back while his family said “you know, you should marry that girlfriend of yours.” That’s just power of suggestion to do something that wasn’t a really good idea in the first place.

The only question I find myself asking is this: where do these marriages get arranged? In Canada? Australia? Massachusetts? Other places seem a bit risky in terms of validity of the engagement, as well as validity of the union itself. The other question is this: how are visas to be dealt with, and will there be mail order husband/brides?

The amusement and silly questions seem almost endless.

My folks have been behind aspartame since forever. This was something that struck me as not necessarily being a good thing. Then, eventually in science class with Mr. Hanlon, we talked about how aspartame acts much like nicotene. You can’t get rid of it, you just build it up in your system.

Well, then my dad became a diabetic, and the landscape of our kitchen went from being an awful lot of aspartame to almost all aspartame. At this point, little alarms went off in my head, but I didn’t much know what to do with it.

Eventually I sent my mom a lot of resources about aspartame and how it is not necessarily a safe substance, not does it necessarily help diabetics as much as everyone thought it did.

All in all, this was all scary but relevant stuff to me, and my folks did listen. For that I’m glad.

Well, today I read about another item on shelves and in products that had my hackles up (because it’s in everything and just seems like a silly way to avoid sugar, if you ask me): fructose. What is fructose? Fructose is something else my dad has to stay away from: fruit sugar. In yet another field of inquiry where science starts to point the finger at our problems, fructose is being seen as a possible factor in obesity.

This sounds a little preachy considering the amount of research, but it does point to the more important issue at hand: it amazes me that as a supposedly intelligent critter running around on this planet, we can’t figure out that moderation is really the way to go. There are no shortcuts to being healthy. You have to eat well, from all the food groups, in moderation, and you have to exercise. There are no shortcuts, and yet, everyone must believe in them because look at the industry in weight loss.

I find myself smiling knowingly when a friend echoes my own unvoiced opinions. Today I got that from Andre, as he wrote Not an Accessory.

Here is my thought… the phone does not surpass face to face contact. It is a tool to be used when face to face contact is not possible. Then there’s also the issue of respect: respect the people whose presence you are sharing and get off the stupid phone. Nothing makes me feel more insignificant than to be cut off for a prolonged phone call. This is not to say that I am the center of the universe. Important things happen, emergencies happen, crises happen. Sure. This is usually not what is going on when I’m sitting across the table from someone engaged in a long conversation. For the most part, they’re just shooting the breeze.

The other thing that I have noticed about the phone, people use it as a pacifier substitute when doing things alone. I have sat at coffee, enjoying my time, reading a book, and there I see someone alone and incapable of being at peace. The person picks up the phone, flips through the address book, and proceeds to call everyone possible to have a conversation with. In this case, why bother going out and spending the money on the coffee?

Warning: If you are out with me and spending a stupid amount of time on the phone, I might walk away, because I’m not needed in the slightest. Either I’m not interesting enough, or you have too much going on.

One of my favorite reads that I’ve gotten behind on of late is Neil Gaiman’s journal. This would be because the feed isn’t showing up in Kinja, and while I haven’t the foggiest idea why, I will be sure to try to remedy that fact (and pick up all that lost reading).

So, today I went back to take a look and, as always, was met with a serendipitous collection of things I wanted to know. The most important being how to survive collaboration. These are nuggest of wisdom worth reading, for example:

1) Only collaborate if you both are working on the same thing. If you and your collaborator are writing the same book, great. If you want to write something like Prisoner of Zenda, and he wants to write something like Atlas Shrugged you’d better stop now, while you’re still on speaking terms.

Why would this be important to me? I plan on launching a webcomic in the fall. I really do, only it will be a words and pictures experience rather than a webcomic. I want a little more. I want character journal entries in there, I want interaction, I want ensemble. Only… while creative I am going to consider channeling 7 or so really strong characters. I hope to bring in some folks to “write” those people. I am looking for potential collaborators who are willing to take ideas and run far, hopefully not away from me and deadlines.

Today I was adding along to a post over at domynoes.network forums and found that what I posted there about my favorite authors was worth bringing up over here.

Let’s see… people who move me and make me drop things to read their stuff….

That’s actually a tough question since a lot of people I like to read are dead… makes it hard for them to put something out I want to get a hand on…

Caryl Phillips
Julian Barnes
Jeanette Winterson
Neil Gaiman
Zadie Smith who has written a great bit about the American book tour
Mark Kurlansky… a man who I see as the best researched writer, something i admire and aspire to.
Ha Jin… someone who reminded me that you could be a good writer, and even write about the Cultural Revolution in China and still write about people.

People who I read, but feel less of a need to drop the phone:
Mercedes Lackey
Stephen King
Douglas Whynott (i loved his book on the bluefin… though I didn’t realize he was a Mt Holyoke professor when I had the time to go say hello)
Kate Christiansen
Orson Scott Card

Also, if you find tight harmonies and writers to be your thing, you should check out the song “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors” by moxy fruvous.

My friend Andre made a really good comment of late. I like words, I like knowing the meanings of words, and I understand his frustration with the deviation from words’ importance, in this case the word “soul.” So, if you would humor him, you would use it less:

The use of the word soul is, to me, a perfect example of the cheapening of rich spiritual understanding. People talk about souls with such ease. It’s a throwaway word. And yet the actual word is not. Christians use “soul” quite a lot, but Jesus didn’t. Jesus was a Jew, and the concept of “soul” comes from greek. The hebrew concept is embodied in our word “spirit”. …

This all may strike you as word games. If so, it only exemplifies the extent to which we’ve denigrated language, and how far we are from art and language as a place. If there is a symbol of spiritual sickness, it is the way the word “soul” gets thrown around like a cheap rubber ball. …As if to prove that the word and the idea really are the same, the idea becomes cheap, and then people walk around asking why they don’t feel spiritually connected. Link to the whole thing

I highly suggest reading the whole thing, as it’s very well laid out.

Some folks I know over at Nightingale’s Lamp have been chatting about this post on the web called Memos to Americans. Call me a hippy, call me a liberal, call me an anti-American, but I agree with a whole lot of the sentiments going on here. Here are my thoughts:

It’s funny… I didn’t see this post so much as bashing america, as bashing the things that come out of people’s mouths that actually make it a dangerous thing to say I’m american.

Not only that, but I see the growing droves of people who come back here to China due to a whole mountain of reasons.

Also… folks from all walks of life who do manage to come to America get grilled with all kinds of nastiness when they come to the US, even if they are only staying as students. The INS is not exactly the most friendly department, even for our Canadian neighbors.

Heck, at the moment I have to watch my step here as retaliation for screening Chinese folks so heavily, and my Chinese friends in the US can’t visit family why? nothing to do with the Chinese government this time. It’s because the US will hold them up before letting them back. Funny thing for folks working on things like cancer research, you’d think they’d be welcome.

One of the things I like about the post is that it reflects a little bit of a global perspective, and it echoes things I hear from folks from other countries, not just Americans. Why? Because we aren’t the only democrats, we aren’t the only “free” country, we aren’t the police, and we seldom see other people’s cultures within the US, nevermind the rest of the world. The US isn’t perfect, though many people get very hurt and very angry for believing some of the PR. The most angry anti-american non-americans I know are people who have lived in the US, people who have lots of personal experience to speak from, it’s hard not to listen to that.

It’s hard when this is added to questions from my students when they try to unravel conflicting historical information, and when they try to understand “modern english” in various news clips. Even my littlest students want to know what they did to be so “dangerous” and to stand so near to the “axis of evil.” Why? Because they don’t see anything else from US news. It takes a lot of effort to convince my students that Americans won’t think they’re dangerous on sight, and won’t shoot them with a gun, and that’s equally true for my students from grade 1 through university.

Love to hear folks’ thoughts on this one.