Month: March 2010

help some artists get to norwescon!

Regarding my recent post about Norwescon, I have to admit the primary reason I’m planning to attend this year is because my friend Myke Amend and his incredible partner Bethalynne Bajema will be in attendance. (Check out their super website, the Miskatonic Archive.) Both of them are absolutely lovely people, treasures in the world, and though I’ve known Myke for many, many years, we’ve never yet had a chance to meet!

For me, attending is simple. Seattle is three hours away by bus, the con will be full of friends, and it’s all very familiar territory. For them, not so much. Late-payment by a publisher has made the point of payment pretty much pointless, as their plane ticket prices have jumped $500 in the time it has taken (so far) for them to make good. To help, I’m asking my readers to take a look at their art and purchase something or pass it on to someone else who might.

What do these two do? Style, panache, airships, steampunk, tentacles, elegance, and dark, deadly wit. If you’re at all interested in ‘teh spooky’, these two are where it’s at. (To give you some references, Myke just recently did a book cover for another friend, Cherie Priest, author of Boneshaker, which has just been nominated for the Locus Awards, {vote for her at the link}, and had a painting commissioned by Robert of Abney Park to hang in his study.)

They have Airship Pirate T-shirts and Babydoll tees, prints from Myke Amend’s Airships and Tentacles series, pretty box purses, and Bethalynne’s striking neo-victorian art for sale at Etta Diem. Prices range from $10 for a print to $375 for an original painting, with a lot offered in between. For a more visual view of what they have on offer, they also have an Etsy shop.

so fascinating I’m forgetting to sleep

Scott and Scurvy:

I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? […]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

Also: Vitamin D crucial to activating immune defenses. Copenhagen scientists have proven that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells – will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.

norwescon

Norwescon is coming up, and Tony and I are wondering who’s going. Are you? If so, what panels are you going to? Where are you staying? Mainly we’re just trying to find out what other people’s plans are, because ours (so far) is exceedingly simple: Find Friends -> Spend Time With Them -> Socialize/Dance/Hot-Tub/Sleep.

the internets are serious business


a friend’s baby

Hey Jude: Times Square subway sing-along

I just bought a white topped IKEA table desk at a very steep discount off Craigslist to replace the desk I sold several years ago. This, for a multitude of reasons, is far more exciting than it has any right to be. Lung helped me bring it home and wrestle it upstairs to my apartment and even into my room, for which I am deeply grateful. The desk, more of a table, really, is not very big, but my room is smallish, so almost every piece of bedroom furniture had to be moved to accommodate it. My entire body hurt from how much work it took, but it’s so amazing to finally have a workspace again that all the hassle was completely worth it. (Even the bizarro Trial Of The Talking Computer, which apparently complains out loud of overclocking failure when it needs a new BIOS battery.)

My next big step will be to get my website up and running again, this time with a focus on photography, with a page, too, devoted to the various Thread of Grace projects. I am slow with websites, though. I begin to have a general design figured out, then find myself lost among the apparently endless methods of developing a gallery backend. Realistically, I don’t much care what it looks like, as long as what I end up with is easy to update and allows people to link to each image. Simple, understated, a bit of text with each picture. Uncomplicated. (I’ve started looking for that pop up gallery everyone’s been using for the last couple of years, where the image slides up over the page, and there’s tiny little > and < for right and left). In the world of fanciful imaginary land, however, I'd also like an automatic flickr feed widgety thing in a sidebar somewhere, thumbnails that offer a preview when a mouse hovers over them, and a significantly prettier interface than most templates offer. An overnight degree in graphic design, plane tickets to somewhere tropical and warm, and an oceanside horsie ride wouldn't hurt, either.

Consider Role Reversal for International Women’s Day

Penny Red: Objectification: what if the world were different for a day?:

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable. They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

…

What is the response of the government, of the media to this trend? They say nothing. These silly young boys don’t know any better than to copy what they see. And anyway, women have to worry about what they look like too! Granted that it’s the men, not the women, who are judged on the basis of their appearance in public life – but then, there are so few men in politics and in business that we’re bound to look at them a bit funny, aren’t we? It’s all in good fun, isn’t it?

Link via Alasdair.

wtf computer problem

I just got the weirdest error message of my life. I just unplugged my computer and all of its components and moved my computer across the room to my new desk and attempted to turn it on after plugging everything back in. Instead of booting up, a pleasant woman’s voice said SYSTEM FAILED DUE TO SYSTEM OVERCLOCKING. I replied, “buh?” and tried again, to the same result.

Please, internet, explain this to me! Talking computer? What the heck!