There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Linkee-poo, no justice, no peace

Love how the derailments start. But this isn't about race. What about the women attacking men in gaming? Not all men. Secure the border first.

So, what do you do when you've finished a book and it's about to arrive on store shelves (yea, there's a whole big part in there that I skipped, don't think about it)? You market the thing. There's two pretty easy tips that don't including starting a twitter feed that you only post, "Buy my book!" or some variant on. (Grokked from Elizabeth Shack)

I'm looking for various crutches and support structures to get my fiction writing flowing again. Here are two templates to help jog the creative parts. One is for scenes and on is for rewriting. There's sort of like the various character profile sheets out there, but with a better purpose (IMHO). And then there's the ubiquitous note card systems. One of the functions I use of Scrivener is the note carding system. Here's a way to do it in real life. (Grokked from Elizabeth Shack)

I've also been looking at plot dissection. There's photo that was making the rounds last spring that was captioned something like "Hemingway's copy of James Joyce's Ulysses" (which someone pointed out that 1) not Hemingway's copy of anything and 2) wasn't Ulysses) which had a book marked up in various shades of highlighter. And that's been sitting in the back of my brain as something I should probably do, but I can't think of the rules for why I would use different highlighters and what I should be tracking.

The Joan Anderson letter goes up for auction. That's the letter that spawned the "stream of consciousness" writing of Jack Kerouac.

Jim Hines on #CandyGate.

There's a fundraiser to help repopulate the American Chestnut now that a blight resistant strain has been developed. (Grokked from Dr. Doyle)

NASA's Cube Quest Challenge to prove CubeSat capabilities for lunar and deep space exploration. (Grokked from Kathryn Cramer)

"A two-year investigation by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees." Not that I expect this latest report (number four, IIRC) to actually stop the insanity running rampant in conservative circles. Like this from Lindsey Graham. Because the insanity was never caused by information and data, but by belief and ideology. Those things don't respond to actual data and facts.

And then Jim Wright goes and fucking writes the post I was going to do on President Obama's executive action and the GOP going apeshit all over the news cycle. I wonder if they work out on a stationary news cycle? Anyway, I've also come to some of the same conclusions he has when it comes to the modern conservative movement. "You’re trying to reason with people who are just plain fucking nuts." So, yea, I'm tired of the bs. I remember hearing some conservative commentator saying that he didn't have any quibbles with what the President did, but that he did it "arrogantly." I think that was the first time the thought of, "wow, what a racist" immediately jumped into my head. For how ever many years now Fox News and the conservative bubble speakers have had a lust after Putin and complained that "if only Obama would lead, and would be strong, like that Putin guy." We'll skip the fact that Putin is an unreconstructed Soviet apparatchik that longs for the heady days of a Stalinist USSR for the moment. But now that the President has led, and has shown his backbone, they're all up in arms and going apeshit.

A little more on the history of executive orders and just what the Obama executive order on immigration actually does. (Grokked from Charles Oberndorf)

The problem with fracking. Besides watching the price of a barrel of oil dropping below production costs, apparently fracked wells don't have legs. Most wells see a fifty-percent drop in production over one year, and facked wells aren't cheap.

Kinda sucks when the politics of hatred experiences blowback. So, Geraldo Rivera thought the President's executive action on immigration wasn't the horror the rest of the GOP thought it was, and all the minions of hatred that Fox News has been goading on for years decided to let him know just what they thought of his idea. To which Mr. Rivera responds to with shock, and then threatens to tell Mother. In this case reporting to Facebook, which makes sense since his comments were on Facebook, and Fox News which, well, because REASONS - I was going to say because that's actually the real Mother in this circumstance and some of those commentators might actually feel ashamed that the mothership knows about them, but see earlier comment about how Fox News bread and nurtured such resentments in the first place. So, I don't know, maybe they'll get a gold star or something.

Looks like another GOP presidential candidate is going to be sabotaged by their father. Now it's Teddy Cruz's, turn. The problem, and Democrats really should listen to this, "I encourage Christians, pastors, run for school office, for school board, run for city council, run for mayor, run for state rep, run for state senate, run for every office in the land." And see, that's what they're doing. That helps generate a farm team of potential candidates for higher office, but it also helps turn local governments into ultra right wing nut case factories. It's easy to ignore local politics when the news is all about the national echo chamber, and that's when you have the Texas State School Board rewriting standards that affect school books all across the nation.

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