Justine Larbalestier talks about writing her novel Liar using Scrivener. Pretty cool. I'm using an app called Index Card (on the iPad) to organize Post Rapture Industries (I've also put in some ideas I have for other novels). I have to admit the ability to shift those cards around is like magic. I don't think I'll end up writing the final this way, but it's a great way to organize, put thoughts down, see where you're lacking and where you're overflowing. Who knows, maybe I might write it all in there.
Tobias Buckell and pigeons/writers and pellets. One of the strongest reinforcement techniques in behavioral science is random rewards. That is, if you're pushing a lever, while the reward is based on pushing a lever, the number of times varies wildly. This leads to obsessive compulsiveness in the study animals. So it doesn't surprise me that decoupling the reward from the action (after conditioning for reactions) would drive subjects a little crazy.
The Nanmcy Coffey Literary agency will be completely honest with queries submitted Monday morning 7-8am. Or at least Joanna Volpe will be. See link for details. (Grokked from Miranda Suri)
The women fighters in reasonable armor tumblr the hip cats are all abuzz about. And a sublink to the discovery that many archeologist misidentified viking burials as "male" because of the grave materials, when in fact by looking at the actual remains (bones) shows half of them to be women. For me, however, the rethinking of "well, maybe they were married colonists instead" is just as wooly headed thinking as "it's got a sword, must be a guy." Female warriors are not as rare as our modern culture pretends they were. And the ones that made it in weren't all cross dressing fakers either. Welcome to lingering cultural identity issues and the vestigial echoes of the Victorian Sensibilities. Think I'm overstating it? The first gods of war were really goddesses of war (search Morrigan, Athena, Kali, etc). While men also worshiped the goddess at those times, understand that it wasn't strange for them to accept a woman in the warrior role (the male warrior role model at the time was that of "companion" to the goddess). (Grokked from Tor.com)
Some font resources. The designer who dies with the most fonts wins.
Crazy Uncle Pat is up to his old wacky self wondering if the crack in the Washington Monument is a sign from God. Considering on the day of the earthquake the Super Committee started it's work to slash the federal budget and roll back social programs while Obama was miles away on Martha's Vineyard, maybe.
There will be no charges filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court "Who Choked Who" case after everybody and their uncle recused themselves from investigating it. As an FYI, "no charges filed" is not the same as "no wrongdoing found." It's more of a "the trial would be hell, and we don't have a high degree of confidence in winning the case." So I guess we'll never really find out what happened.
Another of the Freshman Republican class trying to say that making $174,000 a year (with other benefits) isn't all it's cracked up to be. See, he has to have "security" in the room, you know, just in case. What can I say? Didn't you realized just what you had to do as a Congressman before you threw your hat into the ring? Obviously another proud know-nothing. You may remember Sean Duffy's verbal diarrhea earlier. As for "'[I]f you took the hours that I work and divided it into my pay,' the $174,000 salary would not seem so high." Okay, hey, I love math. At 80 hours a week (a pretty healthy workload of 11.4 hours a day), 52 weeks a year, that would be $41.82 an hour. Let's take an extreme case, there's 168 hours in a week, lets say you sleep/eat/pee for 56 of those (8 hours a day), that leaves us with 112 possible hours to work. That still means $29.87 an hour (or $62,142 for a 40 hour work week, like the rest of us, if you still only work 40 hours a week).
And another (really? two paragraphs with the same opener, it's almost like an epidemic) of the conservatives running from their record and embracing the "benefits for me, none for thee." This is also known as, "Got mine, screw you." Oh Rubio, VP fodder, can we tone down the hypocrisy?
So, the muslim "terrorist" wanted to attack the Xmas tree lighting, but the Christian "arsonist" who set fire to a mosque isn't one? Also, please note his quote on Obama and Muslims. Tell me again it isn't racism? But then, real racists support Al Qaeda.
What's in a name? Well, sometimes you just need to taunt the trolls.
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