I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Linkee-poo, no one flies around the sun

Ferrett Steinmetz's book is out today. Happy book day, Ferrett!

The reality of the six-figure book deal. Just in case your writing dreams needed crushing this week. (Grokked from practically everyone)

My father, the pornographer. Chris Offutt writes the biography of his father (and mother) who helped pay the bills by writing porn. There's no judgement here, hell, if I could write it, there's still a hellalotta money to be made.

Annalee Flower Horne on not being broken. I'm glad that terms used to describe people that have had traumatic events in their lives (broken, damaged, dysfunctional) are starting to lose favor in the popular culture. On the other hand, those words die hard.

We've come full circle, we now have computers that can play computer games. How about a nice game of chess? Okay, well, yea, it is kinda a break through. The computer was just given the game and the basics of how games are played, but not the rules or goals of the various classic arcade games. The program had to figure that out for itself. I wonder how many quarters it had to use? (Grokked from Dan)

John Scalzi offers a menu of responses to online stupidity. Now, just like at a Chinese restaurant, you can order by number. "Oh, you wanted Beef and Broccoli?" To this list I would add "13. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son," because, well, who doesn't love a Dean Wormer quote (extra points if you didn't have to Google that one).

So, Speaker Boehner does what everybody knew would happen, use the lawsuit against President Obama's executive orders on immigration as an out to abandon attaching language to the DHS funding bill. And now the shit will fly.

On February 3, "(a) 20-year-old U.S. military weather satellite apparently exploded for no obvious reason." Uncontrolled chain reaction, or a laser strike on a satellite someone didn't think anyone was using anymore? In either case, wasn't this the plot bunny from Gavity? (Grokked from Dan)

Hey, ho, way to go Ohio. Yep, little by little a woman's right to choose is being whittled away. Remember, conservatives are the ones who say government should regulate less and stay the heck out of your lives. Unless they don't like what you're doing, and then they'll regulate and interfere like hell.

You know how conservatives are all for the "open market"? Yea, well, not so much when it's their pocket-book being threatened. In this case, how the Kochs and others are trying to hamper the installation of consumer solar power. This is why you hear so much hype against it, many powerful people are seeing their profits going down and they're going to fight like hell to make sure they keep that profit margin. Also connected, the Ohio PUCO in a rare example of actually protecting the public, rejects AEP's attempt to saddle rate payers with the extra costs of running older coal-fired power plants (in other words, they wanted to make the citizens to cover their losses as the power plants age out into obsolescence). Yea, this is going to be a hard fight with lots of propaganda being spewed. (Grokked from Dan)

Boom gone bust.

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