sundries

[rm]

Tonight, Patty and I are going to see Cirkus Cirkoir. We are expecting it to be better than Quartett, which I still need to write about in all its horror. Seriously, at one point, the Marquise was lying on the floor saying over and over "The death of a whore, cancer, mon amour," while her part of the floor was dragged one way and a tank of fish on a part of the stage behind her was dragged the other way. Fish! Whore! Get it? And that wasn't really even remotely the worst moment. THERE WERE LIZARD NOISES!

Last night I used Exciting! New! Grooming! Tools! on Little Kitty. They still didn't even get all her mats out, but they pulled out a lot of dead hair and she felt soft and ungross after I used the cleaning wipes on her. Then, when we went to vacuum up all the hair this unleashed, the vacuum sent huge clouds of hair into the air, where one clump stuck to the wall at about eight feet up. It was hilarious. Cat is gross.

Tomorrow I leave for Switzerland. In my mind, I have packed my suitcase (two suits, 5 dress shirts, 1 pair of slacks, 2 dresses) and think it will be fine. I bought lots of gluten-free snacks to bring and hope I don't get shit for it in customs. I know where my passport is. In a moment I will go out and get currency. The rental cellphone arrived in the mail. Things are, such as they are, under control. The weather for my flight out looks abysmal, however, and I am now expecting delays and a bumpy ride; I feel pretty stressed about this.

After some prodding from the editor and with the wonder of Scrivener (how did I write anything without this program?) and some inspiration from a night drive through Central Park, I now finally, finally understand what my lesbian werewolf story is about, what's happening, what the obstacles are and why the audience should care. Working-title is either The Wealthy and the Wolves or Stone Boxes. The second is funnier, but this is not a funny story, and I think it'll be the first. I am finally excited about this story, as opposed to the fact that someone wants a story from me. And now I'll have something to read that's new when I read at the Library of Congress in March!

NaNo! I'm still behind on quota, but I did over 2,000 words yesterday, so I am almost up to 15K. I'm getting sloppier and sloppier as I proceed, but I don't care. Map now, fix later. I still love this project with all my heart.

So, I don't know if I'll "win" NaNo, and even if I do, ConSweet's first draft will probably be more like 70K than 50K (final expected length is probably around 100K) BUT, I'm producing a lot (25K this month so far if you count the virtual season stuff), and I'll certainly be writing over 50K for the month no matter what. Much of it for sale. So I'm trying to be happy with that. Making things go!

Did I really think I was going to get the full Io Station backgrounder stuff up before Zurich? I was fucking high. Let's call it my little end of Nano celebration, especially since I should be at least 75% done with my first draft on Con Sweet by then.

Things for my calendar -- the Circlet Press apocalypse call. That's so me, and I already have the story half figured out.

MUST. FINISH. BRISTOL. ABSTRACT.

Somewhere in December or January I must schedule in a fucking-off fan-project other than the VS, because I still desperately want to write my West Wing/The American President/Torchwood thing.

Yes, kalichan and I are still working on Enough to Go By, but the shit life has thrown at her lately has been too epic for it to have a front seat. But soon! Really. We love them.

What was lost...

Do not vandalize the apatosauraus, via reannon.

I think I'm the only person who hasn't clicked on the John Barrowman Single Ladies vid making its way around LJ over and over again. I should just click... and yet... I haven't!

THIS IS THE BEST THING ON THE INTERNET TODAY. It's cat macros + Project Runway + the Whoniverse. via robbling_t.

TW fanfic rec: You have the heart of a star by electro_club. It's exquisite. It's quiet. It's difficult. It made me go "oh!" about some fandom things, actually. Go go go go now. Jack/Ianto, no references to CoE and everyone is very much alive, but you know, there's CoE relevance; there can't not be.

A survey on rape shows that if you don't use the R-word, a small percentage (somewhere between 6% - 13% depending on the study, and that is pretty horrifying) of men will admit to rape; a lot of rape. The good news here, of course, is what we hopefully already knew -- that most men aren't rapists. The rest of the news? Rape isn't accidental; it's not a one time thing; it's not about "good guys" going too far -- it's a crime perpetrated by repeat offenders who don't think of themselves as rapists. via logansrogue.

CNN is reporting that "significant water has been found on the moon." How is it that this still makes my breath catch? How is it that I still believe we could be entering a bold new age at any moment when it seems all we ever do as a species is use the future for car ads and porn? There is water on the moon, and we are so earth-bound.

Comments

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine has said and, sadly, I'm coming to agree - that humanity is never going to get off earth.

As a group, we've pretty much lost any interest in exploring the totally new and ...

... we've become so completely addicted to the instant, mass communication of the various things that make up our 'net' (twitter, phones, internet etc) that we'd be pretty unhappy and intolerant of going someplace where it isn't. And, basically, the 'net only exists on earth.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been feeling that too, for a while now. Our best hope is waiting for some aliens to show up and "choose us." Which is really, really fucking depressing, and not just because I watch too much SF, but because I don't believe in getting "chosen" as a strategy or a goal for anything -- it's faulty logic that makes us behave badly most of the time and yet we value it so highly and use it to frame all sorts of crap we shouldn't.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

We will get off Earth eventually. But how long did it take us to get from the first dugout canoes paddling around the lagoon to colonizing ships? Tens of thousands of years I figure. We're better at tech than we were, but the problems are so much bigger too. I think that we are putting our minds to it, but it will still take 300-500 years to have tiny outposts on other worlds and they'll be as fragile as Jamestown was.

My gripe with the romance of space travel is that we've gotten gun-shy. The first team to be sent to Mars will die on Mars, and that's assuming that everything goes perfectly and they don't die on the way. I don't think we're twenty years away from being emotionally prepared to launch that ship; the space shuttle can't even take off on a cloudy day.

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

Well, that's sort of what I mean by not interested in exploration. There's a level of risk that we've decided we don't want to take anymore and a sort of ... shelteredness that our culture has come to expect - that we all stand a good chance of living to old age, that if we become injured or ill, someone is there to help us etc. Death rates from all sorts of things has dropped hugely since our last big push of (western) exploration (the new world/africa) and we're not willing, as a culture, to just throw people out there with the expectation that significant numbers of them are going to die. The increase in the value of human life isn't neccesarily a bad thing but it does have concequences - one of them being the unwillingness to put people at huge risk.

There were few small articles fairly recently about the prevalence of GPS/emergency beacons for campers resulting in a real conflict for rescue services; people who are vastly unprepared for wilderness adventures are starting to go out because they assume they're 'safe' because they've got an emergency beacon - and because they're untrained and inexperienced they aren't able to handle even minor issues so end up calling out a major rescue mobilization because they don't like the taste of their bottled water or can't figure out how to put up the brand new tent they bought. It's also leading to more deaths because, again, people who are unprepared for whatever it is are out doing it and get killed.