What are you currently reading?
Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Where Angels Fear to Tread by Thomas E. Sniegoski
I switched from audiobook to ebook for this series because I wasn't loving the writing style enough to want it read to me. I found the beginning annoying. But I've only read a few pages so far.

The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll (audiobook)

What did you recently finish reading?
Dangerous Mourning by Anne Perry, #2 in the Inspector William Monk series, set in the mid-19th century. Audiobook well narrated by Davina Porter, one of my favorite narrators. Although it's called the Monk series, this book's main protagonist is Hester Latterly—she does the primary footwork for solving the mystery. I really liked it for its attention to class and women's issues, and for character development. I also think Perry does a good job with dialogue.

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series. Liked it a lot. McGuire does a great job of pacing and reveals and drawing out the story arc.

What do you think you’ll read next?
I'm going on a trip without much Internet access, so I downloaded several ebooks:

A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King (#3 in the Mary Russell series)
Larger Than Death by Lynne Murray (#1 in the Josephine Fuller series)
Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
The Vampire Files, Volume Two omnibus by P. N. Elrod (contains books 4–6 in the series: Art in the Blood, Fire in the Blood, and Blood on the Water)
Ventus by Karl Schroeder

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/810539.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?
Dangerous Mourning by Anne Perry, #2 in the Inspector William Monk series, set in the mid-19th century. The first book in this series was interesting but not a standout. But I'm really liking this book for its attention to class and women's issues. Some books use an historical setting as an excuse to let protagonists be sexist and racist with impunity, but this one does not. (And as a result some of the characters' attitudes are probably more modern than they would really have been.)

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire (October Daye #4)

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

What did you recently finish reading?

Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody #1)
Mystery series set in late-19th/early-20th (this book in 1884-85). The protagonist is based in part on a real Victorian novelist, Amelia Edwards. This book was written in 1975. There is quite a lot of racism in this book, unfortunately. Not the hateful kind but the "they're so backward" kind. It's probably historically accurate to some degree.

P.N. Elrod, Bloodcircle (Vampire Files #3).

What books did you acquire this week?
Where Angels Fear to Tread by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Ancient, Ancient, short fiction by Kiini Ibura Salaam. One of the 2012 Tiptree winners.
Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales by Greer Gilman. One of the 2009 Tiptree winners.
The Mount by Carol Emshwiller

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/810407.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

Someone on FB linked to a post from the blog You Need a Budget (YNAB) (which is a software product). The post is called "15 warning signs you're addicted to debt" and it references Debtors Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. The post said this:
"Whenever I see an overweight person, I automatically assume they’re seriously in debt. Probably just a case of projection – but probably not far from true."

(I'm not linking to the blog but with that info you can probably find the post.)

My thought on the matter:

In fact the person might be right that fat people are more often in debt simply because fatness is associated with poverty, and if you're poor it's a lot harder to stay out of debt because you don't have the resources to deal with emergencies.

There is another connection between debt and fat: both are assumed to be caused by the behaviors of the individual and are assumed to be the sole responsibility of the individual to fix. But both actually have a lot to do with what the individual was handed in life—in the case of fat, genetics and the pressure to yo-yo diet can contribute; in the case of debt, socioeconomic status, and a society that increasingly preys on poor people and conspires to keep them in debt. (See http://strikedebt.org)

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/810163.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

Kiera Wilmot is a 16 year old black girl who attends high school in Florida. While at school (not during school hours) she engaged in an extracurricular chemistry experiment that produces a small explosion and some smoke. No one was injured and no property was damaged. She was expelled from school and will now have to attend an expulsion program. She was also arrested and charged with two felonies ("discharging a weapon on school grounds").

Rocket Boys: A Memoir is a book about some white teenage boys in a coalmining town in the late 1950s. They build and test rockets. Their first attempts cause property damage, but many of the adults they know help them. They win a science fair. The author and protagonist of Rocket Boys became a NASA engineer. The book, according to Wikipedia, "is studied in many American and international school systems."

Wikipedia claims: "According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009. According to the 2010 census of the US Census Bureau blacks (including Hispanic blacks) comprised 13.6% of the US population."

http://www.change.org/petitions/polk-county-school-district-don-t-expel-kiera-wilmot

https://www.change.org/petitions/polk-county-state-s-attorney-drop-felony-charges-against-16-year-old-kiera-wilmot

http://raniakhalek.com/2013/05/02/prosecutor-behind-kiera-wilmot-arrest-filed-no-charges-for-white-teen-who-killed-little-brother/

http://www.policymic.com/articles/39061/kiera-wilmot-arrest-racial-inequality-arises-from-a-science-project-gone-wrong

"Would a White Girl Be Prosecuted for a Botched Science Experiment?">

http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/the-case-around-fla-teen-kiera-wilmot-is-part-of-a-bigger-more-disturbing-pattern/

"Kiera Wilmot's School Expulsion Is Racist"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/education/black-students-face-more-harsh-discipline-data-shows.html (This one is not specifically about Kiera Wilmot, it's from 2012.)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/2013/05/01/florida-teen-charged-with-felony-for-trying-science/ "I can’t name a single scientist or engineer, who hadn’t blown up, ripped apart, disassembled something at home or otherwise cause a big ruckus at school all in the name of curiosity, myself included." --DNLee, a biologist and animal behaviorist (one of a few black women who didn't manage to get the science harrassed out of them).

http://www.policymic.com/articles/39381/kiera-wilmot-how-her-arrest-and-expulsion-exposes-americas-racial-discipline-gap

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This essay basically says (my own words) "In our enthusiasm for evidence-based medicine (which uses statistics and large population samples to evaluate treatments and create clinical guidelines), let's make sure not to throw out things doctors learn through many years of practice seeing one patient at a time." It says it really, really well.

"Why do we always end up here? Evidence-based medicine’s conceptual cul-de-sacs and some off-road alternative routes" by Trisha Greenhalgh, M.D. (Journal of Primary Health Care 2012; 4(2))

Excerpts:

Researchers in dominant paradigms tend to be very keen on procedure. They set up committees to define and police the rules of their paradigm, awarding grants and accolades to those who follow those rules. This entirely circular exercise works very well just after the establishment of a new paradigm, since building systematically on what has gone before is an efficient and effective route to scientific progress. But once new discoveries have stretched the paradigm to its limits, these same rules and procedures become counterproductive and constraining. That’s what I mean by conceptual cul-de-sacs.
...
the skilled practice of medicine is not merely about knowing the rules, but about deciding which rule is most relevant. This remains under-acknowledged and undertheorised in the dominant EBM paradigm. Illness may be a narrative, but just as in law, just as in literature, there is no text that is self-interpreting.
...
I think something sinister is happening, mainly because of the striking circumstantial resonance between the reductionism of EBM and the reductionism of contemporary policymaking.
...
EBM isn’t inherently wrong, but it plays to a vision of science that is characterised by predictive certainty—a vision that is taught to schoolchildren and perpetuated in the media, a vision of simple logic with readily deduced details and rule-governed consequences. It is this logic, coupled with the values of consumerism, which appear to have prompted the coalition government to develop a one-dimensional metric of human happiness which will light up like a thermometer bulb when policy tickles the public G-spot.

These books that she mentions sound very interesting:
How Doctors Think by Kathryn Montgomery (not the book of the same name by Jerome Groopman)
Complex Knowledge by Professor Hari Tsoukas
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha Nussbaum
The Logic of Care by Annemarie Mol

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Superb takedown of the "obesity epidemic". Putting it here mainly so I can find it later.

"The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic?" by Paul Campos, Abigail Saguy, Paul Ernsberger, Eric Oliver and Glenn Gaesser

(Their answer: moral panic)

Excerpts:( Read more...Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/809334.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?

P.N. Elrod, Bloodcircle (Vampire Files #3). Urban fantasy/detective-mystery. I find these books kind of interesting and calming, but some people might find them dull. The're set in the 1930s and written sort of in the style of old pulp noir novels, but they're somewhat less gritty and less sexist/racist than many of those. In this one more than the previous two, I think, there's somewhat more telling than showing, at least in the first chunk. I mean there's a lot of time spent on characters telling each other about things that happened in the past, and characters watching other characters, which isn't the usual style for genre fiction these days. The partnership between the main character and the sidekick is unusual. There's very little tension between them, and they're more or less equal partners, although with different strengths. So again that makes less opportunity for high drama than in many genre books. I like that the vampires in this series have some traditional vampiric traits along with the "drinking blood" one.

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. Hey, I just found an article about this trilogy by Joan Slonczewski, who is one of the guests of honor at Wiscon this year: "Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist's Response" in which she says ( vague spoilersCollapse )

What did you recently finish reading?

Driving Mr. Dead, Molly Harper. Paranormal romance one-off set in the Half Moon Hollow universe. Harper is a great comic writer, and some parts of the subplot about the heroine's fiancé ring true. There's something off about the characters in this one though. The vampire starts out with a certain personality and then suddenly changes to another personality, and I'm not persuaded as to why. Actually that makes me realize that characterization is just not Harper's strength in general, or perhaps I should say that her characters in general are kind of broad. (The main protagonists sometimes have more depth.)

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/809101.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

This is not OK.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/04/19/aclu-discovers-illegal-debtors-prisons-in-ohio/

Excerpts:

A new report by the ACLU reveals that “debtors’ prisons” in Ohio. The phrase refers to the practice of imprisoning someone for the failure to pay fines. This practice is in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Still, people who can’t afford to pay fines issued in response to traffic violations or misdemeanors are being routinely imprisoned in at least 7 out of 11 counties studied.
...
An investigation found that as many as 22% of the bookings in Huron were for failure to pay a fine, usually coded as “contempt.” Typically this resulted in a 10 day incarceration. The state would then charge them fees related to being jailed, making it even more unlikely that a person would be able to pay.

The ACLU report referred to:
http://www.acluohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/TheOutskirtsOfHope2013_04.pdf
( More reports and quotesCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/808806.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Driving Mr. Dead, Molly Harper. Paranormal romance one-off set in the Half Moon Hollow universe. Harper is a great comic writer. There's something off about the characters in this one though.

What did you recently finish reading?

Once Burned (Night Prince #1), Jeaniene Frost. Audiobook narrated by Tavia Gilbert. Paranormal romance, spinoff from the Night Huntress series, featuring Vlad, a secondary character from that series. Frost writes a compelling storyline with good pacing, but I didn't like this as much as I like the Huntress books because the protagonists' points of conflict are too similar to those of the Huntress books. Unfortunate, since Vlad in the Huntress books was different from your run of the mill "centuries-old powerful vampire" protagonist...he was powerful but seemed to have a sense of humor about himself. In this book he's not that way.

Great Detective Stories (contains Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man," and G.K. Chesterton's "The Man in the Passage"), narrated by David Case.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Maybe Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine, because the OH got it out of the library.

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/808418.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Wardens-Go-Undercover-to-Crack-Down-on-Trophy-Animal-Sales-203101781.html
Excerpt:

Online marketplaces such as eBay have made it even easier for international sales of exotic animal parts such as ivory, rare animal skulls, horns, and other items banned for sale under state, federal and international law because they threaten endangered species.

To address the problem, the Peninsula Humane Society partnered with eBay to train volunteers to identify, report, and help investigate these illegal sales. In the first year, more than 2,000 items were removed from eBay after being identified by volunteers. In the first 3 months of 2013, some 1,300 products have been flagged.

Job description: http://phs-spca.org/volunteer/positions.html#InternetExaminer

I can see this program making a difference by watching the way the wording of ebay auction descriptions changes as sellers try to get further under the radar. For example, elephant ivory is illegal to sell on ebay, so sellers advertise real elephant ivory as "faux ivory" (but if you look at the pictures, plenty of the faux ivory is real).

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The other day I was picking on posts that have unhelpful-to-me tips for handling depression. In this post I'll mention a helpful-to-me depression aid, and ask for some advice.

Helpful-to-me thing: http://boggletheowl.tumblr.com/
This is a depression support blog where a cartoon owl offers a lot of encouragement and a little bit of advice. Some of the people writing in say upsetting things and sometimes Boggle is a bit too sweet. But I find the high encouragement to advice ratio helpful. (When you're depressed, what are some helpful things for you?)

Advice request:
I used to e-socialize a lot via mailing lists. These days it seems all the topical activity that used to occur in mailing lists has moved to Facebook. I check Facebook once or twice a day. But I've noticed that I usually end up feeling worse afterward. Part of it is that people post so much bad news. And OK, I do belong to some groups there where the whole purpose is to post bad news. But it's not just those groups that make me feel bad. I guess I could just quit reading FB, or limit myself to reading only a few people I have no other way to connect with. But it would be nice if there were a less drastic option or some way to approach FB that doesn't get me all riled up. (Does this happen to you?)

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/807231.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler

Great Detective Stories (contains Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man," and G.K. Chesterton's "The Man in the Passage"), narrated by David Case. David Case is one of my favorite audiobook narrators.

What did you recently finish reading?

Katherine Lampe, The Fits o' the Season. Fifth in the Caitlin Ross/Timber MacDuff series. This book relies on stuff that happens in the third (A Maid in Bedlam) and fourth (The Parting Glass) books in the series. Small-town fantasy/Paranormal romance but with a difference, in that the POV characters are human witches and shamans, not vampires/werewolves/faeries. This one is a set of interrelated shorts from Timber's point of view. Interesting magical and shamanic and violent things happen, but I especially like that it's an exploration of love for the long term, the kind you need to start building after the pedestal you stuck under your loved one crumbles. A lot of urban-fantasy/paranormal-romance books look at this from the point of view of a female protagonist, but this book looks at it from the point of view of a male protagonist.

Charlaine Harris, Grave Secret, the fourth and (so far) last in the Harper Connelly series (paranormal fantasy/mystery). Harris started this series in 2005, after her other series (although the Sookie Stackhouse series has lasted longer). Harper Connelly is a psychic with a single talent, the ability to sense corpses and know what the person died from (but if the person was murdered, she doesn't know who did it). She and her step-brother make a living by helping people using this talent. I think Harper Connelly is Harris's most interesting protagonist. This book has a mystery in it like the others, but it also delves heavily into Connelly's past and family dynamics.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Maybe Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine, because the OH got it out of the library.

What books did you acquire this week?

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (the Kindle edition was on sale for $2 last week, and a friend recommended it to me).

Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones. I don't know anything about this, but the Kindle edition was free last week, so I figured why not.

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/807096.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?

Late Eclipses by Seanen McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series. I almost quit reading this series after the second one, and I'm glad I continued, because the third one was good and I'm enjoying this one a lot.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. I don't know any other writer who can creep me out so much and make me keep turning the pages at the same time.

What did you recently finish reading?

Bears Discover Fire, short story collection by Terry Bisson. The titular story broke my heart. In a good way. I guess I'm not the only one because it won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. My other favorite in this collection is "England Underway." I also liked "Over Flat Mountain," "George," "Canción Auténtica de Old Earth," "Partial People," "Carl's Lawn and Garden," "The Message," and "The Shadow Knows."


What do you think you’ll read next?

I'm having a hard time picking my next audiobook. I tried and rejected Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches. I liked some things about it but several other things irritated me and it goes really slowly. Then I tried and rejected Richelle Mead's Succubus Blues, after I'd listened to something like 10 scenes in a row involving ( vague spoilersCollapse )—it's not that I object to such scenes on principle but that was the only thing that was happening for pages and pages. Then I tried Linda Fairstein's Final Jeopardy. I found out the author was behind the conviction of the Central Park Five and that kind of made me uncomfortable. But I decided to give up after these two scenes coming one right after the other made my head explode. ( spoiler and offensive ethnic referenceCollapse )

I would really like to find a good procedural series that isn't sexist, classist, racist, or fat-phobic and that doesn't rely on sexual violence against women for every single plot. Recommendations welcome.

So now I'm listening to Charlaine Harris' Grave Secret, the fourth and last in the Harper Connelly series, which is paranormal fantasy/mystery.

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she was a guest of honor at FogCon.

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/806465.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

Or perhaps I should say "the gaze of people who find a variety of men wiggling in tiny briefs attractive."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wyx6JDQCslE

Wikipedia sez "LMFAO is an American electronic dance music duo consisting of Redfoo and SkyBlu. The duo are both descendants of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Jr."

Yes, it's almost two years old, but I just heard it. At least with Gangnam Style I was a little faster on the uptake. (The songs bear some similarity.)

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/806307.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

The OH and I are going on a cruise in May, but I have misgivings because of the way cruise lines are reported to treat some of their workers.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/15/cruise_from_hell_dont_pity_carnivals_passengers/
(beware the comments)

Linkspam via the OH:

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/31/new_york_times_obit_for_rocket_scientist_introduces_her_as_mom_and_cook_first/ (self-explanatory)


http://smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=1765767
I should probably keep my mouth shut about religions that I don't follow. So I'll just quote this.

at the Casal del Marmo juvenile detention facility in Rome...the 76-year-old Francis got down on his knees to wash and kiss the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women. The rite re-enacts Jesus’ washing of the feet of his 12 apostles during the Last Supper before his crucifixion, a sign of his love and service to them.
The church’s liturgical law holds that only men can participate in the rite, given that Jesus’ apostles were all male.

...

“If someone is washing the feet of any females ... he is in violation of the Holy Thursday rubrics,” [canon lawyer Edward] Peters wrote in a 2006 article that he reposted earlier this month on his blog.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/21/news/economy/stripper-labor-rights/
Strippers seek benefits:

As independent contractors, strippers' income comes solely from tips. Often, club owners' long list of fees take a big bite out of that too.
Hima B., a former stripper in San Francisco who is working on a documentary about strippers' labor rights, paid $5 "stage fee" for a six-hour shift when she started working in 1992....By the time she stopped working in 1999, she was paying $200 per shift....Sonja also paid stage fees, and more -- $80 for showing up late, $25 to dance one song and $60 for a half hour in a private room. Some strippers also have to pay DJs and other overhead costs like rent.
...
There are other professions where employees work for tips or have to pay for a spot -- like waiters and hairdressers. The difference is that these workers also earn wages.
...
Workers at The Lusty Lady, a San Francisco peep show, formed the Exotic Dancers Union in 1997. Soon after that, The Lusty Lady became fully owned and operated by its employees, who continue to vote on all business decisions.
"I get paid a little bit more than minimum wage hourly on top of my tips" said Victoria Privates, a dancer who started working at The Lusty Lady last year.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-21/fab-dot-com-winning-in-e-commerce-with-whimsy
Being a target demographic: I had a membership on fab.com for a brief period and I had to get rid of it because I wanted to buy so many of the things they sold. (None of which I actually needed.)

( trigger warning for descriptions of violence against women (advertising $fail)Collapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/805966.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

via snippy. It seems like a good idea to create free teacher training materials for teaching children about consent culture.

Help fund / signal boost 'Creating Consent Culture by Providing Youth the Tools: A Teacher Training Model' http://igg.me/p/creating-consent-culture-by-providing-youth-the-tools-a-teacher-training-model/cstw/330779

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/805800.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

There was a controversy at Pycon 2013 in which a woman of color tweeted a complaint about the language some men were using. As a result, she and one of the men lost their jobs, and she's getting a metric gigaton of harrassment, which is still ongoing.

This op-ed says IMHO all the right things about it. I'm mostly putting it here so I can find it later.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2013/03/22/why-asking-what-adria-richards-could-have-done-differently-is-the-wrong-question/


The situation is well summarized here:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/PyCon_2013_forking_and_dongles_incident


I'm not really in the mood to argue about whether the forbes op-ed is right, so I might be wielding an arbitrary ax in the comments section.

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I just finished a bunch of books at once so it's time for another one of these.

What are you currently reading?

Ebook on my smart phone: Just started Late Eclipses by Seanan McGuire, the fourth book in the October Daye series.

Paper books:
Bears Discover Fire, Terry Bisson. I have only read the titular story so far. It broke my heart. In a good way, but still. I don't know if I will be able to read any of the rest.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. Am only a few pages in. It's a page-turner.

Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. Jane Hill is white. I thought I had an OK handle on this subject but Hill points out so many things that I wasn't aware of, and collects them into categories that make sense. She also provides a good description of the split between two theories of racism that cause problems in public conversations about racism. Now that I've read this book, I am seeing more racist language in the culture and seeing it in different ways.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson. I find Gibson's sentence- and paragraph-level writing style very creative and beautiful. His plots and characters are kind of formulaic. (But that's looking at it from OMG 26 years later. I suppose it's kind of like saying Chuck Berry is formulaic.) But I find it hard to concentrate on the plot of his books, at least in audio form. I had the same problem with the previous book in the Sprawl trilogy. This book has some interesting female characters and has characters that come from a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds. I'm uncomfortable with the appropriation of Vodou loa, although Gibson does seem to have made some effort to research them.

Ebook on my iPad: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold. The book didn't suck me in the way the Vorkosigan books did. It took me weeks to pick my way through it. Come to think of it, that's been my experience of everything Bujold has written except for the Vorkosigan books. Well except for what I actively dislike (Sharing Knife, ick). I think part of my problem with CVA was that I thought all the other characters were far more interesting than Ivan, and I wanted stories about them, not glimpses of them through Ivan's mind. I felt that way about some of the characters in the Miles books too, but I also thought Miles was interesting.

Audiobook: Keeper of the King, P.N. Elrod & Nigel Bennett. Do you want to read an Arthurian legend? Do you want to read a spy novel? Do you want to read a vampire story? Now you don't have to choose!

But the book doesn't wrap up, it pretty much ends in the middle of a plot. I hate that. Also the audiobook is abridged; I didn't notice that until I'd finished it.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the third book in the Cat Wizards series, which is set in the same universe as the Young Wizards series. The first two books are The Book of Night with Moon, and On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service (UK title)/To Visit the Queen (US title). Duane self-published the third book as an e-book, available here: http://www.the-big-meow.com/ (Buying the e-book theoretically gets you a paperback at some point, but the paperback is over a year later than promised and the web site hasn't been updated for a while so I don't know if that's going to happen.)

This got off a pretty slow start but when the cats traveled back to 1946 Hollywood I began liking it better. She digs around in Aztec mythology quite a bit, and I don't know enough about it to have an opinion whether it's borrowing or appropriation. I feel like it has Christianish tropes too, but possibly not more than the Wizard series in general. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she was a guest of honor at FogCon.

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I got a package from Ontario today and it contained a Red Panda plushie! You can see it if you click the cut tag and are prepared to look at it in the context of a very untidy room. As a bonus you get to see my newly bright-purple hair.

( this way to the plushieCollapse )

Thank you, secret gift-giver!

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This article talks about how humans vary in how many copies we have of a gene that codes for a carbohydrate-processing enzyme. Humans who live in societies where starch is a major part of the diet tend to have more copies.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/12/11/amylase-and-human-evolution/

When I say the Paleo diet is too simplistic, I mean that this is evidence human digestion has evolved since the introduction of agriculture. If you are on the Paleo diet and feel happy and healthy, that's cool.

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via piglet

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/feature/entry/leaning-in-can-get-you-laid-out

It's really good that people are talking about women's health and the effects of perfectionism, stress, poverty, and race. But I think this article conflates too many things and ends up being more on the "victim blaming" or "pitying" side and less on the "critical of society" side than it might intend.

It starts out by giving examples of privileged women who try to be perfect for their children and end up becoming sick. Then it goes on to say "The health risks associated with being a woman who does too much are even more pronounced for women of color." But the studies mentioned to support this claim didn't look at "doing too much." They seem to say that the poorer health of women of color is due to stress and poverty. Granted that a woman can cause herself stress through perfectionist tendencies, but if you're poor or a person of color, you don't have to be perfectionist or "leaning in" to be subjected to lots of stress. Society is capable of doing that to you even if you're trying to reduce stress in your life.

Then the article goes on to mention that women have more autoimmune diseases, depression, and anxiety than men. This might be partly due to biology (lower androgen levels, theorizes the president of the American Institute of Stress), but the article doesn't mention that there are likely diagnostic biases involved, or that women are more likely to seek medical care than men.

The author of this article has written a book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How Perfection Is Harming Young Women, which is about eating disorders. The first edition of the book was called Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body.

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Soundation.com is a web app that's kind of like GarageBand. There are several account tiers. The free account lets you use around 600 recorded loops and MIDI instruments, but you can't record anything of your own into it. I have the free account.

As an assignment for the course I was taking on digital sound design, I created a one-minute composition. I also created a few other pieces, ranging from 45 seconds to 2 minutes. They are here for your listening pleasure/amusement, in no particular order. The last one ("Behind Door Number Three") is the one I submitted for the assignment, but it's not my favorite. The assignment had a lot of parameters and I found it difficult to accommodate all of them in a one-minute piece.

http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/wind-up-rhythm-box


http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/inside-out-and-shaken-to-pieces


(This one doesn't seem to be loading right.)
http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/4


This one requires headphones for the full effect.
http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/the-technological-age-called-bring-gravel


http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/factors-of-twelve


http://soundation.com/user/firecat/track/behind-door-number-three


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mjlayman passed away on February 22. Here's a link to what little I know.
http://tenuousnet.myfastforum.org/forum2.php

I didn't know her well, but I admired the heck out of her for her handwork talent, her determination in the face of a heap of medical issues, her love of science fiction and support of the SF community, and her stories about her cats.

If I believed in an afterlife I would imagine her in a heaven where she has all the time she wants to catch up on her reading, and all her cats on her lap.

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...and the XKCD "Umwelt" cartoon, which looks different in different browsers, different countries, etc.

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/google-ads-may-be-racially-biased-professor-says-1C8369538

A professor at Harvard University believes she’s uncovered evidence that race is sometimes used to determine which ads you see when you go online.

Based on thousands of searches, Latanya Sweeney, who runs the university’s Data Privacy Lab, concludes in a recent paper that there is “discrimination” based on race in the delivery of certain ads.

She found that Google searches using names that sounded black (Latanya) turned up strikingly different ads than when the search was done for a name that’s more typically considered white (Adam).

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What are you currently reading?

Audiobook: Keeper of the King, P.N. Elrod & Nigel Bennett. Arthurian in some way that has yet to become fully apparent.

Paper books:
Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. It's really excellent.

Ebook on my iPad: Still picking my way through Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. Still liking it a lot, but I mostly only read it in cars and doctors' offices so I'm not getting through it very fast (which means not too many doctors' offices. Yay!).

What did you recently finish reading?

Audiobook: Agents of Light and Darkness (Nightside, #2) by Simon R. Green. Semi-humorous, semi-serious, enjoyably over the top. I liked this book better than the first novel in the series, which had a lot of body horror, which isn't my thing really (I just don't get scared by mucus!). In this one we get to know the characters better, and Taylor gets really obsessed with [SPOILER]. But I didn't like the ending because [SPOILERS]. I also didn't like the "character broken by [SPOILER]" plot points. Those were the wrong sorts of things to make a semi-humorous horror novel about. I bought the next one in the series.

Audiobook: Undead Sublet by Molly Harper. Novella from the collection The Undead in My Bed. In the same setting as the Nice Girls Don't series. Molly Harper does "sardonic first person paranormal" and "small town in the US South" really, really well.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she's going to be a guest of honor at FogCon.

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/802732.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

What are you currently reading?

Paper books:
I read half of Redshirts by John Scalzi and gave up. I just don't like his fiction-writing style.
I've read the first four chapters of Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane Hill. Anthropology. Upsetting but really interesting and well written. I'll make a post on it later.

Ebook on my iPad: Still picking my way through Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Ebook on my smart phone: The Big Meow, Diana Duane. This is the 3d Cat Wizards book, the one she self-published in installments. Still liking it a lot, but I mostly only read it in cars and doctors' offices so I'm not getting through it very fast (which means not too many doctors' offices. Yay!).

Audiobook: Agents of Light and Darkness (Nightside, #2) by Simon R. Green. This is a humorous horror series that seems like it would mainly appeal to fans of heavy-metal music...not sure I can explain what I mean by that. Well written, well narrated, in a delightfully over the top way. I'm liking this book better than the first novel in the series, Something From the Nightside. My first encounter with the series was a short story, "The Difference a Day Makes," in the anthology Mean Streets. That and "Noah's Orphans" (from the Remy Chandler series by Thomas E. Sniegoski) were the best stories in the anthology. The other stories were by Jim Butcher and Kat Richardson, neither of whom I particularly care for.

What did you recently finish reading?

Audio: "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Free short story from Audible. (Here is the link; you have to have an Audible account to get it, but I don't think you have to be a member: http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AJ2VYRC) Well narrated by Alan Cumming.

Audiobook: Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori, #1) by Lian Hearn. Lian Hearn is a pen name of Gillian Rubinstein. Most of her books are YA. This one is semi-historical fantasy set in a land an whole lot like feudal Japan after the introduction of Christianity. I started out thinking it was too full of clichés. I still think it's full of clichés, but also think they are really well done and entertaining clichés, without a lot of stuff that annoys me added on. I bought the next one.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I want to read An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews because she's going to be a guest of honor at FogCon.

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Oooohhhh
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/02/the-unsettling-beauty-of-lethal-viruses/
http://www.lukejerram.com/glass/

And that led me to this:
http://www.madmuseum.org/exhibition/playing-with-fire
Steffen Dam, "Marine Group"

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The free MOOC I'm taking through Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/course/digitalsounddesign
This format works for me because the course happens over a particular time period, and I had to sign up. Both of those make me feel like I committed to something. So I'm actually working on the course instead of just bookmarking it for later. Also it's free, so I didn't talk myself out of signing up with "This is too far outside my area of knowledge to spend money on." And it's not for any kind of official credit (although supposedly I get a "certificate of completion" at the end) so I don't worry about grades. (Although on the forums for the course a lot of people are worrying about what's on the tests. Maybe that's habit, or maybe they're taking it to fulfill a requirement elsewhere and it matters to them how they do.)

I sometimes use NewEgg to buy tech stuff. I didn't know they were patent law heroes.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushed-the-shopping-cart-patent-and-saved-online-retail/

Unrelated white people who look alike, especially because they're wearing similar clothes and hairstyles
http://slideshow.nbcnews.com/slideshow/today/strangers-who-look-like-twins-im-not-a-look-alike-50590127/

This entry was originally posted at http://firecat.dreamwidth.org/801316.html, where there are comments. I prefer that you comment on Dreamwidth, but it's also OK to comment here.

I asked Bertha at Size Queen Clothing to make me an Inverness cloak with a purple lining. She did a fabulous job and I love it. Have a look.
( five picciesCollapse )

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Here's The Guardian's list of "The 20 best glam-rock songs of all time," created in honor of a new exhibition (which I wasn't able to find info about) (I think it's this one: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/glam-performance-style).

http://m.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/01/20-best-glam-rock-songs-all-time


I don't know if they're really the 20 best, but I like enough of them well enough that I was inspired to create a playlist on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-OlnHsrXC-TcWbEl4yyPVk9ymR_ZnwN

(My favorite is "Ballroom Blitz".)

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