... Okay, one meteor sighting is cool, but two in as many weeks? Y'all, space is stalking me.

I would invest in a bunker, but my room is pretty much one already.

This one was definitely not a bolide, though. It was more sparkles and less flash, but by damn, it was still enough to get me to utter an impressed curse.

Trekspammin’ got me looking for “Worst Job In Starfleet,” and goddamn if it hasn't fallen off the internet.

I was so depressed I had to watch my favorite scene from the original series, barring pretty much the entirety of “Amok Time” (the “OMGYAY” moment alone ...). And now I share it with you:



And people wonder what made TOS so damn great.

Signs that I have been in fandom too long:

In the Star Trek (2009) Rifftrax, when Mike Nelson follows up Baby Spock’s little speech about “Whatever our lives were before Nero changed the timeline” with “We could all be GAY now!”, my thoughts were as follows:

1. How is that different?
2. Oh. He is probably being all ironical and shit, because how can this Enterprise crew know that originally …
3. God dammit.

Actually, as far as Kirk’n’Spock goes, this is only a sign that I have seen the original series. But extending it to the rest of them may be a bit of a stretch.

It is gratifying to know I'm not the only one who spotted Spock Prime's dentures. I guess two hundred years of lousy teeth caught up with him.

Also, the answer to the question “Why is Baby McCoy on the bridge?” is: Spock Prime told them to just let the poor doc have a chair, because McCoy Prime’s got a little folding chair set up in the turbolift so he can pop right out and inject comments* whenever necessary. I should think that was obvious.


*Or sometimes injections.

Considered getting Dad a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE apron for Christmas, in honor both of the fact that he likes to grill things and the way he refuses to eat any food he does not think has been cooked thoroughly through to its core.*

I was stopped, however, by the third paragraph on the apron, because it does not follow Dad’s philosophy, as summed up by the following conversation:

DAD: This seasoning needs more salt! And rosemary!
MOM: I am not so sure …
DAD: Trust me; I am French! I know these things.
AMELIA: What? You’re not French, you liar! You’re English and Italian.
DAD: Well, I should be French. I have the cookbook and everything.

So once again, I am back on the hunt for a gift for him. Maybe I’ll buy him some bad monster movies from the ’50s. At least we can agree that you don’t need to season monsters before cooking them with fire.


*His philosophy for this is that he does not want it to resemble, in any way, the stuff he works with in the OR. Fair enough, but it does make for some rather overwrought backseat cooking. “HAVE YOU COOKED THE CHICKEN ENOUGH? CHICKEN SHOULD COOK FOR 40 MINUTES, YOU KNOW.** AND IS THAT PORK BROWN YET?”

**This is one of The Rules, as defined by Dad’s obsessive-compulsive personality. It is true for whole roast chickens down to chicken cubes in stir fry. Don’t tell him we tend to fudge it sometimes so the chicken will not be jerky.

Dangitall, my family gets tuna casserole tonight, and they can either eat it or make their own damn dinner. I was going to get all fancy up in our new cookbooks, but after about twenty-five minutes alternately leafing through one of them and staring at a single page therein, I realized that fancy meals were not going to happen tonight. As it was, I had to give myself a pep talk to even get through making the casserole, since I felt my level of food-prepping energy was more along the lines of:

1. Buy pizza bagel
2. Eat pizza bagel*

Maybe I should invest in some serious cooked spinach or raisins as a side, because this lack of energy is getting rather troublesome.

At least my pep talk to myself consists of chanting "Out of ze vay! Out of ze vay! I kyan do zis! I kyan do zis!" There's nothing like the image of Pavel Andreyevich "Hoozum Wuzzum" Chekov scampering down a starship corridor to perk one up.


*Pizza bagels are not, strictly speaking, part of the optimal PCOS-oriented tailored-for-insulin-resistance low-GI diet, but I reserve the right to a Captain Barbossa approach to diet plans, and anyway they are fucking delicious.

BRAIN’S WTF CENTER: OMG WTF! BLOOD! THAT’S BLOOD! WHY IS THERE BLOOD COMING FROM THERE SO MUCH BLOOD NOW IS THE TIME TO PANIC.

RATIONALITY and EXPERIENTIAL MEMORY, in unison: Because you’re a girl, you dumb broad!

AMELIA: Oh … oh, right. I suppose I am.


Yeah, it’s been one of those weeks, where past experience and learning is having a little bit of a delay catching up with the current sensory input. I hate weeks like that.

Stayed up late last night alternately watching my siblings play Beatles Rock Band as I wrote and watching some of the first season of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.* It’s good to have my brother home.

For some reason I’ve been more listless than usual this week, and haven’t even bothered with the friends page—so if something you want me to know about is somewhere back there, let me know. Even my writing has slowed down—gods help me, I’m on the last episode chapter and it feels like I’ll never get to the end. I really hope this slowness is due to its being the first time and, like with other craft-style projects, you get faster as you sort of figure out what you’re doing.

Doesn’t help that I’m going through one of those increasingly frequent phases of THIS IS A TERRIBLE BOOK NO ONE WILL READ IT WHY EVEN TRY. At least I’ve learned to plow through that. But the rising insistence of the Obligatory Giant Young Adult Fantasy Epic to be put together is on the same cycle for once, and with both forces combining it’s hard to keep motivated to finish Doctors!. I just keep telling myself that once I get the raw composition done, I can scribble all I want about the OGYAFE whilst I try to edit Doctors! for continuity.

At least I have too many projects, instead of too few. And my Sharpies will get me through this, because with colorful Sharpies, one can overcome anything!


*In related news, I think I have partially figured out why everything comes back around about two decades later—the generation that was very small right when those decades were happening starts to discover the strange sensation of having a past, and starts to wonder what the hell that early past was all about, anyway, and then suddenly the late 80s and early 90s have risen out of the grave like some sort of hideous neon zombie, dressed in backwards baseball caps and ready to hit the arcade to the accompaniment of synthesizers and drum machines.

Late, but I forgot to post this when it came out.

Made me laugh, though.

'80s babies, unite!

So one of the hazards of working at a Liberry: I have stacks of books all over my room.

At least I’m not buying them, though, and the space they take up ’round here is temporary. Man, I love me some Liberry.

Anyway, I’m sitting around reading books when I’m not trying to write them for the last couple of days, so not much bloggy thoughtfulness. Instead, you get a picture of Kyōko in her new school uniform:



I still need to get her some good socks.

I tried to model it after images of actual uniforms I found online.* The pleats in the skirt were tremendous fun, but I think they already need ironing again.

Figures I do the short-sleeved one and now it’s winter, too.

Back to the books!

We have achieved Winter!

And as the snow settles around our house, a slightly better mood settles around me—I’ve never known why, but hey, who’s complaining? Sometimes I really love living on a mountain.

Today’s installment of Ailments You Never Even Would Have Suspected Might Exist:

Athlete’s Boob.

Yes, it is yet another drawback to having boobs that florp down over the skin of one’s torso—apparently my sub-mammarian region is warm, moist environment capable of supporting life. Sort of like deep-sea vents, except instead of studying it to determine the myriad exciting ways life can support itself, I am trying to destroy the whole ecosystem with spray-on athlete’s foot powder,* because sometimes Science takes a back seat to OMGWTFKILLITBLARGH. If that doesn’t work I will have to move on to Plan B, which at this point involves that staple of all movies where you have to kill the alien life form: flamethrowers.

As you can imagine, I’m rather hoping Plan A works.


*The can says “Family Size,” which makes me kind of nervous, to be quite honest.

Happy birthday, acrossthelake! I hope it is a good one!

I guess not everyone's first thought last night was "OMG HOLY SHIT METEOR." A lot of people, like Mom'n'Dad, saw the flash without seeing the thing itself and had no idea what it was. I got to feel all smart and note that it was probably an ambitious chunk of the Leonid dust cloud.

Anyway, here's the best report I could find on it, and here's a sillier one (that does dickheaded autoplay on its videos, so you might want to turn your sound down) with some stuff from Clark Planetarium and a lot of "I SEEN IT WITH MAH OWN TWO EYES" type reporting,* not to mention quite a lot of article comments of either the "THE END IS NIGH" or "THE GOVERNMENT IS KEEPING THE TRUTH FROM US" variety. (KSL is one of those sites for comments.)

Check out the videos, especially the ones from the first link--they're really something.


*My favorite part of that video report is right at the end when the correspondent follows up her interview with NASA guy Patrick Wiggins with this gem: "... He says it's possible meteorites fell elsewhere ... he says It can't hurt to look ... if you do happen to find a piece that looks just like a rock, he says it's worth THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. Back to you." It's also in the text of the article, but with less force.

Really, I can only see people hearing the news that ORDINARY ROCKS IN YOUR BACKYARD ARE WORTH THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ending well, can't you?

YOU GUYS.

I JUST SAW THE BIGGEST FUCKING METEOR I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE GODDAMN.

IT LIT UP THE SKY.

IT WAS A PERFECT VIEW FROM MY WINDOW AND IT WAS ALL BRIGHT ORANGE STREAKING STRAIGHT DOWN.

I MEAN HOLY SHIT THAT THING WAS BIG.

WOW!

I have started using the Professor Layton Puzzle Indexes as translation exercises for Rredŕa. The simple descriptions and instructions in them helps me hammer out a lot of basics of the syntax, and they’re fun, too. The only downside is that some of them are visual—not too big a problem for an exercise—or culturally based, like the clock ones, and would require a lot more explaining to the aliens who speak the language.* But hey, a lot of arhods like puzzles, so it seems like a logical way to go.

Also, I'm trying to decide if I want to make a descendant of my original Luam language. I love Luamavan—it’s my first real attempt at a conlang, and it’s got the most extensive lexicon. But given that I started writing it as a tween, I must admit that it’s pretty … well … stupid. It needs the same kind of polish a smart tween's first attempts at a sweeping epic novel would. I figure I have the makings of a good proto-language; I can do some sound changes and syntax changes and get myself a good diachronic conlang, but it’s kind of a big endeavor, so I’m shying away from it.

At least I have my spreadsheets, though! Oh, Excel, why didn’t I realize you existed when I was but a wee conlanger?


*This is also why recipes are hard to translate—no equivalent words for any of the stuff, so it winds up having a lot of Rredŕized English words. (“… zata she vızengha bra chicken pe brumyen …”) Not to mention their extremely sparing use of plant matter …

All right, so the poll from my last entry has been very interesting, and has turned up a lot about what people define as a “geek.” Bonus points to those of you who supplied the original definition, too. From the poll, we can establish that a geek is one of two things:

1. Someone who bites the heads off of small animals in a sideshow, or
2. A person with a vast knowledge of and enthusiasm for a particular, often non-mainstream subject or subjects (most often technical, mathematical, scientific, or speculative-fiction related, though there are subsets of “literary geeks,” “drama geeks,” etc.). Anayltical. Pedantic. These traits may reach the point of impeding social abilities.

I’d argue that a lot of the second definition has become the basis for a subculture of such people, with its own definitions of “cool” and its own rules of interaction, but that’s a discussion for another day. Right now what’s important is that neither of these definitions seem to fit with this book I picked up—Marybeth Hicks’ Bringing Up Geeks.

I admit, I saw the title and was rather intrigued by the idea. Is it for geek parents trying to indoctrinate their kids? Is it one of those “so your kid is a geek; now what?” books? I was curious enough to pick it up.

Turns out the book is, above all else, a study in cognitive dissonance. Mostly it’s your standard sanctimonious book telling you that “MY kids are great; you should raise them like I do!”, with some good advice and some totally bizarre advice. The idea is that raising kids to be uncool and unpopular is actually better for them in the long run—something I don’t really contest. But Hicks keeps referring to this as raising “geeks,” and the word pops up all over with very little recognizable connection to what a geek is except for the part about being unpopular with the in crowd, so that my main reaction to the book is, “You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” She could have taken the word “goth” and it would have made just as much sense.

Because she has decided her kids were geeks, Hicks goes on to redefine “geek” to make her kids feel better about it:

Genuine, Enthusiastic, Empowered Kid.

Okay, well, we geeks aren’t quite as self-esteem-less as people make us out. So let’s consider the evidence. I looked through the book, so let’s see how her ten pillars of “geek”dom actually correspond with, y’know, geeks:

• Brainiac – Okay, this is fair enough. She waffles a bit about the difference between a kid interested in pursuing knowledge and the kid who has all the answers, but yeah, interest in learning is geeky enough.
• Sheltered – When Hicks says “sheltered,” she means it in the sense of cyberspace—her kids aren’t allowed to instant message, and she has to approve every website they visit. No blogs, no social networking sites. She also keeps tabs on her kids’ movies, feels that they should have limited exposure to popular culture, and finds video games distasteful.
• Uncommon – I think she’s trying to say you should let kids like what they like, but really this chapter is a rant about consumerism, Bratz dolls, midriff clothes, and not buying the shit everyone else is buying. Geeks are not consumers, she tells us. She has apparently never been to Think Geek.
• “A Kid Adults Like” – This is about teaching kids good manners and social skills, so that adults will be impressed with how polite they are. Because geeks are the kinds of people who charm everyone.
• “A Late Bloomer” – This chapter is not about the scrawny kid with the cowlick who doesn’t hit puberty till their sophomore year at college, if ever. Instead, it’s about willful late-blooming: it advises you that ten-year-old girls should probably not wear g-strings and go around having oral sex, even if they do have to wear training bras.
• “A Team Player” – Specifically, playing on a sports team. She has some pretty common sense advice about not turning into a crazed win-obsessed parent. I spent the chapter snickering madly at the words “geek” and “sports” being put together without fuss.*
• A True Friend – The usual. Friends are people who you can trust etc., etc..
• A Homebody – Someone who is comfortable with family.
• Principled – Geeks are the same thing as being Nice People, she contends, who care about others and never, ever succumb to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory even if they are allowed on the internets. They also never go to bookstores and read the comic books without buying them.**
• Faithful – As far as I can tell, you need to have a religion (she quickly says she means any religion and then carries on about how everyone else gets God’s Plan wrong) if any of the other stuff will work, because what kind of crazy person has morals and values without religion? She equates doing religious things like praying and going to church with being geeky.

Right, those are her ten ideas—not terrible suggestions, for the most part. But is it, y’know, geeky? Well, let me just tabulate the scores on my graphing calculator here, run it through the Geek Test, and …

Oh, fuck it. Madam, I hate to break it to you, but while your kids may be well-rounded and imbued with values stronger than the popular kids, they are not geeks.

Geekdom is not just a general label for someone outside of the mainstream. We are not defined by what we are not—it’s not just about being unpopular. There is a very specific set of positive characteristics involved in being a geek. We have a subculture—and we have sub-subcultures. We have a jargon, our own pop culture, our own material culture, a shared set of cultural icons, a specific history. We have jokes, songs, unofficial holidays, even superstitions. As far as we’re concerned, we’re not uncool—we just have our own ideas about what is cool. We have our own intra-subculture battles, we have a particular set of social rules, and we also have our share of total fuckwads. Many of us may even have some varying degrees of an upbringing like the one you have outlined up there—but that upbringing alone does not a geek make. That’s reserved for something more specific.

Find some other way to describe your outsider kids.

I hear “twerp” is free.***


*I won’t say that in my experience all geeks avoid sports with the same vigor they’d use to avoid a chainsaw-wielding madman, but I will say that most geeks seem to prefer solitary sports.

**Not that I know anyone who does this regularly.

***Unless you want to go with one of the possible etymologies of the word, which doesn’t conjure up images of beheaded animals but does bring with it the possibility that Christopher Tolkien will attempt to bring death and ruin to you and all you hold dear.

Okay, dudes, I need a bit of help here for a round of Just How Clueless Is This Author? Today’s contestant is a book I found in the library, but to tell you what it’s about may contaminate this tremendously scientific experiment. And by god we are going to do it scientifically, by which I mean we are going to poll whoever happens to be reading this blog. After I tabulate results, I will let y’all know just how clueless that author was—and, of course, what the hell I’m talking about.

But first:

Poll #1486028
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33

What is a "geek"?

Oh, and I didn’t post yesterday about the coolest thing of all—water on the moon! My moon-colony smoothie bar is only one small step for man away now …

I love how obsessive American Girl has gotten over making sure you understand that its products are FOR PRETEND. And I’m not just meaning that hyperbolically. The descriptions are filled with things like “Chrissa’s picnic table comes with a pitcher of pretend pink lemonade, a pretend cake, some pretend sandwiches, and a box of inspirational sayings to remind Chrissa to pretend that she gives a second thought to her friends' existence.” The catalog goes out of the way to insist that your doll is not getting a tiny, working camera, she will probably not be receiving an actual miniature watermelon, and there is a reason the bathtub comes with an empty bubble bath bottle and PLASTIC bubbles.* It’s ALL PRETEND DO YOU UNDERSTAND.

I would say that this is something of an insult to kids’ intelligence, because when I was eight they did not warn me that Molly’s cake was FOR PRETEND, but I managed to work it out on my own and not, y’know, break a tooth on it. However, the very fact that they didn’t used to specify this suggests to me that somewhere between then and now, a whole lot of dolls showed up at the Doll Hospital caked with jam or cheez whiz or, well, cake; or the doll was shampoo-soaked with rusted-shut eyes; it’s possible there were also some complaints about the objects that turn out just to be props. (“I bought this llama from you and it seems to be a FAKE! My daughter is so disappointed!”) ETA: And, as pointed out, I forgot to clarify the most obvious one: kids actually eating the pretend food. I do figure that it's probably where the most lawsuits came from, but I still can't get myself to really believe it.

And with that, extrapolated from just that single word “pretend” scattered all over the catalog, we can infer that we are all very glad we don’t work at American Girl’s customer service department. Imagine getting the call that made that word necessary.


*Entertainingly, the syringe that comes with the Cone Of Shame kit for the doll’s ailing (pretend!) pet is not listed as a pretend item. I hope this has led to a few embarrassing misunderstandings.

This.

The best way to learn to write is to read.

I would add that your other best tool would definitely be a blank wall. Or a game like Tetris or Minesweeper, if you are the sort of person who can do it with just a little of your mind. But no matter what form you give it, the Blank Wall is one of the most important parts of any writer’s toolkit.

Probably the package of fine-tip Sharpies is just me, though.