Sillybean

2008 reading list

I had a very quiet New Year’s. Allergies have been kicking my ass all week and I’m barely starting to feel human again, so I’m going to ramble at you about books for a while.

For the last four years or so I’ve made an effort to read more new fiction. I’d noticed that I was rereading a lot instead of branching out, and there were a lot of classics (both in sf and in general lit) that I’d never read. To that end, I started keeping a list of all the new-to-me books I’ve read.

In lieu of actual New Year’s content, here’s the 2008 list and some plans for 2009:

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Dear Closet:

What the #$@% have you done with all my Christmas gift bags?!

Nolove,
Me

Virtual Christmas cookies for you

For you, my imaginary invisible internet friends, here’s the virtual version of the holiday treats I gave out this year:

Chocolate chocolate chip cookies with dried cherries

Citrus Bars

Shortbread Sandwich Cookies
(with tart cherry, red plum, and raspberry)

Cheesecake Brownies

IMO, it’s the two chocolate recipes that get the gold stars, but the sandwich cookies have been surprisingly popular at the office.

Just testing, pls disregard.

I think I’ve hosed the LJ crossposter — or rather, I’ve upgraded it, and the new version is hosed.

ETA: Seems to be working, although I lost one post from LJ in the process. Technology, el yay.

Snow!

The weather service predicted snow overnight. Having been out to lunch in uncomfortably humid, mid-70s sunshine yesterday, I did not entirely believe them. Then the wind started whistling around the house.

Behold, what I woke up to:

Actual fluffy flakes rather than the usual coating of solid ice we usually get in winter! Awesome.

Which seems as good an excuse as any to link to pretty snowflake pictures, as captured by a snowflake photomicroscope.

ETA: More snow fell this afternoon, so we have fresh pictures, including the wee snowman Michael made on the back porch after dinner.

Whatever Superman is trying to do with his hips here, it’s not working.

Far be it from me to deny the cheese factor in the early Superman movies, or in the street dancing scenes that were so popular in the ’80s.

However, I feel confident in saying that only in a Bollywood film would it occur to anyone to combine the two:

I’ve just melted my brain. Please address future correspondence to my next of kin.

Ouch.

XKCD on relationships with insecure men, with devastating accuracy.

In other “ouch” news, I’ve had a low-level migraine for about a month. Time to locate the neurologist’s phone number, methinks.

Gifts for Writers

When people who do not write try to buy gifts for writers, they often get it wrong.

Books

Specific books — things you think your writer might enjoy — a bad choice in most cases. We’re picky as hell. We have piles of books we intend to read that we haven’t gotten around to. We also have weird research interests; the books we need are often obscure and/or hard to explain. And our taste in books is very different from other readers’ because we can’t turn off our mental editors, and we’re constantly nitpicking the things we read. The bestseller you love? Your writer probably can’t stand the author’s style.

Gift cards to bookstores are always welcome. There is never enough money in the world for all the books writers need; this gift never gets old.

Exceptions: if your writer has given you a list of wanted books, or keeps a wish list on Amazon, go for it.

If you’re sure your writer doesn’t have a copy of The Unstrung Harp, Or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel ($10 at Amazon), it’s one of the few books most writers — at least, writers seeking publication — will enjoy.

Reader stuff

Writers start out as readers, and we stay readers forever — even if we have less time for it as we spend more time writing.

Reading pillows ($20 at BasBlue or you can make your own) with pockets for bookmarks and reading glasses.

Thumb Thing for holding books open while you take notes, feed the baby, whatever.

Shelves

What’s better than books? Places to put books! Umbra makes awesome shelves: the Conceal shelf and the Flybrary. My local Bed, Bath & Beyond carries them.

Bookzup book easel ($5) or office-style stand is great for hands-free reading and note-taking.

Notebooks and Pens

Writers always want writing supplies, right? Wrong. Ix-nay on the fancy stationery. Writers are a neurotic bunch, and most of us feel like pretty notebooks are too nice for us to scribble in. Really.

Exceptions: ink refills for fountain pens, if you know what kind of pen your writer uses and which ink s/he wants, and Moleskine notebooks, if you know your writer uses them or needs a small notebook to carry around.

Sparklies

Typewriter jewelry ($36-110 at Uncommon Goods) for men and women: cuff links, bracelets, necklaces, earrings.

Banned book bracelets and necklace ($15-30 at Amazon). I have the bracelet; it never fails to elicit comments.

What else? Writers, add your wish list (or the things you dread receiving) here!

ETA: more gifts for writers, via Emma Bull: literary action figures, more jewelry, bookends, bookmarks, sealing wax, the personal library kit I love but have never been able to justify given that I use Delicious Library… on and on.

Another WordPress plugin: Assign Missing Categories

I’ve written another WordPress plugin as a result of one of my client projects. After I imported old blog posts from Blogger into WordPress, all the Blogger tags had become WordPress categories. That was a huge number of categories, so I used the category-to-tag converter on the whole lot of them… only to realize that quite a few of them were then left with no categories. Since a lot of WordPress code assumes that every post has at least one category, the situation quickly became untenable.

Rather than edit each post by hand, I whipped up some code to assign the default category to all the screwed-up posts. If you’re in the same boat, you can now download it and fix your life with the press of a button. Enjoy.

Election Night

You know, I don’t think I’d rewatch The West Wing often enough to justify dropping the cash for the entire series DVD set. (Probably.) But there are times when I’d like to have myself a little marathon, and tonight’s one of them.

Oh, well, I’ll watch TV instead.

Dan Rather: “The checkmark next to her name means we’re prepared to call the election in her favor.” Thanks for belaboring that point, Cap’n Obvious. You let me know when you’re ready to call those solid blue states for Obama.

PA? PA!

McCain has to be on oxygen right now, even knowing that a big chunk of his votes are in the West and report in a little later.

UK residents going by the Guardian’s reporting think Texas might be swinging blue, because the Guardian is reporting a few counties from downtown Austin, and they think the capital must be representative. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, how I wish.

Fuck me, Arizona is too close to call?! My schadenfreude knows no bounds.

9pm Central; fivethirtyeight.com has called it — and so far, its projection map has been dead on.

Miles and Miles and Miles

The reason I haven’t posted in a couple weeks? After kicking the cold I came home with, I started physical therapy for my ongoing neck and shoulder problems. (Turns out the muscles in my back are knotted up like strands of pearls. Not good.) The therapy is working, but it hurts to type afterward. And then I had the brilliant idea of going to BodyFlow… and I hurt my lower back. AGAIN.

The bright side of being flat on my back for nearly a week is that I got to blitz through the entire Miles Vorkosigan series. To everyone who recommended it: thank you, and I loved it just as much as you said I would, and I’m sorry it took me ten years to get here. Except that it appears Bujold is under contract for a new one, and by procrastinating I have cleverly avoided most of the agonizing wait between books. Procrastination pays, people!

Alas, this means I’m actually going to have to pay money for some Baen books. (I was reading library copies.) Damn, folks, those books are fucking ugly. None of the cover styles match. Nor is it possible to obtain the entire series in matching formats and sizes. Ugh. I’m tempted to wait until the new one comes out and see if they reissue everything, but unless Baen gets a new art director between now and then, the point is moot. Why, Baen? You’re so clever about ebooks. Why must you suck in all other ways?

Hmm. I’ve just noticed that the SFBC has the least offensive edition of Memory I’ve yet seen. Did they not do the rest?

The great thing about the series — or one of them, anyway — is that my writer-brain more or less shut itself off until the eleventh book. Ten whole books without my internal editor offering corrections or suggestions… do you know what bliss that is? But then I hit A Civil Campaign and the writer-brain flipped back on to critique some regressions in character development (or so they appeared to me on the first read), and it really got loud in the first half of Diplomatic Immunity. It settled down nicely once things started going boom again, but that was the last book, and now it’s muttering little blips of things back through the whole series. (”But if Miles had done that, why not…?”)

I’d utterly forgotten that the other Steph had been Tuckerized in A Civil Campaign until Lord Vorfolse popped up, and I nearly fell out of my chair.

I’m going back and selectively rereading now. Not quite ready to let go of Miles. The first few books are sheer fun, but the sequence from Brothers in Arms through Komarr is some of the best SF I’ve ever read.

Must give myself a break before I start in on her fantasy novels. Work is piling up around here!

Back from HighEdWeb ‘08

I’ve just returned from HighEdWeb ‘08. I came down with a cold the day I left and am just now starting to feel normal, so I was way less bouncy than usual and didn’t attend much of the after-hours stuff. Still had a great time, though.

If you’ve been following my Twitter stream, I imagine things got a little confusing there. Here’s where I was all week: (more…)

Debate thoughtstream

Mostly reprinted from Twitter:

Watching CNN’s little undecided-voter meter, it’s clear that people know she’s pandering every time she says “hockey mom” or “Joe six-pack.”

Every time she says “nucular,” a Democrat gets his voter registration card.

… did she just imply that she supports Cheney’s gross abuse of his authority? OH. No. She came right out and said it.

Biden is making good points, but he’s repetitive and didactic. He’s coming off like an irritated history professor.

Palin seems to be in love with the word “maverick” regardless of its actual meaning. I suspect she secretly thinks she’s running alongside Tom Cruise — the hot version from 1986 with the nifty aviator glasses.

Mercy movies?

Of all the recent werewolf/vampire/etc. series, Patricia Briggs’s is the last one I would have picked to be optioned for movies, since it’s perhaps the least fluffy.

I’m just having trouble picturing this. Peanut gallery, what say you?

Someone open the wormhole and get us out of here

We’ve landed in Bizarro-world:

Why Secretary Paulson asked for seven hundred billion dollars: “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.” Excuse me while I run screaming around the room here for a minute.

OK, I’m done. Next up: McCain is running around like a headless chicken, blowing off Letterman to “dash back to Washington”… and instead sitting for an interview with Couric, giving speeches in New York, and generally being everywhere but Washington. As usual, Scalzi has the guy’s number: “He is the Sir Robin of 2008 presidential election.”

And finally, PETA has lost its collective mind: The Breast Is Best! PETA Asks Ben & Jerry’s to Dump Dairy and Go With Human Milk Instead.