On living life to the fullest
- She: I know I should be traveling and parachuting and --
- Me: Hold on, hold on. Jumping out of airplanes is never something you should be doing. Unless it's the Second World War. And then you still shouldn't be doing it.
I will be at Necronomicon in St. Petersburg, Florida promoting Strategy of Numbers on October 21-23, and this is the ad that will appear in the program.
Strategy of Numbers, by Clint Irwin: Available now for $2.99 on Kindle and all other ebook formats. In print: $14.95 on amazon.com
If only someone would let me borrow a copy. I’m dirt poor so ordering online is not an option. Hope to get my hands on one of these in the future (when I have moneyz).
Thanks. Check your ask box ask box, there.
Obama vs. the Gorn
Sometimes I feel like the entire Obama administration has been like that classic Star Trek episode where he has been sent down to a planet to fight some stupid, nasty lizard-like gorn in a tri-corner hat called the Tea Party. The crew is allowed to watch the fight back on the Enterprise and a lot of us have felt like Spock over the years, knowing full well what Obama must do, but unable to do anything but hope he figures it out himself.
Lately, I’m reminded of a scene, which builds up to the climax where the gorn is hit with diamonds from a makeshift cannon built by Kirk. Watching Obama’s current, long-awaited push for anything, a willingness to fight publicly at all (in this case for the millionaire tax) I feel like Spock, when he saw Kirk finally getting the idea to build the cannon. “Fascinating.” he said, “Good. Good. He knows, Doctor. He has reasoned it out.”
It sure as hell took him long enough. But now comes the real suspense:
GORN: Captain, let us be reasonable. You have lost. Admit it to yourself. Stop running.
It is worthy of note that perhaps Obama has finally learned that the Gorn’s definition of “being reasonable” is exactly that of the Tea Party: “I shall be merciful and quick.”
MCCOY: Can he do it?
SPOCK: If he has the time, Doctor. If he has the time.
Yes, it may be too late, but more than time, he needs perseverance. If he is perceived to have knuckled under for another losing “compromise,” the death of his presidency will neither be quick, nor merciful.
Mindy Kaling on the women who only exist in romantic comedies | Flick Chicks (via rufustfirefly)
I like movie tropes and this is right on. Although it is typical of a female writer to at least imply that the things she does not like about a genre entirely generated by women to appeal to women might somewhere be a man’s fault. She talks about one trope as “essential to [a] male fantasy.” She’s a screenwriter, who wants to write rom-coms, yet doesn’t seem to understand the basic demographic she must write to, female consumers of female fantasies where guys are just props. It’s women who are the absolute worst with comments about women in movies like, “She’s fat, I think she’s fat, don’t you think she’s fat? I don’t think she’s pretty, do you think she’s pretty?” Kaling explains one trope as a “rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart.” There is always the implication that, of course, the male lead is normally realistic — not a cardboard cutout, who is insanely successful, good-looking, romantic, roguishly charming and a bit of a bad boy. He is a female fantasy, so the female lead must be “flawless” enough to “deserve” him, and the average female audience member can fantasize about being the “perfect” girl with the “perfect” man. It’s Hollywood, wall-to-wall bullshit because bullshit sells, and no woman wants to fantasize about being someone who looks like herself. It is called fantasy for a reason, and that means a character who is somehow always fashionable, just quirky enough to be “unique,” and weighs no more than 110 pounds.
(via clintirwin)
Conservatives are always trying to dictate to you who is American, and who is not, as if everyone’s rights and citizenship are based on conditions that only they are qualified to set. They talk about liberals, their fellow citizens, like they are enemy foreigners. Liberals never try to strip conservatives of their citizenship. They are mostly embarrassed and ashamed of them, the way anyone would be of a psychotic relative, but it would never occur to a liberal to stoop so low as to deny a conservative his birthright.
So, there’s Rick Perry, the bumbling clown with nice hair, Mitt Romney, who stands for…hair…and whatever else he has to stand for this week, Ron Paul, the pure and holy grumpy old man who remembers the good-ole-days of the 19th Century, Rick Santorum, the mean kid who likes to pick on “queers,” and the crazy-eyed psycho (do I have to mention her name?)
You don’t have to be in love with Obama anymore to vote for him.
nebachanezar replied to your post: katskradlexx replied to your post: A tattoo’ed,…Honestly there is a lot more Swedish politics and intrigue in it than hacking, I would say that’s less than 5 or 10%, and there’s another guy who is practically the main character.You know, the way it is marketed and talked about, you would never know that. I suspect the movie, being a movie, will likely be more like the marketing. But, true, I can’t say for sure. I’m sort of making a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire argument here, like where there is one lame cliche like, say the very title of your book, then there is likely to be plenty of others afterward. I suppose it is not actually fair of me, because I don’t care much for the thriller genre, anyway.
katskradlexx replied to your post: A tattoo’ed, goth-girl hacker helps solve a murder mystery…I’ve never read those books, but I kind of want to because the covers are pretty.I sort of never got past the premise of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I mean. just google “hacker girl,” you know — done to death. Since it came out, everyone’s been acting like it is such a fresh, current idea, but it’s really as dated as any 80s movie with a skier or something, who wants to get the girl and win in the end. I mean, even a dragon tattoo? With all the ink out there, a dragon would only mean she is as lame and unoriginal as one of the tramp-stamped legions, or girls with angel wings. But everybody has agreed to pretend otherwise. It is a good point about covers, though. I was always told how important they are to selling a book. Guess they are.
A tattoo’ed, goth-girl hacker helps solve a murder mystery…
I mean, isn’t that a tacky 90s cliche? Is everyone bending over backward to praise this book/movie as genius because the protagonist is a girl and they don’t want to look anti-feminist? I don’t know, cheezy is cheezy, I say.
Fragments #164
It is the only power she has ever known, and she likes power over others, that of a daughter over parents or that of a young, wayward girl over other relatives of any kind. Failing all else, there was always the ultimate trump card of every girl, sex. She never had any of these powers over me and she couldn’t understand it, so she became cruel. I exercised a power above all, I walked away, cut her off cold. In doing that, I took everything from her hands except one, that she could try to reconnect with me, re-establish contact, which would level the field between us. I love her still for what she was but I will never bow to what she is now. If she sees fit to speak to me again, it will be from the acts her own heart. I will be cordial, even let the stream of her scent and breath and soul trickle back into my heart. As long as she remains kind, a friend. I have no room for cruelty. If that’s all she has left for me, I will have lost nothing. I know what I bring to her table. I never asked anything from her. Now it comes to what she brings to my table. She can come back through my door any time, but now I will look closely at her offering, either a dagger or an olive branch. I will judge all else accordingly.
See, Native Americans gave those of us of European stock tobacco. We still don’t have much tolerance to it, so we get addicted and it kills us when we are old. This pisses us off because we expect to live forever. We gave the Native Americans alcohol. Since they still have little tolerance for it, it tends to destroy everything long before they have a chance to get old, but they’ve learned not to expect that anyway. It’s a trade like any other we ever made with them. They get the most worthless of the worthless land, and we get to resent them for being on welfare. We get the clean end of the stick, and they get the shit end. In small ways, though, they get some real revenge. Because they are not beholden to state laws on the reservations, they can set up casinos to exploit and ruin the lives of our gambling addicts. It’s a wonderful country when you think about it.
Peter Schiff Testifies Before Congressional Jobs Committee: Part 2
Part 1 is here.
(via evilteabagger)
Reading all the reblogs on this are hilarious, “why gold?” “why so obsessed with gold?,” because gold is actually worth something, that paper in your pocket isn’t. I bought a candy bar yesterday for $1.19, 5 years ago they were $.75, that’s the beginning of hyperinflation.
(via nebachanezar)
Well, actually gold is no more worth anything than paper money. Both have value because people believe it has value. You can’t eat gold, or wire buildings with it like copper, make I-beams and weapons with it it like carbon and steel. It is not vital to electronics like silver. In fact there are cultures like China that don’t place much value on gold outside of the fact that foreigners like it. I can’t understand the idea of backing something that has no real value with something that has no real value.
Oh, and Ford did that because he had unique economic ideas for a corporate head. He wanted to plow most profits into his product and workers. His board forced him to stop that. Government had nothing to do with it.
(via clintirwin)
I shouldn’t have to reply to this. You can’t print more gold. Simply put gold has value because there is less gold on earth than there is paper you can print money on. You can’t quantitatively ease more gold into existence.
A philosophical answer doesn’t cut it.
(via nebachanezar)
I don’t know why every “libertarian” thinks they get a free pass from rigorous argumentation just by being snippy, as if they are entitled not to be questioned. You stated that “gold is actually worth something, that paper in your pocket isn’t.” I simply pointed out the fact that gold’s only worth is the belief that it is worth something, which is the same as the paper. That is a valid argument.
If you want to know why gold standard will never come back, well: “the world supply of gold is too small to support a global economy with an annual output of $50tn a year. Secondly, the global economy is a lot more diverse than it was in the 19th century, when the scene was dominated by a handful of European nations plus America. Thirdly, pegging currencies to gold would almost certainly prove to be deflationary. Here, the lesson of Britain is apposite, since the 1925 decision by Churchill to return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity following pressure from the Bank of England governor Montagu Norman was one of the great economic blunders of the 20th century. Within six years, deflationary pressure had forced Britain to abandon gold.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/nov/08/gold-standard-strong-reasons-against-it
(via clintirwin)
(Source: antigovernmentextremist)
Man On The Street of the Day: The latest “Fifty People, One Question” clone stops fifty passersby on the streets of Chicago and asks them to recall their all-time favorite memory.
Care to share yours?
[colossal.]
My favorite memory is being a 17-year-old runaway to New York, and meeting this girl in the Bronx, whose family took me in like Hyde in That Seventies Show. And there was matzo brai on the stove, the smell of the eggs and the matzos slow-cooking. It was a Saturday, and I was singing the first line of Subterranean Homesick Blues, by Bob Dylan, which was supposed to go, “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine.” I had my own version which went: “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the matzo brai.” And my new mom was not a foster mom, but just someone who cared. She was laughing, and I felt this sense of family for the first time in ever, because all of her family got me and my humor, something I had never known before. Everything was good and nothing hurt. Funny how it’s always the little things that loom large.
Late night thoughts on the impossible standards we put on female characters
….I’ve heard plenty of men, some even approaching me, expressing nervousness about writing female characters. This shouldn’t be an issue. You’re not writing about Hindus in 19th century Bengal, you’re just writing about women. You know, half the planet. The elusive “other half” should not be so elusive and mysterious, and yet it is. For two reasons, in my humble opinion:
One: the female point of view is wildly underrepresented in fiction aimed at general audiences (I’d wager at least 95% of main characters for general audience films are male- case in point, all Pixar films). This means we grow up in a culture where almost the only female points of view we see are from… Disney. Eesh.
Two: the pressure you get from everyone else. It seems like for most folks the attitude is, “why bother?” when it’s such a pain to write a main female character, not to mention in this world we live in of Hollywood tentpoles, no one is going to see Transformers if the main character happened to be female. Cause nobody goes to those movies for the robots.
But I digress; this isn’t about Hollywood, this is about my inability to put one word to the page confidently.
There are plenty of people like me who bitch and moan about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in fiction, but when it comes time to put my money where my mouth is, I find myself unable. I’ll have to eventually, of course, or I will fail the course. But I feel that this is another symptom of hypersensitivity; characters can’t just live and breathe naturally, if they’re female, no, they must be female first and character second, meaning that they have to serve their purpose in the greater culture rather than their purpose in the story. They must be a STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER that is realistic and fair and does not represent the patriarchy or something.
Even after forcing out almost a thousand words in half an hour I still don’t know what to write. See? I can write fast. But only when I’m openly being a hypocrite.
Thanks a lot, touchy liberal fiction-culture. Now I’m too hyper-sensitized to even write my own gender.
I edited the original post in the interest of space, and the whole thing is worth a read, but I just wanted to add this input: There’s one thing she missed, and it is at the very root of the problem. Any given female is going to be ten times more complicated at any given minute than a male, so writing a good, believable, distinct female takes the energy and commitment of writing, say, five males. Simply having a character who is female enter the room changes the entire dynamic of a scene. All males are automatically shifting into some variation of there’s-a-girl-around mode, some combination of deferential, showy and charming. Even if there already were other females around, whatever was happening has just raised up one level of unpredictability, as the new female is fitted into the complex personal dynamic of each of the other females. If you just default to the female tropes in the interest of simplicity, you will find that writing lots of male tropes will never catch as much heat as writing single female one. Worse, no matter how strong a female character you have, someone, usually a female, will leap up to lecture you on how it “objectifies” or “perpetuates stereotypes,” or some such. Guys are default, gals are “representation” or “role models” and the like. Put simply, guys are comfortable feeling like soldiers, vital cogs in a machine, girls like to feel special, which means fewer but each uniquely important. With all of this to take on and limited time and energy, even female writers like J.K. Rowling tend to avoid too much trouble by populating their worlds with males and a few, special females into which they have put a good deal of thought. Of course, you can try to avoid gender problems altogether and just write characters who somehow are neither male or female, but you better be prepared to have people find your work boring.
