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I knew some about his work. The sad thing was my first reaction was personal. I almost manifested Stevens-Johnson Syndrome in reaction to a drug treatment. It's a terrible thing. My sympathy for his death was all the more for knowing what I do of the manner of it.
I can only hope the world gets more people like him.
Big shoes
All of Fred Clark's articles originally posted on The Slacktivist website have been moved (with the original comments) to his new home at Patheos. http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/2010/06/21/big-shoes/
Mazel Tov.
Anticipation/Worldcon travel advice: Exit 31 on the Northway, the Elizabethtown/Westport exit
For those driving to the Montreal WorldCon up 87 (aka the Northway), I suggest you make time for a stop over at exit 31, the Westport-Elizabethtown exit. Both Westport and Elizabethtown are 4 miles off the Northway. Also, if you are taking Amtrak to the WorldCon, Westport has an Amtrack station....
Nice to know things are going well.
I am, of course, making the quasi-obligatory thanks post; having just found that you keep a blog. I could go on about the whys, but I suspect that gets tiresome.
The roundedness of Spenser was the selling point (lo, those many years ago), and the sub-threads of constancy (baseball, cookery, poetry, freindship) were what kept me coming back.
I'm glad to see the blog is much the same.
An Harbinger of Spring
As the swallows return to Capistrano (usually), I am back, in the spring, with a commercial message. As you may have noticed NIGHT & DAY (the most recent Jesse Stone novel) had a 5 week run on the NYTimes best seller list, and the paperback of STRANGER IN PARADISE had some face time there too. ...
I didn't know he wasn't a major player in the right-wing comment factory.
I just knew he pissed me off.
Shorter Michael Coren
Women are too innocent, gentle and graceful to be good soldiers. Now get in the kitchen and make me a sangwich. Lengthy rebuttal by Damian at The Torch. RELATED: I don't suppose it occurs to Dawg that much (probably even most) of the dextrosphere doesn't bother checking the daily snoozefest of...
I confess, I don't understand this at a visceral level. It may be that 25 years of public "performance" as a writer and photographer burned it out of me, but I don't recall this sort of crisis of motivation.
It's strange to me that I get direct feedback, but it's also not. When I was a journalist I'd get letters (or, depending on the subject, the paper would; that's a strange set of distinctions).
When I started blogging the level of intimacy was greater, but years in Usenet (and before that in BBS, and Amateur Press Associations) had me used to people making very direct comments.
I think, actually, the thing which I most wish I got was more feedback and interaction, because much of the time I feel my photography is too much mine, and the viewing audience is offered images with the understanding that these are mine, and if they like them swell.
Which is what I prefer, when I'm working, but the idea that I am my only audience is anathema too.
That my photoblog (http://www.terrencekarneyphotograhy.com) inspires no comment (which is partly structural and I am working with my web developer to make easier) is probably my greeatest regret.
Good luck with this, it's a rewarding, but tough, thing to have such a place.
A Thousand Voices
I believe every artist invariably reaches a crisis point as more and more people see their work. We ask ourselves, are we being true to our art and ourselves or are we pandering to what we think we know our audience to want? Are we more concerned with the lay audience or critics? Fellow artis...
Yeah, but that's manageable. If one has 3/4s of a brain, the only trace is going to be to an area.
Don't use home, don't use work, create the account from someplace anyone has access, never use it from home, or work. If it really matters, get a second hand-laptop, and use it for the clandestine stuff, and never from home, never from work.
Don't use it to log onto anything which traces to you.
But that does limit things, and most people don't have the discipline to practice that sort of tradecraft.
TK
. . . and an Internet Risk for Adults
From the Christian Science Monitor: On the Internet, everyone may find you're a dog: Anonymity on the Web may seem attractive, but how you use it raises interesting ethical dilemmas. Avoiding the use of pseudonyms online is not just good advice for public figures, it works for everyone. The free...
OT, but something I stumbled across that I thought might interest you.
White Orchid
and
Remember "White Orchid" and "Blood Rose"
It's a guy who claims to be building a group/groups to "rescue" girls trapped in the sex trade in SE Asia, and take them to Islands in the tropical Pacific for rehabilitation.
There's some links there.
It doesn't seem to me they have a hope in hell of getting anywhere near pulling any of this off, but he's a case.
Greg Bear sighted on The Daily Show
I'm in Houston in a hotel room getting changed after a dip in the hotel pool with the kids. I turned on the TV to find something for the kids to watch while I get dressed, and saw a few seconds of sf writer Greg Bear on the Daily Show with John Stewart. (I just saw Greg a couple of days ago in Se...
This was a big deal over at Pandagon.
Seems the problem (and it is a problem) is there was another allegation; of his taking part in an actual rape, which wasn't winnable.
So the DA decided to take advantage of a statutory claim (and one which was meant to punish same-sex interaction, since oral copulation with a minor has a greater penalty than coitus).
Which is, even if he did the rape, wrong. Convict him for what he did, don't abuse a bad law to get around a weak case.
Susie Interviews Jamie Gillis
"A man is as faithful as his options" — Jamie Gillis Mr. Gillis is a former mime, Columbia grad, Shakespearean actor, and very nice Jewish boy— and better known as one of the most influential actors and innovators in the history of American blue movies. He also isn't the type to seek out in...
I've taken a few times, I always come up Benford.
TK
So I took the Which SF Writer Are You Quiz . . .
And it tells me that I'm Benford, which is interesting, because he's a good friend of ours and calls a lot just to chat about life and the state of the world. Actually, in terms of personality quirks, I can see a certain resemblance between Benford and I, particularly in the department of a cer...
My baseline is about 400. When I make a post of note, I'll get spikes to about 1,000, and occaisionaly (when I get heavy linkage) as much as 1,500.
I figure this has to do with how I blog. I figure that people like me (with a steady readership, and topical posts, on a semi-regular basis) have similar patterns.
TK
Blog Traffic Volatility (Revised Iron Blogger Edition)
Until very recently, I thought all blogs had traffic patterns rather like mine: that there was a certain baseline level of traffic punctuated by huge spikes. For non-ego related reasons I happened to compare my traffic with that of some other sites, and discovered that my traffic pattern seems to...
I recall opening the L.A. Times one morning and reading that a source on a contentious story (not just that it was a long running sort of local feud, on land use, but she'd lied to me, by omission, which put things in a strange light as the story flopped, with only a short time to deadline) had been shot in her car.
It was a very ugly divorce, and a pitifully inept murder for hire.
I'm sorry.
TK
Peggy Perez-Olivo
A teaching assistant at my son's school was murdered. Because she was a neighbor of the Clintons' and her husband's dramatic account of the event, it is all over the national news. My son knew her and says she was a nice lady who sometimes helped him at school a couple of years ago. I knew her...
The Army ain't fond of the idea either, not that this administration really listens to us.
TK
The War on Weather
Back on September 6th, the new War on Weather was a Tom Tomorrow political cartoon. [If that link doesn't work, try this one.] But the Bush administration is running a little low on ideas, so they are turning to some unusual sources. For example, the other day Bush's speech writers cribbed fro...
I dislike the word refugees, because it implies they aren't going back.
Our Own Chernobyl
BAG News Notes has been doing a nice job of analyzing media photos emerging from New Orleans. Certainly, most of the Katrina images last week were unvarnished and pulled no punches. At the same time, however, I'm wondering how much of what we saw was still edited according to the taste of a ma...
This pisses me off.
There isn't a whole lot more to say, I've said it all elsewhere.
I can say I'd probably me more likely to shoot one of them, than I would a run of the mill, "looter."
Black Water
[UPDATE: See new post, Jeremy Scahill: "one of the Blackwater mercenaries told us that he had been deputized by the governor of Louisiana."] I've spent days scrutinizing satellite photos of New Orleans, helping people check out their houses. Inevitably, if they or their neighbors had a swimming ...
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