"This is part of the reason that Americans are bewildered when non-Americans have opinions about all Americans. On any apartment corridor in the States you can have, per door, a different language, philosophy, level of education, financial condition ... How in the Nine Circles does anyone generalize from that?" -- from the Television Tropes & Idioms wiki entry, 'American Political System'
"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still." -- Edward Estlin Cummings (aka E.E. Cummings or e.e. cummings; b. 1894-10-14, d. 1962-09-03)
[To my countrymen: happy Independence Day! (Happy birthday to
a nation I love enough to want to help make it as great as it thinks
it is, and could be.) And also, happy birthday to
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justgus37!]
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by train. for an entire day. back and forth. sometime i will mark the stations ive been to on a map and see how many loopdeloops ive done.
they kicked me off the train at 4 am in croatia because i didnt have a visa. i bet you've never been convoyed out from a train before. the problem with slovenia is its lack of trains that go to budapest more than once a day. 10 mins before i get there.
16 hours more than the original 16, 12 transfers, and innumerable amazing people later.
im in budapest.
its been an experience.
:)
have some things to finish tomorrow, thank goodness i'm off of work
:)
Valis
Thought and Memory
New words: 2,691
Total words: 90,692
Listening/watching: Tea Party - Edges of Twilight
Total words for the year: 264,392
And it’s done.
This draft is now complete. I definitely need to work on the ending, as well as go back and do some minor edits to the earlier sections. But it is finished, and I wrote “The End” with great satisfaction.
I think I’ll set it aside for a few weeks and go back and work on Shaede a little (just doing some minor edits to the beginning as well as proofing it again) and get some queries for that winging their way out into the world. Then I’ll come back to Thought and Memory and do those minor edits and send it out to a few beta readers.
But for now, it’s done.
[cross-posted from my website]![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
when i sleep without it, i feel absolutely no different. i don't even feel like i've been affected by the cpap at ALL since i've started using it. i don't know how long it takes for most people to feel better with it, but i feel like i'm gradually starting to hate it more and more. what is going on!!!
p.s. does anyone have any easier cleaning tips? i'm terribly lazy so i hate getting up and filling the little tub with soap and washing every piece. i haven't even washed the hose in so long, which is probably gross. i know i'll probably just have to suck it up and DO IT but you know, if you have any tips it'd be helpful haha.
- Mood:annoyed.
- 17:18 Are you substituting IMs, tweets, and other social networking for email? tinyurl.com/68rjgg
Automatically copied from http://www.twitter.com/jenk3 via LoudTwitter cause it's easy :)
sleepy- Location:Purcellivlle
- Mood:
hopeful
- 06:50 Nothing to see here: Uno: the dual-wheeled motorized unicycle tinyurl.com/4qrjrr #
- 06:50 Nothing to see here: Getting frustrated with ScribeFire tinyurl.com/6js823 #
- 12:10 @macrossactual: identi.ca had a planned server migration, hence the temporary inability to resolve #
- 16:24 from identi.ca so, I can has Tweets from identica via twitterfeed? tinyurl.com/6gbdf5 #
- 16:54 Nothing to see here: Linkucopia tinyurl.com/6fg62l #
- 16:54 from identi.ca: Body mod via laser printer... what the fuck will they think of next? http:.. tinyurl.com/59jbca #
- 16:54 from identi.ca: retweet from @gnat: ur1.ca/2v tinyurl.com/6jxtjp #
- 18:09 @sassmo: the Declaration of Independence could be funny. If somebody said they believed it was the basis of our current govt, I'd laugh... #
- 18:52 from identi.ca: reading the Declaration of Independance... How did the "free and independant states" become the "un.. #
- 18:52 from identi.ca: identi.ca doesn't warn when your IM post exceeds 140 characters. Nor does it seem able to display t.. #
- 22:22 from identi.ca: Twitter is flying the Fail Whale again. I'm so glad identi.ca is here! #
- 22:22 from identi.ca: It's raining buckets of fail... Twitter, Twhirl, and apparently identi.ca too #
- 22:52 from identi.ca: @bentpipe: not sure what's going on here. The post I thought didn't go through did. But IM seems to.. #
- 23:22 from identi.ca: And here is my very last post for the year... I start a new year in the morning. Night all. #
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
If there are any problems with the comic or website, or if you have any questions, comments, or complaints you would like to address directly to Randy, please email him at choochoobear@gmail.com.
I have scoured the neighborhood, contacted the ACCESS animal hospital down Lake City Way, am checking the Seattle Animal Shelter stray hotline and have posted on Craig's list. She was not willing to have pictures taken. Any other ideas?
- Mood:
frantic
A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, Five Myths of New Media, and consider how those predictions panned out. Good idea, here goes…
1. Business use is driving the growth of the Internet
That myth is long since busted — I called it right. The action, and most of the traffic volume, are in social networking and P2P and other on-line communities not tied to someone’s line of business. Personal use dominates even in measures as simple as tallies of broadband connections; “home” accounts vastly outnumber “business” accounts.
Note: I’m not claiming business use is unimportant, but then I wasn’t claiming that in my original article either. It’s just not the main driver of volume growth today, and probably never has been.
In truth, I think I was actually more prescient than almost anyone else about this, at least anyone else who was willing to speak up in public.
The Internet is the future of mass entertainment and news.
In my prediction I was being derisive of video-on-demand services and the notion that old-media moguls could shoehorn the Internet into a dumb, centralized broadcast medium, issuing entertainment and news over an essentially one-way pipe. Busted: that hasn’t happened either, my negative prediction was correct.
Eleven years later the Internet looks like the future of news, but in a different way than I anticipated in 1997. What it’s done instead is turned everyone who wants to be into a publisher. I didn’t make that positive prediction, but then nobody else did either.
So I’d say I got this half right; I was correct in terms of the questions we knew how to ask in 1997, but I didn’t quite foresee a more radical development that would change the questions.
The techno-literacy problem can be solved in isolation.
Despite the more general title, I was mostly talking about the broadband-deployment problem in my original prediction. But I don’t think anyone would even argue the more general claim in 2008.
Notice that you don’t hear much squawking from the “digital divide” crowd any more? As I correctly predicted, attempts at grandiose government interventions came to nothing and markets mostly solved the Internet deployment problem. Free wireless Internet provided by private citizens and businesses has spread like crazy.
The big remaining deployment issue isn’t rich vs. poor, which is what the do-gooders were obsessing about in 1997; it’s urban vs. rural. Below a certain population density it’s difficult for anyone thinking about dropping in cable or fibre to recover their infrastructure costs. I expect mesh networking and WiMAX to solve this problem during the next five years.
I think I got this one entirely right.
On-line magazines can make money.
…by subscription. If anyone has actually managed this yet, I have yet to hear about it. All the “successful” operations I know of are cross-subsidized by a print business or float on advertising revenue. So I was right as far as that went.
I’m going to concede half of this one, however, because I was wrong in the more general sense. Slate, my example of 1997, started making money in 2007 after the Washington Post bought it from Microsoft. The advertising revenue did it.
And it’s still the case that even specialized devices like ebook readers “cannot replace the experience of leafing through a magazine with your feet up.”
Paper will be history soon.
</p>Busted. Obviously it isn’t, and won’t be in the foreseeable future. Displays aren’t good enough or cheap enough, or light enough, not by an order of magnitude. The technology to make them better than paper is now realistically imaginable — that’s a change from 1997, when high-resolution color CRTs were still pretty novel — but only barely so. It will be a long way off yet.
I wrote: “Internet (like other media) has a natural ecological/economic niche which it fills better than its competitors,
but that said niche is different from any of its competitors. We won’t serve anyone by trying to fit the Internet on a Procrustean bed of old-media forms, nor by assuming any of them is inevitably going to be completely subsumed by the Internet.
One thing we can see a little more clearly ten years later is which old-media forms do look most likely to be replaced. My post on Converging curves cites long-term trends suggesting that general-circulation newspapers look like being one of them.
The learning process continues. I was solid on predictions 3 and 5. I got 2 and 4 at least half-right. And I was ahead of almost everyone on prediction 1. That’s at least an an 80% hit rate, which is pretty good in the prognostication business.
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- Mood:delicate
This is one of my favorite recent photos-She and her Papa match...
( More here-Just FYI, there are some of Cayne in his boxer shorts )
Details are still coming together, if you have any ideas or talents you'd like to add to our twisted circus, let me know!
*yoinks a Russia House coupon for later*
It took nothing away from my accomplishments. But lord, did it remind me of how long a road I've to go!
Will be offline for most of the weekend, so will take this opportunity to wish everyone in the US (and our expats) a good and safe Independence Day. Celebrate Appropriately-- Speak Your Mind!
-------------------------
And for those of you with a hankering for Stuff To Read, from
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wheatland_press:From now until Monday July 7 (at midnight Pacific Time), if you buy any two Wheatland Press titles at the regular price, you'll get one copy of any volume of Polyphony free.
Just order as usual using Paypal and in the comment box of the order form for the second title, indicate which volume of Polyphony you would like to receive.
http://www.wheatlandpress.com
I might add, in passing, that while P1-5 are excellent volumes, Polyphony 6 has my story "Fire Rising in the Moon," as well as a bunch of other nifty and cool stories, and I won't be at all offended if you get it for free.... ;-)
- Mood:
OMG tired
So, right now, as things stand:
Chapters 1-3: written with one revision, currently about 13,000 words
Chapters 4-10: rough draft only, currently about 16,000 words, would like to expand to about 22,000 or so, worried about this
Chapters 11-15: outlined only
I'd vaguely planned on producing a first draft being a six-month project, which means that I'd need to be about halfway through in two weeks to be on schedule. By that measure, I'm doing all right, although I expect at least one more stall at some point. But hey, if it takes more time than that, it does, as long as I eventually get the fershlugginner thing finished.
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