Ok, I was suddenly inspired at work today what to do with the Traveling Art Book that ms_danson gave me when I was in Ottawa. It had been sitting on my desk for two weeks; there is some very lovely art in there to live up to, and I did not feel up to trying to emulate it with drawings etc, at this stage. However, I got an idea of what to do that would cater to my strengths, so would be relatively foolproof so far as my skill was concerned, and so I went to Fincher's to acquire some supplies, and spent the afternoon creating my artwork. It turned out interesting; I am pleased with it. It will need a pretty high-rez picture to get the full detail of it, though. Unfortunately, I do not know any visual artists nearby, although I will ask, so very probably, I will send it back to Ms_danson soon so she can send it on to the next artist in line.

This made me very angry:

Bath and Body Works is getting sued for religious discrimination for firing a Wiccan employee who legally took vacation time to observe Samhain

I'm not Pagan, but they won't be getting my business.

Really busy at work. Leaving work at 5:30 two days in a row.

1) Isn't it awesome to learn about something purely through debugging someone else's buggy documentation of it? *sarcasm*

2) Dear flist, a speculative question:
Suppose you had a significant other for a period of time, whom you loved and you thought things were good with, and you had sincere hopes this will continue. Then your significant other leaves you for Person X. Through the stages of grief, you are hurt, upset, wondering what went wrong.

However, do you think you would be more hurt if (a) Person X was very dissimilar to you in personality, character, habits or (b) Person X shared a large number of personality traits, features of appearance, or personal preferences with you?

I do not think monogamy or polyamory matters in this question; the point is that a person very important to you makes the statement that they prefer someone else to you, exclusively.

Alastair and I had a discussion of this, stemming from the story of one of his friends, and we found our opinions fall on opposite sides. I am just curious what other people think, and why.

Went walking today and picked up the Globe and Mail. There were a couple of interesting articles:

Melting pot or mosaic? Neither, thanks
Among the British ethnic left, multiculturalism isn't celebrated but scorned
Doug Saunders
Last updated on Saturday, Oct. 03, 2009 03:32AM EDT

( Because link may die at a later point, article under cut )

And I would be interested in hearing Ms_danson's and Dracodraconis' thoughts on this article:
PEI's Big Immigration Boom --- Sorry, Anne of Green Gables, but there's a new reason people are coming to PEI

Dear Margaret Atwood, before you use a word, check that it means what you think it means:

What [The Year of the Flood] absolutely is not, she insists, is science fiction – a statement she has made repeatedly since the 2003 publication of Oryx and Crake, a novel that shares the same future as Flood and some of the same characters.

Science fiction takes place “somewhere in space, far, far away in a distant galaxy,” she explains. “That's where hell and heaven went after Milton, escaping literarily.”

On Planet X, you can still have voices speaking out of burning bushes and “strange creatures with bat wings and horns on their heads flying through the air – dragons, of which I'm very fond.” But “speculative fiction” of the sort she writes deals strictly with things people can experience on Earth “without being stoned,” she says. “It has to be based on real technology, real science, real possibility.”

Um, there is a whole corpus of language use indicating that it's the other way around, fantasy, as well as science fiction, is speculative fiction. Reading this makes me think that the grande doyenne of Canadian literature hasn't read any hard science fiction or well-defined speculative fiction criticism in her life, and is ignorantly trying to avoid branding.

From Goth_hobbit, because Ms_danson should not be the exclusive disseminator of eventually-NSFW links in my Universe's Denizens. If you are familiar with Twilight in some fashion, you may need to wash brain after clicking this.

And I've had it on my bookmarks for a week, meaning to share it: Letter from the Elders of Sodom. I don't want to know the entirety of what John C. Wright originally wrote, but I know that Hal Duncan's response is totally awesome.

Question to my friendslist: Does there exist a Flickr-equivalent for audio files? I.e. a site with free accounts on which mp3s to which you own the copyright can be uploaded, given a URL, and shared?

Other than, of course, MySpace, and as a secondary application, YouTube. I can imagine that these two corner the market, since "audio files to which you own the copyright" require a bit more dedication to secure, ironically, than picture or video files of this nature, and it is very tempting to use them to share audio files to which someone else owns the copyright.

Wolf howl, dog's bay in the night
A fist clenched painfully tight
Blood beats in veins like a bird above,
Faith and hope and love

A thousand hands will rise as aye
And our high banner streams along
Sun in a circle and blue sky:
All's in place but something's wrong.

Up above us a star burns bright
No one else would help us set things right
In the dark dark dark dark
Night.

After the nightfall came stormy skies
Weeping rain and a jester wind
Hands in your pockets, down your eyes,
And keep tongue tightly pinned.

Oh, my depression gnaws at me,
My lover strong and true.
Drink and be merry, dance and sing free
I am awhile with you.

Up above us a star burns bright
No one else would help us set things right
In the dark dark dark dark
Night.

- Kino, The Black Album 

Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!
Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!

In the streets around the snow has ceased to be white,
In the meltwater mirror we see the moon light.
We walk on, we are strong and bright
Frozen fingers snap and break matches
That will set bonfires alight!

Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!
Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!

This is our day; we know it; the aligned stars above we meet,
Know signs in fire and water, the look in gods' eyes...
And now we take a step onto a bridge incomplete,
We had believed the stars
And "I'm ready!" everyone cries.

Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!
Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!

Those who are weak, those who live from beer to beer,
Cry out, "They don't let us sing!"
Cry out, "Try and sing here!"
We walk on, we are strong and bright,
Frozen fingers snap and break matches
That will set bonfires alight!

Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!
Try and sing together with me!
Come and stand by me!



My favourite rendition of this song on Youtube is the rehearsal video that always makes me smile

I translated this a few months before, in a locked entry. This is just for my reference.

At Slacktivist, there's a discussion of songs and movie lines that 'get you every time' and that got me thinking of one of Vysotsky's two songs that are guaranteed (many others do sometimes, but those are guaranteed) to get me bawling every time I try to sing them, or hear them. So I stayed up way too late last night working around with this one. I took some liberties with the translation: it isn't always close, but except for the last line it is singable; I will be polishing it some more.

And I was crying at it (I don't cry very often, actually; it's just that you people are the ones who hear of it when I do.) And the next day, still trying to review it in the back of my brain, I got the prickling feeling in the back of my eyes thinking of the original --- in the middle of a software demo.

Song About A Downed Airman

Dedicated to Nikolai Skomorohov, twice awarded Hero of the USSR, and to his fallen friend.

Through the war till the ending I yearned for my home town
And though I was hotheaded, did my duty as called.
While he was too hasty, one time didn't duck down ---
And in war turned around, around --- two war years, and nothing at all.

And his heart isn't beating since that spring, 'forty-three,
While dreams war sent fleeting once again circle me,
And I can't breathe, reminded, and dark clouds dim my sight ---
He was better and kinder, and better, and better, and kinder...
I was lucky that night.

Silver spoons I've not tasted, I ain't one of God's choosing,
I did not seek the rear, and I met fate's attack.
But the women I met with would look silent, accusing,
"If you had stayed forever back there, perhaps mine would've come back."

I am sadly aware of what widows don't say.
I too care that their lives did not turn that way.
And I blurted, "Forgive me, sorry I made it through,
Accidentally I'm living, I'm living, I'm living,
Doing what yours couldn't do."

In his plane he was burning, and I heard his last shout,
"You will live, you will make it!" came through that roaring glow.
We would fly up by heaven, by God's own kingdom cloud,
He stayed there when he flew a bit higher...while I came down below.

And God's airfield dryly met the pilot they called.
He would land on his belly, on it he never crawled...
So he slept without waking, and his song couldn't end.
So I'm back, I did make it, I'm back, I did make it...
It was too late for my friend.

All around and forever I will always be wronging
Those whom if I met now, I'd be honoured to call.
Though we fly home still living, to where our hearts were longing ---
But our memory burns and our conscience torments us, all those who have it at all.

Someone stingy and clear counted hours we mete
In our short stay down here, like airstrip concrete.
On it some crashed and burned, and some flew never to land,
While I, I returned, I returned, I returned and...
That's the trouble, if you understand.


Song begins at 2:48 ; subtitles happen to be included, just in case you want them. (The first song is one I haven't worked on yet, but I'll translate someday, also about air war).

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

Re-posted from Blackfelicula

I'm posting this because I cannot count the number of times I've gone to the movies only to be left wondering, "Where are all the women? Where are all the women's stories?" If any of you reading my page have the means to help this woman produce her movie, I urge you to lend a hand. At the very least, please take the time to read this in full. Our stories are out there. Our voices are here. Let's use them.
____________________

You know, other than in personal interactions, I do not think I have ever experienced direct institutional sexism yet, but I've met many, many women who have, and Ela Thier's story twists at my heart.

“No, I don’t work this hard to be a star. I’ve put in thousands of hours of unpaid labor because I care deeply about the artwork that I create. The stories I tell, and how I tell them, really matter to me. I think my work will make a difference to people.”

I am heading off to Reach for the Top Provincials 2009 in a few minutes. I will probably be able to post from there.

Tired of all of those surveys made up by high school kids?! Have you ever kissed someone? Missed someone? Told someone you loved them? Drank alcohol? 49 questions for the people who are a little older...

( Read more... )

As from the power of sacred lays
The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator's praise
To all the Blest above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky!

Happy Easter, all those who celebrate! Happy Ostara! Somewhat belated happy Passover! Advance wishes of joy for Orthodox Easter!

http://syncategorematic.dreamwidth.org/

Thanks to Siderea and Kareila.

Nothing there yet, but I will get to importing sometime today or this weekend.

Yes, I am changing my name. And thanks to DW, I can now use all of my favourite word (LJ had a limit of 15 characters.)

My brain ordered me to get looking at my fiction writing again.

I hadn't looked at it since early 2008, since before I had been channeling most of my creative impulse into music. I am a different person now than the person who wrote them, from my location and career to my ideas about people and relationships. Different enough from the person who wrote them to be objective.

I am enjoying the read; the question, however, now that they are in MS Word 2007 and it helpfully displays the word count in the margin all the time --- how did I write so much? Nearly 85,000 words in one, nearly 58,000 words in another, and I am still not done (well, the longer one will probably take another 15,000 or so to get to The End, but it's the part of the original that I actually liked, by which time the early apprenticeship stage of my writing was over, and much of it I'll probably reinstate without extensive rewriting.) I find myself wondering whether there are any scenes or plotlines I can reasonably cut from the darned things, for lo, even though much of my genre features doorstoppers, I do not claim that this is a virtue.

I also found myself thinking of the 10,000-hour rule mentioned in Outliers and the parallel rule stated somewhere else that any writer needs to write half a million words to find his or her voice. I think this is true; between starting to actually write a novel, and long thing that it was, at fifteen years old, and the zillion revisions that happened to it after, and my habit of writing epic sagas in some of my posts, and occasionally emails of extraordinary beauty and even more extraordinary length, as ye know --- I don't know whether I'm at the half-million mark yet, although probably I've passed it a while ago, but I don't hesitate when asked to write stuff for work. They at work think it is a talent, apparently. I know that if I am any good at it, it's the result of years and years of practice.

(I am reminded of my epiphany about the string ensemble I had been in, in high school; they were a select group from the senior orchestra's string section, and at times they had the busiest performance schedule of any non-chamber group at the school. I realized one day that it wasn't that the string ensemble was composed of the technically best musicians that made it what it was; it was that it can be relied upon to perform, at short notice, without many rehearsals, get out there and do it.)

I'm no Anne Rice; I still need an editor; everyone does. Those two beasties I particularly will need an editor for, but for now, I will reread them, only noting the occasional badly-phrased sentence, and then finish the darned things as best as I can find the time. Then get to the actual editing bit.