Yet Another SOPA Post

Right off the bat: I think piracy is terrible, and I am one of those old farts who still goes out and buys albums and movies to support the artists and performers I like. However. When someone (a lot of someones, in this case) is proud of his technological illiteracy, refuses to acknowledge someone who has the knowledge and is willing to explain it, and decides to levy legislative power, I am appalled.

This is what I see - a salt-and-pepper haired, slightly overweight man in a suit, standing with a nailbat in his hand, while another, fatter and greasier man, ties a blindfold over his eyes. The man with the bat is spun around in circles and let loose, to bludgeon whatever he comes across, with the greasy man guiding his dizzy feet in cries of "warmer/colder." Oh, and the blindfolded man is surrounded by paper bags and boxes suspended on strings, and they're all full of kittens.

SOPA is a sick, sick round of piñata.

I encourage you to contact your representative if you value your internet and first amendment rights.  This stretches beyond the US borders, and would have international repercussions for decades to come, if passed.

Find your representative, and how to contact him/her here.

A very useful infographic explaining SOPA and its effects.

Surviving The World - Besides being an ingenious and thought-provoking "photocomic" that I enjoy immensely, it is where I found the above infographic, so my hat's off to Dante for that one.



I'll get off my soapbox now - I hate getting up there at all, but as someone who has an interest in both the Internet and intellectual property rights, I felt I must say something.

From a non-political standpoint, the fact that this bill has come up at all, fills in a hole in the sci-fi book I'm working on, Three Point Oh. It will be set about fifty to seventy-five years in the future, and the events leading up to the plot could hinge on the passing of SOPA. To clarify, I sincerely hope it does not pass, but I cannot help but feel a little giddy about it. The happiness, I assure you, is only in that "puzzle pieces falling together" sense.

Cheers,
Em

A Poem for Christmas Time

A bit of holiday cheer for you.  I've always admired the quaintness of Gorey's poems, which I've tried to emulate.  I wish I had some semblance of artistic skill to accompany this, but no matter.

Christmas is a week from Sunday, and so I present to you a poem:

"Christmastime With Mother"

When I was younger, Mother

would often take us out

during the winter holidays

to see all the snow about.

She taught us to make snowballs,

and angels in the drifts,

and not to ever walk beneath

the nearby skiers' lifts.

That was many years ago

I am sorry to tell,

but I am reminded of it now

as it's Christmas time and, well...

Mother has been gone, you see

a long time, which is nice,

but it really was unpleasant

to see her sink beneath the ice.

Come April and the thawing,

we pulled dear Mother out

and dressed her up in Sunday's best,

though she wears an awful pout.

Now at Christmas, when we ride

out to the frozen lake,

we're sure to take her with us

though she never wants to skate.

She won't do much of anything,

my sis and I have found,

but with Ma around, it is more fun

than if she were in the ground.

A very happy Christmas and New Year's to all of you and yours.  If the stress gets to be too much, or you have become desensitized with the commercialization of it, I recommend giving this a listen: Tom Lehrer's "A Christmas Carol"

I may post something else before the new year, but if not, I'll see you on the other side. :)

Happy Holidays,
Love,
Emma

Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

Evidently, today is Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day.

It's as good a day as any to extrapolate on an old theory I had growing up, one which will explain a lot about me, I think.  I don't remember how old I was when I first thought this up, because the oldest memory I have about it dates back to middle school, and that memory is a privately excited realization that a dusty old theory I'd had was true.  It happened during gym class while they were taking attendance.

Gym - sorry, Physical Education - at that point was 3/4 the entire class.  The other quarter was off in the bowels of an unused classroom, trapped in what was known as Health Class, which was usually accompanied by dramatic chords and terrifyingly bad photocopies of genitalia.   Gym class meant there were fifty-odd middle schoolers to wrangle into some semblance of physical activity.  They took attendance by having us sit alphabetically by last name, in long rows with ten feet between each kid.

Class periods were only about 45 minutes long, and we were given five minutes at the beginning and end of the period to change into and out of our gym clothes.  That brings us down to 35.  Fifteen minutes were spent taking attendance and making us all do "warm up" exercises.  These warm-ups were Do Quad Stretches, Run In Place, Do Arm Circles, Do Jumping Jacks, Do Push Ups, Stop Complaining, Run In Place.  That leaves twenty minutes to do the activity of the day, but that's not important.

Ex Libris, Vitam: Working Title

That, if Google Translate is to be trusted, is the working title for a new(ish) project idea that is finally getting a proper work over. A project that will have me listening to a lot of trippy, progressive rock.

The idea itself came out of listening to a couple of different prog songs a while back, but was a kind of carrot-on-a-stick until very recently.  It kept dangling itself in front of me, whispering, "Hey, I'm a good idea!" and I'd hiss back, "No, you're not! You're exactly like this other story over here! Get out of the way!"  Yet it kept stringing me along... that is, until my brain found some scissors lying around, and reached up and cut the string.

What I have now is a very small idea that wraps up an otherwise very large idea and makes it not terrible, and also different from that other story.

In a Post-NaNo Haze

November has come and gone, which means that my yearly endeavor in literary abandon has come to a close.  This year was fraught with illness and wordless days, but I somehow managed to come out on top regardless.

As usual, while trying to write one story, I was hit with ideas for three others - the downside to being an Aquarius, I imagine - and now have them waiting in the wings.  The first of which I am started to draft today, using primarily Google Docs.  I haven't done much with Docs before, preferring my fuddy-duddy hard file transfer ways.  However, in my month of NaNo-ing, I discovered that one of the computers I use for a lot of my writing has a flash drive port exactly even with the seat of the chair, and one turn too far and too fast would likely snap any drive sticking out.  As this computer does not belong to me, but rather my day (evening) job, I cannot change it, nor the chair, and had a couple of close calls that almost lost me my NaNovel.