found_drama

• Break Through Writer’s Block
  via Stepcase Lifehack
• Why Banned Books Week matters « Everybody’s Libraries
  via B^2, written by John Mark Ockerbloom :: My oldest child is only 8, but he’s already coming up with new and challenging questions on an almost-daily basis. By the time kids reach double-digit ages (which is the young end of the audience for most of the controversial books) they have lots of questions about life, death, sexuality, unfairness, hatred, violence, drugs, and religion. They deserve the chance to explore answers to these questions in their reading and in their conversations.
• On Writing Groups
  written by Cat Rambo on Ecstatic Days
• The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc
  via 43 Folders :: yes, it's about The Wire but it's also about writing and well-formed plots, scenes, characters, etc.
• GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps
• Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com

• Private Rockets Could Boost Military, Too
  via Danger Room from Wired.com
• Pirated Arms Freighter Cornered by U.S. Navy
  via NYTimes.com :: this story is fucking fascinating to me
• Let’s Play Palin VP Bingo!
  via gedblog (via a DF tweet)
• Flickr: Genres
  A pool for iTunes "genre" art. To go along with that whole "Genius" feature and the new grid view, I suppose. Some good stuff in here. Not seeing "deeptech sophisto" though; guess I better get to work.
• Is 190 Bowery the Greatest Real-Estate Coup of All Time?
  at New York Magazine

• Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter^[1]
• Cryptonomiconby Stephenson^[2]
• Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991 by Isaacs and Downing
• The UFO Phenomenon (Mysteries of the Unknown) by Time-Life
• Orbiter by Ellis (illustrated by Foran with Stewart)
• How to Get Happily Published by Appelbaum
• The New Space Opera edited by Dozois and Straham

(Original at Flickr.)

1. Yes, still reading this. [↩]
2. Yes, reading this again. As a substitute for reading Anathem. [↩]

Post-apocalyptic.  Landscape is overrun with forests; thick, chocking forests.  What left of us all fit on a train.  We live on this train.  We must keep it moving or else perish.  No one knows what lives out there in those woods.  We rarely stop; we cannot afford to stop.  When we do stop it is for quick repairs:  stumbling across another car to add to the train; locating food or fuel; fixing a wheel or a tie or the brakes.  Each stop requires all hands.

There is unrest on the train though.  Not quite disorder or revolt but serious grumbling.  Rumors of a purge.  It doesn’t make sense.  We hunker down in one of the cars, myself and a friend and his pregnant wife.  We hide there.  We wait for this whole thing to blow over.  While we hide on this car, we root around for supplies, trying to dig in.  There is no way to know how long we will be here.  This particular train car is self-powered; right now it’s being dragged along by the main engine but if we needed to, we could move ourselves.  It has a diesel generator for power.  And a nuclear reactor.  After a while though, it seems to have gotten too quiet.  We rush out of the car just in time to see the rest of the train pulling off into the distance, abandoning us.

From out of the woods comes a peculiar sound.  There is a bridge not far off and we can make it there if only we can figure out how to engage the throttle.

• The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time
• Neal Stephenson reads from Anathem
  via mefogus
• Neal Stephenson and the 10,000-Year Clock
  via mefogus
• 10 Essential Principles of the Javascript Masters
• Scenes from India
  fascinating pictures

I’m sitting in an IT office surrounded by computers and monitors and peripherals &c. when she comes in.  She looks like an extra The Maltese Falcon, all skirtsuit, scarf, and sweater.  The only thing that she is missing is the hat.  She starts rifling through the items in the office, building a computer more/less right in front of me.  When I ask what it’s for, she says that she needed a new one at home and she thought that no one would notice.  I ask if she’s joking and she laughs.  Like how could I conclude that she isn’t serious about this?  After another minute or so of telling her to cut it out, I duck out of the office, flag down her supervisor and explain.  She is fired on the spot.  With much incredulity, she looks at me, heart-broken and in utter disbelief.  I suspect that she might fly into a rage and start trashing the place but she is escorted out of the building before anything unsavory can happen.

I go back to work.

Minutes later, another woman comes into my off (the IT office), struggling to fight back tears.  She is tall and thick-boned, casually dressed and very pretty aside from the tears.  The woman pulls herself together just enough to explain that she heard about the other woman (that was just fired) and how could I do such a thing.  It is flabbergasting to me that this would be someone’s first response.  I explain what happened, terse as I can.  She was stealing from the company, after all.  And stealing in a big way.  How did that make me at fault?  I try calming her down but she seems only to get more worked up by the minute.  And I start to wonder if it wouldn’t have been cheaper for us to just let the first woman take the computer in the first place.

• Dirty Secret Of The Bailout: Thirty-Two Words That None Dare Utter
  Section 8 alone should be enough reason to throw Paulson out on his ass; this is totally unacceptable. CALL YOUR SENATORS!!
• WordPress Archive that *works*: StepxStep Guide and Plugins
• Using jQuery for Background Image Animations
  this is just plain sick
• Hiding in Plain Sight – washingtonpost.com
  Washington Post: She sat down for a lengthy discussion with one nonpartisan interviewer, ABC's Charles Gibson, and granted another interview to conservative Sean Hannity of Fox News, as well as a sit-down with People magazine and some interviews with Alaska media. Pathetic.
• Use Michael Bay as Your Writing Muse
  via Write to Done :: a fun little series of tips; plus how can you beat that title?
• Order Your Free Pocket Constitution and Declaration of Independence
  at The Heritage Foundation (via WiseBread.com)
• Clockpunk.com
  via John Joseph Adams :: Dr. Roundbottom: Scientist & Philosopher: Latest Dispatches
• 6 Tips on Critiquing Without Melting Down
  via Stepcase Lifehack
• Zebra Striping: More Data for the Case
  via A List Apart
• Look at it Another Way
  via A List Apart

• How We Became the United States of France
  at Time.com (via Beyond the Beyond) :: You just know the Frogs have only increased their disdain for us, if that is indeed possible. And why shouldn't they? The average American is working two and half jobs, gets two weeks off, and has all the employment security of a one-armed trapeze artist.
• Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk
  via Bruce Sterling's "Beyond The Beyond" :: my comment starts: More so than “expecting Star Trek and [getting] Blade Runner“, we were all expecting to be Da Vinci or Thomas Edison and instead we get DRM wars and corporate-owned patents.
• Looks like megamergers and big-box stores have finally killed American publishing
  Bruce Sterling's "Beyond the Beyond" (at Wired.com) :: Sterling on that NY Mag piece about "the demise of publishing"
• Watching DFW: State Fair Twirlers and Cruise Ship Service
  via OMNIVORACIOUS :: videos of DFW reading
• 10 Questions with Neal Stephenson
  at Goodreads

A. and I return to our car, going home from a dinner party.  We get into the car.  I’m driving.  The car is parallel parked and the street is slick and a light rain is coming down.  I maneuver the car out of its space but the car gets stuck in reverse.  I try to hit the brakes but they fail and we careens down the hill.  I try to pull the emergency brake but that has no effect.  I try pulling the car out of gear and forcing it into first again.  At this point the steering wheel is even becoming less and less responsive to my tugging and pulling.  The back window fogs up and I tell A. to brace herself.

I’m golfing with D.J., D.P., and my brother J.  The country club is crowded.  But it’s also indoors.  The terrain is varied as one would expect:  little hills, sand traps, scrubby woods, water hazards.  But this whole course is under the kind of ceiling that you’d find at a grocery store or a warehouse.  We rent clubs but between us we only have enough cash for one ball each.  After waiting in line and joking about how long we’ve been waiting, we tee off at the first hole and our game is under way.  I’m better at this game than I expect; certainly better than I should be for someone that’s never played before.

We keep the game casual and we joke around to keep it interesting for ourselves.  We get a lot of funny looks from the regular players and country club members.  But fuck those people.  We paid our money to be here and we’re not breaking any rules.  This one guy behind us though is taking it really personally.  He’s playing a shitty game and he’s decided to take it out on us.  After making some joke to D.J. (“Choke! Don’t choke!”), the man comes over and asks if I could keep it down because I’m distracting him.  I fire back that he needs to be a grown-up about this and if he doesn’t mind his own business then we’re going to have a serious problem.  He withdraws a bit but you can tell that we haven’t seen the last of him and it’s only a matter of time before he comes back.  Even now he is plotting against us.

Fortune favors the assholes though and before we’ve played two more holes, we’ve managed to lose all of our balls to water hazards and other obstacles.  We leave the indoor country club peacefully and are in good spirits until I realize that I’ve lost my phone and it’s probably still lying on the greens of that par four fifth hole.