My full rant about how terrible the last episode of Battlestar Galactica was (including the stupid implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve) will have to wait, as I am out working on my short story for the Genomics Forum competition (and again posting from my phone). In the meantime, I agree with pretty much all of the points raised by the Battlestar Round Table at tor.com.
Month: March 2009
Oh my gods, that was such a train wreck. What the frak was Ron Moore thinking?
Decree: there is no last hour of Battlestar Galactica, in much the same way that there is only one season of Heroes. Battlestar Galactica ends with the ship getting destroyed at the colony when they attempt to jump away. The last hour is an insane fantasy that goes through the mind Kara Thrace (who is NOT a fucking angel pigeon) right before she turns the jump key.
As I have suspended my ban on buying books for Love Your Indie Month, I went ahead and picked up a copy of James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd Fish, which first came to my attention after I read a highly entertaining short story on his blog. Last night I read 130 pages of it–about a third of the book–and…I think I’m going to put it down and move on to something else.
It isn’t that the book is bad. It isn’t. In fact, I think that if this book had been handed to me when I was eight years old I would have read it and re-read it, laughing uproariously every time. But while I have a great appreciation for absurdity, I think that to stay entertained these days I need some degree of subtlety or connection to reality. The Order of Odd Fish is a fabulously mad, over the top cartoon. The images are outrageous, but the story just isn’t capturing me. I’ve been reading a lot of books marketed as YA lately. Some, like M. T. Anderson’s books I don’t think I could have fully appreciated when I was young. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series I find light, entertaining reading that may have seemed more fraught with meaning to me when I was younger, but I suspect I would have related to about the same coming to it at any age. The Order of Odd Fish I think I came to too late to appreciate the way it should be. I will try to get my copy to someone it will have the chance to touch more significantly.
Check out the “signs and symptoms ” section of the Wikipedia article on Cushing’s syndrome. I am experiencing most of these; not because I actually have Cushing’s, but because I have Crohn’s disease, which is currently being treated with prednisone, which ups my cortisol levels–functionally giving me an artificial case of Cushing’s. One of the symptoms on that list is central body obesity: weight gain that affects the trunk and head but not the limbs. After I started on prednisone I very quickly gained 30 lbs. and was suddenly at risk of needing to buy a whole new closet full of clothes. That, plus the acne, plus the moon face, meant that I had traded chronic pain for a host of body image issues. I think, on net, that’s a good trade, but still is less than ideal. So, despite my doctor rolling his eyes and saying, “On prednisone? Good luck with that,” I decided to try going on a weight loss regimen with the hopes of at least stabilizing my weight before all of my pants stopped fitting. Since the symptoms from my Crohn’s are still at a level that makes exercise difficult, I chose to focus on dietary weight control. To that end I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Lose It to help me track my calorie intake.
That was a little over four weeks ago. I’ve lost 9.5 lbs.
Lose It is more than just a calorie tracker. It calculates your resting metabolic rate and assigns you a daily calorie budget to meet your weight loss goal. Every day you put in the food you eat and, if you so desire, the exercise you undertake, and it keeps statistics about your budget management on a daily and weekly basis. What makes it really effective is that its interface for tracking diet is connected to an online food database that makes it largely unnecessary to know the caloric content of what you are eating beforehand; you can find the the meal you just ate, or a reasonable approximation thereof, from within the program itself. The database has specific meals from many national restaurant chains, most national grocery brands, and any individual ingredient you are likely to use. You can input custom recipes and foodstuffs, and the app remembers them so you need only select it the next time. I’m not an eater of staggering variety, so after a month of using Lose It I very rarely have to search for foods anymore; most of what I eat is there to be selected from my list of previous meals. I’m also not a person of great willpower, but the subtle feedback of my green calorie bar turning red when I go over-budget for day seems to be enough to keep me in line. I’m averaging about one over-budget day a week, making me consistently under-budget on a week-by-week basis. And, as I mentioned, it’s working. I’m losing weight.
Lose It (iTunes App Store link) is a great. It even has nutrition tracking functions, which I haven’t used because I’m more interested in vanity than health, but I’m sure they’re excellent. It’s a free download, so if you are an iPhone user there’s no reason not to check it out.
It was an accident at first, and then a week and a half of having this website had gone by and I noticed I had not missed a day yet. So I started doing it on purpose. And I even came up with a reason why blogging something every day was a good thing: just putting something out into the world helps me lower my perfectionism bar. Perfectionism is just procrastination wearing a fancy coat, after all, so forcing myself to put something up here every day could have the knock-on effect of helping me relax my internal editor. Help me work on my other writing projects in a more focused manner.
But today all of my ideas for things to put up here would actually take me too long to develop, and I want to use that time to…gasp…work on my short story. So please enjoy this meta-post while I am off working on fiction.
Last night Neil Gaiman was on The Colbert Report discussing The Graveyard Book:
And tonight on the BBC World Service, Geoff Ryman was brought on to discuss the propriety of the United Nations holding a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica. I haven’t been able to find a link to that segment, but my favorite part was the host asking, essentially, “might it not be considered irresponsible for the UN to look to a work of fiction for insight into real world events?” and Geoff answering, “Well, that depends on if you think of fiction as a lie or you think of fiction as a way of telling the truth.”
I urge you to find a way to get your hands on the current issue of Interzone, which contains the story “Home Again,” by Paul M. Berger. Paul was my Clarion classmate and roomie, and I got to read the first draft of this story at the workshop. I don’t actually know of anyplace in San Antonio that sells Interzone, but I’m going to have to track down a copy, because this story was a creepy little gem even at its earliest, and I must have it in a form that I can thrust in the faces of others.
So I’ve broken my rule about not buying any more books until I’ve read some (intentionally hazy) fraction of the unread books I already own. But I have done so for a good reason. Joe Hill, author of 20th Centurey Ghosts and Heart-Shaped Box, has taken a look at the bookselling landscape and decided that this spring–always a slow time for book stores–has the potential to be disasterous for the small, independent shop. So he has declared March to be “Love Your Indie Month,” and is running a contest to encourage people to support independent bookstores. All you have to do for a chance to win one of 12 fabulous prizes is buy something from an independent bookstore and email a picture of the receipt to Joe. (Address at the first link.) I went down to the only indie bookstore I’m aware of in San Antonio, The Twig, and bought a hardback copy of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, vol. I by M. T. Anderson (my softback will become a gift for someone) and Pretties by Scott Westerfeld. (They didn’t have any of my previously listed five books.)
March is Love Your Indie Month. Find an independent bookstore in your community or online and show it some appreciation. If you don’t have any particular bookstore that has earned your allegiance, I recommend Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, beloved of Clarionites. All of the Clarion instructors do a reading at Mysterious Galaxy during their week; the store is a great friend of the workshop. You can order from them online. (Online purchases are being accepted by Joe for the contest.) Spread the love!
A personal journal entry from several months ago begins with a quotation by Primo Levi, which I encountered in an essay by Ursula LeGuin. “It is the duty of the righteous man to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”
I wrote several paragraphs of not-very-focused rumination about this idea when I first encountered it, and I have thought back to it many times since. And now I find myself thinking of it once again as I read the thoughts of one of my Clarion teachers, Mary Anne Mohanraj, talking about issues of race and its treatment in SF/F on John Scalzi’s blog. (“Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up To Speed” Part 1, Part 2) A fair amount of this discussion concerns genre fiction and the genre fiction community, but there is much here that is a reflection of our culture as a whole. Specifically, it was through the early rounds of this discussion (which has kind of unfortunately come to be known as RaceFail ’09) that I encountered Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which helped focus for me some of the fuzzy edges of the concept of undeserved privilege and made me realize that while my thinking about privilege in terms of class was fairly developed, it was still very rudimentary on issues of race.
I’m still getting my thoughts in order on the subject of subverting undeserved privilege, and how doing so interfaces or fails to interface with rational self-interest. It’s a sort of idealism vs. pragmatism in the face of preexisting conditions argument, and I am struggling to find my own clarity of thought about it. But the RaceFail ’09 discussion has helped me learn to recognize kinds of privilege that were previously invisible to me, and even bereft of conclusions the improved perception is valuable.
I am in my hotel in Houston, where tonight I will see Jonathan Coulton in concert at the House of Blues. Surprisingly, my hotel does not seem to have wireless internet. But this affords me a good opportunity to test the iPhone WordPress client. If this works like it is supposed to, I should momentarily have a new blog post with a phonecam picture of my ticket to the show appended to it.
EDIT: Huzzah!