I don't think I mentioned on here, at the beginning of the week I won a charity auction for one of the atheist bus ads. Original bus panels like these ones:
It turned up the other day. It's...kind of...bus-sized. Heh. It's in two parts which currently appear to be devouring my other sofa. I'm not quite sure what to do with it - I'd like to get it framed, but it'd have to be custom framed and that would be a) very expensive and b) probably impossible to get up the stairs of my block of flats once it's done, what with it being about 5m long. And I doubt you get home visits from picture framers. Maybe I'll just nail-gun it to the wall.
I've been buying Christmas presents too - I got a little bit carried away and seem to have bought 9 books and a DVD box set for my dad. (And some toffee.) It's not quite as bad as it sounds - five of them are the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (£6.99 from the Book People just now, if anybody on my flist doesn't have them, which seems unlikely.) I lent him the original book of Last Chance To See after he'd watched the new series, and he adored the humour, so, yay. And my brother will be very happy to pay me for some of the other things and use them as his presents!
Speaking of books, the balance between technology and my disorganisation means it's now significantly quicker to bittorrent an ebook copy of, for example, The God Delusion and search it for a quote, than it is for me to FIND my copy, far less find the quote I wanted. Is this some kind of minor singularity?
Ooh, yay. Two new eps of Dollhouse to watch.
What's happening?
Richard Curtis is writing a Doctor Who episode.
Scott Lynch smacks down a batshit crazy emailer. (I'm more likely to buy his books now.)
Derren Brown is predicting the lottery numbers tomorrow night, and then back for more shows starting on Friday. Hurray!
And the recession is officially over. So presumably if you're still skint, it's now your own fault. Or something.
I was watching Lost Land Of The Volcano with my dad tonight. I learned many things: you can get HUGE stick insects; teeny parrots are cute; nature tends to bite. Also that I still have a crush on Springwatch's Gordon Buchanan, who is on Twitter. I can has stalkericity!
Currently reading: We-Think by Charles Leadbetter. Thumbs up so far.
*phone rings*
Me: Hello!
Dad: Hi, how are you doing? Are you at work?
Me: No, I'm not working today.
Dad: But I called your house and you weren't in! The phone rang out!
Me: I do leave the house occasionally for things other than work, you know.
I mean, I know I don't do all that much, but REALLY. Anyway, today I did many things, and took many photos, and also discovered that the Gaiman photos I thought I'd lost were just...on a different bit of my phone's memory or something, and have inexplicably reappeared. I'm not complaining, just bemused. So, photos of Collectormania this afternoon, and the Book Festival ten days ago and tonight.
( Neil Gaiman )
( Collectormania: Amber Benson, Peter Davison, Kai Owen )
( Douglas Coupland )
( What's a photo post without a couple of randoms? )
Generation A actually sounds like a return to form for Coupland, and I must find the JPod TV series, although he didn't sound too keen on it. And I picked up the new Best Of Tom Leonard poetry compendium - I've been meaning to get some of his poetry for ages.
As a prize for getting this far, two video links people showed me on their snazzy iPhones today: Literal Video for Birdhouse In Your Soul, and a fan-made "trailer" for a Green Lantern movie with Nathan Fillion.
Today I have put a bunch of books on to my new phone. The speed of phone advancements amazes me. If I had access to a recharger, I could amuse myself off my mobile for about a month without internet access (and indefinitely with it.) I've got dozens of books, hundreds of music tracks, a bunch of games, a camera with editing suite...nuts. And the only down side is that my phone crashes occasionally, which phones never used to do.
The ebook reader I use is mobipocket, and I download free books (free books!) from Feedbooks, which I recommend with a million gold stars. Well, if you like classics, technology and SF/fantasy. And politics. I've got Bertrand Russell, Thoureau, Mills, lots of Nietzsche. Essays are great to read on the underground.
What else? I've been to see two (TWO!) Neil Gaiman talks this week, and met him after the second one. w00t! Wednesday was Neil on his own, reading from the Graveyard Book and taking questions, then reading Blueberry Girl. Thursday was Denise Mina chairing a conversation between Gaiman and Ian Rankin, which, awesome. They've all done novel-writing and comic-writing, so there was a lot of talk about different mediums and how storytelling works in them, etc. Gaiman (I think) said that comics are a medium that gets confused with a genre, which is true enough. Rankin has just written a Constantine comic, and was talking about how much hard work comics are, heheh. Also there was a signer-for-the-deaf, so they spent half the discussion dropping in phrases like "balls-to-the-wall" and pausing to see how she signed them - mean, but very funny!
I was with a friend from work, and we decided to skip the enormous signing queue on Wednesday, and wait on Thursday night instead. We ended up almost at the end of the queue (sigh) but it was shorter than Wednesday's 3.5-hour effort, and we got chatting to the lady on her own standing behind us, and geeked out about Gaiman, Doctor Who, Buffy, and many other things for the hour or so we queued. And it turned out that she used to be a subtitler too, in Newcastle, one of our satellite offices. That's some freaky coincidence there, considering there's only a couple of hundred subtitlers in the UK, probably. (Also we only discovered this because she told us something I'd just read on a Twitter search for @neilhimself, and I realised she was that tweeter, and we read each other's profiles. Yay for internet phones.)
So yeah, Ian Rankin is lovely, and so's Neil, of course, and we chatted and got things signed and then trundled back home to Glasgow. I've still got Mieville and Coupland and the Richards Dawkins and Holloway to see. Horrifically, I managed to lose my photos from the signing, because it was the first time I'd connected my new phone to the PC and I hadn't installed the software and it all went nuts. Gutted. I'd twitpicced one of them, though, and I think our new friend is going to send me some others. They pretty much looked like this, though, with me instead of a random person...
The
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hundredpics community popped back up on my friendslist the other day, so I've decided to try that again - post a photo a day for 100 days. I'm going for a theme - I will take a picture a day of the clouds! (Stop laughing at the back.) My first three are here, and I also stuck up another photo I took yesterday that made me giggle in an adolescent way. Really, who designed this sundial?
The caption at the bottom? It says "morning glory". I know it's also a plant, but...
Of course, that interpretation probably, er, sprung out at me, because "morning glory" was mentioned in the book I've been reading - Slang: The People's Poetry. Which is very good, actually, at least if you find things like the following paragraph fascinating:
There is a difference between "nonexpletive" (a category that includes both Buffy-comicverse and oh as usual dear) and "anti-expletive" (a category that includes only oh as usual dear); and there is a difference between, on one hand, expletive inserts (such as Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ) and impletive inserts (such as oh as usual dear) and, on the other hand, "nonpletive" ones (such as Buffy-comicverse).
In what circumstances will the impletive supersede the expletive, avoiding a turn into the nonpletive?
(It's not all like that, but I did like that bit. Hee.)
Altocumulus, I think.
I finally got round to getting a supporting membership for Worldcon and downloading the Hugo package on...Monday or Tuesday, and it's so worth the money. Many good (e)books and novellas and novellettes, and various other things, for £30. Will vote in the categories I've managed to read things in - at the moment the most difficult categories seem to be Best Related Book (because they're all great) and Best Short Story (because none of them grabbed me at all). Discovered via
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james_nicoll that at least I'm not the only one bemused by the existence of the Mike Resnick story on the shortlist.Argh. Must get dinner before Big Brother. And then abandon Big Brother for Question Time, probably.
So, anyway, linkspam:
I didn't know who Ed McMahon was before he died. Farrah Fawcett reminds me more of a couple of lines of Buffy dialogue than anything else. I was never that into Michael Jackson. The only "celeb" death that's really affected me this week is that of Steven Wells, an ex-NME writer. He died of cancer: this was his last column, a couple of weeks ago, for the Philadelphia Weekly. ( Quote and more links under the cut )
(Vaguely related aside: watching Lauren Laverne presenting Glastonbury makes me want to look out my Kenickie CDs. She's one of my only girlcrushes.)
I've mentioned the Lord of the Rings re-read and discussion on Tor before, but I'll take the opportunity of them starting The Two Towers to plug it again - totally geeky, utterly fantastic conversation. Put aside a day or two and read the whole thing from the start.
If anyone hasn't read
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cereta's post On Rape And Men yet, please do, especially if you're a man. And read at least the first couple of pages of comments. I've been meaning to link to this and post about it for a while - I might still do a post. But I've been reading through all 17 pages or so of comments, too.On a lighter note, blankets with sleeves! We saw these on the Big Bang Theory, and I looked them up because I Need One. Totally. Sometime before winter.
The Nieman Journalism Lab tells us that the New York Times has data on which words its readers look up in the dictionary. Interesting. And it also has an article about the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment on the MPs' expenses claims.
An overview of the gay marriage debate, in chart form.
The best optical illusion I've seen in ages, and another illustration of why no, you shouldn't believe the evidence of your own eyes.
HTML Playground seems like a good way of relearning html and CSS by example, in a very web 2.0 stylee.
Jesus And Mo is always entertaining, but I particularly liked the latest one.
I thoroughly commend and recommend this How To Meet A Nerdy Girl post, if only because point #9 made me laugh out loud.
Tip #9: Embrace her collectibles.(Yes, I have
That is not a euphemism for something pervy. It’s just a fact. When you walk into her apartment for the first time and notice a glass cabinet filled with a miniature TARDIS, a sombrero-wearing Giles, a 17-inch Han Solo and a two-foot long replica of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D, do not say, “What the hell is all this stuff?” Instead say, “What the hell? Why don’t you have MORE of this stuff? And may I mail order something for you?”
And finally, in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Buffy meets Edward from Twilight. With inevitable consequences. One of the best mashup videos I've seen.
( And this was about 3.45am. )
I've been playing Freelancer the last couple of nights. Haven't spent hours blowing up spaceships for far too long. Also reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, which is quite hard work, for some reason. Good, though. Need to finish it tonight because it's going back to the library tomorrow, and also because I have a bunch of new books from amazon that I want to read, including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
And I'm reading a defence of fantasy in the Guardian - I expect the comments will be more interesting than the article, though.
Kate Atkinson
Carlos Luis Zafon
Simon King
David Crystal
AC Grayling
Iain Banks
Cornelia Funke
Jonathon Green
Neil Gaiman
Ian Rankin
Neil Gaiman & Ian Rankin (different event to above)
Susan Blackmore
Lewis Wolpert
David Sedaris
Jeremy Paxman
Vince Cable
John Sutherland
Christopher Brookmyre
Mark Millar
China Mieville
Alain de Botton
Douglas Coupland
Richard Dawkins
Richard Holloway
I don't think I can afford either the money or the time off work to go to all of them. Gaiman, Paxman, Cable and Brookmyre are must-sees, probably Coupland as well.
And Amanda Fucking Palmer is gigging in Edinburgh in August too, not coincidentally I expect, since she's dating Gaiman now. So right. So I want to go to that too; I've been loving the Who Killed Amanda Palmer album. (Spotify link, that one.)
marrog and inspired by this tattoo:If you were going to have a tattoo of five books (or their titles) somewhere on your body, let's say somewhere where it will be seen from time to time, what five books would you get?
It might be your favourite books, or ones that have changed your life, or that your favourite quotes come from, or that you think will impress people, or all of the above.
My five would be:
The Homeward Bounders - Diana Wynne Jones
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Babel Tower - AS Byatt
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Oxford English Dictionary
But it made me flail a bit to have to choose. I have another four or five bubbling under, and I'm particularly not sure about putting Gilgamesh in instead of Sayers' Gaudy Night.
..I kind of want a bookshelf tattooed across my shoulders now. With spaces so I can add things.
Turn Coat by Jim Butcher. Yay, a Dresden book! Borrowed, because I only buy the paperbacks. I didn't think this one was as good as the last couple, actually, but that's still way better than most other things.
The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. Interesting to have read, and I think is going to make a real difference to my next re-read of LOTR, but kind of a slog to get through.
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. About how group formation and collaboration has never been easier, and the difference that might make to the world. Loved it.
Bad Things by Michael Marshall. Regular crime spook-fest from Marshall - decent, but I wish he'd go back to writing fantasy as Michael Marshall Smith, really.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert. Wolpert's theory on the evolutionary origins of belief, and how a concept of causation could have kick-started the evolution of homo sapiens. Not just about religious belief - everyday beliefs, "common sense", mental health issues, drug-induced beliefs and hallucinations, and the paranormal are all explored.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I thought this was "normal" literary fiction, and then the vampire turned up. Pretty readable, not as intellectual as it seems to think it is.
PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. Bit of a kitchen-sink novel, as in "everything but the". Anti-corporatist rant, mystery, Bridget Jones love story, code-breaking and ciphering textbook, espionage tale, workplace satire, homeopathy promotion. Mostly good, with interludes of WTF.
Careless In Red by Elizabeth George. Latest Inspector Lynley mystery. They're not astounding to begin with, and this one in particular is predictable, with too big a cast and too many unrelated stories, and a bad case of research showoffery that doesn't quite come off. (No, people in Cornwall are not all called things like Benesek and Selevan. Really.)
Currently reading: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. It's obsessed with plants, and I can't take Mrs Danvers seriously thanks to Jasper Fforde. Next up will either be Great Expectations (I expect to have the same problem with Miss Havisham as I have with Mrs Danvers) or Matter by Iain M Banks.
- Dollhouse has been renewed! Utterly unexpected yay! For people who intend watching it when it starts on Sci-Fi in the UK (Tuesday, I think) - stick with it! It starts off....variable, for various reasons, but it does get good. (And I must watch the last two episodes.)
- Eurovision was pretty good - even though I wasn't with my normal Eurovision buddies, there was plenty of texting going on. Can't believe Germany didn't get more points for Dita von Teese and whips.
- I have finished reading The Silmarillion! Hurray! I don't think I'll read it again, but it will make my next re-read of LOTR quite different. (I was inspired to finally finish the damn thing - I'd started about three times before and not got far - by kate_nepveu's LOTR re-read blogging and the subsequent comment conversations on Tor. They're a combination of recap, snark, and deep analysis of the world, language, plot, characterisation, and anything else they care to touch on, and I'd recommend them to everyone.)
- And I've started reading PopCo by Scarlett Thomas, which, while looking like chicklit, is mostly cryptography and maths and codes mixed with hip new corporate design and marketing shenanigans which may or may not be shady in some way. Although it's just taken an unexpected left-turn into homeopathy, which is frustrating, not least because Godel and Turing and Asche and everyone else she's namechecking would slap her silly for believing in it. Guh.
- nextian posted a fantastic quote from Alexander Hume's Of The Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue, and now I have the whole thing downloaded from Gutenberg. Early 1600s linguistics glee!
- Also I ordered prettyshiny Dave McKean postage stamps with Neil Gaiman short stories to go with them. I can't remember the last time I bought stamps. (Oh, er, yes I can - it was another collectors' edition thing, an Eccleston Doctor Who special something-or-other. I don't post things unless there are Freepost envelopes, apparently.)
- Nadine Dorries went nuts about the Telegraph's story on her expenses but only managed to come across as ranty and illiterate, as usual, and actually incriminate herself further, which is impressive.
- Graham Linehan posted a link to the YouTube clip of the dream version of My Lovely Horse, Father Ted's Eurovision song actually by the Divine Comedy, and Neil Gaiman retweeted it. I can just imagine a lot of Gaiman's followers boggling slightly. In other top TV comedy Eurovision moments, have Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson singing Pif Paf Pof on The High Life.
Today I bought the Home Office Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, 1950 when I spotted it for £4 in a garden centre. It's fascinating (and slightly terrifying). "In case of atomic warfare, hide under your sturdiest table", that sort of thing. The garden centre also had, instead of garden gnomes, little kung-fu statues to put among your plants. Some of them might have been Bruce Lee. I do have photos to prove it, which I'll probably post when I get back to my own computer. (I did wonder briefly if my new medication - which is making me feel even crappier than before - was also causing hallucinations, but other people seemed to be able to see them too.)
1) Amazon are an Evil Corporation who are purposefully censoring GBLT books (either just because they want to, or after pressure from right-wing protest groups) and should be boycotted, or possibly taken out and shot.
2) Amazon can do what they like, and it's a non-issue.
3) Amazon have been trolled by this guy, because he says so.
4) Amazon have had some sort of technical or manual glitch that's caused this, and it'll be fixed.
Me? I don't know. And more than that, I suspect it's a combination of all of them, except maybe 3. There's definitely some sort of policy where adult books can be de-ranked, as explained in the emails to Mark Probst and others. Nobody's really had a problem with this before, because it affected very few books, and they didn't seem to be specifically targeted in the way that the gay and lesbian books have been this weekend. And while it makes me a bit squirmy, I can see why they don't want porn turning up in top level searches.
This weekend is a completely different matter, of course, but I call cock-up rather than conspiracy. I don't believe the trolling theory, really - none of the suggested ways of doing it seem to work, and the post linked to above screams of attention-seeking. It seems more likely that since the de-ranking filter exists, something has happened (either maliciously or lazily or incompetently, but probably from inside Amazon, since I've seen no evidence it can be influenced from outside) to hugely increase the number of books put on that filter. And it's one of those things that's a lot harder to do than to undo.
Meanwhile, Amazon PR are panicking - ignoring the problem, then blaming a "glitch" and giving no other details, then going quiet again - because they don't know what's going on or when it'll be fixed, or they've been told not to give out any information until they can say "yeah, we've sorted it, and done X to stop it happening again". Because they ARE a major company, and covering up their cock-ups until they can lay blame is what major companies do.
The difficulty for me with this sort of issue is getting the balance right. Spreading the word about the problem far and wide, and trying to make sure something gets done about it? Absolutely vital. Ignoring it or saying it's not important, or that you're sure it's just a mistake and it'll be fine, isn't enough - saying it's not a problem at all is abhorrent. But at the same time, I'm uncomfortable with the immediate decision some people have made that Amazon Is Evil, that it should be boycotted long-term, shares should be sold, etc etc, before giving them a reasonable chance to explain what's happened. And it's all complicated, of course, by the people jumping in to claim or deny responsibility.
People want immediate and definite answers, and that's understandable, but it's not entirely compatible with a search for the truth of the matter. I'm happy to wait a few days, and see what the picture looks like then, before I make up my mind.
Basically, amazon.com have deleted the sales rankings from what they're calling "adult" books, which actually means books with any sort of queerness in them. Like, Ellen Degeneres's autobiography has been de-ranked, but Ron Jeremy's hasn't. Classic literature like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit has been de-ranked, but Chuck Palahniuk (much as I love him, he's definitely "adult") hasn't. A collection of Playboy centrefolds is fine, but a biography of Harvey Milk isn't. Stephen Fry and John Barrowman's autobiographies, Tipping The Velvet, Brokeback Mountain, and Heather Has Two Mommies have all lost their rankings. (You can tell by the title the latter is an "adult" book, can't you?)
Deleting the sales rankings means that the books don't show up in searches, unless you search specifically for them by title. They don't show up when you're browsing, and they never get recommended. It can have a huge effect on a book's sales, and just generally on the visibility of non-heterosexuality.
I can't tell what's happening with amazon.co.uk - the sales ranks seem to have been deleted for some of the books but not all of them, and it doesn't seem to have affected searches yet. Except that would mean that this has always been what you get if you search for "homosexuality" ( which would be bad: )
This is all over twitter and ye olde blogosphere today:
markprobst broke the story here, and there's more from mashable, Daytona Beach News Journal (somewhat randomly, but it's a good article), the LA Times book blog, and Jezebel. There's a compilation of links here and a post compiling information about what's been affected here, both at meta_writer.I do feel slightly sorry for the Amazon CTO on Twitter, he's getting mashed. Tweets with the #amazonfail hashtag are currently running about two a second, and have been for hours - if you're feeling masochistic, you can try and keep up with them on twitterfall. And Amazon's site hits are going to be MASSIVE today, as the entire internets tries to figure out what they've de-ranked and what they haven't - I do hope this doesn't backfire!
(Also, my semagic really isn't working. Hmm.)
Second was the holy-crap-1TB-of-storage-for-how-much Toshiba hard drive I gave in and bought after my computer blue-screened and I realised that yes, I really should back up occasionally. It's very lovely, too. Smaller than my 250GB hard drive, and shinier, and much, much quieter. I'm busy copying about 130GB of assorted downloaded gubbins to it, which could take a while. And I should get back to putting all my music on to the computer, too - I wanted to listen to the Field Mice the other day, and had to actually go and dig out the physical CD. Horrendous. (Actually, I was listening to a TAPE the other day - Victor and Barry comedy. Must find someone who can put that on the computer for me, too, before the tape dies.)
..and I just got SO distracted on youtube. Someone's put up loads of Victor and Barry stuff, though no songs that I can see. V&B are the comedy duo that Alan Cumming was half of in the late '80s, with Forbes Masson. There's a clip of them on Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade, and I wouldn't have claimed to remember the theme tune to that, but as soon as it started - whoa! Flashback! Heh. Also footage from the Scottish part of an ITV telethon which includes a man singing with his head in a washing machine, while they're mildly sarcastic at him. Very odd. And there is a clip of them doing a song about the Edinburgh Festival on the STV website.
I may have had something else in mind to say before I sidetracked myself, there, but if I did, I've completely forgotten it.
- A bin bag full of clothes to take to the charity shop.
- A brand new shiny library card, thanks to a visit to the Mitchell. (Where I was "helped" by the slowest typist in the world, who also completely failed to check my requisite two forms of ID. I could be ANYONE running off with their books. ANYONE.)
- Only five books to read from the library, cos four of them are on two-week loans. Julian Baggini, Dan Dennett, David Crystal, JS Mill and, er, Tricia Sullivan. Good haul. Worried my friend by spotting the enormous Cambridge Grammar Of The English Language and going "Ooh! I read his blog!"
- Three pairs of socks with robots on them, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a bra and a wallet, but sadly not an outfit for the wedding I'm going to in ten days, which was the actual plan.
- A stomach full of lovely lovely fajitas from Buddha. (Er, that sounds odd. It's a pub, obviously.)
- The Dead Like Me film and the new Big Bang Theory episode to watch, and Red Riding taped, too.
- TICKETS FOR WATCHMEN TOMORROW NIGHT YAY!
But when I go googling for a link for that, it turns out that half the people doing the meme think it's the Big Read list (which had Tolkien at the top) and half of them think it's the (American) NEA's top books list (which doesn't exist), but it's actually - probably - a World Book Day survey. And I can't find a source for the "average adult has read only six books from this list" thing at all, possibly just because searching for it just gets me the meme all over the place....
ANYWAY. Wherever it comes from, here is the meme. ( Long, obviously. )
A-ha! And I've just found a blog entry where The Book Geek looks into the origins of the meme, with similar results. Right down to the "..but I don't care, I'll do the meme anyway". Hee.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 41
Which of these people have you heard of?
View Answers
William McGonagall
33 (80.5%)
William the Gonnagle 18 (43.9%)
Minerva McGonagall 28 (68.3%)
Ticky! 18 (43.9%)
The gonnagles from Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle books and Minerva McGonagall from the Harry Potter books are both, of course, named after William Topaz McGonagall, one of Scotland's "great" "poets". His most famous poem is The Tay Bridge Disaster, which starts:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
and continues in that vein for seven increasingly long verses. Fantastic! He's thought of as Britain's worst poet (apart from Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, one assumes) but is still fairly well known 100 years later because really, this is astounding, amazingly, hilariously bad poetry.
And there's a petition to put him on a stamp. Surely this must happen. Sign!
(Man, I just found out there's a Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers film about him, The Great McGonagall. (Well, "about" him. Y'know.) Only £2.98 on Amazon! I'm so tempted.)
Hat-tip to
sesquipedality for the petition link!(Oh, and happy Darwin Day, all!)
