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Review: Jude I. Parry, The Annoying Cases of Stepmother Gray
Unlike most Americans who call themselves Satanists, Stepmother Gray worships Satan. She founded the Church of Impure Evil, and leads its Minneapolis congregation.
In the tradition of Chesterton's Father Brown and other fictional clerics, she's an amateur detective. But unlike Father Brown, she doesn't want justice to be done. Her goal is to find the criminal, and then frame an innocent person for the crime.
Unfortunately, this never works out. In each story, the person she frames turns out to be guilty.
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xposted to IJ and LJ
- Wrote 229 words on what I hope will grow up into an SGA story.
- Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away. Just hearing his name brings back so many memories from college, like sitting in an enormous lecture hall listening to my favorite prof.
- Does the San Francisco Panorama not look brilliant? Look at that list of contributors -- I can't wait!
- Here is another blog I really love: High Country New.
- Sorry to repeat myself, but higher education is my life, and I spend a lot of time worrying about it. The LA Times has an excellent article on the demise of higher education in California. Economists found that for every dollar the state invests in a CSU student, it receives $4.41 in return.
- Tomorrow night I'll be at my Mother's. I already miss my dear husband and my own comfortable bed.
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xposted to IJ and LJ
Today I wrote:
210 words of what I hope will be a short Daniel Jackson story.
558 words of the story I've been working on, the one I've been dreaming of for months.
Currently, my favorite blog is The Iceland Weather Report.
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Tonight I wrote 694 words. I sure hope this turns into a story.
Tonight I also bought my mother a Kindle DX. I heard from my sister and she really likes the idea. Mother is so miserable; she's trying to read using a magnifying glass, a word at a time. It's taken her two weeks to read 240 pages.
She has also decided to give up driving. My sister and I are very grateful for that. Thank god she moved into her assistive living place about six years ago -- they have all kinds of services to help people get around, and there's even a little grocery store right on the premises.
The Kindle should be there by Wednesday, and I fly in on Thursday, so I hope I can figure it out, get it configured, and have Mother reading before I leave. I think Amazon gives you a month to make up your mind so we can always return it. But I hope she likes it. I really, really hope she likes it.
Changing the subject wildly: A show I really enjoyed was canceled: Defying Gravity. It wasn't a very good show, but I loved the premise and was really curious where it was going to go. I googled around looking for news of the show and discovered an interview with the show's creator about where it would have gone. Reading that made me even sorrier it was canceled.
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Thursday October 22, 2009 More science fiction becomes obsolete. Minnesota Public Radio had an NPR program on living in the panopticon age; the time when all of our past and present can be known to anyone who wants to make a search. Everything is now in electronic archives, which don't decay or get lost. [Yes, I know this isn't entirely true.]
One person inteviewed has two Facebook pages. The one under his own name has only innocuous material. The other has content which might get him in trouble if tied to him.
I see two problems with this solution. 1) There's software which looks for stylistic similarities in texts. It was developed to spot plagiarism; but it's also been used to find the authors of anonymous writing. 2) What's innocuous today might not be in five, ten, or twenty years.
The earliest science fiction story about this privacy problem I know of: T. L. Sherred's "E for Effort" (1947.) The technology there was a time viewer, and the problem was mostly Real History being revealed. Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past"(1956), also about a time viewer, concentrated on the problem of individual privacy.
Roger Zelazny's stories collected in _My Name is Legion_ focused on the threat to individual privacy. The series protagonist had written himself out of data bases and set up false identities.
Would it work? I suspect not. My purchases and downloads are idiosyncratic enough that a false identity could probably be spotted (given availability to grocery, bookstore, and thrift store data, sufficient computing power, and a reason to give finding me priority.)
***"Your dog is probably a socialist." Ask Doctor Science.
( Read more... )
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xposted to IJ and LJ
Happy November 1! It's el día de los muertos, my favorite holiday. I went into town and saw people placing flowers at little shrines along the road, where their friends and family have died, and we have candles burning. I made cupcakes but I don't have any sugar skulls, which makes me sad. I love crunching on them.
November 1 is also the first day of NaNoWriMo, in which I do not participate, but I do think it's time for me to do some writing. I am watching the community Mini NaNoWriMo, and have committed myself to writing at least 100 words/day this month. I didn't join the community because I will be AFK for several days -- next week is my mother's 87th birthday, so I'm flying back to spend the weekend with her. I still don't have a gift for her, though I'm seriously considering buying her a Kindle DX.
I'm using Write or Die again; I really like that little app. I don't think I'll buy the desktop version, though, because I like the online so much. Today I've written just over 600 words, so I'm happy. I'm not sure it will actually become a story, but it's something I've thought about writing for months now. We'll see if anything comes of it.
For Halloween, I saw Paranormal Activity, which scared me to death. I seriously have been leaving lights on when I sleep. Laugh at me if you will, but I'm not turning them off.
( Other things in my life )
Did you move your clock back? I mean, if you live someplace where you have to?
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) msilverstar |
| 2009-10-31 23:19 |
| USAians and Canadians, time change tonight |
| Public |
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This is the "Fall back" switch from Daylight Savings Time, so set your clocks to 11 pm at midnight or whenever: you can always check timeanddate.com, just to be sure. I'm going to try and think of it as an extra hour to sleep in or get things done.
ETA to add Our Neighbors To The North
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http://community.livejournal.com/viggo_daily/780280.html This is Viggo not pretty, but desperate. I have been fortunate enough to see this film twice now and he rips your heart out and stomps on it. It is a wonderful, powerful, heartbreaking performance, Click thumb twice for full size. 
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Richard Taylor! Viggo! Bob Anderson! Swords! I so wanted to like this.
Shame that Reclaiming the Blade does the ponderous narration thing. It's mostly the script, which keeps making portentous statements and generalizations about how The Blade was So Amazing before those Awful Guns. They kept reaching for dramatic tension, instead of just relaxing and letting their passion show. The Netflix version didn't have any special features, but I doubt they'd be worth actually paying much for.
Also, the term "European Martial Arts" does not need to be used every five minutes: we get it, OK?
(Yes, I'm in a rotten mood today, but the documentary really was disappointing.)
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| mirabile_dictu |
| 2009-10-29 18:41 |
| Low vision, Naomi Klein, awards, and stuff |
| Public |
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xposted to IJ and LJ
My mother is blind in one eye, due to macular degeneration, and has very low vision in the other. Fortunately, the macular degeneration has been halted in her good eye, due to new meds, but damage was done.
She is a great reader; nothing makes her happier than to settle down with a pile of books by her side. She has a favorite armchair that I call her "nest," and she settles in with coffee, a bright light, and her books. For the last few years, those books have been enormous large print ones, so heavy that she finds them difficult to hold due to her arthritis.
Now her remaining eye's vision has deteriorated to the point that even large print isn't large enough. She went to see a low vision specialist, who charged her $185 for ten minutes and sold her an $85 magnifying glass that 1) doesn't work well, and 2) is too heavy for her arthritic hand to hold.
I spoke to my own optometrist, who has followed her history (and checks me carefully for any signs of macular degeneration each year), but he tells me there's nothing for it but assistive devices. No magic treatment to restore her vision, or even improve it a bit. Right now, we don't believe she'll go completely blind, but she can't do very much, including read.
I've been investigating assistive devices, but they all seem to be magnifying glasses of one sort or another (like a flat fresnel lense you lay over the page, except the page has to be perfectly flat and what book is perfectly flat?) or would make her sit at a special table and read from a monitor. I want her in her comfortable nest.
To me, the obvious solution is books on CDs, which I love and listen to all the time. Alas, Mother doesn't care for them. I've bought her any number of them, but I don't think she's ever opened one; they just sit on her shelf.
I've been looking at the Kindle DX, the Sony e-Reader, and the new Barnes and Noble Nook. Sony's device is simply too small for Mother's vision, but both the Kindle DX and the Nook look like real possibilities. I found this comparison of the two (you'll have to click on it to enlarge the jpg). The Kindle is about an inch longer than the Nook, plus part of the Nook's landscape is taken up by some odd screen I haven't figured out yet (I've never seen a Nook in RL).
Of course, both have stupidly small navigation buttons, but we can paint them or something so Mother can identify which button is for what.
My question to my flist: does anyone own either of these devices? For someone very nearly blind, would they do? I've googled "low vision" and their names and found lots of very promising articles about them. They both cost a fair bit, but that doesn't matter to me -- it's my Mom, you know? Plus my sister is going to kick in. But I want to get something she can actually use. Bonus problem: she loathes computers with a white hot passion; they totally freak her out.
Advice or suggestions gratefully received.
( Other stuff, less urgent and interesting )
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