I adore honey, and have bought mine from local beekeepers (or traded with friends who keep bees)... but it hasn't had an appreciable effect on my allergies, and I haven't seen research which backs this up. Of course, allergy shots also didn't do much for me, despite having them for four years. (Antileukotrienes, on the other hand, were a life changer. There was a ton of lung capacity that I just wasn't getting to use, and with it an awful lot of endurance - who knew?)
I have ridiculous allergies, and take a number of antihistamines to keep them in check (but hey, the asthma is enough in check that I can run, so I'm happy.) I have found that for me guaifenesen, which is usually thought of as a expectorant, works pretty well as a decongestant with the added bonus that it's non-drying - a huge plus in Ohio winters.
It thins mucous and does something with its consistency that protects the vocal cords - a lot of singers take it for this reason. I take it if I'm getting a scratchy throat and know I'm going to be talking a lot. I pretty much never get the kind of prolonged laryngitis that I used to when teaching with a minor cold. (Though these days that's more about getting through a major conference when I'm staying in a random AirBnB.)
...though considering laptop batteries, you might do just as well altering them rather than replacing them. Depending on the alternative explosives, of course. It always amuses me that laptop batteries are considered *just fine* for airplanes...
Hm. I have been hit twice, but both were fairly early in my career of being a serious commuter (and one involved a narrow shoulder with an abrupt drop off and a really difficult driver - I might have a better radar now for difficult drivers, but damn he was an asshole.) I've fallen rather more recently... but I'm a four season commuter, in Cleveland, and I will at times push my luck in the snow on what my carbide studded tires can take. It's, ah, kind of fun, when I'm in the mood.
Of course I do that in part because as long as I'm in circumstances I'm comfortable in (and if I'm not, mostly I grab a shuttle), I'm just not that afraid of falling. I mean, falling in the way of cars would be awful, but all the years of martial arts training has meant that usually at worst I get a bruise or two on my ankles if I didn't get them all the way clear of the frame.
(p.s. Not that this is probably news, but having moved here from the west coast, bar mitts are amazing. OMG.)
There was a study done one this, mostly pointing out that there was a lot of confirmation bias in play - that people who were incensed at bicyclists not obeying traffic laws generally did not noticed automobile drivers committing similar acts. (This is, of course, a general observation, I can't say jack about you in particular.)
I think there are a lot of factors here - some are cultural, where people think of bicyclists and interlopers and inappropriate in their use of space, and bicyclists regard automobiles as both physical and idealistic threats. But some of them are design - I've spent most of my time commuting in areas with very low commuter rates (and often high speeds - I am extremely polite and painfully aware of my lack of exoskeleton thank you*.) Some urban designs really don't encourage bicycles and cars to play well together.
I'm currently living in a midwestern city where the streets are generally not in the best repair but the shoulders are especially dire. Now, really, I'd prefer to ride on the shoulder as much as possible, and be out of everyone's way, but often the state of the shoulder makes that too dangerous. For my commute, and for places I go frequently, I've found routes that don't have this problem, but it's not a great situation (even though local drivers for the most part are considerate if sometimes clueless - I don't need a full carwidth's distance between me and a car, nice thought, not really helping traffic here.)
* In my Microsoft days, pretty every week at least one person would post to the internal discussion board about having joined the "roadkill club", which is to say having sustained a major injury while commuting.
Mm. The prion work has been largely supported. However, he was not the first person to originate the concept of an infectious protein, and there's an argument to be made that his primary contribution to the field was the name "prion".
I wouldn't disregard his work, but double check everything. (A former labmate in a previous lab went toe to toe against him for her dissertation work - and totally won, but watching him try to bash by means of his position when he just didn't have the data was pretty unsettling.)
What they showed was that what was presumably a misfolding disorder was also infectious. They didn't show a means of transmission that would be viable in the wild - you don't just have someone's brain matter fly into your head. This isn't the same prion (PRP) as that related to Mad Cow. The means of transmission might be completely different. It might not transmit at all - it might be that proteins misfold spontaneously, and once you've gotten one (or more likely, a few) they drag a bunch of others along, but that it is not transmissible between persons. It might be similar to mad cow, or it might be a different mechanism - keep in mind the difference between Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - one you could only get if you either had the misfolding yourself or if you ate someone's brain. The other you could get from eating cow neural tissue.
And, of course, Mad Cow, for all that it was both very infectious and quick moving for a prion, was super inefficient overall. And awful lot (tens of thousands, at least) infected cows entered the food supply for every person who got Mad Cow. The takeaway? While most prions we know of aren't nearly so bad, there's room for prions to be much, much worse.
Or y'know, a girl can take pictures of herself, send them to her boyfriend, and be charged for sex crimes against herself. It's not just a gender thing - it's much broader stupidity.
Despite my self imposed limits, my family generally has tended to be kind of ridiculously fertile - in my generation there are almost forty first cousins (though admittedly some of my uncles and aunts went through multiple marriages to manage this feat.) My grandmother had my youngest and favorite Aunt, a retired CSI who now does medical auditing, when she was 46....of course, increased rates doesn't mean the absolute rates are high, just that they're higher than they would have been.
Eh. I've always been extremely careful about birth control (I just had this talk with my sixteen year old nephew, pointing out that the familial rates of fertility might suggest that he be a belt and suspenders man if he wants to avoid paternity), but were I to become pregnant at this point in my life, I would be hard core about pre-natal testing, but it's not unlikely that I'd carry to term. Not something I'm seeking out - and I had a few guys audition for "father of my children" once I left my ex - but an experience I have mixed feelings about missing out on.
Being in my forties, it's a toss up whether I'd manage to have children at all, and autism is hardly the only thing that increases with maternal age (I seem to recall that there are some risk factors associated with paternal age as well). This was, in fact, my point - even if it was a high priority for their postulated struggling post-apocalyptic community to make babies (and seriously, I think you want to make sure you have the basics covered before you get on with the breeding) I am just not your best candidate. I'd always figured that if I hadn't had kids by the time I was thirty-five - and I was aiming for late twenties - I wasn't having them. However, my ex rather abruptly decided that he wanted not to have kids, and for me to quit my job and take care of him... well, hence the ex part.
(Between my martial arts students and my undergraduate research students, I pretty much get any need to nurture taken care of, and I might make a better teacher than I would a parent. I have a twisted enough sense of humor than I regret not inflicted my genes on the next generation - but when I looked into donating eggs, while apparently I looked like a great donor, they said I'd have to lay off of the training for a month, and, well, no.)
"(Guess why autism rates are skyrocketing? That's right, women having kids well past their thirties because they were too busy having a job. Thanks feminism.)"
There are so many things wrong with this line. First of all, you're pulling out one factor that is correlated (let us repeat together, correlation does not imply causality) and trying to put all the increase in autism rates (which are hard to track anyway because diagnostics have changed so much) at its feet. The research simply doesn't support this - this is clearly far more about your political agenda than about the science. Especially since the science shows linkages to paternal age as well.
But it's equally asinine to lay women having children later because they have jobs at the feet of feminism. Hell, you could just as strongly make exactly the reverse argument, that feminism in its current form arose in part because of women entering the workforce and achieving such a degree of economic independence. This isn't something that just happened - you're looking at the results of huge changes with industrialization, better medicine, the rise of birth control*, increasing automation of housework, and so on. Do you want to have an economy that works? Well, from where we are right now, women have got to be in the workplace in large numbers - it's not some hobby, it's economic necessity, both on the individual household level and in terms of our country.
* And seriously, for all the guys who seem to fantasize about a time when women would be forced to be homemakers because they got pregnant just like that, isn't it awfully nice to be able to have sex without worrying about having kids? I am highly pro-birth control myself. Yay, more sex, fewer worries.
As charming as fantasy as that might be, one really would hope that common interest might have us focusing on such pressing needs as food and shelter....I guess it would depend on just how thin resources were on the ground.
I've wondered a lot about the average age of posters, and if that has changed. A lot would be explained (including some matters of timing) by a strong influx of the 15-22 year olds.
It's hardly a matter of one political bend or another - I just had Jehova's Witnesses on my porch trying to tell about the world that is to come, and how only the really good people will be in it (making for a much smaller population, they emphasized) and God's going to clean everything up...
But you'll see it as a trope in fiction of all stripes. There's some terrible disaster, and mankind re-emerges into a form that somehow fits the political biases of the author. A lot of people imagine that being in horrible circumstances like that, fighting for survival with less technology and an awful lot fewer people would make for a simpler, more real world and yearn for it.
Not that long ago, here on Slashdot, a bunch of people were explaining to me that in such a world, as a woman, I would go back into my biologically ordained role of reproductive servitude, which struck me as saying a lot more about their preoccupations, I thought, than anything else, but then people always seem to project their fantasies into these scenarios. (Especially since I'd already mentioned that I was in my forties, as well as being a martial artist and martial arts instructor and having an awful lot of skills useful in such a society.)
I haven't done what the OP is suggesting, but I used to (including in a much lamer age of data coverage) take off hiking while vaguely babysitting database builds - every time I'd hit a ridge or a peak I'd check for connectivity, and if I had it, I'd check to make sure nothing had broken too terribly. (And if I was feeling bratty, snap a picture and send it to my labmates.) But this was up in the Cascades - the terrain matters.
Another of my rules of thumb - more generally than just with the above excursions - was to do as much as possible on my phone (which was much easier to recharge via solar.) The solar sets ups have gotten better, and computer batteries have gotten better - I'm less stingy these days, but still. (But OTOH, the OP is describing activities where much of the time various checks might be able to be done via phone, saving the computer battery.)
Well, turning to science fiction for pleasant escapism that doesn't question the status quo is... well, I can't say made of fail, because there's an awful lot of that, but, darn, should it surprise anyone that this isn't the stuff that is winning awards?
I'm kind of fascinated by the argument around class divisions in SF, though when I try to map it to the folks I know I do find myself wondering how sensitive a measure that is. I suspect there's a generational component. I suspect there's a regional component.* But I know so many fans working service industry jobs who were all about the progressive fic, and so many well paid software engineers who weren't. (I am thinking of some hilariously awful conversations with a baby lead not so many years ago.)
* And this is where I'm probably most likely to be blinded myself - I'm from Seattle.
I think it's pretty valid to make a distinction between authors saying "Hey, BTW, my book is eligible to be nominated!" which a ton of people from all kinds of backgrounds do, and for that matter "Hey, this is a bunch of cool stuff I've read that you might want to check out that's also been eligible," to putting together a slate. There's an argument to be made as to where the sad puppies fell. There really isn't one with the rabid puppies.
(And really, as many people have pointed out, when you have so much stuff being published, and a relatively small body of people nominating things, it's a system where even a very small organized voting bloc can get something on the ballot. This isn't the first time this has come up, even, though it's the first time there's been a slate that I know of. There are a number of reforms to the nomination system being looked at, so things might be changing.)
Card... So, you do know that opposition to gay marriage is only one of the more recent bits there? And he takes it an awful lot further than a lot of people seem compelled to by their faiths. He was, at one time, one of my favorite authors. I attended one of his Secular Humanist Revivals way back when. He seemed to be a great guy. I mean, this was back when the net was flat, and I was a young thing, but still....and I guess I should be glad that the quality of his writing had been falling off by the time I heard about him writing about how there should be laws criminalizing homosexuality, which should then be selectively enforced to keep the unruly ones in their places. *boggle* The volume has increased and decreased at various times over the years, but I do think there's a difference, at least in degree between someone thinking that their own religion is a great reason some other people entirely shouldn't be able to get married, and their own religion is a great reason those people should be thrown in fail unless their keep their heads and voices down. Ew.
(Of course, as a bi woman it's perhaps not surprising that I'd take this a bit personally.)
I've been hearing a lot about "People don't like stories about self reliance any more! And everyone is preachy! We just want good stories!"...as if these statements are entirely in harmony with each other.
Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.
Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.
Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.
...and most of the folks I know did indeed sit down and slog through most every story, and only voted "No Award" if they really felt nothing was up to Hugo quality. (Personally, I'm perfectly happy to stop reading about the point that stabbing pencils into my eyes sounds like more fun than continuing reading, but then I'm not a purist.)
The saddest story is the alternate universe where there wasn't an attempt to organize a voting bloc: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2...
(As an aside, I think there's at lot to be said to building bridges with sad puppies, though it has to be a mutual effort. Rabid puppies? Not so much.)
...and the thinkpad keyboards. And the thinkpad clitmice, with the hard buttons (goodness, that last almost makes me want to use one of the more polite forms of the name...) I looked at this briefly the last time I went shopping, but lack of input options made it seem awfully unattractive for some of my 3d modelling work.
(So I have two Thinkpads, a w-series for when I'm doing serious simulations and don't mind the weight, and a yoga12 for running around with.)
Yes, this. The part I found the most disturbing was:
"Maybe since we in the IT industry tend to be well paid, nobody should care, and there's no reason complain."
There's a pretty significant portion of the tech industry that isn't necessarily well paid, nor do they have much in the way of job security. When times are good, they do just fine. When times aren't, they bounce between really marginal contracts and unemployment. (I replaced IT with tech because I've spent most of my time in software development, so most of my knowledge of IT as a field is somewhat second hand.)
Tech culture tends to be all about individual achievement - and on the flip side, if you're not bringing in the buck, then you must be an underachiever, right? Which just means that if you are one of the workers who is more vulnerable, and if you are being exploited, there's more social pressure not to speak up about it, because you don't want to be labelled a whiner, when everyone knows that it's really that you couldn't hack it.
(Just in case there's any doubt, while I'm a big fan of people doing cool stuff, and rather like to do cool stuff myself, I think the above is a rather stupid and short sighted approach to structuring a either a business or a society.)
Slashdot Mirror
I adore honey, and have bought mine from local beekeepers (or traded with friends who keep bees)... but it hasn't had an appreciable effect on my allergies, and I haven't seen research which backs this up. Of course, allergy shots also didn't do much for me, despite having them for four years. (Antileukotrienes, on the other hand, were a life changer. There was a ton of lung capacity that I just wasn't getting to use, and with it an awful lot of endurance - who knew?)
I have ridiculous allergies, and take a number of antihistamines to keep them in check (but hey, the asthma is enough in check that I can run, so I'm happy.) I have found that for me guaifenesen, which is usually thought of as a expectorant, works pretty well as a decongestant with the added bonus that it's non-drying - a huge plus in Ohio winters.
It thins mucous and does something with its consistency that protects the vocal cords - a lot of singers take it for this reason. I take it if I'm getting a scratchy throat and know I'm going to be talking a lot. I pretty much never get the kind of prolonged laryngitis that I used to when teaching with a minor cold. (Though these days that's more about getting through a major conference when I'm staying in a random AirBnB.)
...though considering laptop batteries, you might do just as well altering them rather than replacing them. Depending on the alternative explosives, of course. It always amuses me that laptop batteries are considered *just fine* for airplanes...
...because the only possible thing that could motivate "smart people" is money. :-P
Hm. I have been hit twice, but both were fairly early in my career of being a serious commuter (and one involved a narrow shoulder with an abrupt drop off and a really difficult driver - I might have a better radar now for difficult drivers, but damn he was an asshole.) I've fallen rather more recently... but I'm a four season commuter, in Cleveland, and I will at times push my luck in the snow on what my carbide studded tires can take. It's, ah, kind of fun, when I'm in the mood.
Of course I do that in part because as long as I'm in circumstances I'm comfortable in (and if I'm not, mostly I grab a shuttle), I'm just not that afraid of falling. I mean, falling in the way of cars would be awful, but all the years of martial arts training has meant that usually at worst I get a bruise or two on my ankles if I didn't get them all the way clear of the frame.
(p.s. Not that this is probably news, but having moved here from the west coast, bar mitts are amazing. OMG.)
You win the most apt, if most depressing, metaphor award.
There was a study done one this, mostly pointing out that there was a lot of confirmation bias in play - that people who were incensed at bicyclists not obeying traffic laws generally did not noticed automobile drivers committing similar acts. (This is, of course, a general observation, I can't say jack about you in particular.)
I think there are a lot of factors here - some are cultural, where people think of bicyclists and interlopers and inappropriate in their use of space, and bicyclists regard automobiles as both physical and idealistic threats. But some of them are design - I've spent most of my time commuting in areas with very low commuter rates (and often high speeds - I am extremely polite and painfully aware of my lack of exoskeleton thank you*.) Some urban designs really don't encourage bicycles and cars to play well together.
I'm currently living in a midwestern city where the streets are generally not in the best repair but the shoulders are especially dire. Now, really, I'd prefer to ride on the shoulder as much as possible, and be out of everyone's way, but often the state of the shoulder makes that too dangerous. For my commute, and for places I go frequently, I've found routes that don't have this problem, but it's not a great situation (even though local drivers for the most part are considerate if sometimes clueless - I don't need a full carwidth's distance between me and a car, nice thought, not really helping traffic here.)
* In my Microsoft days, pretty every week at least one person would post to the internal discussion board about having joined the "roadkill club", which is to say having sustained a major injury while commuting.
Mm. The prion work has been largely supported. However, he was not the first person to originate the concept of an infectious protein, and there's an argument to be made that his primary contribution to the field was the name "prion".
I wouldn't disregard his work, but double check everything. (A former labmate in a previous lab went toe to toe against him for her dissertation work - and totally won, but watching him try to bash by means of his position when he just didn't have the data was pretty unsettling.)
Still, this is pretty exciting if it stands up.
What they showed was that what was presumably a misfolding disorder was also infectious. They didn't show a means of transmission that would be viable in the wild - you don't just have someone's brain matter fly into your head. This isn't the same prion (PRP) as that related to Mad Cow. The means of transmission might be completely different. It might not transmit at all - it might be that proteins misfold spontaneously, and once you've gotten one (or more likely, a few) they drag a bunch of others along, but that it is not transmissible between persons. It might be similar to mad cow, or it might be a different mechanism - keep in mind the difference between Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - one you could only get if you either had the misfolding yourself or if you ate someone's brain. The other you could get from eating cow neural tissue.
And, of course, Mad Cow, for all that it was both very infectious and quick moving for a prion, was super inefficient overall. And awful lot (tens of thousands, at least) infected cows entered the food supply for every person who got Mad Cow. The takeaway? While most prions we know of aren't nearly so bad, there's room for prions to be much, much worse.
Or y'know, a girl can take pictures of herself, send them to her boyfriend, and be charged for sex crimes against herself. It's not just a gender thing - it's much broader stupidity.
http://www.fayobserver.com/new...
Despite my self imposed limits, my family generally has tended to be kind of ridiculously fertile - in my generation there are almost forty first cousins (though admittedly some of my uncles and aunts went through multiple marriages to manage this feat.) My grandmother had my youngest and favorite Aunt, a retired CSI who now does medical auditing, when she was 46. ...of course, increased rates doesn't mean the absolute rates are high, just that they're higher than they would have been.
Eh. I've always been extremely careful about birth control (I just had this talk with my sixteen year old nephew, pointing out that the familial rates of fertility might suggest that he be a belt and suspenders man if he wants to avoid paternity), but were I to become pregnant at this point in my life, I would be hard core about pre-natal testing, but it's not unlikely that I'd carry to term. Not something I'm seeking out - and I had a few guys audition for "father of my children" once I left my ex - but an experience I have mixed feelings about missing out on.
Being in my forties, it's a toss up whether I'd manage to have children at all, and autism is hardly the only thing that increases with maternal age (I seem to recall that there are some risk factors associated with paternal age as well). This was, in fact, my point - even if it was a high priority for their postulated struggling post-apocalyptic community to make babies (and seriously, I think you want to make sure you have the basics covered before you get on with the breeding) I am just not your best candidate. I'd always figured that if I hadn't had kids by the time I was thirty-five - and I was aiming for late twenties - I wasn't having them. However, my ex rather abruptly decided that he wanted not to have kids, and for me to quit my job and take care of him... well, hence the ex part.
(Between my martial arts students and my undergraduate research students, I pretty much get any need to nurture taken care of, and I might make a better teacher than I would a parent. I have a twisted enough sense of humor than I regret not inflicted my genes on the next generation - but when I looked into donating eggs, while apparently I looked like a great donor, they said I'd have to lay off of the training for a month, and, well, no.)
"(Guess why autism rates are skyrocketing? That's right, women having kids well past their thirties because they were too busy having a job. Thanks feminism.)"
There are so many things wrong with this line. First of all, you're pulling out one factor that is correlated (let us repeat together, correlation does not imply causality) and trying to put all the increase in autism rates (which are hard to track anyway because diagnostics have changed so much) at its feet. The research simply doesn't support this - this is clearly far more about your political agenda than about the science. Especially since the science shows linkages to paternal age as well.
(Just a couple of abstract links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... )
But it's equally asinine to lay women having children later because they have jobs at the feet of feminism. Hell, you could just as strongly make exactly the reverse argument, that feminism in its current form arose in part because of women entering the workforce and achieving such a degree of economic independence. This isn't something that just happened - you're looking at the results of huge changes with industrialization, better medicine, the rise of birth control*, increasing automation of housework, and so on. Do you want to have an economy that works? Well, from where we are right now, women have got to be in the workplace in large numbers - it's not some hobby, it's economic necessity, both on the individual household level and in terms of our country.
* And seriously, for all the guys who seem to fantasize about a time when women would be forced to be homemakers because they got pregnant just like that, isn't it awfully nice to be able to have sex without worrying about having kids? I am highly pro-birth control myself. Yay, more sex, fewer worries.
As charming as fantasy as that might be, one really would hope that common interest might have us focusing on such pressing needs as food and shelter. ...I guess it would depend on just how thin resources were on the ground.
I've wondered a lot about the average age of posters, and if that has changed. A lot would be explained (including some matters of timing) by a strong influx of the 15-22 year olds.
It's hardly a matter of one political bend or another - I just had Jehova's Witnesses on my porch trying to tell about the world that is to come, and how only the really good people will be in it (making for a much smaller population, they emphasized) and God's going to clean everything up...
But you'll see it as a trope in fiction of all stripes. There's some terrible disaster, and mankind re-emerges into a form that somehow fits the political biases of the author. A lot of people imagine that being in horrible circumstances like that, fighting for survival with less technology and an awful lot fewer people would make for a simpler, more real world and yearn for it.
Not that long ago, here on Slashdot, a bunch of people were explaining to me that in such a world, as a woman, I would go back into my biologically ordained role of reproductive servitude, which struck me as saying a lot more about their preoccupations, I thought, than anything else, but then people always seem to project their fantasies into these scenarios. (Especially since I'd already mentioned that I was in my forties, as well as being a martial artist and martial arts instructor and having an awful lot of skills useful in such a society.)
You mean, that it was named McKinley in the first place?
Because there was a totally arbitrary political renaming - but this one wasn't it.
I haven't done what the OP is suggesting, but I used to (including in a much lamer age of data coverage) take off hiking while vaguely babysitting database builds - every time I'd hit a ridge or a peak I'd check for connectivity, and if I had it, I'd check to make sure nothing had broken too terribly. (And if I was feeling bratty, snap a picture and send it to my labmates.) But this was up in the Cascades - the terrain matters.
Another of my rules of thumb - more generally than just with the above excursions - was to do as much as possible on my phone (which was much easier to recharge via solar.) The solar sets ups have gotten better, and computer batteries have gotten better - I'm less stingy these days, but still. (But OTOH, the OP is describing activities where much of the time various checks might be able to be done via phone, saving the computer battery.)
Well, turning to science fiction for pleasant escapism that doesn't question the status quo is... well, I can't say made of fail, because there's an awful lot of that, but, darn, should it surprise anyone that this isn't the stuff that is winning awards?
I'm kind of fascinated by the argument around class divisions in SF, though when I try to map it to the folks I know I do find myself wondering how sensitive a measure that is. I suspect there's a generational component. I suspect there's a regional component.* But I know so many fans working service industry jobs who were all about the progressive fic, and so many well paid software engineers who weren't. (I am thinking of some hilariously awful conversations with a baby lead not so many years ago.)
* And this is where I'm probably most likely to be blinded myself - I'm from Seattle.
I think it's pretty valid to make a distinction between authors saying "Hey, BTW, my book is eligible to be nominated!" which a ton of people from all kinds of backgrounds do, and for that matter "Hey, this is a bunch of cool stuff I've read that you might want to check out that's also been eligible," to putting together a slate. There's an argument to be made as to where the sad puppies fell. There really isn't one with the rabid puppies.
(And really, as many people have pointed out, when you have so much stuff being published, and a relatively small body of people nominating things, it's a system where even a very small organized voting bloc can get something on the ballot. This isn't the first time this has come up, even, though it's the first time there's been a slate that I know of. There are a number of reforms to the nomination system being looked at, so things might be changing.)
Card... So, you do know that opposition to gay marriage is only one of the more recent bits there? And he takes it an awful lot further than a lot of people seem compelled to by their faiths. He was, at one time, one of my favorite authors. I attended one of his Secular Humanist Revivals way back when. He seemed to be a great guy. I mean, this was back when the net was flat, and I was a young thing, but still. ...and I guess I should be glad that the quality of his writing had been falling off by the time I heard about him writing about how there should be laws criminalizing homosexuality, which should then be selectively enforced to keep the unruly ones in their places. *boggle* The volume has increased and decreased at various times over the years, but I do think there's a difference, at least in degree between someone thinking that their own religion is a great reason some other people entirely shouldn't be able to get married, and their own religion is a great reason those people should be thrown in fail unless their keep their heads and voices down. Ew.
(Of course, as a bi woman it's perhaps not surprising that I'd take this a bit personally.)
I've been hearing a lot about "People don't like stories about self reliance any more! And everyone is preachy! We just want good stories!" ...as if these statements are entirely in harmony with each other.
Maybe I'm over influenced by a lack of sleep, but I've been getting pretty tempted to hang up my hat.
Okay, some basic factual errors. First off, the Hugos are a fan award, not a writer award - that's the Nebulas. They're both important, they aren't the same.
Second, the people who refused to grant awards were *the very people who paid $40 [or much more if they attended] to vote*. This wasn't some arbitrary decision, or a decision by some committee, there has always been an option of voting that it was better to not award an award in that category than to award it to the option on the ballot because they were so universally sub-par. This wasn't done by some committee, this was the voice of the voters.
Seriously - the summary was godawful and misleading, but the information is widely available.
...and most of the folks I know did indeed sit down and slog through most every story, and only voted "No Award" if they really felt nothing was up to Hugo quality. (Personally, I'm perfectly happy to stop reading about the point that stabbing pencils into my eyes sounds like more fun than continuing reading, but then I'm not a purist.)
The saddest story is the alternate universe where there wasn't an attempt to organize a voting bloc: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2...
(As an aside, I think there's at lot to be said to building bridges with sad puppies, though it has to be a mutual effort. Rabid puppies? Not so much.)
...and the thinkpad keyboards. And the thinkpad clitmice, with the hard buttons (goodness, that last almost makes me want to use one of the more polite forms of the name...) I looked at this briefly the last time I went shopping, but lack of input options made it seem awfully unattractive for some of my 3d modelling work.
(So I have two Thinkpads, a w-series for when I'm doing serious simulations and don't mind the weight, and a yoga12 for running around with.)
Yes, this. The part I found the most disturbing was:
"Maybe since we in the IT industry tend to be well paid, nobody should care, and there's no reason complain."
There's a pretty significant portion of the tech industry that isn't necessarily well paid, nor do they have much in the way of job security. When times are good, they do just fine. When times aren't, they bounce between really marginal contracts and unemployment. (I replaced IT with tech because I've spent most of my time in software development, so most of my knowledge of IT as a field is somewhat second hand.)
Tech culture tends to be all about individual achievement - and on the flip side, if you're not bringing in the buck, then you must be an underachiever, right? Which just means that if you are one of the workers who is more vulnerable, and if you are being exploited, there's more social pressure not to speak up about it, because you don't want to be labelled a whiner, when everyone knows that it's really that you couldn't hack it.
(Just in case there's any doubt, while I'm a big fan of people doing cool stuff, and rather like to do cool stuff myself, I think the above is a rather stupid and short sighted approach to structuring a either a business or a society.)