Tag: Lazy Linkage

Time to link a few items that have been languishing while I’ve been otherwise occupied!

:: Friend and fellow writer SK Waller has been paying tribute to the rock bands of California’s Gold Coast:

But the Tri-counties didn’t adhere to the British Sound. Instead, they took what they liked and cast off the rest. While southern California topped the charts with Folk-Rock (the Byrds, the Mamas & the Papas…) and Progressive Rock (the Mothers of Invention, the Doors…) and northern California grabbed national attention with Acid Rock (the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother & the Holding Company…) the Gold Coast, overlooked and passed over, was busy mixing up their own brew that included all of that, but whose base was Surf. Welcome to 1960s proto punk, California style.

She’s created a whole site about this part of rock history, California Gold Coast Dreamin’. Check it out!

:: Farran Nehme, one of the best film-bloggers around (under the title Self-Styled Siren), has a novel on the way. It sounds amazing, steeped as it is in her astonishing knowledge of film history:

New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she’s never going back, minimum wage job (vintage store salesgirl) and shabby apartment (Avenue C walkup) be damned. Who cares about earthly matters when Ceinwen can spend her days and her nights at fading movie houses—and most of the time that’s left trying to look like Jean Harlow?

One day, Ceinwen discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have—just possibly—starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. So naturally, it’s time for a quest. She will track down the missing reels, she will impress her neighbor, and she will become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue.

As she embarks on her grand mission, Ceinwen meets a somewhat bumbling, very charming, 100 percent English math professor named Matthew, who is as rational as she is dreamy. Together, they will or will not discover the reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld.

As it turns out, I know nothing at all about silent film…but I might have learned some, had I gone to college a couple years later. The music director of my school’s orchestra was a part-time player in a Des Moines ensemble that played the scores to accompany silent films, and just after I left with diploma in hand, she made this passion of hers a part of the college’s orchestra scene! I’ve always been bummed that I missed out on that.

:: It’s Monday; your to-do list at work is probably short and manageable. So go waste some time learning stuff! Atlas Obscura is one of those sites you can lose yourself in, quickly.

:: I’m a sucker for reading other writers discuss their procedures, what tools they use, their workspace, et cetera. I obviously don’t subscribe to the “Maybe if I use the same pen Stephen King uses!” kind of thinking, but I still like hearing about process. I find it a bit inspirational, both in general terms (these folks still have to sit down and work), and in practical terms (lots of successful folks have good thoughts on how to organize and create a workspace). George RR Martin is very particular about the word processor he uses.

:: Chalkboard art, created in secret.

Have a great Monday, folks!

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I feel that I should at least post something here just to show you folks that I’m still around (Lord why can’t we just be moved already this sucks why do we still live here GAHHHHH), so here are some cats sleeping on the beds belonging to their much-bigger canine housemates, and saying to those housemates, “And there’s shit you can do about it!”

More posting to follow, sometime….

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Just a few links to some nifty stuff seen ’round Blogistan of late:

:: Cal reports on a saloon in the Yukon that serves a cocktail with a pretty odd addition. No cocktail olive or Maraschino cherry up there, nosiree, Bob….

:: SamuraiFrog has been blogging off-and-on, and pretty bravely in my view, about his struggles with anxiety and depression. We do not, as a society, tend to appreciate nearly as much the degree to which such things are a major struggle for those who suffer them, and the degree to which they can turn what non-sufferers see as normal events into harrowing ordeals. Here’s his latest report on this. As always, I wish him the best in conquering these particular demons.

:: Roger reports on attending a taping of an NPR radio show. The show is Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, a quiz show with a live studio audience.

:: Ken Levine on being asked to do an improv scene…with Robin Williams.

:: John Scalzi went to Worldcon, and brought himself back some hardware. I’m not a big fan of the book he won the Hugo for, but as I’ve indicated elsewhere, it’s not a function of his writing but rather that it’s just not my cup of tea (being “meta-fiction” and all). But still, congratulations to him. He’s having a terrific career, and it’s interesting to recall that I first got wind of him a little over ten years ago, when a story circulated Blogistan of some blogger who had stuck his book online and then had a publisher pick it up. Now he’s winning Hugos. (Should the plural of Hugo be Hugi?)

:: Help a clown to deliver a pie to his 1000th face. I’m on board with this, obviously!

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I haven’t done a ‘lazy linkage’ kind of post in a while (of course, Sentential Links and the Sunday Burst are that sort of thing, I suppose), so here’s a bit of ‘lazy linkage’!

:: Neal Asher on tracking word counts in writing.

I upped this to 2,000 and still found it too easy, but then this was all my words, so next I discounted journal entries, blog posts, and stuff I put on message boards (yes, I even counted the words in them) and reset my target to 2,000 words of fiction. This is what I’ve stuck to ever since. When I get started each day I read through and correct the previous day’s 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure I try to simply stop, and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you’re going to write next, it’s easier to get going again the next day.

I should try that…the ‘not trying to get to a natural breaking point’ idea. I should say, I have tried it, but I often wind up staring at the screen and thinking, “Where the hell was I going with this?” So now I’ll just leave a little note in parentheses, indicating what’s to happen next, like this:

“It was you!” she exclaimed.

[The murderer is the butler. Later, having solved the crime, the two Princesses have hot fudge sundaes followed by a pillow fight.]

:: Charles Stross on why he doesn’t self-publish:

Anyway: this is why I don’t self-publish. Yes, I could do it. But it’d suck up a huge amount of time I would prefer to spend doing what I enjoy (writing) and force me to do stuff I do not enjoy (reading contracts, accounting, managing other people). The only sane way to do it would be to hire someone else to do all the boring crap on my behalf. And do you know what we call people who do that? We call them publishers.

I do think about self-publishing from time to time. For me, it’s a notion of last resort, for these reasons: I don’t want to spend the necessary time doing all the marketing, design, and all that jazz. If it comes to that, I will, because I frankly believe very strongly in the book I wrote and the one I’m writing and I also believe very strongly that I’m going to get better at this (based on the fact that I can look at my writings from years past and see that I already am better at this). But I won’t do that unless absolutely no one out there is willing to do the heavy lifting for me.

:: Phil Plait sums up some new cosmological findings. They are mindblowing. Go read it! As he concludes:

I still hear some people say that science takes the wonder out of life. Those people are utterly and completely wrong.

Science takes us to the wonder.

:: Ten small changes you can make to help avoid another Steubenville.

:: In the early to mid-1990s, I became quite the rabid baseball fan, falling deeply in love with that game. I’ve fallen away from it for many reasons, which always makes me a little sad, because I remain convinced that of all the major sports, baseball is the most inherently beautiful.

Anyway, any baseball fan from that era likely remembers the awful day in 1993 — now twenty years ago — when horrible news came out of the Cleveland Indians’ spring training. Two of their players, pitchers Steve Olin and Tim Crews, were killed in a boating accident, and only by some incredible quirk of fate did Bobby Ojeda avoid the same fate. For a franchise that was on the upswing, the accident was an absolute punch in the gut. Today, I read a deeply sad but well-written article about that accident and the lives it altered forever.

The cloudless sky, the shining sun and the still waters betray the truth of what happened here.

This is where the world lost you, Tim, and you, Steve. On Little Lake Nellie in Clermont, Fla. This is where you boarded a black power boat shortly after sundown on March 22, 1993, hoping the bass would be biting on that overcast evening. This is where you saw the headlights flashing from the shore, alerting you that the rest of your friends had arrived. This is where you hit the gas, Tim, not knowing that, in the blackness of a night with a new moon, the 18-foot, open-air Skeeter had drifted out toward the unlit dock on the opposite shore — a 185-foot-long wooden structure that extended far into the water. This is where the boat slammed, head-high, into the end of that dock.

This is where life met death.

The baseball world couldn’t fathom what happened here, because ballplayers aren’t supposed to die. Not during Spring Training, when optimism is abundant and nobody frets over standings or statistics. Not when they have young, growing families waiting for them on dry land.

That’s why baseball fans remember the names Tim Crews and Steve Olin. They remember the way your Cleveland Indians teammates wrestled with the emotional intensity of that 1993 season. The way Bob Ojeda, who had been with you on the boat and survived only because he happened to be slouching at the moment of impact, dealt with survivor’s guilt and suicidal thoughts before returning to the team later that year.

What they don’t know, what they can’t know, is what it’s been like for your families to live with the losses. What it was like for your wives to explain to their children that Daddy wasn’t coming back. What it was like — what it is like — for them to wonder what their lives would be like today, if only you were still here.

Twenty years. You’ve missed so much.

You know what’s really odd? While writing this, something jogged in my memory, and I realized that I once linked, for another site, an article for the tenth anniversary of the Little Lake Nellie accident. I wonder if I’ll still be here in ten years, to link someone’s observation of the thirtieth anniversary of it.

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That last post is kind of a bummer, so…here’s the Brady Bunch doing the Charleston!

(I don’t recall exactly why Bobby is pouting at the top of the stairs….)

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You’ll need volume for this. Content-wise, it’s safe for work, but it could be misinterpreted by someone walking by the cubicle at the right (or wrong) time as being not-so-much….

I’m not sure I recommend recording one’s passions for all to see in quite this way, but there really is something to be said for having something in your life that makes you as happy as this fellow.

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Here’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to link but…haven’t. Enjoy!

:: SamuraiFrog, always a fine writer, has been on something of a tear of late. I’ll highlight two recent movie reviews of his: Blade Runner and Red Dawn. I don’t totally agree with his assessment of Blade Runner, a movie which I have to assume, at this point in my life, just isn’t ever going to cross over from ‘movie I admire but feel little emotional connection with’ to ‘wow, I love this’. But he brings quite a few good insights into the movie.

As for Red Dawn, I’m in total agreement. That movie is crap on toast and always has been; I’ve never understood why it’s a quasi-classic for a lot of people. Aside from the fact that it’s basically right-wing action pron, that is.

:: In keeping with my long-professed fascination with photos of American Presidents in moments that aren’t the most Presidential, here’s Gerald Ford with soccer star Pele.

(via)

:: I am generally able to be forgiving of media from decades past, in their reflection of prevailing views of their day toward matters like race and women, but I have my limits. Witness Retrospace’s exploration of men spanking women in comic books from yesteryear. Ye Gods, this is stunningly creepy stuff.

:: It’s odd how, in some cases, “Hey, it’s been X years since Y happened!” can make me feel old, and in some other cases, it just makes me say, “Huh. Been a while, eh?” The fact that Cheers first aired thirty years ago? Not sure how that makes me feel. But really: wow. Anyway, Ken Levine reflects on that first night.

:: Joe Biden: smartass VP. (Hmmm…some of these quotes don’t seem real. Like, all of them.)

:: Wow, why do I mess around with that stupid egg separator?

:: From time to time, Sheila O’Malley posts commentary on her iPod ‘shuffle’ results. It always amazes me how she manages to say something insightful about every song she hears therein.

:: John Scalzi on Mitt Romney as a person. I tend to agree, although my feelings are a bit more negative. (Not ‘OMG I find this guy to be a loathsome turd’ negative, but…if Romney was my Mayor, or maybe something else like that, I’d probably be OK with it. In fact, given my general lack of good feeling for the current Mayor of Buffalo….)

:: Lynn links a piece of music by a modern composer with whom I am unfamiliar. Go and give it a listen — it’s interesting and good!

:: Finally, he’s me with the sun shining over my shoulder. Just like the John Denver song!

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Seen in comments on SamuraiFrog’s post about Hell’s Kitchen:

Here’s a tip: as the percentage of people around you who think you’re an asshole approaches 100%, the odds that they’re wrong drop precipitously.

This is extremely high in truthiness.

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