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ritaxis: (Default)
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 07:25 am
A bit more than year after the not-Poland novel first came to my head, I have an outline. This is not to say that I didn't know the whole of the events in the story before now -- I did -- but the specific structure wasn't there, which is why I kept moaning about how it should be written. Now I know in what size chunks the story needs to be told, and where the chunks go, and even, oh my dog, why.

But my house is flithy and I am having visitors who are already worried about me.

on another front: a Reuters columnist muses "is climate change increasing earthquakes?" No, stupid. This is just an attempt on your part to combine two sexy and frightening things in one headline.

And another thing. Old usenet buddies might remember when the US first invaded Afghanistan I said "But the war seems awfully civilian-oriented" because of early reports of biombing villages and schools. Pete McCutcheon was outraged. He said, essentially, "do you see what she said? How dare she say anything like that! That's completely out of bounds!" (Pete was an early harbinger, on a trivial scale, of the vicious eliminationism that has become a normal part of the US political landscape). But, really? Years and years and years later, what is the war in Afghanistan but worse and worse for civilians while warlords and arms traders and other criminals get richer and richer?

I almost wonder what old Pete is saying now.
ritaxis: (Default)
Sunday, March 6th, 2011 05:17 pm
Reuters has a headline today: "Studies find gene links to world's biggest killer". earlier I was aprticipating in a discussion about assassin/mercenary/thug/serial killer/torturer/executioner protagonists in slash fiction (short version: I'm totally uninterested in them, where "uninterested" means "I'd rather wash dog poop off the floor than read another one of those"). So of course I thought it was another one of those periodic articles where they find a gene that pops up in fifty-five serial killers and the newsies decide that they must have found the gene for mass murder.

But instead, it was one of those articles where they find a gene in a wad of people with heart disease -- and Reuters actually did okay with putting the findings in scientific perspective.