I have never seen a dog with such glamorous lashes. I am so jealous.
Things are going as well as can be expected with a 10 month old Great Dane puppy and a still puppy-like two year old Dane. Utter chaos peppered with bouts of sleeping, lots of drool and many, many games of tug. All Bixby ever wanted was a tug partner and he has met his match.
In other news, seems we might have company:
Strange Messages Coming From The Stars
A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence.
Preliminary, but fascinating all the same.
Open thread.
Mnemosyne
I hope I’m not taking on too much for November: I’m signed up for NaNoWriMo, plus I’m taking a class in Creative Focus, PLUS I may take a train trip over a weekend.
On the other hand, I’m usually pretty lazy and don’t get much done, so I may have a skewed perspective on how much I should be doing.
TaMara (HFG)
…and I guess I’m staying up to watch Jeffrey Dean Morgan on James Corden
trollhattan
Since we’re talkin’ puppehs, this critter has passed his fifth month. No eyelashes of note so far.
MobiusKlein
Clickbait see a less breathless version
Major Major Major Major
I was working on some network visualizations today, and for proof of concept I decided to go with a comment thread here because I’m terrible like that. So here’s a map of one of the longer ones. You can scroll and zoom like a map. The colors are commenters, the thread-looking things are threads. Kinda cool. Don’t worry, this one’s not creepy.
craigie
The signal is coming from inside the galaxy!
piratedan
if there is a communication from another civilization out in space, I wonder how the Fundamentalists will take it…. I assume, not well.
Monala
Hubby showed me an episode of the daily in which one of their African-American correspondents tried to figure out why a lot of black millennials aren’t supporting Clinton. He concluded, “They’re spoiled. They never had to choose between two white people for president before.” He told a group, “We never had another option besides two white people in the past. We were so desperate for someone to relate to that we made it up. When Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio, we were like, ‘okay, close enough.”
He then had the millennials give him lists of which they dislike about Clinton and Trump. They came up with about six things for Clinton and two pages for Trump. He looked at the two lists in disbelief and said, “And y’all still can’t make up your mind?”
seaboogie
@Major Major Major Major: That’s really cool!
Monala
Does Word Press dislike Trevor Noah ‘s show? It keeps editing it out of my comment.
Major Major Major Major
@seaboogie: Thanks!
Steeplejack
@craigie:
Win.
James E Powell
I’m watching this Brian Williams show and he just let Mike Pence lie uninterrupted about the Clinton Foundation, the latest email bullshit, and his own ticket.
Williams made no remark, challenged nothing Pence said, asked a stupid question about whether Trump would accept the results of the election, Pence said Trump said he would, which he did not, then Pence went on another two minute ramble of plain and simple lying. Williams said thank you for joining us and went on.
How much do they pay that asshole to just sit there while Pence talks?
Aleta
@trollhattan:
Sacred flying cartoon wind nymph dogs do fine without, looks like.
Calming Influence
We should invite the nice aliens for a recipe exchange, maybe a potluck? What could possibly go wrong?
Aleta
@Major Major Major Major: very cool
Ruckus
@James E Powell:
I have two versions.
1. Way too much.
2. Whatever he wants to sell his morality. As it isn’t worth much I’d say about $1.95
Secret #3 If in doubt of #2 amount see #1.
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
I *might* be in your neck of the woods in a couple of weeks. Or not. I haven’t made up my mind yet. (See train trip above.)
Joyce H
@Mnemosyne:
I usually sign up, and I ought to this year, but I don’t know. On the one hand, I haven’t written anything for months and I have a couple projects that could really use the attention. But on the other hand, I’ve been so obsessed with politics this year and I’m so glued to the television and the internet for hours every day, I figure at least the first week or ten days of November would be a wash, and it would all make me feel like a big old failure, so… I just don’t know…
Mnemosyne
@Joyce H:
I haven’t done it in years, but I have a historical that I’m working on right now that needs to have a first draft by early March for a writer’s conference, so I’m hoping it will help kickstart me towards that.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: the bay?
Joyce H
@Mnemosyne: I have half a Regency and the start on a sci-fi serial, but there they sit. Maybe I’ll try Nano. Telling myself, “WRITE something, you need the money!” isn’t working.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Possibly. The LA NaNo group does a train trip up for the big fundraiser weekend. I don’t want to do the big fundraiser, but I love trains, so I’m thinking of tagging along. I need to sleep on it so the ADHD enthusiasm doesn’t lead me astray. Again.
slag
So, for some bizarre reason, I was just perusing Jake Tapper’s twit stream and have come to the conclusion that he’s either on some sort of medication or is profoundly stupid. I can’t decide which. To his credit, he can form a complete sentence (such as it is), but his twit stream is totally scattershot and disturbingly shallow—as if he’s tweeting by committee.
Does anyone know if he’s been impacted by a severe medical condition, such as a brain injury or schizophrenia, recently? Is this just what happens when you go to CNN? Or has he always been such a flake?
Mnemosyne
@Joyce H:
Okay, since you’re here, I’ve gotta ask: is Han going to be the hero of his own novel someday, or what? I know technically that would take you past the Regency, but I wouldn’t care.
SWMBO
If one of the front pagers run out of ideas, I’d like to see a thread of pics, memes, videos of Obama tributes. Everybody could just post a link or two (FYWP). I’ll start with this one that was posted on my timeline today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtiyAFf9ix4
ETA Watched it again and damn. Grace Under Pressure. All of the Obamas.
Joyce H
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not sure about that. I’d sort of like to, perhaps have him solving crimes, as observant as he is, but I have all these other projects clamoring for attention. The conventional wisdom is to pick a genre and stick to it, but I read so many different genres and would like to try some other things too. But Han is definitely one of my favorite characters.
scav
@Major Major Major Major: We’re in constellations!
Also, we’re in good company: Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe have unique n-grams as well. Christopher Marlowe credited as one of Shakespeare’s co-writers
SWMBO
Can I get a jailbreak?
Joyce H
And MAN, people, that Newt Gingrich blowup is quite a thing! I just saw the video a little while ago. I’d read the transcript and it seemed problematic, but the transcript doesn’t quite convey how angry and aggressive he was. Usually, it’s Trump making trouble for his surrogates to clean up, but this was a surrogate creating the wrong story at the wrong time. Who’s going to clean up after Newt?
sigaba
Fascinating banner ad on the front page for me — “A CRTV Exclusive: Michelle Malkin Investigates”
sigaba
@Joyce H:
Callista.
slag
@Joyce H: I thought the same thing. Apparently, someone still hasn’t gotten over being rejected in favor of the Clenis.
How long has he been harboring these revenge fantasies, I wonder, and will he ever learn how to actually win friends and influence people?
Steeplejack
@SWMBO:
Bad word or naked link? There is little help in the small hours.
Mnemosyne
@Joyce H:
Since you like both mysteries and the Regency, I assume you’ve read Kate Ross’s series? We lost her way too soon to cancer.
I think the old advice about sticking to a single genre is outdated in this Internet age. I mean, you probably don’t want to write middle-school novels and erotic romance under the same name, but most fiction readers don’t stick to a single genre anyway.
SWMBO
@Steeplejack: Naked link. Don’t know how to embed them yet.
SWMBO
@SWMBO: Search youtube for Jon Tarifa Don’t Go Tribute to Obama. It’s quite good.
Steeplejack
@SWMBO:
A short primer:
VoilĂ !
The biggest problem people have, from my observation, is leaving in the presupplied prefix and trying to work around it. Odds are, if you copied a hyperlink to the clipboard, it already includes the prefix. FYWP doesnât like double prefixes and canât handle them. If you can even get a simple link with just a
www.prefix, FYWP handles that fine. Again, the main thing is to erase (or overwrite) the prefix that is supplied. It causes more problems than it’s worth.Steeplejack
@SWMBO:
Here’s one of the many versions on YouTube: Jon Tarifa, “Don’t Go.”
ETA: Changed to link to the official version.
SWMBO
@Steeplejack: Thanks. This is what I was trying to link to
opiejeanne
@Joyce H: John Scalzi, one of my favorite authors, said that he was two months late for the deadline on his new book because he’s been so distracted by the election. He was at a convention or conference recently and several other writers told him the same thing.
I hope we never have a 2-year-long campaign ever again.
Joyce H
@opiejeanne:
I was quite proud of myself recently for READING a fiction book, much less writing one. Lately I’m mostly reading news and blogs.
But speaking of news – did anyone else notice how Trump gratuitously changed Biden’s ‘behind the gym’ challenge to ‘the back of the barn’? What’s up with that? Is there some hidden traumatic memory associated with behind the gym that he is unwilling to process?
opiejeanne
@Joyce H: I noticed, but I thought he said he’d like to fight him in a barn. I’ve never heard that idiom before, maybe he’s thinking woodshed? Take him to the woodshed? Something that doesn’t translate well from the original German?
opiejeanne
@Joyce H: Recently I have written the first chapter of a book I’ve been chewing on for 10 years. Well, about 6 months ago I wrote that much. I know where the story should go but I’m stuck on researching stupid things like what did kids wear in 1858 in the Ozarks, and whether the girls would have borrowed their brother’s overalls, and if overalls even existed, and maybe I should just ignore all of that, let people assume that the girls were wearing dresses while wading in the creek and doing chores. I know they didn’t have shoes on in the summer.
Also stuck on moving the story forward from where I left it. Maybe what I’ve written is just the first half of the first chapter. Should I describe the weather, the flora and fauna, or focus on the terrain? Ugh.
I’m working from the memories and diaries and photographs of relatives that lived in the area at the time and doggone it, they didn’t bother to record what the kids wore.
CZanne
@Joyce H: if you NaNo your Regency first draft, I will NaNo my Regency-paranormal second pass AND will beta read your first draft in December/January.
sukabi
@Joyce H: don’t know but might be one of the reasons he was sent to military school.
Grabbing girls and getting his ass kicked would be my guess.
Joyce H
@opiejeanne:
I get hung up on the period details with Regency, too. The difference between a curricle and a phaeton, how many players for whist versus piquet, etc. And the titles! Then you look at something like Pride and Prejudice and realize how very little was mentioned about clothes, descriptions, weather, etc. What color were Darcy’s eyes? What was Elizabeth wearing when he proposed to her? Of course, she was writing contemporary, and a certain amount of descriptors would be necessary for period detail, I think.
Some 19th century novels used to go in big for description – the first couple pages of a book would be all about the landscape and the weather and the house and its situation on a prominence overlooking the river, blah blah blah – I don’t think today’s reader would let you get away with that. They’d either skim forward to stuff starting to happen, or they’d just put the book down and move on to something livelier.
But in that era, girls would do everything in dresses, wearing boys’ trousers would never even cross their minds. My grandmother never worn pants in her life, and she would make soap in a big old cauldron out in the yard, and garden and do whatever, all in dresses. So yes, they’d wade in the creek in dresses.
Joyce H
@CZanne:
I don’t want to commit to the Regency, I might be more inclined to the sci-fi serial. I need to see what grabs me. The Regency is closer to being done, but it’s also very light-hearted and it’s hard to get back into that mood. Whereas the sci-fi has a billionaire villain that I’d get to kill in the last section, so that might be more to my liking these days.
CZanne
@opiejeanne: the design term you’re looking for is “slops”, which began to exist in the 1700s in the form we now consider bib-overalls, though without the hardware. By the 1850s, they probably weren’t as common for children as they would come to be in the later 19th and early 20th century, on the mass production and transportation issue: in the transitional period, the expense of a factory manufactured garment would make it a working man’s investment in his job (or his employer’s investment in him). Vernacular clothing (most clothing, especially children’s) was still produced at home or in the local community, and built for growth and re-distribution. If a boy has a pair of slops, he probably only has one or two at most, so if his sister absconds with one, he’s going to know very soon, or she’ll know it’s impossible for her because he wears them every day. However, working class women and girls have been turning their skirts into waders since wool washing started, by double-tucking their front skirt hem under their back skirt waistband, and their back hem over their front waistband or under their -pair of bodies to form a loose bloomer-type skirt.
But what’s the story? Tell the story first , make assumptions on the clothes that you can fix later. What’s the conflict? What needs to be resolved? What does your protagonist sing about when she’s the star of a Disney Princess musical? How do you get there? Costuming and set dressing — those come later, unless you have a plot-revelant prop. Get the who and they why and you’ll build the how.
MattF
Some possible good news at work– there’s evidence I may get sucked into an interesting project. The two people trying to get it going both want me in on it.
Still adjusting at home to the new internet setup– I got FiOS + WiFi. The 15/5 connection is a big improvement (factor of ten in speed) over the old connection. It’s actually a DSL connection (VDSL to be precise), so there’s phone service + internet. OTOH, it’s stretching the truth a bit to call it a fiber connection. A no-foolin’ fiber connection will (maybe) arrive with an upgrade to the apartment building wiring, but that’s still in the works. We shall see.
ETA: I may even buy a TV. Something to ponder.
CZanne
@Joyce H: I can beta sf-serial, it’s just not my best place to beta. But if that’s getting you writing, that I can read and find the holes. I enjoy the beta-edit side. And having a deadline, knowing that I have to be ready to kick a draft out the door because I’ve got something else coming in with a time-limit, makes me produce lines. I know where Immortal Day is going and how it ends; I just need to rebuild a middle section that I ditched because I couldn’t make the legal aspects of what they were doing work, and the better solution went into a darker place, so I need to be able to tie it all back into the latter half.
opiejeanne
@Joyce H: Yes, I figured the girls mostly waded in dresses. These are people who are a bit rough and may not have a school near enough for their children to go to yet. They lived in the Ozarks and their descendants still do, in an area that still has no paved roads other than the state highway that cuts through one town, just dirt roads and fords at the rivers; some of the houses still do not have indoor plumbing. Heck, we had trouble finding a map that showed the roads and ended up making one by taping enlarged sections of MapQuest prints together, but there were hardly any street signs so we were still guessing most of the time. We located a family cemetery in a field from a satellite photo that someone had included in a list of cemeteries in the state, and then just got lucky. When we got home from that expedition we ordered a detailed map of the area from a company that offers them for a bit more money than your Rand McNally.
The one town has about 300 residents, and I’m related to all but one, and she’s related in a very round-about way to my husband. They were very isolated back in those hollows (hollers) and most of them didn’t understand why they ought to court a girl about 5 miles away instead of their 1st cousins at the next-door farm. My line doesn’t twine the way it does for most of my cousins. I have one, a 5th cousin, whose grandparents are double 1st cousins; she’s not the brightest bulb on the tree. Another cousin thinks it’s kind of cute that her husband and their kids all have webbed toes.
But my book is not about that, not about inbred family lines because the close marriages was just starting. The parents were not related to each other but some of the kids are half-siblings and step-siblings as well as cousins because the 1st wife in family A had died just about the time the husband in family B was killed, and the two wives were sisters, so there were kids from both 1st marriages, and more children from the 2nd marriage.
The next generation is when it gets complicated but I’m not going to deal with that very much because it’s not important to the story, but kinship at this level is part of this story.
I should probably just go on from where I stopped to the explanation of who lives with my main character and how they all got there, and I know how to tell that story as a story.
opiejeanne
@CZanne: Thank you! I had forgotten about how they tucked their dresses up. Duh! I KNEW THAT! I wrote it with her skirts tucked up but couldn’t remember what they were tucked into.
Yes, Mr Levi and his denim pants came along a bit too late for my story, and these people were so isolated that their speech is full of “thees” and “thous” in some neighborhoods, but I am probably not going to deal much with that.
My main character is about 8 when the story begins and it ends around 1866. Hmmm. I want her to be 14-15 at the end so I’m going to have to start it later than 1858, maybe 1860. I’ve been playing with the dates and what age she should be, to figure out how everything in the family would work. I know who she is, in part. Figuring out who she is is part of the story and while I know how it ends, I’m not sure what she wants to do that is different from her older sisters or the other women in the community.
opiejeanne
@MattF: Have you never had a tv, or did your old one die and you just didn’t bother to replace it?
Ours is starting to make me think it needs to be replaced. I’ve adjusted the brightness as much as possible but the picture is pretty dark these days, and I’ve noticed “ghosts” after we’ve paused a show for a while.
sherparick
@James E Powell: That is SOP when any Village Media figure interviews a Republican. Chuck Todd gave the game away a few years ago. “… We all sit there, because we all know, the first time we bark is the last time that they do the show. You say something, and sometimes it is last time they will ever come on your show. There is that balance…â http://www.politicususa.com/2014/12/28/chuck-todd-defends-challenging-republican-lies-meet-press.html
For more see: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2016/10/operation-memory-hole-americas-elite.html
P.S. If you can, drop Driftglass a dime or nickel in the can.
sherparick
@Joyce H: I just love the way Newt started going on about “Bill Clinton, sexual predator.” If I had been Kelly, weren’t you married to wife No. 1 when you met wife No2, and married to No.2, when you met No.3.” Newt never figured out that whole “throwing stones while living in a glass house” thingy.
yellowdog
@opiejeanne: Scalzi is a prolific tweeter (and he has a blog-Whatever). He’s probably produced more words on Twitter in the last six months than on his literary endeavors. He’s one of my favs too.
NotMax
@opiejeanne
Denim pants pre-dated Levi Strauss by a long time and denim was also used for factory worker overgarments. Strauss’ innovation was adding the reinforcing rivets.
For the 1850s, both traditional blue denim and also brown cotton duck would have been available relatively inexpensively and used by adults as sturdy work wear. Picture of forty-niners in California, at least one of whom is wearing denim pants.
For boys in rural areas, buckskin or wool probably more than denim, flannel or even twill for dress-up occasions would fit within the period.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mnemosyne: I’ve never done NaNo. At the moment, I’m revising, so the timing is bad for me this year too. I need something to turn off my inner editor though. It’s hard.
MattF
@opiejeanne: The latter, pretty much. Also, when my cable supplier went digital my old set went obsolete– and since I almost-never watched it, I wasn’t motivated to do anything about it.
Matt McIrvin
@Joyce H:
The first couple of chapters, sometimes.
Didn’t Victor Hugo devote a huge section of Les MisĂ©rables to a digression on the Battle of Waterloo?
PaulWartenberg2016
@craigie:
And the message keeps repeating:
“Mars… Needs… Y’all… To Stop… Voting… For that Gasbag… Trump…”
PaulWartenberg2016
NANO!
NANO!
NANO!
NANO!
…I just need to outline and synopsis meself and I’ll be ready to go!