serakit

See, the problem with mixing fandoms is that I know of no one else who's aware enough of library science, country music, and filk traditions to appreciate that I have filked Toby Keith's "Drunk Americans" as "Drunk Librarians."

I actually did this a while ago; I was just reminded of it tonight-- and of the fact that despite having done it a while ago I haven't really shown anyone as yet.

(I'm not going to tack on my frustrated rant about the sorts of songs Toby Keith chooses to use his songwriting talent to create, but know that it exists.)

The actual purpose of a meat share is to introduce me to strange cuts of meat I have never experienced before.

In this particular instance, an "eye round roast." Now, I have never made any roast outside of a crock pot (and only a couple there), but I had trouble finding a good crock pot recipe for it and in any case I wanted it to retain enough structural integrity that I could easily slice it into sandwich meat. That meant making it in the oven. (The beef tongue, however, will be made in a crock pot. I am not quite brave enough to attempt something that finicky in an oven.)

I found a very simple, straightforward recipe online and then promptly substituted almost half the spice mix because of what we were out of. (And thyme and onion powder have now been added to the grocery list.) It was surprisingly easy-- rub olive oil on roast, rub spices on roast, stick in oven, remember to turn oven temp down after fifteen minutes. And then make the ritual obeisance to the smoke gods by standing under the smoke alarm waving a magazine until the oven temp has been turned down. (I didn't burn anything; our smoke alarm is just Like That-- but since I don't do a lot of roasts, I'm used to "frying things sets it off but using the oven is safe" and so didn't put the box fan in the window... and this turns out not to be the case if you're doing high-temp meat.)

It's maybe a little well done, but I think it came out pretty well. I am going to slice it up and freeze some of it as sandwich meat-- I want sandwich meat, and one of my rules for myself with the meat share was that if I was doing this that was all the meat I cooked; there would be no meat in the weekly grocery run. Since they don't have deli as an add-on, this means I have to get creative. And some of it is dinner tonight with mashed sweet potatoes.

My primary food source is still boxed processed things, but this is at least forcing me to periodically eat food that didn't come out of a box. And it tastes good.

Reading a lot of good stories is essential to being a writer. It helps develop language, broaden your horizons, and give depth to your ideas, It also tells you what people are already doing and what's been done before, which in turn permits you to respond to the zeitgeist a bit better.

But even when the story I'm presently working on was very, very shaped by a story in the anthology I've just finished reading, even when I'm excited about the concepts I'm exploring in this story and being surprised by some of the places it's taking me...

There's also a pervasive sense that I will never be able to write like that. Clearly my existing publications are a fluke and Neil Gaiman's man with a clipboard is going to come and tell me no one wants to read my writing and this isn't going to be my life.

Which is, I know, hardly atypical of writers. But still.

My Switch Lite has shown up! I now own my very first video game console. And Animal Crossing.

Surprising absolutely no one, I spent something like five hours playing Animal Crossing today.

Which is fine, it's the start of a long weekend, but tomorrow I do in fact have actual things to do. (I also have a protracted ride on public transit due to my car place being in Watertown, so I'm going to try to confine "yay Animal Crossing" to "being on the T.")

This was my reward to myself for my first pro sale-- while in general the writing money is not meant to be exclusively for toys, prior to the pandemic I was playing with Mathfriend's Switch enough to have decided I really wanted my own.

Ever so slowly, my metamorphosis into a gamer edges towards completion.

(Though I am getting a lot of my game choices from "Gaming for a Non-Gamer"-- a while back, a YouTuber who goes by Razbuten did an experiment and made his non-gamer wife play some video games without giving her any assistance or instructions as a way of testing how the language of video games is passed on. He's kept up the series, and I am to some degree basing my game choices on "Which ones did Razbuten's wife like." Which is how I wound up with Animal Crossing.)

Does anyone here know anything about Internal Family Systems therapy? The thumbnail description I was given makes it sound like it has some things in common with the way DID was viewed back when it was still called Multiple Personality Disorder where all the personalities conform to a standard set of Purposes, so you have The Innocent One and The Organized One and The Aggressive One, except that instead of full-on headmates you have the internal parts of your personality and I have... issues... with that framing.

On the other hand, it was a fairly quick thumbnail description, so it's entirely possible there were some words crossed here.

Anyone know enough about it to explain what I'm seeing?

So the popular narrative seems to be "the libertarians caused the bears." And certainly something seems to be going on in New Hampshire because Vermont has half the number of bear complaints and just as many bears. I certainly never saw bears when I lived in Vermont over the middle of the timeframe covered by the book despite a certain amount of wandering the woods barefoot. (Sidenote: don't do this.) But the book only partially makes a connection between the two--the woman feeding bears on her lawn certainly contributed, as did the "You can't mandate bear-proof garbage cans!" crowd.

But there were bear attacks in places that weren't Grafton, and every time the state Fish and Game department was called in they were emphatically unhelpful to the point where they come off as the real villains of the piece. There are two incidents of bears attacking women in their houses, one in Grafton and one not, and in both cases the game wardens show up and promptly engage in victim-blaming while doing nothing else, to the point where it often reads in much the same way police react to rape victims. Taking a cold pot roast out of the fridge in your kitchen isn't an activity that one should have to be concerned about, and neither is just existing in your house. They go to great lengths to make it the fault of the people who get attacked. "She had open cans of cat food inside her house and an empty bag of birdseed by her door!" The game warden doesn't even take a report on the first one, just checks off a "bear encounter" tick mark, which is a number that covers everything from seeing one in town to going through garbage cans to attacking your house, and all of these are reported exactly the same. (The second one has Fish and Game saying that it's not really fair to call it a bear attack despite the bear coming into her living room and charging her-- bear attacks are rare, doncha know.) All this while repeatedly upping the limits on acceptable numbers of bears in the state and doing nothing except saying "You are not allowed to shoot bears no matter how they behave."

The most fascinating intersection of the bears and the libertarians, to my mind, is the difference between the bears in Hanover and the bears in Grafton-- Hanover, being a wealthy town full of wealthy people and lovely infrastructure, gets immediate and expensive ways of dealing with their bear from the state, as the state relocates it and goes to a lot of trouble to dissuade it without harming it. Grafton, being filled with the kind of libertarian who doesn't have much money, gets ignored and dismissed by the state. As does neighboring Groton, which is a town similar to Grafton but with actual infrastructure. The Hanover bear isn't actually behaving any differently from the Grafton bears-- if anything it's less aggressive-- and they initially just wanted to euthanize it. When the town residents, who've named it, put up a fuss about this, they spend a lot of money to relocate it twice, and it finds its way back each time.

Meanwhile Grafton can't even get the state to admit the bear attacks were in fact bear attacks.

The book is about half ridiculous hijinks of libertarians as the town slowly spirals into a giant mess, and half bears. Occasionally you get things like the bear posse that goes around to every known den and kills them all one winter, but that was explicitly not the libertarians. (And the reporter repeatedly talks to people who refuse to talk to him and also make it known that they own guns and places where a body will never be found when he inquires about it.) But it really does seem more like the libertarians and the bears just kind of... happened simultaneously. The town definitely did break when the libertarians showed up, though; the population has now dropped dramatically from what it was pre-incursion, as the lowering and lowering of taxes and disappearance of a tax base made it impossible to even maintain cleared roads.

I remain incredibly amused by the description of a guard llama just completely owning a bear that tries to come after its herd.

In all the chaos of the continuing drama about the Best Related Work Hugo ballot (what can there possibly be to continue to argue about? Surely we have established at this point that no one's convincing each other of anything!), the community has missed another story that I think would be rather bigger under other circumstances: Jason Sanford has an article up which includes the tidbit that to submit to the open submissions for Last Dangerous Visions, writers have to sign a constrictive agreement that resembles nothing standard in short story publishing and which you really, really shouldn't sign. It requires you to stipulate that Straczynski can write things materially similar to your story without having to compensate you.

Now, being a bit more aware of Straczynski's history than I think Sanford is, specifically the kerfuffle during Babylon 5 surrounding how the episode Passing Through Gesthemane almost didn't happen--and happened much later in the series than they'd originally meant to put it, to account for getting releases signed--because someone proposed on the show's forums a vague concept that was similar to the already-planned plot for Gesthemane, I get why he might want to put these things in the releases.

But that's Hollywood; it's not how short story publishing works. It's a violation of about a hundred norms and anyone else doing this would land themselves on Writer Beware with a big flashing "THESE PEOPLE ARE PROBABLY A SCAM" sign. You're not supposed to have to agree to anything beyond that the rights you'd be selling are in fact yours to sell and that it's not a simultaneous submission just to submit. Or occasionally that you've removed all identifying information from the manuscript itself, if they do initial reads anonymously. But that's the most you should be requiring just to submit.

Lest anyone say "Yeah, but editors don't have to worry about writing a similar thing," I will point out that a lot of editors are also writers, especially at the story magazines.

As I said elsewhere, Last Dangerous Visions continues to be cursed.

(Incidentally, the submission criteria itself is also a little odd. They're using completely unpublished rather than pro sales, which is out of step with most things like this and shuts out even people who've had one thing in one of the little anthologies or magazines that only pay a token amount-- and also puts you in weird spots at the margins, with things like handmade zines or self-publishing. I wouldn't qualify for a thing targeting unpublished under any criteria, but the thing that disqualifies me should be the Derelict sale or a total amount of money made from fiction writing, not that one story in the small-press anthology from 2015 after which I didn't submit anything for five years.)

Excerpt from my evening:

Me: *spots title on spreadsheet* "Wait, which one was that story?" *opens .rtf file* "Oh, right, that one... which is not the one I submitted to that one anthology, that was the other one. Wait, where did I submit this one?" *scrolls to where I have it listed* "Oh, RIGHT, that other anthology!"

Seriously, up-and-coming writers, listen when they tell you to make a spreadsheet. (The only thing not on my spreadsheet is "Hunting for Ice Demons" and that's because it was sold long before I was doing this regularly or seriously.)

There is a Hugo controversy.

I know, this surprises anyone at all, right? There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the annual Hugo controversy.

In contrast to the last several, though, this one is very much a tempest in a teapot. Which is why I've written lots of words about it.

( *Lots* of words. So many words. All the words. )

Printers are actually demonic creatures.

Which is to say, the Windows work laptop is throwing "can't connect to this network" as an error, which has... some fixes but none of them are great and none of them are permanent, and I don't really want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the laptop just so I have it functional enough to spend a lot of time troubleshooting the printer when I don't even think it will work. (This shouldn't be necessary, but HP has decided to make printers that can't function just by plugging them into the laptop like a normal machine; you *have* to have wireless connectivity. Which I specifically didn't want because all of my machines have intermittent problems with wireless connectivity.)

Besides which, the only reason I need the Windows laptop is that HP has decreed that you can initially set up the printer only on a Windows or Mac-- which, person maintaining the list of Linux-friendly printers, is not what I would consider a Linux-friendly printer; you are a liar-- and I think I may have gotten that part done enough during the last time I was doing this since I got far enough to be stymied by the disappearance of my printer paper. Now that I've got more printer paper, though, I can't install the HP file on my Linux laptop because it insists it is unable to locate this package. Which I downloaded. And is sitting in the same directory I'm in when running the apt install command.

And all of this means that I've now been actively trying to install the new printer for several days and have not yet actually printed anything.

Have I mentioned that I hate printers?

(Update: I have now succeeded in printing from a hardwired connection between the Windows laptop and the printer. This does not help with either the Windows laptop's wireless issues or getting the printer to work with the Linux laptop, but it does mean I've printed both the things I want to print right now. This is not, however, a long-term solution.)