This change has provoked a certain amount of discussion in comments on an old entry of mine about the Forever Stamp, including some comments that contradict statements made by USPS employees when the Forever Stamp was first released. In particular, I had seen information to the effect that a Forever Stamp could be used only for very specific purposes, on very specific kinds of mail, but commenters were saying that wasn't true.
So I poked around on the USPS website for a while, but I couldn't find specific answers to my particular questions. They don't provide a lot of detail about how the Forever Stamps work, at least not on any pages I could find when I searched their site.
This morning, I was looking at a news release on their site titled "Every Time a Bell Rings... Another Forever Stamp is Sold," which gives some information but doesn't quite answer my question. So I dropped a note in email to David Partenheimer, the media contact listed on that page, using the email address provided on that page. I figured I probably wouldn't get a response at all, and that if I did it would probably take a week, given how busy I would expect the USPS's main media contact to be just before a rate change.
Instead, I received a detailed response less than three hours after my query. On a Sunday afternoon. That is dedication; I'm very impressed.
Anyway, Mr. Partenheimer explained (I'm paraphrasing) that the limitations on the use of Forever Stamps that I'd heard about aren't real. You can use Forever Stamps on anything you want to mail.
To put it another way: at any given moment, if the cost of a one-ounce First-Class Mail stamp is n¢, then a Forever Stamp is worth n¢ in postage. You can put a Forever Stamp and some additional postage on a two-ounce letter. You can put several Forever Stamps (and additional postage if needed) on a five-ounce letter, or on a package. And so on. It's just like regular postage, except that its value increases as rates go up.
Sounds like it's time to stock up on Forever Stamps.
]]>And especially to Kam.
(Who got up ridiculously early this morning to go see Morris dancers in the Baylands. I had no idea there were Morris dancers around here. I admire both the dancers and the audience members for getting up that early, but it's unlikely that I will ever see Morris dancers--even y'all friends of mine who are reading this--performing in their native habit and habitat, given that I think the last time I was awake at dawn was maybe 15 years ago during an overnight camping trip to Foothills Park. We tried to watch the sun come up, but there was too much haze; after it got light, we went down to the meadow and watched a herd of deer grazing in the mist. Magical, especially after a sleepless night. But I digress.)
Some day I'll get around to posting the story of how I first met Kam; it looks like I've never posted that here. But at the moment I'm roughly 3/4 asleep, and I still have a little more to do before I go to bed, so for now I'll just mention that it's been 16 years since that Beltane on the beach not long after I met her, and I'm still glad to have her in my life. Yay, Kam!
]]>IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized.
World five is my favorite part.
And if you need a soundtrack while you navigate through Ikea, you could do worse than Jonathan Coulton's song Ikea, available for free download and listening online.
]]>So while I was eating it, I looked it up online to find out more about it. (The box wasn't available.) And I came across the nutrition info page, presumably an image of the nutrition-info panel from the box, and I read the ingredients.
Looking only at the sweeteners and the grains, the ingredients go like this:
oat blend (whole oats, oat bran), rice, sugar, oat clusters (sugar, toasted oats (rolled oats, sugar, .., molasses, honey, ...), wheat flakes, crisp rice (rice, sugar, barley malt, ...), corn syrup, ..., honey, ...), high fructose corn syrup, ...
So apparently the way to make this stuff goes something like this:
Or, to put it another way, the cereal consists of oats, rice, wheat, and ten sweeteners.
No wonder it's tasty!
Yes, I realize I'm not being fair in how I counted that. It's hard to tell exactly how much sweetener there really is in this stuff. But given how high sugar alone appears in the ingredients list and in each sub-list, I kinda get the impression there's a lot of sweet stuff in this cereal.
Elsewhere in the nutrition-info panel it says that every 60g serving contains 17g of sugars, so sugars are a little more than a quarter of the content by weight, which appears to be about the same as the granola that I sometimes have for breakfast. So it's not as extreme as the number of different kinds of sweetener might suggest. But it still looks like a lot in the ingredients list.
(Btw, polydextrose is another ingredient in the oat clusters, but TSOR suggests that that's not a sweetener, just a sort of thickener/texturing agent made from dextrose.)
]]>I'm kinda baffled by the drop in submission volume these past couple weeks. I was expecting a big spike in volume before we close; instead, submissions per day are down about 25% from the levels of the past couple months. On the one hand, that's kind of a relief; on the other hand, it's kind of disconcerting to suddenly be back at (or, really, below) last year's volume after a couple of months of much higher volume. Not complaining; just surprised and confused.
]]>Unfortunately, several of my tools have mysteriously disappeared, including my drill and the two or three hard-cased tape measures that are always sitting on the same shelf in the garage.
I imagine they'll turn up sooner or later. But in the meantime, I knew that I had two of those soft plastic tapes for tailors and sewing (one yellow, one white), and that both of them were coiled up on my desk by my computer.
But they weren't in the spot where I expected them to be. I knew that one of them had been on top of a plastic container holding a stack of blank CDs, but I couldn't find that either. I dug through one pile of papers. I dug through another pile of papers. I moved stuff around. I accidentally dumped some papers on the floor.
Finally, I gave up and decided to use some less-precise measurement system, like my hands.
And then I saw the white tailor tape on the floor, where it had fallen with the papers.
Not sure how I missed it; it must've been right where I was looking for it. But no harm done, I went and did the measurements.
Just now, I went to my closet and got some socks, and turned back toward my desk. And there, on the corner of my desk, in very plain view, a quarter inch from the iPhone dock that I moved while I was looking, actually touching the credit cards that I moved while I was looking, about a foot from the specific place I had thought the tape measures were. . .
. . . is the plastic case holding the blank CDs. And, on top of it, coiled up, the yellow plastic tape measure.
It's right there. I must have touched the CD container while I was looking for it. There was nothing on top of it, nothing obscuring it. The plastic case is a cylinder about 4" high and about 5" in diameter. It's the tallest thing on that corner of the desk, by a couple of inches. There's an empty Advil bottle on top of it, raising the height and visibility by another 2+ inches.
I have missed many obvious things in my day, but this may be the most obvious thing I've ever missed.
So I've got a theory. It could be--never mind. I think gnomes must have stolen the CD container and the measuring tape yesterday, perhaps in order to measure something for nefarious but ultimately unknowable gnomic purposes. (Presumably they needed the CD container as something to stand on--gnomes are pretty short.) Then last night while I was asleep, they crept back into my room and put back the container and the tape measure, carefully replacing the thin layer of dust that had covered it before.
Either that or the tape measure and the drill were off at a party together when I was looking for them yesterday. Maybe I should check the shelf where the drill usually lives again this morning and see if it's back.
]]>I'm sorry about that. Haven't had a chance to look into it. I suspect that the simplest answer will be for me to upgrade to Movable Type 4, but that's enough of a Project that it's unlikely to happen for a while yet.
In the meantime, keep trying with the authentication (I think it does work in some circumstances), and rest assured that I'll approve legitimate comments that get held for moderation. And if I don't do so within a day or so after you post, please drop me a note--it's possible, though unlikely, that a legitimate comment could get marked as spam, in which case I would never see it.
]]>Luckily, Liz H has posted an excellent discussion of the whole episode (read the comments on that entry too), along with useful links to various other people's comments. And links to the original post and various followups; the original event as described by the original poster (see below for a couple other people's descriptions) sounds both more innocuous in some ways and much creepier in other ways than I had assumed from the original description I heard.
I also like coffeeandink's response (which includes the line "Women spend THEIR ENTIRE LIVES IN SEXUALIZED SPACES"). And there are some good comments in Tempest's initial entry and her followup. And plasticsturgeon suggests a followup: the Open Source African Hair Project. (Hey, how about an Open Source Pregnant Women's Bellies Project too?) (Also tattoos.)
(Okay, this is a tangent, but I can't resist: someone in the comments on that plasticsturgeon entry pointed to Rent-a-Negro.com, which reminds me of the similarly entertaining Black People Love Us! site.)
The FSFwiki has an excellent and detailed summary and set of links for the whole discussion, including links to people who participated in the "project" either at the original con or at the second one where it happened; part of the problem was certainly the way that the original poster described things. See novapsyche's description of her experience, for example, and netmouse's description of her experience (plus the comments thread there).
Over at Metafilter, Pastabagel weighed in. Although I think at the time of that posting they may not have known all the details of the original situation, I do love this line: "Women aren't a collection of sex parts behind a security system that needs to be bypassed before you can access them."
And here's one of Anna's comments at feministing: "Touching and being touched is great. Why don't we start with all the guys at Cons who want to break down sexual taboos [...] encouraging and participating in non-sexual touching between men?"
Finally, vito-excalibur posted a thought-provoking entry about the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Program--women rescuing women from unwanted attention. (Yes, there is a male auxiliary.) And shaysdays provides some suggestions on some rescue techniques, along with some signs that may indicate someone could use some rescuing.
]]>I've been assuming that most of them were rejected by one or another of the Daikaiju! giant-monster anthologies. The second volume came out last summer, and the third last fall, so the timing is approximately right for the rejected stories to be washing up on our shores and stomping and roaring through our slushpile.
I've got nothing against giant-monster stories. But as with anything that we see a lot of, such stories are getting to be kind of a hard sell for me.
I'm not putting it on the stories-we've-seen-too-often list yet, 'cause I think it's a temporary thing--I suspect that after this wave passes, giant monsters will go back to being a rarity in submissions to us.
But if you were thinking of sending us your giant-monster story in the next few days, might be best to send something else instead.
]]>Oddly, submission volume dropped by quite a bit this past week. Usually an imminent temporary closure results in a much higher volume than usual; not sure what's up with that.
]]>They mostly tend to fall into three categories:
Some of my favorites:
(A review on Li Wei's site notes that some of his photos bear some resemblance to Yves Klein's Le Saut Dans le Vide ("Leap into the Void"); true. But I like Li Wei's renditions better.)
Of course, the obvious question is: were these photos faked?
And the answer appears to be: sort of.
He uses wires, mirrors, and other structural assistance, and then removes the wires from the photos using Photoshop. So the photos are really of Li Wei, really in those places; but the illusion of the absence of gravity is, of course, an illusion.
Note that, as I understand it, he is primarily a performance artist rather than a photographic artist; he does performances, some of which apparently involve holding himself very still for a long time in a particular pose (with his head buried in something, for example), and the photos are sort of (retouched) records of those performances. I think.
If you want to know more about how all this works, you can watch the videos on the site. For example, the video of the being-kicked-off-the-roof photo shows the setup and testing process, with the rope holding him in place clearly visible. Oddly, the guy who's kicking him doesn't appear to have anything holding him in place; that ends up looking a lot more dangerous than Li Wei's part.
Anyway. Lots of cool stuff, well worth a look.
]]>I've been annoyed by Classmates for years, but not quite annoyed enough to unregister until today, when I received a note from them saying that had a new "guestbook signature." In other words, someone stopped by my "guestbook" page (a standard page provided by the site) and put their name on it.
I generally just ignore Classmates emails, but this time I was just barely curious enough to go take a look. And I discovered that it wouldn't even tell me who had signed my guestbook unless I signed up for a paid account.
Classmates is allegedly a social networking site, but if you don't pay to join, there's almost nothing you can do there other than receive their annoying emails. I did once send a message to a former classmate, but I felt bad about it later, because unless they or I upgraded to a paid account, the message would never be delivered. (I considered paying the upgrade fee to deliver the message, but I just didn't want to support Classmates.)
Contrast this to, say, Facebook, or Orkut or Friendster or LinkedIn or any of the other more standard social networking sites. Those sites want you to connect with friends and classmates and so on, because they're funded by advertising, and they know that more eyeballs means more money. Some of them still sometimes do the annoying thing where they send you email saying you have a message but not saying what it is, to lure you to the site; but my impression is that more sites these days are realizing that happy members are loyal members, and not doing stuff like that. And certainly none of them that I know of other than Classmates will refuse to give you any information unless you pay them; on the other sites, at worst the cost is that you have to visit the site for free.
So why pay Classmates for something you can get free elsewhere, with less unwanted email?
I shoulda unregistered years ago.
(I feel obliged to note that I feel funny about complaining about a service requiring money. Of course there are many many services, both online and off, that you have to pay for. But Classmates does a kind of bait-and-switch: it lets you sign up for free, it gives the impression that free membership is actually useful, but then it turns out that pretty much anything you might want to do there requires a paid membership. If they'd just said from the start "this is a paid service, you can't join unless you pay," I'd have been fine with that--but on the other hand, they would have far fewer members if they did that.)
]]>And at the time, I lamented the fact that many of the songs they'd performed weren't available on K/C/E recordings.
That has now changed.
The new album is called Heart Walk, and you can listen to the entire album online for free on that page. Not just 30-second samples; the entirety of every song. (Requires Flash.)
If you like what you hear, you can buy the CD for $15.
The album contains three of the songs I mentioned in that old entry: David Dodson's "Farthest Field," Gordon's "Frobisher Bay," and Cindy Kallet's "I'm Gonna Walk" (which is paired with another piece, "My Heart Is Ready"). Those three would probably be good starting points if you're not sure what songs to try.
Good stuff. If you have any interest in folk music and/or nice harmonies, go give the album a listen.
The recording, of course, is not quite as good as hearing them live. Luckily for those of you in the Boston area, the trio is having a CD release concert on Saturday, May 17, in Watertown. If I were going to be in town then, I would totally go.
It'll be at 8 p.m. at the First Parish Church, 35 Church Street, in Watertown. For more info, see the Tremedal Concerts site.
. . . I like the rest of Cindy Kallet's music too--her solo albums, her albums with Grey Larsen and with Gordon Bok. (You can also get some of her albums at the iTunes Store.) I've been a fan of hers since before I first heard her, ever since I first heard Gabby & Joanna sing "Shores of Africa" and "Out on the Farthest Range" at a Swarthmore coffeehouse. But the K/C/E stuff is my favorite. Wonderful wonderful harmonies.
I see that a few songs from their first album, Angels in Daring, are also available for online listening; I particularly recommend "Cold Is the Night," one of my favorites of theirs.
Added later:
Originally, I noted that another of my favorite of their songs, "I'm a Mammal" from their second album, isn't available online. It turns out I was wrong!
This is the lovely and funny song that Kallet wrote after taking flak over breastfeeding her child at a holiday dinner. You can listen to the whole song on the page for Leave the Cake in the Mailbox, her kids' album; and if you don't want that whole album, you can buy the song for 99 cents at the iTunes Store.
]]>And he made clear, very matter-of-factly, that he was going to kill me sometime soonish.
This didn't terrify me as much as one might expect, but I was kinda scared and stressed.
He seemed, of course, like a perfectly ordinary guy. Was reasonably friendly, had a couple of cats, interacted in a friendly way with my friends. Hugged me now and then, which was really creepy.
I spent a fair bit of time and energy trying to figure out how to avoid getting killed, with limited success. Various obvious things, like contacting the police, never even occurred to me.
At various points during the dream, I was aware that it was a dream, but I "knew" that it was a recurring dream, and that in itself was a problem; I didn't want to keep dreaming about this.
Eventually, I woke up. The room was dark, so it must've been still pretty early. As I fumbled around for one of my various clocklike devices to see what time it was, I heard a rustling noise.
I looked up, and there was my housemate's cat. The door to my room was open.
And then I woke up for real. Apparently my subconscious likes horror movie genre conventions even though I don't watch horror movies.
This dream wasn't the awful nightmarish kind of thing it could've been. But not pleasant. But it did have some nice moments--like a writer friend coming over and doing an amazing painting project on paper spread out on my living room floor, whirling around while holding a paintbrush, resulting in circles and spirals of paint spatters, only apparently it was all rigorously controlled, 'cause they could dip down and make very precise dabs in specific spots as they spun in place.
Anyway. Despite being convinced during the dream that it was a recurring dream, and although it was quite long and involved, I'm now pretty sure it was a one-time thing. I'm hoping it stays that way.
]]>I'm not as pure about playing only cool words as I probably made it sound in my previous comments; if faced with a choice between a neat word that scores little and an ordinary word that scores twice as much, I'm torn. (If I can play EN for 18 points, for example, that's hard to resist.) But having made a public statement about it, I tried to mostly stick to my principles in the games I recently played--which is just as well, given that there's no way I could have won either of them if I were going for points, due to the other players being way better at that sort of thing than I am. . . . And on several turns I couldn't come up with a nifty word, so I did go for ordinary and points.
So score does matter to me--it's not that I don't care at all about it, it's just that nifty words are more interesting to me. (I'm not entirely noncompetitive; I tend to enjoy games more that I win often, like fan-tan or Illuminati, or that always end up being really close, like Puerto Rico.) But I don't like having wild imbalances in scoring in any direction. So when I'm playing Scrabble with people who care about scoring, I sometimes end up feeling a little resentful that the other players are playing in a paradigm that I'm not so interested in, and thereby winning by a lot of points.
In one of the recent games, I did end up playing one two-letter word that I couldn't resist. Part of the board looked like this:
ZIP
DETENTS
A
ENVOY
and I played LO horizontally right under DETENTS and above ENVOY, which resulted in also making IDLE and PEON (both vertical), for 13 points. Even though I was passing up a chance to play WEAL elsewhere.
But even though it's neat, that's a violation of my preferred approach (see below)--I just don't find parallel-played words (as opposed to words that cross other words) satisfying, at a visceral level.
An example of my playing the way I'd prefer to play: near the end of one game, I considered playing WIENIE, but somehow that didn't seem as elegant as WEAN, so I went with WEAN. In some sense I shoulda played WIENIE, 'cause it would've let me go out the next turn, instead of being left with one tile; oh, well.
In these recent games, I almost never scored less than 10 points in a turn (and usually more), but that doesn't help against players who regularly score 15-35 points in a turn.
Here are some notes toward a set of house rules that would let me enjoy Scrabble more.
The main thing I discovered while playing is that at a gut level, I want Scrabble to be a cross-word game; I find it unsatisfying to see a word laid down next to another word, with no crossing, which is one of the main ways that people who are into the game play.
There's nothing at all wrong with playing parallel words, obviously; it's entirely legitimate, and it's probably the only way to consistently score a lot of points. It just doesn't feel right to me. Though adding to an existing word is okay with me; I guess my criterion is more that I want the main played word to use at least one letter already on the board, whether it crosses another word or extends it in the original direction.
(Crossing the end of a previously played word, in a T shape, and thereby extending the previously played word by one letter, is somewhere on the borderline for me.)
Another issue that I ran into several times is that I don't like the challenge system. When I come up with a neat word, but I'm not certain that's how it's spelled, I want to go look it up and check. Given that I can't (according to the rules), I tend to play it safe and avoid the word, which leads to less enjoyable (for me) play. Also, if I'm playing with serious players, there's no point in my challenging 2- or 3-letter words; they know far more of them than I do. It would be trivially easy for a serious player to just make up a bunch of 2- and 3-letter words and score big off me; I'd never know the difference, and I'd never challenge them. (Also tied in to this point is the fact that in most contexts, I just don't like bluffing, nor being required to figure out whether someone else is bluffing--poker and Bullshit being the only contexts I can think of offhand where I enjoy that kind of thing.)
As for validity, I'd rather play that at least one other player has to know the word, than that it has to be in some given dictionary. Of course, that doesn't help me when two or more of the other players know the words from having read them in the Scrabble dictionary or books on how to play Scrabble; I want to say that doesn't count, but arguably, they know those words just as much as I know lots of words that I've never seen or heard actually used.
I'm tempted to outlaw two-letter words entirely, except in the last few turns. At some point I went through the official list of allowed two-letter words and divided it into words that seem completely legit/common to me (BY, ME, TO, US, etc), questionable ones (BI, MM, SH, etc), and ones that I wouldn't allow at all (JO, KA, OD, WO, etc). But a lot of that is just gut feeling; my list of common two-letter words doesn't quite match the list of common ones on that linked-to page, for example. I suppose the players could agree ahead of time on a list. Maybe I'll publish my list and see if it becomes popular among less-competitive players.
With all of the above in mind, here's a first draft of my ideal house rules:
Here's another rule I'm considering adding but haven't decided on yet:
Here are some potentially interesting variants or additional house rules that somehow don't feel like they should be part of my core house-rules ruleset:
Here are some "words" I would have liked to have played in my recent games, had we been playing much sillier variants:
And some actual words that I was only a letter or two from being able to play:
Finally, a few proper nouns that I had all or almost all the letters for, but couldn't play 'cause they were proper:
I was looking through some high-scoring Scrabulous games played by other people, and came across one particularly odd one. How did this game work?
Looking at the move list, it looks like they started off by playing a word near the upper left corner, then played a bunch of words that didn't connect to each other at all. And at some point they played TERMINOLOGIES (13 letters) without, apparently, having any of the four crossing words in place. (Though they may've had the middle MI in place.) How'd they do that? Even if they weren't following the usual rules about connecting words, I'm not clear on how one player could put down that many tiles at once.
They also played several words that I would've guessed were made up, such as INKLE and TERAI, but those turn out to be real. I'm now guessing that FANDED is also real, but it's not in MW3 (unabridged), and TSOR isn't helping. Anyone happen to know what FANDED means?
Btw, it's kinda funny how many of the top-scoring "super bingos" in the Scrabulous "global stats" section consist of the word SINGHIOZZEREBBE, played by Marco Pagano in a bunch of Italian games; he and his collaborator very carefully arranged the board and their tiles to be able to produce that word (and others). Not my style, but I admire their dedication.