This started as an entry about what kinds of things SH is looking for that we don't see enough of. Then it became a list of things about which I'd said "I'm a sucker for X." Then it was going to be an entry about Ben R's "sources of reader pleasure" paradigm.

But in the end what it turned into is a long list of assorted things I like in fiction.

This is not a magazine wishlist. The presence of one or more of these things in a story is neither necessary nor sufficient to make me want to buy the story, and even if it were, Karen and Susan might not agree. Also, if I say "I want to see more stories of type X," and we get a hundred stories of type X that month, then we're not likely to take more than three or four of them; really, we're not likely to take more than one of them, if that. We start to lose interest when we see too many stories of a given type or in a given subgenre.

So this is just a personal list from me as a reader (rather than me as an editor per se), unlikely to be of any practical use to anyone.

Note that all of these are things I like only if they're done well (and "well" is a very subjective term). This is not a comprehensive list of things I like in stories, but it covers a lot of what I like.

So what are some of the things y'all like in fiction?

Happy Mother's Day to all of you who are mothers!

And to those who've been mothers, or expect to be mothers in the next few months, or plan or intend to be mothers at some other future date.

And, as I wrote a few years ago: Sympathies to those who would like to be celebrating Mother's Day as mothers but aren't or can't, and to those who for whatever reason can't or don't want to celebrate it with their own mothers.

Wikipedia, btw, seems to be a little muddled about the history of Mother's Day in the US; in particular, the US section of the article on Mother's Day around the world attributes the beginning of the idea in the US to Julia Ward Howe, but that notion has been removed from the US-specific article. If any of you have reliable sources on the topic, it would be cool if you could go adjust both articles to match each other (and put a note in the Discussion sections to explain what you're doing).

. . . I really do seem to have a remarkable number of friends who are or will soon be mothers. "Remarkable" only in the sense that the number has gone way up in recent years (I think it was about two or three until about five years ago), which shouldn't be surprising but somehow is surprising me at this particular moment.

The first one arrived recently, and I watched it this weekend. Three half-hour episodes. I remembered about 80% of each episode; the rest of each episode seemed completely unfamiliar to me. I don't know whether I've missed bits of episodes, or whether I just don't remember some of them. Apparently at least one bit (the Queen Victoria/Gladstone sketch) was removed from the episode at some point? But is restored in this version. So I may not have seen that one before.

Anyway. There are two unfortunate things here:

First, I don't know which episodes I have and haven't watched. I'd certainly seen (some version of) these three. There are probably others that I've missed, but I don't know which, and don't know how to figure it out. I could get an approximation by looking up which episodes all the famous sketches are in, but I imagine that wouldn't eliminate more than half the episodes.

But that seemed originally like it shouldn't be a problem; I could just watch the whole series regardless. Which brings me to the second unfortunate thing:

I didn't find these episodes funny.

I do still have a sense of humor. (I got concerned, so I checked.) But apparently it no longer matches Monty Python's. Maybe the humor's been worn down by constant repetition--I've certainly heard every word of some of these sketches recited, in unison, by Python fans many more times than I've seen the original sketches. And in general I'm not so fond of watching things multiple times. And, as I recently learned by re-watching Heathers and Fawlty Towers, apparently my sense of humor has changed since I was in high school.

But, y'know, there are jokes that I've been hearing (and telling) for 20 years or more that still crack me up. And last time I watched Brazil (a few years back), I still loved it.

Anyway. It seems likely that if the first three episodes didn't even elicit a chuckle (just a twitch of a smile three or four times), it's probably a waste of my time to spend 20 more hours watching the other 40+ episodes. But it's too bad.

One thing I did enjoy this time through was associating names with faces. John Cleese has always been easy to recognize, and I've usually been able to recognize Eric Idle and Michael Palin (though I sometimes mix them up). But somehow I didn't have a very firm grasp on which faces belonged with the names Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. So I referred to the handy group photo in the Wikipedia article, and got a much clearer idea of who was who in each sketch, as well as what sorts of characters each was likely to play.

On the plus side, I suppose clearing out 13 discs from my Netflix queue is nicely productive, especially since it only cost me a couple of hours.

But now I'll have to do some rearranging so that I'll have some comic relief mixed in between Insomnia, Alien, Night of the Hunter, Deliverance, and so on.

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:

1. Take rolled oats and add three kinds of sweeteners.
2. Take rice and add two kinds of sweeteners.
3. Mix the rolled oats and rice together with some wheat and add three more kinds of sweeteners.
4. Add oats, rice, and two more kinds of sweeteners.

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:

• Photos of himself head-down, with his head completely submerged in something (water, dirt, a floor, etc).
• Sort of the inverse of that: photos of just his head sticking up out of a surface.
• The really impressive ones to me: photos of himself apparently defying gravity in various ways.

Some of my favorites:

• A bunch of flying people dunking him in a basketball hoop. (Sort of combines multiple themes.)
• A guy kicking him off a building.
• Triptych: a woman spinning him around her head and throwing him, and him hanging upside down above her, kind of a Spider-Man moment.
• My favorite: falling horizontally straight out from an office building window.

(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.)