My Tesla Model 3 arrived yesterday. I ordered it on the morning of the first day they were open for pre-order: March 31, 2016. The expected delivery date kept getting pushed back (for about a year, starting in late 2017, their delivery estimator said my car would be ready in 4–6 months); even after the […]
Content warning for mention of possible use of publicly available tracking technology by stalkers and harassers. The New York Times published an article last week about creating a face-recognition system using publicly available camera feeds: To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked […]
In 1989, I wrote a story (titled “Absences”) about a kid and her brother who had survived an alien invasion. Part of the core idea of the story was that the invading aliens were super sensitive to sound; humans who made too much noise got killed, and the protagonist’s brother was deaf, so the protagonist […]
I’m disappointed in the ACES Executive Board’s statement about the incident in which a presenter said the N-word during a presentation at ACES 2019. My post here is a long discussion of the Board’s statement—first my responses to what they wrote, then a description of some things I wish they had said, then a couple […]
Content warning for discussion of a white presenter’s use of a racial epithet. (In this post, I’m writing the standard euphemisms in place of the epithets that the presenter spoke aloud.) Last week, I attended the annual conference of ACES, an organization for editors. (Copyeditors, developmental editors, etc.) On the last day of the conference, […]
This year’s northern-hemisphere vernal equinox will arrive about seven hours from now, so here’s my traditional spring post, even though the rains aren’t over. For winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time […]
Last week, Kam and I played the boardgame Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala. (We had played it before, but it was a while ago.) I more or less like it, but as we went back through the rules to re-familiarize ourselves with it, I felt like the rules just kept going on and on […]
Today is the 14th anniversary of my father’s death. I’ve been mostly okay the past few days, but kind of fragile and mood-swingy. Have gotten some important overdue stuff done at work this week, but have also had multiple instances of getting too anxious to read specific emails and thus ending up being later than […]
I’ve now labeled all 39,801 photos and videos in my collection. Whew. …I don‘t know if I ever really explained what I mean by “labeled” in this project. I mean that each item now has a descriptive title (although often the titles are just things like “View”), and each item has one or more categorization […]
Am reading Defiance #2: a paperback magazine of the US revolutionary left, published in 1971, edited by Dotson Rader. Pretty interesting stuff. Articles include: Rader’s introduction, which recommends abandoning electoral politics in favor of joining the imminent revolution. A piece by two young white men who were part of the NYC branch of Weatherman (aka […]
Achievement unlocked: When I gave my billing account number to Pair tech support this morning, the support person said they hadn’t known there were account numbers that low. :) Pair has been hosting my website since July 1996. I was going to say that’s the longest-duration business relationship I have with any company, but then […]
I’m reading Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter (1997), for the first time. I’m sorry to say that it’s not quite grabbing me yet, though it’s growing on me as it goes on. (I’m nearly a quarter of the way through it.) But there’s one thing I love about it: the portrayal of the three sisters who […]