Married white man, creative, seeks sadist
As I mentioned a while back, I am getting back into SF-writing after a long absence. I have a story written and and almost (I hope) submission-worthy, but I would like to get feedback from some more people before actually sending it out. So I am willing to let you read “The Blessed Ones”, this 11,500-word story of mine, if you would only repay me with a thorough and ruthless critique. Everything is fair game: plot, characters, world-building, science, sex/race/class issues, etc.
Herewith, the teaser.
When Diana Rosenberg was six, she asked her father how to spell those strings of nonsense syllables that her mother said to him every morning and evening, sounds that she could not quite imitate and that didn’t resemble any language she heard in school, even on the playground. Her father explained that men could never remember what the Five Blessings sounded like, and anyway, they weren’t exactly words—they were sounds that touched a different part of the brain. The First Blessing, he said, was for housework; the Second was for out-of-house work; the Third was for fidelity; the Fourth was for listening; the Fifth was for safety. Her father spent a long time explaining “fidelity” to her, but the other four terms seemed perfectly clear to her.
By the time Diana was in fifth grade, she understood that “safety” was a euphemism. By the time she was in eighth, she realized that she would never hear her mother give her father the Fifth Blessing; even mentioning the topic to her parents earned her a cold look.
If you want to see the rest, drop me a note. If you don’t… I have more where that came from, bwah-hah-hah.
Getting the point
The Seven-Year-Old had been spooked by a book he had been reading in his bed, and I was looking for something to distract him from his fears. I picked up Sally Miller Gerhart’s Wanderground, flipped through it, and then thought better of offering it to him.
“This probably isn’t a book for seven-year-olds,” I said, recalling that although the world the book portrays is bucolic, some of the stories within are less so. “It’s a book about a bunch of women who live without any men.”
The child, who had seen the map in the frontispiece, asked, “Is ‘Dangerland’ where all the men live?”
“How did you figure that out?”
(I do actually recommend Wanderground… to grown-ups. For the purpose of this book, puberty is probably a necessary condition of grown-up-hood, but not a sufficient one.)
Writer’s trance
After a long long hiatus, I am using some of my Copious Free Time for writing science fiction. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes that I saw in a certain Internet imbroglio last year, I am also trying to give myself a better multicultural education, and one of the first books that came to hand was called, natch, Multi-Cultural Literacy. In one essay from that book—“Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink”, by Gloria Anzaldúa—there is this passage:
When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to be projected in the inner screen of my mind, I “trance.” I used to think I was going crazy or that I was having hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images. Some of these film-like narratives I write down; most are lost, forgotten. When I don’t write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill….
I believe this is the sensation that, in the fanfic community, is known as “plotbunnies”.
Missing the point
Scene: A father is reading And Tango Makes Three to his three-year-old son.
Father: “…Roy and Silo taught Tango how to sing for them when she was hungry. They fed her food from their beaks. They snuggled her in their nest at night. Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.”
Three-year-old son: No. One of them has to be the mommy.
You have nothing to loose but your bowels
It appears that in honor of May Day, a major aqueduct of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has gone on strike.
The e-postman always pings twice
My wife called me at work this morning to report that she hadn’t gotten any email, not even in her might-be-spam folder. “I’ll fix it”, I said, remembering some odd “temporary failure in name resolution” messages I had received from some scripts running on the server (the virtual machine which serves this here site, and which also handles mail to ropine.com) the previous day. So I restarted the network on the server and figured that would be the end of it.
(It’s always dangerous when you think you know what caused your problem, and therefore focus all your attention on what you think is the cause, rather than the actual problem.)
Tonight, when I got home, she said she still hadn’t gotten any mail, and I looked at the situation again, and discovered that my mail server was not listening to the rest of the world. I’m not sure why it decided to take an unscheduled vacation—I assume this all has something to do with an unfortunate incident yesterday where I filled up my hard drive—but I brought it back up, and one of the nice things about ubiquity of spam is that it’s really easy to tell when your mail service is working.
I must admit that every time this happens I wonder whether running my very own mail server on a machine (albeit virtual) that I administer by my very own self demonstrates more geek-machismo than practical sense. However, for the time being, I am too lazy to migrate to doing it any other way.
Mail servers that are properly configured, i.e., those not used for sending spam, should just keep trying to send their messages for about five days before giving up, so if you sent us something today, you shouldn’t have to do anything else to make sure we get it.
I, for one, welcome our new Nordic overlords
Like most of my co-workers, I have long expected that my happy little GeoStartup would some day be acquired by a much larger company—the IPO market being kind of shvakh these days—but I was surprised to learn which company ended up acquiring us. After having some time to reflect, though, I can appreciate what a far-sighted decision that was. A corporate group that purchases its raw materials in 55 different countries, manufactures its products in 10, distributes them from 16, and offers retail outlets in 25; a group with over a hundred thousand employees and over 20 billion euros in annual sales; a brand known worldwide for low prices, quality manufacturing, and social conscience; one that continually strives to improve itself—surely such a corporate colossus can find new and innovative uses for a cutting-edge Geographic Search and Reference Platform.
Also, that couch we bought from Jordan’s a few years back is really showing its age, and—
What’s that?
We were bought by Nokia?
Sorry. I thought it was Ikea.
Annals of cultural transmission
Scene: The dinner table.
Father: What did you do in school today?
Five-year-old: It was too cold to go out for recess, so we saw a movie.
Father: What was it about?
Five-year-old: It was about a snowman who came to life.
Father: So you saw Frosty the Snowman?
Seven-year-old: How did it work? And how did he die?
The autumn mists have come to New England...
…and a land called Honalee has a new permanent resident.
Barukh dayyan ha-emet, and rest in peace, Aunt Mary.
Dept. of “you can’t win for losing”
I’ve been trying to protect myself from the headaches of another massive hard-drive failure by backing up our home systems to Amazon S3, first by using JungleDisk, and more recently by using duplicity. (JungleDisk is a fine program—it’s one of the few pieces of software running on my Linux box that I’ve put down money for, and I’ve never regretted doing so—but the basic version is oriented towards backing up one user’s personal files, and knows nothing of Unix ownership, file permissions, etc.)
The one problem with this approach is that we have about 20 GB of music files on our desktop system, and our DSL connection is only 128 Kbps upstream, so the music stuff is not being backed up as frequently as everything else.
But this past week, we were on vacation in New York, and my wife and I independently hit on this brilliant idea: start One Great Big Backup right before we leave, and it should be done before we get back. (Well … mostly done. I should have worked out the math first. But that was the least of my problems.)
So I set One Great Big Backup to kick off at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning, come back at about 4:30 Friday afternoon (the bus having arrived in Boston an hour and a half late), and discover that our system is even less responsive than it usually is under high load, and the console is printing out disturbing messages regarding the hard drive, containing cheerful messages like this:
SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake Dispr LinkSeq TrStaTrns }
After a panicked reboot and some more panicked fumbling with fsck, I gave up and shut the machine down.
Did I mention that this is the computer that controls our X10 system for turning lights on and off at appropriate times?
Anyway, on Saturday night, I did a more sober assessment of the damage, and determined that:
- One Great Big Backup had not finished and seemed hopelessly corrupt, so the music files had not been backed up.
- The most recent backup of our music to JungleDisk had happened, umm, some time in July of 2008.
- Regular daily backups had been going on as expected, so at least the regular desktop files were safe.
- Googling the cheerful messages from the hard drive turned up advice along the lines of “hard drives are cheap, do you really want to keep using one that’s flaking out on you?”
So today’s adventures included a journey to Micro Center, where we picked up
- a Hitachi 500-GB internal SATA hard drive, on sale
- a Hitachi 640-GB external USB hard drive, on sale
- an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD
When I tried to install the first of these items, a little nub of plastic broke off the end of the SATA cable. Also, the drive came with two machine screws, wheres the drive bay in our desktop machine requires four screws on a drive to keep it in place. Maybe that’s why these things were on sale. Hopefully, the Micro Center folks won’t give us grief about replacing it tomorrow.
The second one seems to be working so far as well as one might expect, although VFAT’s limitations on file names and size make my attempts at recovery and forensics… well, I’ve used about as much creativity as I think I can stand right now.
The third item, though, has worked like a charm: I booted from the CD, plugged in the external drive, mounted the partition that had the music on it, and as far as I can tell, all those files were copied over without a hitch. I would have backed up disk images from the broken drive to the external one as well, but then I ran into VFAT’s 4-GB-per-file limit. See previous comment about creativity.
