Grab-baggery

On April 24, 2014April 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching, Writing3 Comments

If you follow science fiction or fantasy literature at all, you may be aware of the current kerfluffle over the Hugo awards. Or perhaps kerfluffles, as there appear to be more than one.

“Kerfluffle” is a fun word, and I feel like it should have a more fun plural. I think I’ll nominate kerfluffen.

Anyway. I almost got a supporting membership to WorldCon, which allows you to vote in the current year and nominate in the next year, last year. The current unpleasantness oddly intensified my desire to be part of it– funny, that– and I shelled out my 25 euros yesterday (this year’s WorldCon is in London) to buy a supporting membership so that I can get the nomination packet and I can vote.

Note the price is in euros. My card was declined. “Oh, right,” I thought; “my silly little local bank probably doesn’t wanna buy shit what’s in Europe with my debit card.” So I switched cards and bought it with another card. No biggie.

Until I got the call this afternoon that they’d detected fraudulent activity on my card and were considering putting a hold on future transactions unless I called them and straightened shit out.

Which I just did, dutifully. I appreciate the service; I normally don’t buy shit from London in non-Americadollars and I’m good with my bank noticing and sending up a trial balloon when I do. So I called the number and got a computer asking me to verify certain recent transactions. I confirmed that the Europe charge was me and then they asked me about the (also online, but not in Europe) charge for the book cover, which I bought the same night.

And got the name of the company wrong. Which… huh. I was literally sitting in front of my computer looking at my bank website so I noticed it.

Is this, like, a gotcha or something? The name they gave me was close to the actual company name but it wasn’t exactly right. Am I supposed to say no right now?

I thought about it and said that, no, I hadn’t authorized that charge.

Hint: don’t do that.

They dumped me to a person who was not terribly convinced that I was who I said I was. And it took several more minutes of talking and cajoling before I managed to convince him that 1) Yes, I was me; 2) Yes, I’d authorized the charge in London; 3) yes, I’d also authorized the charge to the book cover folks, but that they’d fucked up the name of the company and that was why I’d said no, and not because a book-cover company representative was, like, holding a gun to my head for my seventy bucks or anything like that.

Sigh.

Yesterday’s fun was the ISTEP Practice Test. Which is nearly an hour of kids sitting in front of computers and having standardized instructions read at them, for stuff they’ve already done and know how to do. They have to have taken the practice test to be eligible for the actual ISTEP next week. Non-negotiable. And I had to be the asshole reading the instructions. I’ll let you imagine just how good seventh and eighth graders are at sitting quietly listening to an hour of instructions about something that is already insanely boring. I’ll also let you imagine how patient I was with their bullshit by, say, the third time I’d wasted an entire two-period block of class time (the week before ISTEP, mind you) on meaningless nonsense.

And then I’ll let you imagine the fucking internet going out for half an hour during the second test.

I’m expecting next week to be a horrorshow again, just like last year. But we’ll see.

On the writing end of things, I’m completing two stories right now and strongly considering massive revisions to BA #5, which you guys have already seen. The version on the website is admittedly first-draft (if you pay close attention, one character’s name changes partway through, and I think at least one temporally impossible thing happens) and wanted an editing pass anyway, but I’m thinking about some fairly major character-level revisions here. Most of it came from reading the piece Scalzi linked to above that referenced the “Diversity Era” of science fiction. The Benevolence Archives are basically a male buddy story, and are wanting for some gender diversity at the very least. (There has been only one human character in any of the stories, and his race wasn’t specified, so right now I’m not so concerned about racial diversity.) One of the stories you haven’t seen is entirely about Rhundi, but she doesn’t have quite the pull that the two main dudes have. So I want to work on that a little bit. Fun stuff. I like it when I’m actually writing.

Wait no

On April 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Writing2 Comments

I just bought a Supporting Membership for Loncon. So I get to vote in the Hugos this year.

That’s exciting.

Going to bed now. Which is also exciting.

In which this is all I’ve got

On April 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Today was exhausting.

How are you?

Ethiopia, ladies and gentlemen!

On April 23, 2014April 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I swore I’d never complain about American drivers again after spending a month in Israel. This makes Israeli drivers look like pikers.

In which events occur

On April 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Mental note: when testing out new themes for the blog, don’t use the iMac with the 27″ screen. Because Jesus God is that header enormous on the laptop and unreadable on the phone. I really love it, but I may have to go back to something different so that everyone who doesn’t have a Hulk-sized monitor can view at least a little of the blog without scrolling down. Continuing to fiddle, at any rate.

If you haven’t looked yet, be sure to scroll down a post to see the just-released cover for the Benevolence Archives short story collection, which I hope to have available before school lets out. There are two stories still being worked on, but you can read one of the stories (six, currently) that will be included here. The couple of you who volunteered to be beta readers for Skylights, stay tuned– I haven’t forgotten about you, I just didn’t manage to get the stuff sent out before the DC trip and I’ve been trying to get my feet back under me ever since. (Ask my wife: today will be the first day I haven’t fallen asleep on the couch after work in two solid weeks.)

Picking a cover for a book is interesting. I’m specifically commissioning a cover for Skylights; I’ve given the artist some direction and a copy of the book to read, but other than that he’s a professional artist and I’m going to go with whatever he comes up with. I didn’t want to spend the money to do that kind of cover for the BA collection, though– at a maximum of $2.99 a pop (and I may go less) it’s going to take forever to make even a small amount of money back– so I found a ebook covers website and bought/customized the one you see below. The punchline is that I looked at it, thought “Ooh, that looks like a Benevolence spidership,” and bought it, and then in a blaze of glory last night constructed an entire story (BA 7, which will be included in the collection) based on the cover image I’d already bought. Which, honestly, ain’t a bad way to handle these cover farm websites– pick out a cover that you really like on its own merits and then write the story that makes the cover make sense. I’ve got two or three on my favorites list already that I’m going to approach in precisely that fashion. And I found a cover that would be great for Balremesh if Balremesh weren’t a micro-short and thus not something that really is ever going to need a cover.

Lessee. What else? My kids haven’t been bastards this week, at least not in my class, although I’ve had a serious rash of my own students getting in trouble in other people’s classrooms lately. That said, tomorrow is probably going to be exhausting, but I’ll hold off talking about it too much until it actually happens– I have to give a “practice test” for the ISTEP multiple choice that is supposed to happen next week– “supposed to” because who knows how bad the test is going to be fucked up this year; I have no faith at all that it’s going to go well, and my kids are testing in the afternoon because of a general lack of appropriate computers in our building, so their scores are going to be all fucked up. But as I said that’s probably tomorrow’s post. Which will be late, come to think of it, because I’m doing a study session for my Algebra kids after school tomorrow and then going to the comic shop.

Gah. I’m tired already.

Ahem.

On April 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Coming soon.

In which I spend money dollars

On April 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking5 Comments

…so, just went Premium. Figured I’d give it a shot since technically I can justify it as a grant-money expense; I don’t know if it’s going to feel like the money was well-spent or not. I’ve fiddled with fonts and colors and will likely be doing that a lot over the next couple of days; expect the look of the site to change without warning, and don’t be shy about complaining about it if you feel like something’s broken or, maybe, you really hate sans serif fonts. Nothing’s remotely permanent yet, especially since I don’t own the site header and I’d kind of like that top image to be something I control.

But, yeah, floodgate’s open for comments if you want.

Something something fertility celebration

On April 20, 2014April 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting5 Comments

My mom got my son a couple of ~~Matchbox cars~~ Hot Wheels for Easter. This is one of them. I find it vaguely alarming:

Well, okay, not alarming from this angle. This is just a cop car. No biggie. From this angle, though?:

Can’t have a cop car without carefully-molded machine guns and grenades in the trunk. Because military hardware is the first thing we should think of when we think of “police” nowadays.