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bodlonThings are very, very quiet outside right now. That’s not entirely unusual for a Monday night, but there’s a certain stillness that comes of living in a city that has preemptively declared some pretty major shut-downs (buses, garbage collection, schools, two of three colleges) on account of the potentially massive snowstorm that’s slated to get going sometime in the early morning.
It’s like we’re waiting. We’re all indoors, hunkered down with blankets or groceries or whatever there is for hunkering down with, waiting for Snowmageddon to strike.
It’s just astonishing to me that I already know that I’m not due in at work tomorrow because of a set of storm systems that stretch from Oklahoma to Maine, and that the governor has already declared a state of emergency, when I can look outside and see nothing but wet black streets.
Granted, some of that wet blackness is an icy sheet, but I popped to the store not two hours ago because I realized I was out of rat food, so that’s kind of anticlimactic.
Well, except for the bit where it took me five tries to back out of the driveway because of the ice.
We’ll see what the night brings, I suppose.
~*~
- I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Candlemark and Gleam has just released a novel called Broken, which I haven’t read, but is said to contain “political commentary, a scary oppressive government, and people attempting to rebuild from the wreckage of a devastating, world-changing war or two.” So yes. Go have a peek.
- Lone Gurkha fights off 40 robbers to prevent a rape. This man just won the international badass sweepstakes. Bishnu Shrestha, I salute you.
- Oh, XKCD. Why do you have to be right so goddamn often?
- One troubling casualty of the uprisings in Egypt: cultural heritage. It’s hardly surprising — looting and smashing tends to accompany revolution — but it’s upsetting all the same.
- Reminder: Elizabeth Barrette’s monthly poetry fishbowl is tomorrow (Feb 1).
- I caught this piece, “You Should Date An Illiterate Girl,” via a friend a few days ago. I can buy it as a piece about the jagged edge of mourning a relationship, the voice of a speaker who isn’t quite back in his right mind thanks to that suffering, and how in that moment it seems so much easier just to settle for quiet desperation. It is admittedly problematic — and whose process isn’t in those moments? — but as a piece of art I think its effectiveness and authenticity rely on the narrator’s biases and knee-jerk lashings. On the other hand, everything about it makes me long for those things which are also dangerous to the heart. I’d rather have (and be) that strange and difficult thing than the alternative.
- Just this week I’ve spotted posts by three authors — John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Elizabeth Bear — about feeling fictional or strange in the face of responses to their public personae and their work.
- Fibercrafted beasties to benefit animals affected by the Queensland floods. Bonus: some of them are based on my friend Sam’s books.
- The DSM — or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — is currently under revision for a fifth edition. This is a hot-button issue for some communities to which I belong. The way we define mental illness is not at all clear-cut, and the lead editor for the fourth edition has some serious reservations about where these things are going.
- Jim Hines, one of my favorite people, has a great post full of links about some of the conversations going on about ebook piracy, its implications, and international issues related to the whole thing.
- Dear Missouri: I get it. You think drugs are bad. But making life even harder for families of addicts is kind of the wrong solution , especially if you’re explicitly say that treatment programs are off the table. I mean, okay, I get that the new conservatism seems to entail a belief that helping people who don’t pass some sort of moral litmus test is a waste of time, but this is ridiculous.
This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com
Thank you!
Date: 2011-02-01 08:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-01 06:20 pm (UTC)