Other | J.R. Johnson

Just in time for Comic-Con, Linda Holmes over at NPR’s Monkey See pop-culture column has written a lovely piece today. It’s framed as a letter to “young creative weirdos,” those who may be socially awkward now but who will constitute our next wave of creators, of thinkers, of innovators. Here are a few excerpts, but if you are interested in encouraging young people to do more, do better, do different, I suggest you read the whole thing.

On change, and the making of same:

Don’t confuse what people are getting with what people want…. If you had told people [100 years ago], “I am a young person, and I intend to create Superman,” they would have told you, “That’s nice, dear, eat your dinner.” Things change.

On feedback:

Only listen to it if it’s supposed to make you better, not if it’s supposed to make you stop.

On work:

Write a lot, paint a lot, shoot a lot of film, take a lot of pictures, dance a lot, sing a lot, whatever the thing you do is, do it a lot.

…

Keep going.

This is exactly the sort of letter I would have appreciated as a kid. Pass it on.

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Boy, Did My Parents Get a Deal

Posted in Other, tagged adoption, biracial, NPR, race, srsly, Thoughts on June 29, 2013| 5 Comments »

Twelve and a half bucks, that’s what it cost my parents to adopt me. Would they have had to pay more for a white baby? We’ll never know, but according to NPR’s article on the issue, ‘Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt’, a skin-color based fee structure isn’t uncommon today. Not to mention how incredibly expensive the process is across the board.

/wtf, world?

Honestly.

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Reporting Harassment at a Convention: A First-Person How To

Posted in Other, tagged arts, books, conventions, genre fiction, how to, inspiration, publishing, sexual harassment on June 28, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Reblogging this because Elise Matthesen has been brave enough to turn a bad experience into something useful, and it may help someone in the future… although I hope you don’t need it.

Whatever

My friend Elise Matthesen was creeped upon at a recent convention by someone of some influence in the genre; she decided that she was going to do something about it and reported the person for sexual harassment, both to the convention and to the person’s employer. And now she’s telling you how she did it and what the process is like. Here’s her story.

—-

We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different…

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Fauna Report

Posted in Other, tagged fauna, get outdoors, i should be working, inspiration, Motivation, nature, Thoughts, vacation, work, Writers, writing, yay on June 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

[written from The Bush, as they say]
Greetings from Northern Ontario, where I sit at a table in a cottage overlooking a broad grey lake. Most mornings the lake sits still and calm, its surface and the encircling hills a chalice in which to hold mist. Like so many others in this region, this lake is surrounded by birch and pine, underpinned by the heavy, flat bedrock of the Canadian Shield. A small grassy lawn surrounds the house, illuminated by daisies and orange hawkweed.

It’s beautiful here, in the stark, almost frantic way of northern climes in summer. The sky warms around five o’clock in the morning and doesn’t fade until almost ten at night. Local wildlife takes full advantage of the long days, and I try to do the same.

Speaking of local wildlife, in addition to the usual chipmunks, rabbits, hawks, etc. I have seen the following in northern Ontario:

tortoises (tortii?)

loons

beaver

elk (ok, just tracks, but still)

hummingbirds (brave little adventurers from the southern reaches of the continent)

wolves (including one gorgeous specimen with russet fur)

deer, a.k.a. walking wolf lunchies

moose, female or juvenile male, large (hey, it’s a moose)

mosquitoes (forget cicadas, these monsters should be the next major food group)

It’s raining now, providing me with the perfect reason to stay in and keep working. But even work is better in the woods!

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Another Thought After Iain Banks, or, Origins and Destiny

Posted in Other, Science!, tagged atoms, awesome, human body, iain banks, illness, Motivation, neil degrasse tyson, physics, science, stars, Thoughts on June 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Now might be a good time to spend a little time with everyone’s favorite physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as he revisits the origins of the atoms that make up the human body.

From stars we came and to the stars we must return.
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Where Our Atoms Came From

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Iain Banks, 1954-2013

Posted in Other, Writing, tagged artists, arts, books, cancer, creativity, iain banks, illness, literature, Motivation, neil gaiman, patrick nielsen hayden, pnh, Writers, writing on June 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Iain Banks, 1954-2013 | Tor.com

This piece by Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden gives a kind remembrance of author Iain Banks, who died yesterday from cancer. I particularly liked this description of Banks’s personality:

In the social world of British SF, Banks will be remembered as a larger-than-life figure—irrepressible, fearlessly outspoken, a boisterous lover of life’s many pleasures, and given to unsung acts of kindness and generosity.

We might all wish to be remembered so. And as Neil Gaiman says in his own reaction to the news:

If you’ve never read any of his books, read one of his books. Then read another. Even the bad ones were good, and the good ones were astonishing.

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Passport to Galactic Citizenship

Posted in Other, Writing, tagged arts, awesome, creativity, genre fiction, inspiration, literature, Motivation, science, sff, Thoughts, Writers, writing on June 4, 2013| 2 Comments »

In a broader sense, all science fiction prepares young people to live and survive in a world of ever-continuing change by teaching them early that the world does change.… In a more specific sense, science fiction preaches the need for freedom of the mind and the desirability of knowledge; it teaches that prizes go to those who study, who learn, who soak up the difficult fields of knowledge such as mathematics and engineering and biology. And so they do! The prizes of this universe go only to those able and equipped to reach out for them. In short, science fiction is preparing our youngsters to be mature citizens of the galaxy… as indeed they will have to be.

— Robert A. Heinlein (in “Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction” by Damon Knight, ed., pp. 26-27)

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Another Insect Added to My Grr List

Posted in Other, tagged anti-awesome, ash, EAB, Emerald Ash Borer, invasive species, things I wish were science fiction, trees on June 3, 2013| 1 Comment »

I get along with most types of bugs. If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said that there are only two types of critters for which I have a serious hate-on: fleas and mosquitoes. Sadly, I now add the Emerald Ash Borer to that list.

Pretty, isn’t it, all sparkly and green? Ha! Those looks are deceiving.

No, it doesn’t suck my blood, make me itch, or give me nasty communicable diseases, but the EAB is gnawing its way through ash trees at a seriously alarming rate. That’s the sort of thing you hear about and shake your head at the millions of trees dying, but it all gets real when a letter from the City arrives telling you that your favorite front-yard tree has to go.

Things I didn’t know:

if you catch it early enough insecticides can save your tree (the City of Ottawa is using TreeAzin, an injectable neem oil derivative), but it’s got to be done early;
woodpeckers in your tree during wintertime are not sweet and nice (or not just), it’s a sign that the birds hear the EAB larvae moving around under the bark and are coming to snack;
ash trees get very dry when they die, becoming a serious hazard to anything beneath or in them (climbers and car parkers, beware);
the best way to pick a replacement tree is to research your options, then choose from a short list by walking out into the street and checking out what your neighbors have; pick something relatively unpopular just in case another blight like this comes along in the future;
it takes very little time for a dude with a chainsaw to make short work of a decades-old tree.

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