Adventures of an Interplanetary Exchange Student

Smashwords

2011-12-06T07:50:00.001-08:00

Kea's Flight is now available on Smashwords:https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/111646

Machine of Death

2011-11-20T17:03:00.001-08:00

What have I been up to lately?

I have been getting a story published in an anthology!

My story "FURNACE," a tender tale of sex and archaeology in the distant future, was one of about 30 stories selected from about 2000 submissions.

In the second part of the MOD Magic and variety show, they read off my name and story title along with all the others. Before that, they actually mentioned the plot of my story, along with a few other very interesting examples of what's in the book.

So-- yeah, I'm VERY happy to be a part of this. Not only the $200 and the feeling of acceptance as a writer, but my name is going to get out there-- this is a book that will most likely make it to #1 on Amazon for at least a little while. The first volume did, anyway. And I have the feeling Vol 2 will be even better, since they had so much to choose from.

Taste Nirvana

2011-10-19T16:42:00.001-07:00

I don't know which is more disturbing: translucent slime with coconut shavings suspended in it... or a product with two expiration dates, both of which are either 60 years in the past or 40 years in the future.

We all know cat litter is radioactive, but cat food?

2011-09-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

Whenever I see this cat food in a store:

this is what I imagine:

Just saying.

Chaiimanlle

2011-09-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Well, either I have taught my spellchecker something really, really wrong and then forgotten about it, or there is something wrong with the spellchecker itself.

I was typing in Pages, on Mac OSX 10.5.8, and this red underline popped up:

I clicked on it to see what suggestions the spellchecker offered, assuming that it was just prejudiced against the extra "l" and "e," and would prefer "chainmail." But noooo....

So, now I was really curious, and experimentally accepted the correction:

and tried to look it up:

and got nothing.

The only explanation I can think of is that I must have mistyped "chainmaille" as "chaiimanlle" and then told the spellchecker to "learn" it before I realized it was a misspelling. But I have trouble imagining that I would make that error-- to transpose the letters "nmai" as "iman" would be pretty extreme even for my extra-fast-hunt-and-peck typing style. And the very act of teaching new words to the spellchecker is something I can't remember ever doing.

Maybe John did it...

Analog

2011-08-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

Kea's Flight has been reviewed in Analog magazine!

I had sent in a review copy and been told that it might be reviewed in the October issue... and just today I found out that the October issue has been out for a while (things are a bit strange that way in the world of magazines) and it does contain a review of our book.

It's a positive review, comparing us to Heinlein and Asimov (wow!)... though it doesn't get all the details of the story right, and it questions whether the paperback is worth $26.99. Heck, I don't think the paperback is worth that much... Lulu makes me charge that much if I want it to have an ISBN and be sold in print on Amazon. That's why I have the alternative $15.00 paperback edition that doesn't have an ISBN and is sold only on Lulu. And, as the review says, the $3.89 ebook version is well worth it.

Anyway, I'm delighted that it got in, and I'm realizing this may have played a bigger part in the recent uptick in sales than the review on "Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys." Still, I'm grateful for both, and so happy that people like our book!

Kea, website, and Vegas

2011-07-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

There has been a review of Kea's Flight on "Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys." Wow! Since that posted, sales have picked up considerably. I am happy.

In other news, all parts of our site have been moved completely onto Wordpress now, including the webcomic Abby and Norma.

And we also just got back from on a very nice trip to Nevada. We stayed away from the Vegas Strip this time, and just ate at little out-of-the-way restaurants and hiked on Mount Charleston. It is surprising to find someplace so cool and woodsy that close to Las Vegas. There was a waterfall that was utterly unlike any waterfall in the Midwest. It was like a rain shower from a cliff down onto a lower cliff, and when it hit bottom it didn't form a lake, it just trickled down the mountain in a tiny little brook surrounded by plants growing from the rock.

Guest Post

2011-05-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

Well, the virtual book tour continues. A guest post about realism and believability of characters is up at Illusions of Intimacy. Take a look, if you'd like to see what I have to say about portraying autistic characters (and what it takes to make them believable in a world that has a lot of misconceptions about autism).

According to the book tour schedule, Kea's Flight was supposed to be featured on A Mother's Touch on May 11th, and Butterfly Feet on May 6th. Darlyn and Books is supposed to feature it today. As of the time I write this, none of those three sites have actually posted anything about our book, and no one has contacted me or the tour organizer to explain why. But it may just be that the book was long and we didn't give them very much time to read it. We'll see.

Another review

2011-05-10T06:24:00.001-07:00

Glorious Books didn't think Kea's Flight was that glorious. Oh well. I guess everyone gets some bad reviews sometimes.

Nobody has reviewed it on Amazon yet either. Wonder why. I'm hoping it's because the people who bought it on Amazon aren't done reading it yet, and not because they hated it.

Why would anyone buy a Kindle case?

2011-05-09T12:44:00.001-07:00

It all started when John and I invited Mom and Dad over, so that we could make them lunch and give Mom chocolates for Mothers' Day. Well, Mom, being the wonderful mom that she is, gave me an even better present: an early birthday Kindle 3G.

After much rejoicing about how great this was, I started addressing the logistical details. I finally had a Kindle, and now I had to start looking for accessories, like a carrying case.

You know what? Carrying cases designed for the Kindle are expensive. 20 to 30 dollars or more, for an object that can't be any harder to make than a binder or planner that you'd buy for $5 in the stationery section. I was sure I could find cheaper ones online, but I didn't want to wait for it to ship.

So I went to the thrift store and got a small vinyl-bound case for $1.60. It was designed to hold a little pad of paper and some accessories such as pens and business cards-- not a Kindle. But it was the right size, and I knew it would be easy to modify.

First I cut off the piece of elastic that went vertically across it:

I was hoping I could use that elastic to modify it, but alas, it wasn't long enough for what I needed. So I went to my sewing kit and cut some pieces of the elastic I had there:

With a needle and some black embroidery floss, it took mere moments to sew the elastic in place:

and voila, I had a Kindle case:

Narrower elastic would have been better, and not gotten so close to encroaching on the text... but that would have required spending more money, and my goal was to be as stingy as possible today. If I had been willing to loosen my purse strings for better elastic, I could still have had this Kindle case for under $5.

Thus ends your daily lesson on the pointlessness of spending too much. I don't intend to turn this blog into some sort of Thrifty Tips Advice Column, but sometimes I just have to comment about products that gouge you for big sums of money when they can be imitated for next to nothing.

Interview and giveaway

2011-05-09T06:52:00.001-07:00

Australian Bookshelf has interviewed me about Kea's Flight and is offering a free copy to fans of the blog.

Jewelry time!

2011-05-09T06:50:00.001-07:00

Alexandrite is wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because it's my birthstone. Here are three neat things about it:

1. It can look very different colors in different lighting. The range of the color change depends on the stone, but the best alexandrite stones can go all the way from green to red when the light dims.

2. It's one of the most durable gemstones out there. Its hardness (resistance to scratching) is near diamond, and its toughness (resistance to cracking) is better than diamond. This makes it a very good stone for rings.

3. It is extraordinarily rare. The best mines of alexandrite are all used up already. Good natural stones are hard to find, and a large, high-quality natural alexandrite with a good range of color change is one of the most expensive gems you can buy.

My usual sources for jewelry supplies didn't sell alexandrite-- not even lab grown, just "simulated." So it was really cool when I found some little tiny ones on Etsy for $8: a set of seven 2-3mm natural cat's eye cabochons.

The stones are varied, and have have a small but nice range of color change. The pictures in the listing showed them all looking dark blue with no flash and then looking pink with flash... obviously in normal lighting the color change is subtler, a range including brownish-green, gray-green, sea-green and deep blue-green (it varies depending on the individual stone, too). Better yet, they're cat's eye stones, which means there's a nice glowy stripe visible across the stone sometimes.

I decided to make some jewelry. After much practice making rings, here's the one I like best:

The pictures aren't all that faithful to the color. In real life, the stone on that ring appears brownish-gray-green in bright artificial light, and blue-green in bright natural light, with some range in between. The four stones I haven't made into jewelry yet range from green to blue-green in natural light, and green to dark blackish-blue in artificial light.

Then there are two that I decided to make into earrings, which change from deep blue-green to a brownish-blue that's almost black. This is how they look in photos:

The earrings are for my mother-in-law, and I think I'll wear the ring often. It's a new design that I hadn't used before. My previous rings have all been very delicate and easily bent out of shape, but this one has held up to several days of everyday life, including some work in the stockroom at Target.

Reviews and Interviews

2011-05-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Autism Conference went quite well! We met many interesting people and had a lot of great conversations.

Also, our Virtual Book Tour is getting off to a good start. A very enthusiastic review is up at Crack a Spine Book Reviews today. We also did a lengthy author interview there, in case you're interested.

AUSM Conference Times

2011-05-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Here is the schedule for Friday at the AUSM conference. The times in bold are when John and I will be in the book room signing stuff. We're really looking forward to it!

2011 Minnesota Autism Conference: Designing Futures for Autism

Schedule for Friday, May 6
Registration: 7:30 - 8:30
Keynote: 8:30-10:30
Break: 10:30-11:00
General Address: 11:00-12:00
Lunch & Local Author Event: 12:00 - 1:00
Breakouts I: 1:00-2:00
Break & Local Author Event: 2:00-2:30
Breakouts II & III: 2:30 - 4:45

Virtual Book Tour

2011-04-24T14:34:00.001-07:00

Kea's Flight is having a virtual book tour this May! I will be writing two guest posts, doing three interviews, and being reviewed five times. Check out the link to see what sites I'll be on, and when!

AWESOMECON!

2011-04-23T11:02:00.001-07:00

Remember last May, when I signed copies of Born on the Wrong Planet for a day at the AUSM Conference? Well, I'm signing books there again this year... only, this time I'll have copies of Kea's Flight to sign too!

If all goes well, John will also be there, signing copies of his short story, Precious Metal. So, if you're registered for the conference, be sure to stop by the book room on Friday, May 6th, and say hi to us!

Nook problem solved

2011-04-08T06:52:00.001-07:00

OK, everyone, I figured out the Nook problem mentioned in my previous post.

The sample chapter you can download from the Kea's Flight Nook listing is unreadable on my computer, but when I downloaded the Nook app for my iPod Touch and opened the sample on that, all the text was perfectly readable. Apparently when they make the sample, they make it so that only Nook software can read it.

Weirdly, the starship diagram on page three was only partly visible when reading the sample on the iPod Touch Nook app, but it was fully visible when using the Nook preview software, prior to listing the book. So I can only assume that it was cut to fit on the small screen of the iPod Touch, and it would show up fine on an actual Nook. (If you want to read Kea's Flight on an iPod Touch, it makes more sense to get the epub from Lulu anyway. The Kindle edition works too, if you have the Kindle app for your iTouch.)

Nook bugs

2011-04-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

OK, everyone, I have a question.

I've put Kea's Flight up for sale as a NookBook:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Keas-Flight/Erika-Hammerschmidt/e/2940012378828

I submitted the same ePub file that I submitted to Lulu (it uploaded there successfully, and it reads fine on my iPod touch). When I chose the Preview option on the Barnes and Noble site after I uploaded it, it was perfectly readable. But when I try downloading a sample from the product page, I get an epub file full of unreadable symbols.

Maybe they change the ePub file so that it can only be read on a Nook? Do any of you have a Nook you can test the sample on? If you have any insights that may help, please email me at humanalien at gmail dot com.

Thank you.

A Nook can't cook

2011-04-02T10:29:00.001-07:00

Two items of note today:

1. Cooking:

I learned to make my own granola bars. I got the recipe here. Seriously, it's easy. You just bake some uncooked dry oatmeal in the oven for about twelve minutes, stirring it from time to time. Then you mix it with wheat germ. Then you mix butter, brown sugar, honey and vanilla in a pan on the stove until it's all liquid, and pour it over the dry stuff, and press it into pans, and bake it for about a half hour. You can add any nuts or dried fruits you want (I'm currently trying it with pumpkin seeds and cranberries, and some peanut butter added to the butter.) Have I seriously been buying granola bars from the store all these years?

2. Nooking:

In other news, our novel Kea's Flight is going to be available on the Barnes and Noble Nook Store soon, in addition to the Kindle store and Lulu Marketplace where you can already buy it. It should be up in the next couple days (it says 48 to 72 hours).

Don't you always love a Google Maps bug?

2011-03-25T21:25:00.001-07:00

We're considering taking a trip to Pennsylvania sometime soon, and mapping out some of our possible movements yielded this scene. Apparently Google wants us to go straight up into the air, and then back down again. Better get the helicopter car.

Up again, down again

2011-03-20T19:21:00.001-07:00

Please bear with me while I get things sorted out. I promise this roller coaster with the Kindle edition of "Kea's Flight" will be over soon.

Currently it's down because I had to remove the ISBN. I found out that the Kindle edition and the iBookstore edition aren't allowed to use the same ISBN, and I didn't have another one, and Amazon doesn't require one, so I took it off. Alas, that means that http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004QOAVW8 will be unavailable, or at least unreliably available, until 9 on Monday night or later.

After that, I think things will be fine, and I will have no need to change it again for a long time. Thanks to all of you who have bought copies. You're great.

Kindle edition is up again!

2011-03-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

The Kindle version of Kea's Flight was down, but now it is available again, with a new lower price and some typos fixed. Same with the other e-versions.

In other news, pretty buttons on the Kea page! Well, as pretty as I could make them, for now. I might be able to improve their looks later when I have more time.

More book changes

2011-03-17T21:07:00.001-07:00

Fixed the chapter page. The sneak preview you can get to from the Kea's Flight page now has nice book-length lines, not long lines that take up the whole page.

I also noticed a couple typos in the book, and corrected them, so I have re-uploaded the Kindle edition, the epub edition, and the paperback and PDF. When doing so, I also took the opportunity to reduce the price slightly, since I've read that ebooks under $4 sell significantly better. The change may take some time to become visible.

In the case of the Kindle edition, it may take until late tomorrow for the book to be available again at all. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Kea Preview!

2011-03-17T07:00:00.001-07:00

Added a new link to the Kea's Flight page: Now people can read the first chapter of the book, to see what it's like.

I hope the long lines don't ruin the experience for people... I mean, you can always resize your browser window if you don't like long lines, but I really need to learn how to make lines shorter without using "br" tags...

Latest weird book news

2011-03-16T20:19:00.001-07:00

We have a speech on April 4th, and we really want to sell some copies of Kea's Flight there. People at speeches have been asking about our science fiction novel for years, and now's our chance to show them something, finally.

However, even without the selling markup, the print edition of the novel costs over 11 dollars, which is fine if we want just one or two copies, but we can't afford to really stock up for speeches, especially if we're not sure they're going to sell. So I spent all of yesterday evening trying to engineer an edition that we could print in bulk for speeches without going bankrupt.

Luckily, our self-publishing service charges pretty much the same amount per page, regardless of the pages' height and width. So the speech edition ended up being, perhaps, the first 8.5" x 11" science fiction novel ever printed. That plus a one-point reduction in font size got it down from the realm of 600 pages to 190-something. Strangely, it didn't cut the price down by the same proportion, so Lulu's pricing rules must be more complex than we'd thought, but at least it got it within the range of affordability.

People at the speech may be weirded out by the book's size and shape, but we shall console them with the fact that it also contains an extra feature that is not in the versions available online: a lexicon of the made-up language described in the novel.

Ah, the joys of being our own publishers.

Editing of the site

2011-03-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Well, after much trial and error on the Bluehost control panel, I've managed to get JohnAndErikaSpeak set up with the Nucleus CMS, like the rest of the site. I don't know why I so enjoy misusing blogging software to make static webpages, but Nucleus is the only content management system I've found that is truly intuitive to me.

Once it gets set up properly, that is. Getting it installed and running in the first place, that's another story. I guess I know just enough about coding to get myself into trouble, but not enough to get out. I had a heck of a time figuring out an error that happened after I tried upgrading my installations of Nucleus through the Bluehost control panel... I guess you pretty much have to upgrade them through Nucleus's website if you want it to work.

But anyway, new JohnAndErikaSpeak page! The calendar link there now leads to a page with our Google calendar embedded on it, and the news link leads to the ErikaHammerschmidt.com news blog, so there are fewer things I have to update when we have news. And Nucleus is flexible, so I can add more stuff to the site later if I want to. Maybe someday even a forum that guests can post in.

My ordeal publishing Kea's Flight

2011-03-04T20:20:00.000-08:00

Well, now that I've published our science fiction novel "Kea's Flight" on iTunes and Amazon, I thought it might be helpful to share some of the things I've learned about the process, to help other authors who may be as new to this whole business as I am.

When you want to publish an ebook on iTunes, you have to submit it to the site as an epub file, the universal e-reader format. But getting it into this form can be a hassle. There are online converters that can transform other types of files into epub, but they almost always leave flaws, like unwanted paragraph breaks. So, prior to uploading your document into a converter, you'll have to get it ready.

Lulu.com, the site where I published the print version of our novel, will charge you a hundred dollars or more to convert your document into epub form. I consider that quite reasonable-- this process took me long enough that, if I were doing it for someone else, I would fully expect over a hundred dollars of payment. And Lulu probably makes the final product look a lot sleeker than I did. But I don't have a spare hundred bucks for something like that, so I put quite a bit of effort into figuring out how to do it on my own.

Here is the way I prepared the file for epub conversion. There are probably better ways that I don't know, but this is a combination of advice I found here and there, and it has worked for me so far.

I saved the file as an HTML document. If the document is a file type like .doc or .rtf, you can do this by opening it in Microsoft Word or an equivalent (I use NeoOffice) and choosing Save As, then choosing HTML as the file format.

I opened the HTML file in an editing program. On a Mac, you can do this by starting up TextEdit, going to "Open," choosing the HTML file, and checking the box labeled "ignore rich text commands" before you open it.

I edited the HTML file to eliminate unnecessary formatting. Here is an outline I've come up with for making an HTML file to convert to epub:

<HTML>

<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/HTML; charset=utf-8">
<title>The title of your document</title>
<meta name="description" content="description of your document" />
<meta name="keywords" content="words describing your document" />
<meta name="author" content="your name" />
<meta name="publisher" content="your name" />
</head>

<style> .break { page-break-before: always; } </style>

<BODY LANG="en-US" TEXT="#000000" DIR="LTR"> <FONT FACE="Times New Roman, serif"> <FONT SIZE=3>

<P>Making an ebook in HTML</p>
<P>(This is the title page)<p>

<h1 class="break">
Chapter 1
</h1>

<P>Paragraphs
<br>and line breaks</br>
</p>

<p>Paragraphs should begin with a paragraph opening tag, and end with a paragraph closing tag.</p>

<p>If you want to choose where a line break happens within a paragraph, use a line break like the one in the subtitle of this chapter.</p>

<h1 class="break">
Chapter 2
</h1>

<P>Page breaks</p>

<p>On an e-reader, a page break will happen automatically after a certain amount of text, but you probably want to make sure each chapter starts on its own page.</p>

<p>To choose where page breaks will happen, add the code that I have added between the head and body of this document. Then, at the beginning of each chapter where you want to make sure a page break happens, add tags like the one I have added at the beginning of this chapter, with the chapter heading between them.</p>

<h1 class="break">
Chapter 3
</h1>

<P>Formatting</p>

<p> You can use HTML to add <i>italics</i> or <b>bold</b> or <u>underlines</u>. Symbols like "straight quotes" --or double hyphens-- can be changed into “smart quotes” —or long dashes— using special tags, as shown.</p>

<p>You can use tags to make the font <font size="+2">a different size</font> or <font face="Georgia">a different face</font> from the font specified at the beginning of the body of the HTML document. <font size="+2"><font face="Georgia"> You can even do multiple things at once.
</font></font>

<P><b>Does your document have a multi-paragraph section that needs to be in bold or italic? If so, put the tags on the beginning and end of each paragraph in that section.</b></p>

<P><B>If you're making a page for a website, you can sometimes get away with avoiding that step, but it is necessary if you're making an HTML file to be converted to epub.</b></p>

<P><B>If you only put the bold or italic tags at the beginning and end of the whole section, the epub file won't know what to do with them. Only the first paragraph of the section will show up as bold or italic. So be sure to tag each paragraph.</b></p>

<p>Also be sure to close all your tags. There has to be a closing tag for each opening tag. Even the "body" and "HTML" tags at the beginning of the document must be closed at the end.</p>

</body></HTML>

That was a basic intro to HTML, with a few epub-specific details added. My HTML file contained a lot of stuff more complicated than that, so I took it out. Each paragraph started and ended with a dozen assorted tags, instead of one paragraph opening tag and one paragraph closing tag, so I used the Find and Replace tool to change that throughout the document.

It took several hours to do this editing project. An HTML editing program can help make sure all the tags are closed properly. I used Amaya because it can edit long files, even my 600-page book, and it has a convenient tool for viewing all parsing errors in the document.

I opened my HTML document in a browser to check the results of the editing, and used the print preview option to see where the page breaks would be. When I thought I was satisfied, I uploaded it to http://iiiconverter.com/ and had it made into an epub file. Then I transferred the epub file to my iPod Touch to see how the ebook would look to my readers.

After I made sure the document looked okay on the device it'll be read on, I had to make sure it passed Apple's quality standards. ThreePress has a tool to check the "validity" of an epub document.

When I uploaded my epub file there, it gave me a huge long list of errors. At first glance, I had no idea how to correct them. I did some research, and found Sigil, a program that lets you edit epub files.

I opened my epub file in Sigil, chose "code view," and found that the conversion from HTML to epub had moved some stuff around. One of the "style" tags that manage page breaks had changed location, and after I moved it, that got rid of most of the errors. But Threepress kept telling me that my epub had an "unfinished element."

After some more research, I figured out that meant I was missing the meta name="publisher" tag in the head of the document. Once I added that in Sigil, my epub passed the check when I uploaded it to Threepress.

But it still wasn't perfect. A certain area of text had somehow gotten stuck in the wrong font size, which I noticed when I paged through the epub after putting the latest version on my iPod Touch.

I looked at the code in Sigil, and at first it was confusing, because epubs use different code from regular html pages. But I noticed that every paragraph before and after that section began with <p class="calibre2"><span class="calibre4"> and ended with </span></p> ...while the paragraphs in that section, for some reason, were missing the "span" tags. So I added them, and that fixed the problem.

To add the cover image, I opened the epub file in Sigil, right-clicked on the list of html files, and chose "Add New File." I moved the new file to the top of the list, renamed it "cover.html," and replaced the text in it with this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Cover</title>

<style type="text/css">
img { max-width: 100%; }
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div id="cover-image"><img alt="Kea's Flight" src="../Images/the_cover.jpg" /></div>
</body>
</html>

Then I right-clicked on the Images folder, chose "Add existing file," and added the cover image, which I had named "the_cover.jpg." I downloaded the epub file to my iPod touch again, to make sure the cover showed up properly.

Instead of uploading my epub directly to iTunes, I decided to do it through Lulu, which is a certified aggregator. They automatically give the book an ISBN and submit it to the iBookstore. All I had to do was start a new Lulu project-- an ebook-- and upload my epub and enter the information it asked for.

At one point there was some difficulty-- a bug in the version of Sigil I was using caused my epub file to be rejected for "permission errors" when I uploaded it to Lulu, even though Threepress said it was valid. I ended up doing the rest of my revisions in eCub, since the latest version of Sigil seemed to have a bug that made it impossible to make valid files with it.

Now, Ecub is not designed for just opening up an epub file and editing it-- you have to "create a new project" from an existing epub file or a bunch of html files. And on my computer, for some reason, creating it from an existing epub file didn't work-- it froze up. So I had to create it from the files that made up the epub file.

One way to do this is to make a copy of the epub file, rename the file extension from "epub" to "zip," and unzip it. Then go into the resulting folder, take all the documents from the folders "Images," "Styles" and "Text," put them in the same folder, and use that as the folder for the Ecub project. (Unfortunately, I couldn't do this with the version of my epub that I had made with the buggy version of Sigil-- it was so buggy that when I unzipped it, it created another zip file instead of a folder. So I had to unzip an earlier version, and make any necessary edits in Ecub.)

I also decided to remove the Table of Contents that Ecub automatically generated, since it didn't seem to be useful for my book. I did this by choosing "Edit," then "Options," and unchecking "Generate TOC." I also noticed that each chapter had been automatically named "Kea's Flight," so I went through the chapters in eCub and named them "Title page," "Copyright info," "Dedication," "Illustration," Chapter 1," "Chapter 2" and so on.

Then, when editing the project in Ecub, I had to go through all the files and remove the text "../Images/" or "../Styles/" wherever it referenced a document that used to be in one of those folders. Once that was done, I could hit the "Compile" button, make an epub file, and successfully validate it on Threepress and upload it to Lulu. (Whenever I wanted to edit the file after that, I just opened the file called "KeasFlight.ebkproj" and made the necessary edits, then hit Compile again to re-create the epub.)

As for publishing an ebook on Amazon, that's here, and it's a simpler process. As far as my book goes, uploading a .doc file I made in Pages seems to work out better than uploading an epub file to Amazon.

In the .doc file, I just had to make sure there were page breaks between chapters, by going to "Insert" and choosing "Page Break" wherever I wanted one. With a bit of trial and error I figured out what the right formatting for the title page and copyright page was, and then it was fine.

Once it's uploaded to Amazon, there's a tool you can use to preview how it will look on a Kindle. I tried it and my book looked OK, though not quite as sleek and shiny as some other people's books.

The print book from Lulu was the easiest of the three versions. They take a PDF and print it just the way it is.

Trueman Bradley: Aspy Detective

2010-10-11T19:08:00.000-07:00

Latest news: I've become acquainted with a skilled new writer, Alexei Maxim Russell, who is in the final editing phases of a novel called "TRUEMAN BRADLEY - ASPY DETECTIVE." If you'd like to find out more about this project, go to:

www.truemanbradley.com

From the site, you might get the idea that it's a comic or a graphic novel, but that's just an artistic touch, drawing on the main character's fondness for comic book detectives. In fact it's a real, approximately 400-page novel, with no pictures, but lots of wonderful dialogue and characterization. This guy is great at capturing the anguish of a man with Asperger's Syndrome who has great talent and grand dreams he wants to realize, but who has yet to overcome his confusion about the behavior of humans and the use of language.

The premise of the book is outlandish but still theoretically possible: the main character devises a sort of Unified Field Equation of crime-solving, based on records of crimes throughout history. It's highly reliable at identifying perpetrators, but on an emotional level, the man who created the equation doesn't truly understand the variables he's studying, the details of human life that motivate crimes and aid in solving them. In his attempts to pitch his research to the police force, he comes up against so many heart-wrenching exchanges that reading the book is something of an emotional adventure. Here's one little snippet:

I examined her face and clothing and tried to memorize every detail. I was born with such a mind for detail, that I can concentrate on something or somebody for a few seconds, and remember every little detail of it, for months.

"I can see that you eat a lot of baloney." I said.

"What?" she asked.

"And you eat it while sitting in a chair." I said, "The stains on the lap of your dress are the kind made by greasy meats. You've dropped baloney in your lap many times. The dress was washed many times, but washing doesn't completely remove the oil stains. I've seen meat stains before and I remember how they look. I count 21 meat stains and your breath smells like baloney. Because all your stains are exactly the same diameter, they are probably all caused by the exact same kind of sliced meat. So, I can guess that you eat a lot of baloney, sitting in a chair, and drop it in your lap."

Her eyes opened wide and she silently stared at me.

"I can recognize the amazement on your face." I said, "Does that mean I'm right? Usually, if I'm wrong, people don't get amazed like that. I must be right. Now you see what kind of skills of perception I have? I could be a great detective."

Mrs Levi hid her face in her hands and moved quickly to the door. I was puzzled why she was leaving so suddenly. I had been speaking of baloney, so I thought perhaps my talk of greasy meats had made her hungry and she was going to eat.

"Enjoy your baloney!" I said.

Her eyes opened wider and her mouth opened. Tears formed in her eyes and she ran from my room.

"What's wrong?" I asked, but she was gone.

The writing style is very simple, straightforward language-- in keeping with the thought processes of the protagonist-- but the plot twists are complex and interesting, and fit together well. That is something with which I'm having a bit of trouble in my own new science fiction novel, and so I admire it when I see it well done. Likewise for the well-defined speech patterns of the individual characters.

So anyway-- if you'd like to ask Mr. Russell any questions about the book, or give him any advice about editing and publishing it, go check out his website!

That's all for today.

Summertime

2010-05-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

It's been in the 80's and unbreathably humid the past few days in Minneapolis, revealing to all confused non-Minnesotans the reason why this supposedly cold northern state is home to the same vampiric insects as equatorial Africa. I have five mosquito bites already. Argh.

But on the brighter (and cooler) side, I invented an orange smoothie the other day. It's incredibly easy to make, and tastes a bit like a Creamsicle and a bit like an Orange Julius. And I'm too lazy to figure out the nutrition information, but since it contains nothing but orange juice and soymilk, it's probably way better for you than it tastes like.

You'll need
4 cups of orange juice (I use Simply Orange original without pulp)
4 cups of vanilla-flavored soymilk (I use Very Vanilla, the extra-vanilla variety from Silk)
An ice cube tray
A blender
A pitcher

Directions:
Mix the orange juice and soymilk in the pitcher.
Pour into the ice cube tray until the tray is full.
Freeze the ice cube tray; refrigerate the leftover liquid.
When cubes are frozen, put them in the blender with enough of the liquid to cover them.
Puree until the mixture is the consistency of a smoothie.
Pour into cups and drink.

Hope that helps cool off someone else's summer. Now I'm gonna go clean the apartment. Later.

Life is OK

2010-05-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! Things are going well. We've been giving a lot of speeches lately-- I guess the economy has been picking up a bit. We've spoken for St. Thomas University, Spring Lake Park High School, Oak Grove Middle School, and some others. I spoke alone in Eden Prairie on a day when John wasn't able to come, and I also had a table to sell my handmade jewelry at the screening of the movie "Autistic License" at Eden Prairie High School.

I've redone my jewelry page, with individual photos of individual items, so that customers know the appearance of the specific piece they're ordering. I'm going to take a break from buying new jewelry supplies for a while, and try to make as much as I can with the leftover supplies I have. I'm going to see how much I can do with hemp cord, since I have a lot of that.

For those who are wondering what's happening with our science fiction novel... we submitted it to Daw, and it was turned down. We're reexamining it to see how we can make the beginning more gripping, and then we'll eventually send it to Baen.

And, guys, I am trying to stop the spamming on this journal, but I don't always have the time lately to delete every junk comment, so I apologize if you have to wade through pages of crap to find any worthwhile replies to my posts. I'll try to find a good way to get it under control soon.

Helping out

2010-01-25T19:16:00.001-08:00

For the next 2 months (now through the end of March 2010) I'm going to donate 80% of my profits from selling stuff to Doctors Without Borders to help them with their work in Haiti. This goes for merchandise for my comic Abby and Norma, books of my comic Abby and Norma, and my handmade jewelry as well.

If I could donate proceeds from my book Born on the Wrong Planet, I would, but it's professionally published and I don't get my next royalty check for a while, so I can't run a 2-month campaign for that. When I do get it, though, I'll probably use some of it for charitable purposes, too. I'm just that kind of person.

John's first art show!

2009-08-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

A big "congratulations!!!" to John Ricker, who just got his first art exhibit put up in the Boiler Room Cafe! If you are in Minneapolis and you want to have a very tasty snack in a pleasant setting, surrounded by freakin' crazy awesome photos, then go to the Boiler Room anytime between now and the end of September. Yay for John!

The answer to every question

2009-08-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been thinking about how the most recent research on human intelligence seems to indicate that it's decided more by nurture than by nature. Going by the latest studies, it seems that the biggest factor in a child's intellectual growth isn't anything genetic, it's the degree to which the child's mind was stimulated during the first few years of life. Kids whose parents talked to them and played with them a lot as babies tend to end up doing better on intelligence tests.

But the trouble with those studies is that it doesn't really mean anything conclusive when you prove that parents who stimulate their babies' minds end up having more intelligent children. You have to separate the environmental from the genetic: for all we know, the type of parents who do the best job at stimulating their children's minds might be the type of parents who have genes for intelligence, and maybe they're passing the intelligence on through genes rather than through mental stimulation.

To test this, you'd have to do a similar study on people with high IQs who had adopted infants biologically unrelated to them. If the adopted babies' intellectual growth responded in the same way to mental stimulation as that of biological children, you could be pretty sure that the connection was mostly nurture and not nature, and it would be another point against intelligence being mainly genetic.

Unfortunately, you couldn't make as conclusive a deduction if the adopted children's development did not follow that of the biological children, because one could argue that the adopted children's development was stunted by their time in the adoption system before being placed with the family, or that the family subconsciously did a poorer job of stimulating their minds because they loved them less than they would love a biological child. This is the trouble with the nature/nurture debate: it is very difficult to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. The only possible conclusive proof of genetic determinism would be if genes were found that were always associated with high intelligence, regardless of the environment in which one grew up.

However, I find that unlikely, because my own view of nature and nurture is that they're inextricably mixed up with each other. A lot of genes can be turned on or off by environmental factors, and some people seem more ruled by their biology than others, while some seem unable to overcome childhood experiences that shaped their personalities. I think making any blanket statement about what shapes human minds is foolish, because in nearly all cases it's a mix of factors, and individual cases can vary hugely in what part of that mix is most dominant, and how dominant that part is. Once again I have to come to my usual conclusion that the answer to every question is "it depends."

I'm still back

2009-08-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

So there's a bill that could cut down on teenage car crashes. Apparently, if this law passes, teenage drivers will face restrictions on how late at night they can drive, how many people they can drive with, and such. States that have implemented these restrictions have reportedly seen the number of fatal teenage crashes go down by as much as 40%.

But before I support such a bill, I would want to see evidence that it's not just pushing the most dangerous age for driving up a few years. One would think that, if you put those restrictions on teens at the age when the most teens die in car crashes, then the teens who survived would enter young adulthood with less experience driving at night and less experience driving with a lot of people in the car, and therefore suffer more fatal crashes later instead of earlier. Inexperienced people are always the most at risk, and unfortunately you always start out inexperienced at the thing you're starting, no matter what age you start at.

So what I want to know is: In the states where 40% fewer 16-year-olds died in car crashes, did the number of deaths actually go up for people over 16? If it did, then I don't see the point of this law.

Now, it's possible that a year or two of restricted driving gave these teenagers enough experience that they were able to become safer drivers in young adulthood, but until the ads plugging this new bill actually state evidence of that, I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it's the right thing to do. When they're specifically stating that "fatal crashes among 16-year-olds went down 40%," but then conspicuously failing to mention what happened to rates of fatal crashes among other age groups, I've got to wonder.

Personally I'd rather have a bill that bans driving for all age groups, and requires the entire country to have a good rail transit system. I'm sure technology can come up with solutions for the types of situations where taking the train is inconvenient... and if we could pull it off, the number of lives it would save would be rather astounding. (Or maybe not, seeing that a huge percentage of transplant organs come from car crash victims, so maybe the deaths from lack of organ donors would cancel it out. Oh well.)

I am back from the wild North.

2009-07-06T19:26:00.001-07:00

Okay, first of all, if you want to stay in Duluth, I highly recommend the Mathew S. Burrows 1890 Inn. Cozy, pretty rooms, good food and good company, and not too expensive. Such a nice house that I had to take a video of it... a movie is worth a thousand pictures. I especially like the roomful of plants on first floor.

Second, I recommend hiking along Chester Creek.

There are plenty of other local outdoor attractions, too, from parks with fancy stone towers in them... to hidden beaches where people build unconventional homes.

Gooseberry Falls can be wonderful, but be careful if it's rainy (information from our last visit, when John broke his leg on a wet wooden bar) and expect huge crowds at major vacation times like 4th of July weekend (information from this visit).

And I don't have pictures of much else, since my camera has been working unreliably, but here are a few other tidbits:

The beach at Lutsen Resort is still my favorite place to find agates. Someone said Beaver Bay had the best agate-picking beach, but it turned out to be pretty inaccessible. We went on a safari through about a mile of brush on a tiny trail, halfway through which there was a threatening "No Trespassing" sign. Once we got to the beach, we saw people there, and didn't know if they were visitors like us or owners who might kick us out, so we turned back. So much for Beaver Bay.

Cascade Falls is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. It's only 300 feet from the road, in a majestically silent grove that feels like a cathedral, and the only sound is the incredible, powerful rush of the waterfall. Oh, and there's a big swollen tree in there that looks as if it has a giant tumor. Plenty to take pictures of.

Wisconsin Point is only about a half hour from Duluth, but it feels like someplace on the ocean. Sandy beach, tall dry grasses, big silent sky. You feel a thousand miles away from the world... or you would if there weren't a hundred people sitting out there waiting for the fireworks. Dang 4th of July.

Jay Cooke State Park is pretty nice. We went on a long hike in the woods, on a grassy trail that looped around and went back to the main trail, but got more and more overgrown as it got farther from the start point, as if most of the people who had tried to walk on it gave up before completing the loop. It wasn't that long, though, only about two or three miles, all of it pretty much the same in terms of scenery. It was said that we might see ladyslippers, but maybe it wasn't the season for them.

The gulls in Canal Park have always been, and always will be, one of my favorite attractions. Throw a few bits of popcorn at your feet and you will be surrounded by a crowd of them, eating, yelling, chasing each other away from the food. I love how the boisterous ones will stick their heads down almost between their feet for the first few yells, and then raise their beaks gradually up into the sky as they get louder.

I'm not sure what they're communicating. There were moments when I felt like moving into Canal Park and living among them like Dian Fossey among the gorillas, trying to figure them out. There's a fascinating book called "Ravens in Winter," written by a scientist who had been baffled by the social behavior of ravens, and had observed them for years trying to solve their mysteries. Their custom of calling each other when they found food was puzzling to him, since they didn't seem to have a reason to want to share. But as he watched them, he gradually found out lots of really interesting things about their social structure, and about the personality types of individual ravens, that made it all make sense.

I wish someone would do a study like that with gulls. They had feeding behaviors I couldn't figure out, either, which seemed to have something to do with their personality types. The more aggressive ones would sometimes chase the more timid ones away from food, but then ignore the food itself, like a dog in a manger. I'd have to become a gull-watcher for years to figure out why they do something like that.

Oh, and one more thing: John can skip rocks.

Assorted updates

2009-06-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted any actual information about my life, so here goes.

Art fairs went okay, but not great. Bad weather for both of them. Earnings just barely covered expenses. But we learned a lot about running an art fair booth, and we'll be better prepared whenever next time is. Someday soon we'll become members of the Stevens Square Center for the Arts, so we can have our stuff in their gallery and make some connections in the art community. Looking forward to meeting more artists.

Birthday was fun. Spent it with various people, doing various things. Age getting close to 30, but at least it's mathematically satisfying. Goodbye, cube number 27; hello perfect 28, see you soon prime 29.

Going to Lake Superior over 4th of July weekend. Planning to stay in the Mathew S. Burrows bed & breakfast, which looks like a surprisingly nice place for as little as $95 a night. I'll let you know how we like it. But we'll try to spend most of our time outdoors. Hope to get in some serious rock hunting. I'm running low on good agates for my jewelry projects.

Anyway, enough boring real world details. I'll get back to you later when I have something totally weird to talk about.

Penguin parenting

2009-06-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

You know how they say that penguins can recognize their babies' calls? How, in an ice field full of hundreds upon hundreds of penguins, mother and baby miraculously find each other by voice alone?

John and I have been wondering something. Do the penguins actually have the auditory acuity to distinguish each other's voices? Or is this all just a by-product of their well-known devotion to the community above all individual interests?

Think about it. In Antarctica, no penguin can survive alone. Cooperation is vital, even if it means putting aside one's own interests for the moment. When penguins huddle together to keep warm, each one takes its turn on the outside of the huddle to keep others warm, as well as taking its turn at the middle to warm itself. If a penguin community ever had a large number of individuals that were, well, individualistic, that community and its gene pool would die.

And it's documented that mother penguins whose babies have died will actually fight over a baby to adopt. They have no problem with raising babies that aren't their own.

So the question John and I are asking is, has anyone actually done a tagging or gene-testing study to determine that the penguins do find their own babies? Or is it possible that they just call out and adopt the first baby that answers?

I mean, that way, pretty much every baby gets a mother, and it happens faster than it would if they took the time to seek out their own young. From the point of view of the community, which is what matters for penguins, it would make sense.

I'm really curious. Any thoughts?

Art Fair!

2009-04-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

John and I will be at 2 art fairs this spring. If you want to see our art in person, and maybe buy it, feel free to show up.

Not much in other news. Except that yesterday morning I had a dream that my mom had sent me to Mexico in order to improve my social standing and thus her public image, and I was absolutely miserable, and then I woke up and my brain was like "Ha ha! April Fool! You actually are still in Minnesota and your mom is not actually a horrible person!" and I was like "Shut up, brain."

Anyway, I had a kind of sucky day from then on, but today is a lot better.

Hairectomy

2009-02-07T16:13:00.000-08:00

In January 2009, I went from having 21-inch-long hair to having 1-inch-long hair. It's taking a lot of getting used to. I haven't had hair under 15 inches since my teens. But it's much more convenient, much cooler and cleaner-feeling.

I decided to do it after I read that hair can sell for up to $1000. My plan was to sell the hair and donate part of the proceeds to charity, thus accomplishing more good than I could by donating the hair itself.

But it didn't work out so well. It got hopelessly tangled during the haircut, and the person who had offered me money for it on Hairtrader.com never got around to telling me for sure whether he still wanted it. So I think I'm going to send it to Locks of Love and hope they can still use it.

I don't regret it, though. I'm very happy with the haircut. It's versatile-- I can look like my mother-in-law or I can look like a lesbian or I can look like a punk rock star, depending on how I style it. Works for all sorts of social situations I get into.

I keep reaching back to adjust my hair every time I shift position, and then realizing I don't have to. No more pulling my hair through after me every time my head goes through the collar of a t-shirt. John likes it better too-- he says it even used to get in his way. We'd be sitting on the couch and he'd accidentally lean on my hair. But now that, too, is a problem of the past. I should have done this a long time ago.

A fun shop in Minneapolis

2009-02-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Today John and I went into a little store we had seen a whole bunch of times. We'd been curious about it before, but usually hadn't had the time to check it out. Well, today we did, and we're glad.

It's called Sunny Day Earth Solutions. When you first walk in, you may not be all that impressed-- right now it doesn't have a whole lot of interesting things sitting around in plain view-- but if you look closely, you'll start finding stuff.

I got myself a little bowl made out of recycled chopsticks:

that folds up really flat:

John got himself an LED flashlight:

that you charge by pulling a string:

It gives you about a minute of bright light per pull:

and when you're done pulling the string, it clips neatly onto the end of the flashlight:

So, kinda neat. But that isn't the really, really cool thing about this place. When you talk to the people there-- wow, then you'll get interested.

The guy we talked to is amazing. If you've ever been thinking about setting up solar power in your house or apartment, or switching out your light bulbs for LEDs, he can give you more information about those things than you ever knew existed. Take a look at his credentials page to see all the stuff he's done.

And you can buy those things in the store, too-- all sorts of solar panels, and LED lamps that screw into ordinary light bulb sockets.

We're definitely going to try and talk to him some more. Even though we already light our apartment with fluorescents, we could probably cut our electric bill down to a fraction of that by using LEDs instead. They're expensive when you buy them, but they sure pay for themselves. It would be really cool to run a least some of our electric equipment on solar power, too. And after going to this place, that doesn't seem as far out of our reach as it used to.

Trouble is, they're not getting much business lately... so I really want to spread the word about this place. It's Sunny Day Earth Solutions and it's at 1000 26th Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414. Check it out sometime if you're in the area.

This is what happens when I forget my medication

2008-10-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

Speeches

2008-09-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

We're happily settled in at our new apartment in St Anthony. I'm working at the downtown Target, and enjoying it quite a bit. We've gotten a car, which allows us some flexibility to find friends in the area. Meetup.com and its Speculative Fiction group at http://scifiwriting.meetup.com/2/ have provided some opportunities for social life.

Four speeches are now scheduled: one in Duluth on Oct 25, one for the Autism Society on Nov 12th, one for Fairview Community Center on Nov 19th, and one at Peace Church in Eagan on March 14th. The last is particularly significant, because the organizer has specifically told me:

"Please feel free to add this engagement to your web site as we will
welcome the general public and have room for up to 500 people in our
sanctuary!"

So, if you'd like to see us speak but you've never happened to be part of any of the groups we've spoken for, March 14th is your chance. It's open to anyone who wants to come. The speech will begin at 2 pm, and will go on until about 4 pm once you include the time that will be devoted to questions and book signings. Peace Church is at the following address:

2180 Glory Drive
Eagan, MN 55122

Hope that gives you enough time to make room in your schedule!

Note: If you do come, be sure to have $5.00 ready to pay the entry fee.

An ad on MySpace...

2008-08-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

...since when is Naruto a graphic designer?

And a web designer, and a fashion designer? I mean, Naruto? I'm speechless here. The spiky yellow hair, the forehead protector, the fox whiskers (or something on the cheeks, anyway, too small to tell)... are they just trying to attract fangirls' attention? It isn't even an anime-related ad.

Screw this. I'm going to bed.

Moving

2008-06-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

John and I are moving yet again-- this time into the city of St. Anthony, Minnesota.

Like Richfield, where we live now, St. Anthony is on the outskirts of Minneapolis... but it is closer to John's workplace, and on better bus lines. We'll save on gas, and may even be able to go without driving for long periods of time.

For a while, I'll probably have to take an hour-long bus ride to my current workplace (the Bloomington Target)... but eventually I hope to be transferred to the Northeast Target or the downtown Target, both of which are much closer.

Our new apartment will be ready for move-in around July 11th. I really hope this will be more long-term than our previous apartments. It's a lovely place.

Happy Namesday to me

2008-05-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

May 18th is the feast day of Saint Eric, and therefore the closest thing to a namesday that I have, since there is no Saint Erika.

I was never very interested in St. Eric himself; I just liked it when my parents made me a cake for my namesday when I was a kid. Austrian heritage is good. You can get a personal cake two days of the year.

I've always liked my name, though it always has annoyed me when people spell it wrong. It's very strange, but I actually get "Erika" misspelled more often than "Hammerschmidt." I guess it's just that when people don't know how to spell "Hammerschmidt," they ask, but when they don't know how to spell "Erika," they guess. There are three common spellings of "Erika." There are no common spellings of "Hammerschmidt," since it's not a common name at all.

Another strange thing: when I studied in Mexico and Spain, nobody ever misspelled my name. This is strange because the usual misspelling I get around here is a replacement of the "K" with a "C," which is exactly what one would expect in a Spanish-speaking country, seeing that the Spanish language barely ever uses the letter "K" in any word, and always uses a "C" instead. But they didn't actually make that mistake, ever. I guess it's the same issue as with "Hammerschmidt"... the name "Erika" was so unfamiliar to them that they always asked when they didn't know how to spell it.

And it turns out neither "Erika" nor "Hammerschmidt" is really that bad, relatively speaking. When I decided to marry John Ricker, I thought about taking his name, since it seemed like an easier name to spell and pronounce than "Hammerschmidt." But after knowing him a while, I started to notice that "Ricker" actually got misspelled and mispronounced way, way more often than "Hammerschmidt." Seriously. I've seen him get called Richter, Riker, Stricker, Bicker... I've never figured out what is the deal with that.

So I kept "Hammerschmidt." "Erika Ricker" would sound silly anyway.

Anyway, in honor of my namesday, here is a song from the poetry page on my website:

Oh, beautiful for E and R,
for I and K and A,
Oh, beautiful for all of these,
Especially the K!
I'm Erika, I'm Erika,
God shed his grace on me,
But not on those who write my name
And spell it with a C!

New book is out!

2008-04-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

I've been dead to the blogosphere for a while, because many things have been happening... but one of them is that the new edition of my book has come out from AAPC! This means you can buy it from their site, and you do not have to buy one of the secondhand older editions that are being sold exorbitantly on Amazon. (Man, the laws of supply and demand can do some crazy things.)

I mean, you still can buy it there, if you think having a first or second edition is a good investment in case I get so famous that my early books become collectors' items. But personally, I doubt my early editions will ever get up to $70 again. (Plus, I'm pretty sure that if you buy off that Amazon listing, you will not know whether you are getting the first or second of my early editions. It says "second edition," but probably some of the people who put their books up for sale there did not know if they had a second or first edition, since the two look exactly alike and the only way to tell the difference is the presence of one new chapter in the second edition.)

Anyway, this latest edition from AAPC is very different from the two editions printed by my old publisher. The first of my old publisher's editions was 121 pages, the second was 123. AAPC's edition is 198 pages. I've added several new chapters: some about things that happened since the first printing, like my semesters abroad, my job and my marriage; some about earlier things I hadn't gone into before, like the series of semi-boyfriends I had in junior high school; and some about ideas and insights regarding the autism spectrum, like how extreme honesty in autistics is mistaken for pathological lying, and whether the Sally-Anne test really works.

Anyway, feel free to go check it out, and have a great Spring.

Random link of the week

2008-04-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

The Rice Ball Page is a delightful combination of broken English and hideous web design. I highly recommend it. And yes, it even has some useful information about rice balls, though that's not the main attraction.

In other news, my comic Abby and Norma got a bit of an overhaul a while back. I think it looks quite nice now.

double pterodactyls

2008-02-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

"Higgledy Piggledy, My Black Hen" isn't really a Higgledy Piggledy-- but shouldn't it be? Here's my attempt to make it one.

Higgledy piggledy,
Gallus domesticus,
Feathered in ebony
blackness intense,

Hastens to ovulate
(Oft decatuply) for
Aristocratically
Pedigreed gents.

A segue into humility

2007-12-19T09:22:00.001-08:00

My pride as a language major has just been dealt a crippling blow. I've suffered a defeat at the hands of the word "segue."

I spelled it wrong, and my husband, who has only the most basic knowledge of spelling, knew that I had spelled it wrong.

My mistake was not for lack of having encountered the word before. I had read plenty of written examples of a word that meant "transition" and was spelled "segue," and I had heard plenty of spoken examples of a word that meant "transition" and was pronounced "segway."

Yet, somehow, I had never figured out that the two were the same word.

I had assumed that the word that was pronounced "segway" was spelled "segway" (I don't think it was because of the vehicle; I think my misconception of the spelling dates back to before the vehicle existed). And I assumed that the word that was spelled "segue" would be pronounced "seg," or "seeg," or "sayg."

The latter was because, to my knowledge, all words in the English language that end in "gue" pronounced it as a simple hard G. Spanish and French, two languages from which English has gotten many words, follow the same rule. Up until then I had found no exception to that rule in any language, and supposing that "segue" might be pronounced "segway" would require assuming an exception.

So my misconception was caused by my knowledge of a somewhat obscure spelling rule-- while my husband, who knows only the most basic spelling rules, had figured out the correct pronunciation of "segue" by sounding it out phonetically-- a technique that any literate fourth-grader knows you can't trust in this language.

I feel I've been punished for knowledge, and my husband has been rewarded for ignorance. I can't help but think life has been unfair to me. But I guess it just means I have to keep gaining more knowledge.

Abby and Norma Latest News!!

2007-11-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Abby and Norma is now on a new website, with automatic updating so that I will never, ever be late in posting a strip again! Also, there is now an Abby and Norma Merchandise Page, with various shirts, hats, mugs and bags bearing these pictures:

(inspired by strip #42)

(inspired by strip #15)

(inspired by strip #51)

(inspired by strip #39)

(inspired by strip #36)

(not inspired by any strip, just a random idea I had)

(just a simple Abby and Norma logo).

Any ideas will be welcome.

Four weeks of bad luck

2007-09-28T12:25:00.001-07:00

I'm posting while lying on my back with the laptop on my stomach, which is a very awkward typing position, so this may not be a long post.

Week before the week before last: busy helping a friend move out of her house and clean up/recycle/ebay a basement full of computer paraphernalia that her husband left her and refused to help get rid of when he divorced her.

Week before last: busy moving our own stuff (and leftover computer crap from helping this friend) into our new townhouse.

Last week: on vacation at Lake Superior. Husband broke his leg on second day of trip. Spent most of it in cabin taking care of bedridden husband. We will be a single-income family until he recovers in 4-6 weeks.

This week: busy unboxing and putting away stuff in new townhouse, until my back gave out last night. Today we are a no-income family. Hope I can go back to work tomorrow.

You see why I have been so quiet lately?

Ah, college days... and grade school days...

2007-09-11T12:57:00.001-07:00

I'm reminiscing about college a bit today.

I took an education class once in college, more just to pass the time than because I was interested in learning about education. But there was some interesting stuff there... some of which just made me laugh at how silly people can be.

One article talked about a project in which hundreds of children were encouraged to write poems. A couple paragraphs of it were devoted to talking about a child whose poems were "disturbing"... specifically, that he wrote about "shooting his teachers, and killing his mother and flushing her head down the toilet." He was removed from the class and put in counseling.

Now, I don't know if his teachers had ever been children. I know I was a child once, and I remember it very well, and I remember that when I was a child, at least half of the other children I knew sang some variation of a song that went:

"Joy to the world, [insert name of victim here] is dead.
What happened to her head?
I took it from her body
And flushed it down the potty
And around and around it goes..."

And they also sang some variation of a song that went:

"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese,
I shot my poor teacher with a 40 MC
Thirty years later he rose from the dead
And I took my bazooka and blew off his head."

I strongly suspect that the poems written by the boy in the article were these ones, or something like them, and that the reason he wrote them was because he had heard them from other children. So he shouldn't have gotten in trouble for "disturbing writing"-- he should have gotten in trouble for freaking plagiarism.

Not that I approve of those songs, mind you. They're so unrealistic. You can't flush someone's head down a toilet. The only toilets that a human head would fit down are outhouses and porta-potties, and those don't flush.

But I digress...

long essay on random topic

2007-08-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk about how many of our personality traits come from genes, and there's a lot of dispute over it, especially when the question comes up of whether, and how strongly, any of these traits are connected to gender or race. Basically, I believe that many of our behaviors are genetic-- but also that many people take the idea of genetic traits too far, and that we have to recognize the dangers that come with this kind of thought.

First of all, I do believe that many of the personality traits we associate with gender are genetic, and that there is a basic tendency for these traits to follow the genders we expect them to follow. After all, practically every animal species that has genders exhibits behavior differences between them-- differences that often resemble the gender differences we see in humans-- and nobody doubts that they are genetic when found in animals. We share over half our genes with most animals; why should we think that we're the only species that doesn't have any inherent instincts (or at least any that tend to follow the gender lines)?

However-- and this is a big "however"-- we must be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that such genetic traits always, or even almost always, follow the gender lines. They do not. They are tendencies, no more. Within the human species there is enormous variation in what instincts we experience, and also in whether we choose to act on our instincts. For any generalization describing human behavior, there are so many exceptions that the rule is barely any use.

When I was little, I was obsessed with frilly dresses, princesses, ballerinas and jewelry, and my brother was obsessed with cars, tanks, submarines, airplanes and guns. No one knew where this came from. Our parents had made an enormous effort to raise both of us in a gender-neutral environment, encouraging both of us equally to play with traditionally "feminine" toys, traditionally "masculine" toys, and gender-neutral toys. We couldn't have learned traditional gender roles from our parents' example; they were as far from the traditional gender roles as any parents can be. We had barely any friends, and mostly avoided our peers; I doubt we learned anything from them. We were isolated from almost everything outside the family. We didn't even watch TV. And at that age, we saw our mother as the ultimate authority on everything, and she said gender didn't matter, so we wouldn't have listened to anyone who said otherwise.

And yet, somehow, we had developed stereotypical masculine and feminine interests. The only explanation seems to be that it was an inherent instinct.

Yet it's also clear that such inherent instincts do not always appear in the genders they're expected from. At the same time that I was obsessed with princesses and ballerinas, I also played with worms and centipedes in the backyard. At the same time that he was fascinated with war machines, my brother also devotedly loved kittens and puppies.

And of course, time and time again throughout history, a mother has brought her daughter up with nothing but dolls and tea sets to play with, forbidden her to associate with anyone who went against gender expectations, and still found the girl becoming a "tomboy," developing interests in traditionally masculine activities. Such a girl's interests must be genetic-- there's no place else they could come from-- and yet they do not follow our expectations of where such a genetic instinct would appear.

There are similar issues with race. I believe it is quite possible that there are some genetic behavioral tendencies associated with race-- after all, evolution has caused different races to have many different physical characteristics depending on what is useful for survival in the environment where each race originally developed. It's not too much of a stretch beyond that to suppose that we might also have evolved different genetic leanings toward behaviors that were beneficial in our ancestors' original habitats.

However, this idea poses the same dangers as the thought of gender-related genetic tendencies. First, it sometimes leads people to believe that some races are genetically "inferior" to others. Obviously, this is not true. There would never have been any reason for a race to evolve a behavior that was inherently harmful. The only traits that could have been evolved are ones that are helpful in certain environments.

For instance, it's been shown that members of cultures that live in cold climates tend to be more introverted, while members of cultures that live in warm climates tend to be more extroverted. It's quite possible that this is just cultural, but I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some genetic factor. After all, the ability to enjoy being alone is very useful in an environment where snow and cold may often prevent you from going out and spending time with people... while the ability to enjoy other people's company is useful in an environment where warm weather brings everyone outside most of the time.

In contrast, I do not believe that there is anything genetic behind the fact that some races in the United States have higher crime rates than others. There would be no reason to evolve a tendency toward crime. The most likely explanation is that such tendencies come from the economic situations that some races are forced into.

And again, as in the case of gender, it is dangerous to start making assumptions about people based on the idea that there are genetic behavior traits linked to race. It is possible that there are such links, but if so, they are weak links; remember that we haven't even found proof of them yet. And even the most reliable generalizations about human beings have enough exceptions to get you in trouble if you use them as your basis for understanding people.

Using generalizations may increase your chances of guessing correctly about people's personalities, but it's better not to guess at all. There will always be times when your generalizations will cause you to guess wrong and offend someone, and those times will cause a lot more problems than the times when you start out with no assumption at all.

For instance, I would be very upset if everybody looked at me and said, "She's a woman, therefore she probably has a strong maternal instinct-- let's all ask her to baby-sit our kids." They would be wrong. Most women (and most men, for that matter) do have some parental feelings, but I'm different. I panic if I have to look after a child, and I'd be offended if people assumed otherwise just because of my gender. Similarly, I'd be very upset if people looked at me and said, "She's part Norwegian, and Norway is a cold place; therefore she's probably a loner. She'll be happier if we all avoid her and don't talk to her." I am introverted, but that doesn't mean I want everyone to ignore me... and I certainly don't want anyone to make assumptions about me based on my ethnicity.

So, the conclusion I've come to is that each race or gender may carry a somewhat increased likelihood of having certain genetic behavior traits, but even if that's true, it's irrelevant to the question of what's the moral way to treat people. Such traits, if they exist, are not universal or even close to universal within the given gender or race. The best thing we can do for society is to act as if there were no connection between behavior traits and race or gender... and simply avoid making assumptions about people until we get to know them.

Domain name etc.

2007-08-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't been posting on this blog every week as I said I would-- that's partly because I'm reconsidering whether some of the things I was going to post are too controversial, and also whether they may be boring.

In any case, I'd like to announce that I've bought the domain name www.abbyandnorma.com, which now redirects to my comic page. The comic is getting more and more hits, and I wanted to be sure I got that domain before anyone else did.

Which may mean I'm smarter than the government, which didn't even think of buying the domain names "whitehouse.com" and "whitehouse.org" until they'd already been bought by a porn site and an anti-Bush parody site.

This is why I don't trust any decisions the government makes regarding computers. Every government is made up mainly of old men who have spent their whole lives in careers almost completely unrelated to technology-- so expecting them to be tech-savvy is expecting too much.

What. The.

2007-08-09T20:01:00.001-07:00

Someone just found my website by searching for "how to fix baby's pointy ear."

Obviously without the quotes, because that sentence is not on my website. I may have used the words "how to," "fix" and "baby" a few times, but my only reference to pointy ears was about a costume piece I made that you can wear in order to look as if you have pointy ears.

So, fat lot of help they got for Poor Pointy-Eared Baby. I hope they buy one of my pointy ear headbands. That'll at least make Baby look like he has two MATCHING pointy ears.

I'm safe

2007-08-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know that I live in Minneapolis, don't worry about me. We were on our way home when the Mississippi River bridge fell down, but we weren't on that route, although it was one of the routes we could have taken. (When the collapse happened, there were workers on the bridge repairing the surface, and some other construction going on nearby... and we try to avoid routes that are under construction, because of the traffic.)

For what it's worth, we don't think it was sabotage. My husband, who's into physics and chemistry, thinks that it could've been caused by a malfunction of the heater that they were using in repairing the bridge surface... and the reason it collapsed during rush hour instead of some quieter time is probably because of all the extra weight of cars on the bridge.

Abby and Norma's first mention on someone else's website!

2007-07-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

I'm all excited today because I found out that Abby and Norma was mentioned on ITworld.com! In fact, it was the Geek Comic of the Week! Still is, as of the time of this writing. Awesome! I had put a few Project Wonderful ads for it on Dinosaur Comics and Dr. McNinja... and I guess the publicity is paying off.

By the way, I highly recommend Project Wonderful to any ordinary person trying to get visitors to a website. I got three days of ads on Dinosaur Comics and one day of ads on Dr. McNinja for less than ten dollars. The genius of their system is that they charge by the day, not by clicks or page impressions, so you can't get screwed by someone who decides to click on your ad eighty times. If you've decided you don't want to get charged more than ten bucks, you won't get charged more than ten bucks. (Not so great if you're the person selling ad space... but actually, in my case, it would be better than Google Ads, which have gotten me only 5 clicks and $3.34 in the several months and thousands of page views that they've been on my website.)

No faith in the existence of faith

2007-07-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

If "faith" is defined as "believing something without evidence," then there is no such thing as faith.

Now, when I say "evidence," I don't mean "absolute proof." It's impossible to have absolute proof of anything. Even if you see something with your own eyes, you could just be hallucinating. Even if the answer to a mathematical problem makes perfect sense to you, that might be because of some deformity in your brain. There are plenty of things that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but there is nothing that can be proven beyond all doubt.

So if someone says that we don't have absolute proof of the theory of evolution, for example... well, that's technically true, but meaningless, since we also don't have absolute proof that there are any planets besides Earth, or that light comes from the sun, or that fairies don't exist.

It's pointless to define evidence as absolute proof. The most that evidence can be is "a piece of information that convinces you that something is likely to be true." And nobody can believe something without any evidence at all. It's just that some people need more evidence than others.

For example, I believe that evolution happened-- because there is a lot of scientific evidence that convinces me that evolution is more likely than the alternative (since the alternative is either "Thousands of scientists are conspiring to fake their results" or "God faked all the fossil evidence just to mess with our minds.")

But some people hold their beliefs based on lines of reasoning like the following:

A) "My parents taught this to me, and I believe my parents are always right about things like this, therefore I will believe it."

Or:

B) "I believe that God is good, and I like X and dislike Y, therefore I believe that God also likes X and dislikes Y, because otherwise God wouldn't be good in my opinion."

Most religious beliefs are held based on these two logical processes. They are not very strong lines of reasoning, but they are also not faith. They are evidence, in the sense of "a piece of information that convinces a person that something is likely to be true." Starting with pieces of information like "My parents believe this" or "God is good and I think that these things are good," people draw a line of logical reasoning and reach a religious belief.

The reason it's impossible to have blind faith is because there are thousands of religions in the world. If people could have faith in a religion without any concrete proof or logical argument in favor of it, then they would believe every religion that exists... and since religions contradict each other, this would necessitate a lot of doublethink.

So it doesn't happen that way. In reality, people believe in their religions either because they've been brought up in those religions, or because the teachings of those religions make sense to them... in other words, arguments A and B as described above.

Which are a form of evidence, as I've shown. So it makes no sense for a proselytizer to tell me that I just need to have faith and believe what he says without evidence of any kind. A dozen other proselytizers for different religions are telling me the same thing-- so if I didn't need any evidence in order to believe something, then how could I choose which one to listen to? Obviously, when multiple people are trying to convince me of different things, I have to choose who to believe based on who has the best evidence. And right now, the theory of evolution has the best evidence for me.

My mind to your mind... cuts your head open

2007-07-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

Is Sylar really going to be Spock?

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

There's always a reason... but not in real life

2007-07-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed that everything always happens for a reason in fiction?

I don't mean that everything has a cause, or that everything is connected to everything else in small, hard-to-detect ways-- those things are true in real life, too. What I mean is that whenever something, no matter how small, happens in a work of fiction, it always seems to be connected to the main events of the story in an important, "meaningful" way.

For example, if a fictional character has a slip of the tongue, saying something other than what he or she meant to say, it can mean one of three things:

1. It's a Freudian slip, and it gives us a glimpse into what was on the character's mind.

Or:

2. It shows that the character is nervous or stressed, and therefore making mistakes in speech because of distraction.

Or:

3. It's part of character development, indicating that the character is "the type of person" who would make such a mistake-- which, in stories, always seems to mean a clumsy, bumbling type of character.

Of course, in real life, we frequently see dexterous, alert individuals in relaxed, non-stressful situations having little slips of the tongue that cannot possibly be interpreted as windows into their psyches. But those mistakes are completely irrelevant to the "important" events of these people's lives-- and so, if the events of their lives were made into a fictionalized story, those slips of the tongue would undoubtedly be left out. Everything in a novel or short story has to be relevant to the plot, or else readers start asking, "Why is this even in here?"

This is one of the things that annoy me about fiction. In real life, not every tiny little event is relevant to the things we consider important. Connected, yes, in some tiny way-- but not connected in the overt ways we always seem to see in fiction. Which means that fiction-- or at least the vast majority of fiction-- is unrealistic.

I'm guilty of doing this in my own fiction, too, if only because I'm afraid of readers getting confused about why I put some particular detail into the story. There always has to be a "why." If any author ever wrote a realistic story-- a story in which at least 70% of the events were unrelated to the plot in any vital way-- people would not understand it. They would look at 70% of the paragraphs and ask, "Why is this even here? It's not relevant." In fact, the same would happen with a story where only 10% of the paragraphs were irrelevant. If there's even one sentence in a story that's not connected to the plot, then someone, somewhere, is going to criticize it.

So all the characters have to speak perfectly, unless they are nervous, clumsy, or thinking about another subject. No sight, sound or event can be described unless it is useful in building character, setting or plot. How can people say that this is the right way to write a story, and yet still say that fiction should be realistic?

The insane conversations that my brain has with itself...

2007-07-17T19:54:00.001-07:00

"Hi, my name is Roe. I am a salmon egg."
"Hi. My name is Wade. I am a guy wading into the water to take you out and cook you and eat you."
"But I don't want to be eaten! I want to hatch into a salmon and grow up."
"Sorry, that's not your choice. Life begins at hatching, it doesn't begin at spawning. Right now, it's your mother's choice."
"But my mother is dead. All salmon die right after they spawn."
"Oh. Well, then, I believe that this situation does not fall under the legislation established by the Supreme Court."
"Then this conversation has been meaningless. We have not reached any conclusion on any controversial topic. We have only established that salmon are different from humans."
"Well, then I guess it also pointless for me to eat you. Goodbye, Roe."
"Goodbye, Wade."

... goodbye, sanity...

Spiders on potatoes are better than fruit flies

2007-07-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry that Abby and Norma is late today. I was out late last night and had to work early this morning.

There is a Spider-Man/Mr. Potato Head crossover toy called Spider Spud. I am not even kidding. He shoots webs... what are they, a mutant version of those white tendrils that potatoes send out when you leave them in the drawer too long? And who does he fight? Doctor Okra and the Green Gherkin? Nobody knows. There is no comic book, no story, not even the usual plethora of accessories... just the potato and the web.

I got heat stroke today on the way home. Didn't pass out or anything, but I started feeling very sleepy as I approached my apartment building. Once inside, I drank ice water and put a cold cloth over my head, and now I'm a little shivery, but awake.

We bought Guitar Hero! It's bizarre that I enjoy it, seeing that I'm usually rather indifferent to both music and video games-- but I really do enjoy it. I guess there's no accounting for taste, even one's own.

IKEA bot again

2007-07-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

I've managed to get my IKEA bot video to upload to YouTube with a better screencap picture showing up in Youtube search results. You basically just have to make sure the frame you want them to use is right in the middle of your video.

I improved a few other things too, but basically it's the same.

Random robotic reflections

2007-07-10T17:26:00.001-07:00

Have you heard of the "Uncanny Valley"? It's a theory about people's reactions to robots. People can't relate to robots if they look nothing like humans, and we find them cute if they look slightly like humans... but the closer they get to looking exactly like humans, the more disturbing they will seem. They stop seeming like cartoonish representations of people, and start seeming like very strange-looking, creepy real people. It's a "valley" because we can theoretically come back out of it on the other side, when we get good enough at making humanoid robots that they can't be distinguished from humans at all.

I personally apply the same theory to animals. Humans tend to find animals very unattractive if they look completely and utterly unlike humans (for example, centipedes and worms and squids). We begin to find animals attractive when they look a little more like us (lions, gazelles, eagles). We admire their beauty, and compare beautiful people to them. Yet when animals get too close to looking like humans (monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas) we suddenly don't find them beautiful at all.

However, there is one important difference: Animals that look very much like humans do not disturb us in the same way as robots that look very much like humans. Most people do not get "creeped out" when they see a monkey or ape. We have a certain affection for them, even though we would never look at our spouses and say "You're so beautiful, you look like a gorilla." We might very well look at our children and say "You're so cute, you look like a monkey." The difference between "cute" and "beautiful" is important here; we might compare a monkey to a child, someone toward whom we feel parental affection-- but we do not compare it to someone with whom we could be "in love." This may be because monkeys and apes remind us of human children instead of human adults, with their more playful and simple nature.

And speaking of children, this is where I first found out about the "Uncanny Valley." It is graphic proof that a robot that looks like a human child is definitely not endearing in the same way as an animal that looks like a human child. Prepare to be creeped out.

New logo!

2007-07-03T22:14:00.000-07:00

After posting about the updates to my jewelry page, I started thinking about the logo a bit more, and realized it was awfully amateurish (I made it when I was in high school, for crying out loud).

And after thinking about it for a few minutes, I got inspired and made a new one. Take a look!

That's all for tonight. Really.

Propaganda for me!

2007-07-03T21:07:00.001-07:00

My Abby and Norma comic recently had a little three-strip story arc that I'm pretty proud of. It started here.

But there's bigger news: My jewelry page is now fully functional! It's undergone various changes, including the addition of Lake Superior jewelry with real silver wire, and geometric tube bead jewelry with real silver beads and freshwater pearls. Go take a look!

(Oh, and see if you can find the hidden "Enterprises" in the "Erika's Enterprises" logo. I made the logo years and years ago, and incorporated it into my jewelry page back when I first put it up on Geocities... but as far as I know, nobody's ever noticed the Enterprises. Probably only I would recognize a Constitution-class vessel seen from the front. I am such a Star Trek nerd...)

"Nice" signals

2007-07-03T20:11:00.001-07:00

And here's my deep thoughtful post for the week. I posted a version of this as a comment on someone's LJ, and thought it would make a good post of its own.

Basically, there's a very fascinating and informative blog post here, by a person on the autism spectrum who talks about being misunderstood because of an inability to give off "I-am-nice signals." While the post is mainly talking about signals that can be given over the internet (nuances in the wording of a sentence, for example) it's also very much of an issue with signals in body language.

As a person with Asperger's Syndrome, I can certainly relate... but my problems are a bit different. Personally, I'm the kind of Aspie who only has mild difficulty with giving off and perceiving "nice" signals, and I guess I have actually become kind of dependent on perceiving them when dealing with non-autistics.

What I mean is that non-autistics (and many autistics) often say things they don't mean (like "I want to kill him")... but when non-autistics say these things, they will give off fewer "nice" signals depending on how angry they are. So, you often can't tell what people mean by their words (usually the person who says "I want to kill him" doesn't really want to kill anyone)... but when people say words that seem angry, you can usually tell how angry they are by noticing how much or how little they laugh, smile, etc. while saying it.

If a coworker says something like "You brought peanut butter cookies in to work on a day I wasn't there, and you know how much I love your peanut butter cookies! You're so awful!"... there will probably be a lot of smiles and laughs along with those words, and I'll understand that the coworker is not really mad at me. But if a coworker says something like "Why did you go on break while there was still work to do? We didn't get the work done on time!" ...then there will be an overall absence of "nice" signals, and I will know the person's mad at me for real. This is the way the system usually goes, in theory.

Interestingly, there are both "friendly" signals (smiles, laughs, raised eyebrows) and "angry" signals (frowns, bared teeth, lowered eyebrows)... but while an absence of "friendly" signals is often a sign of anger, an absence of "angry" signals is often not a sign of friendliness. Angry people often hide their anger signals, but people who are being friendly usually do not hide their friendly signals. So, in non-autistics, a total absence of facial expression is usually a sign of anger, not friendliness.

So I'm somewhat guilty of making the kind of assumptions that "Ballastexistenz" complains about: When I'm talking to a stranger who doesn't give off many "nice" signals, I tend to assume that they're angry at me, because that's what is usually true for non-autistics. But then, sometimes, I observe this person for a long time, and notice that I'm seeing the same absence of "nice" signals whether we're talking about something serious like a badly-timed break or something silly like a badly-timed batch of peanut butter cookies. Then I realize that there are two possibilities: Either I have offended this person in the past without realizing it, and so they're mad at me all the time... or they're the kind of person who just doesn't use much body language.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty paranoid about making social mistakes and causing people to have grudges against me, and so usually my first assumption is that the person is mad at me all the time because of some unwitting wrong I have committed against them in the past. And I'm really scared of conflict, so I will tend to be afraid of such people for a long time.

There are a few cases, currently, in which I am just beginning to realize that the people in question probably don't really have anything against me, they're probably just not very expressive people. I'm working on getting over my fear of them. It's hard.

Interestingly, I don't differentiate much between men and women on this subject. There are people of both sexes who scare me because their facial expressions don't change while talking to me. It's true that, in our society, men can get away with an absence of friendly body language more than women can-- but as a matter of fact, I tend to get along better with men who do give off a lot of friendly body language (my husband is an Aspie whose mannerisms have often been called "feminine").

So, even though I do have some mild difficulties of my own in figuring out body language, I have become somewhat reliant on it when dealing with non-autistics, because the words they speak often don't say anything at all about what they're really feeling, and body language is the only way to figure out what they are feeling. And when I meet someone who seems otherwise normal but doesn't use much body language, I'm usually out of my depth for a while.

(ETA: I used the word "autistics" in the above paragraph when I meant "non-autistics." I've changed it now. Sorry if it confused you.)

Finally: a thoughtful, serious post

2007-06-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

I wish there were a politically correct word for "politically correct."

When I try to talk about the concept of using words that won't offend people, the only way I can describe it is "being politically correct," and that's a phrase with negative connotations, giving the impression that I don't like having to be that way.

That's not the impression I want to give. I really do make a good-faith effort to talk nicely and politely; I really try to avoid saying anything that could hurt someone's feelings. I do so because I believe it's the good thing to do, and I don't have any resentment about having to do it.

Of course, there are situations when people take offense at something that I don't feel it makes sense to be offended at... and there are situations when I really don't know what to say to avoid offending people. But most of the time it's pretty clear.

It's just important to remember that most rules about what is offensive are based more on association than logic. For instance, the word "Negro" is an Americanized pronunciation of the Spanish word for "black," so it literally means nothing more than "black," and logically it shouldn't be any more offensive than the word "black." (And the "N-word," for that matter, is just a distorted pronunciation of the word "Negro," and logically shouldn't be any more offensive than that). But words aren't purely logical-- they have meanings beyond the literal; they have meanings based on feelings and connections in people's minds.

Every word for a group of people is associated with a certain attitude toward that group, because of what opinions have been expressed in the past by people who used that word. This is much more important than the literal meanings of the words. And as long as we continue moving toward greater acceptance of minority groups, we will never have words that stay "politically correct." Every word for a minority group will, over time, become associated with an earlier generation that was less accepting of that group, and become an offensive word. (It happened to the word "Negro," which was not always offensive; in fact, it was the word used by those who wanted to abolish slavery. But it was used by many bigots, too, and even the abolitionists' attitudes toward race were much less enlightened than the attitudes that are popular today, and so the word became an insult.)

This tendency toward change is not necessarily a bad thing. It is, at least, a sign that shows that we are still moving forward in our acceptance of people. If any word for a group ever stays acceptable for an extended period of time, it will mean either that we have reached perfect acceptance of people, or that we've just stopped making progress.

Random Role Reversal

2007-06-26T17:50:00.000-07:00

In Russia, squirrels kill dogs.

Miles O'Brien on the space station

2007-06-26T17:43:00.000-07:00

Did you know CNN's Space Correspondent is named Miles O'Brien?

Seriously. I saw him giving a report about the Space Station the other day. Am I the last person to notice this?

IKEA has a bot; her name is Anna, Anna is her name

2007-06-21T15:16:00.001-07:00

The main thing I don't like about YouTube is that you don't get to choose the picture that represents your video. They just have a program that chooses a frame from the video and uses it as the picture that people see when they decide whether or not to watch your video. If it's a sucky frame, or a frame that reveals a surprise in the video and spoils the ending for viewers-- then tough luck.

Anyway, I made a silly parody video that you'll only understand if you're familiar with both the song "Boten Anna" and the "Ask Anna" function on IKEA's website. It would have been nicer if the picture had been one of the ones with Anna's face in them... but this is how it turned out:

Making Fiends, etc.

2007-06-20T05:31:00.001-07:00

I'm going to start posting on a regular schedule-- every Wednesday-- and I'm going to try to have thoughtful, insightful posts every time, but today my thoughts are pretty random.

I love this site. Ah, the joy of silly Flash animations. With bizarre quirky humor. I was hooked as soon as I read the FAQ.

Poor Vendetta, reluctantly headed toward heaven on a road paved with bad intentions. She tries so hard to make Charlotte suffer, but only succeeds in amusing her.

Speaking of suffering... we all know that Disney took "The Little Mermaid"-- a Hans Christian Andersen story with a depressing ending-- and made it into a bouncy, uplifting story with a Disney Happy Ending (TM). I can't help but wonder if they can do the same to "The Little Match Girl." After all, it's a Hans Christian Andersen story with a depressing ending, too. Come on, guys! Give it a try!

Seriously. When you read a story in which the entire plot consists of a homeless child sitting outside in subzero weather, trying to sell matches, and lighting them one by one to keep warm until she runs out of matches and freezes to death-- you just have to wonder if Disney is up to the challenge.

(Aw, come on! Disney can do anything!)

In South Korea, video games pay money to YOU

2007-05-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from the article:

(12-18) 04:00 PDT Seoul -- Choi Yeon-sung avoids going out most days, and when he's on the street, he puts his head down -- to dodge the whispers, the stares and the pleas for autographs.

Such are the hardships of a celebrity video game player in South Korea.

I guess it figures. All the people that we idolize-- actors, singers, sports players-- are gaining enormous fame and fortune for doing something that we all did for fun when we were kids.

I mean, as kids, most of us enjoyed singing songs. Most of us played pretend, and most of us threw a ball around from time to time. And now, as adults, we have a certain fascination for people who can take these seemingly simple activities almost to the level of an art form, doing them with such skill that they make gigantic amounts of money just from the expenditures of people who are willing to pay to see them do it.

This happens even when (as in the case of some actors) there is very little actual skill present, and the individual in question got this ridiculously high-paying job because of other traits, like inherited wealth or good looks. In some ways, this may fascinate people even more, because not only is the person making millions doing an activity that kids do for fun, but he or she is making millions without even doing this activity much better than kids do it. It's the American dream of attaining fame and fortune without any significant effort.

So it's no surprise that some country, someday, would convey this kind of celebrity status to video game players. I say it's great-- at least video game players have to have actual skill in order to achieve celebrity status.

I just wish that there were some kind of respect for people who don't do anything fun and useless for a living, and instead work long hours doing hard manual labor that benefits others in a tangible way. Why is it people like that who earn minimum wage?

The things that a backroom job does to your mind...

2007-05-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

Days like this just leave me in awe of how many people there are in the world. Specifically, how many people there are in a big city like Minneapolis (which isn't even one of the most populous cities in the world, which boggles my mind even more).

People are buying patio furniture. A lot. At the Target store where I have my backroom job, if you just counted the number of people who came in for patio furniture and needed to have it pulled from the backroom for them-- heck, if you just counted the ones who did that during the hours I was on duty... I'm sure you'd get over a hundred so far this spring.

I can only imagine what number you'd get if you included people who bought patio furniture when I wasn't there, and people who bought patio furniture that didn't need to be pulled from the backroom, and people who bought patio furniture at other Target stores in the area, and people who bought it at other patio furniture retailers besides Target.

And yet this huge number of people is not even the majority of people in this city. I know this, because there are three situations when you buy patio furniture:

1. When you get a patio for the first time in your life, and have to buy your very first set of patio furniture. (Hasn't happened to me yet.)

2. When your old patio furniture breaks. (Also hasn't happened to me, of course.)

3. When you decide that your old patio furniture is so godawful ugly that getting new, better-looking patio furniture is worth a few hundred dollars to you. (Won't ever happen to me, but probably happens to many of the yuppies around here.)

I am willing to bet that, for the average person, quite a few years pass between these events. I doubt there are many people who buy a set of patio furniture every year, or even every two or three years. So, at any given time, the number of people currently buying patio furniture has got to be a pretty small fraction of the population.

And yet this small fraction of the population is huge. Patio sets just keep marching out the door, day after day, nonstop. I see them being bought, and I know I'm only seeing a small percentage of the ones that are being bought, and yet it seems like a staggering number to me. And not only is this staggering number only a small percentage of the patio sets being bought, but the mind-blowing number of people buying patio sets is only a small percentage of all the people in the city.

And this city is only a tiny, tiny percentage of the people in the world.

Some people look up at the stars to think about how gigantic the universe is and how small they are as individuals. I look at South Bali Gazebos and Parisienne Wrought Iron Chair and Table Sets.

Late-night thoughts

2007-05-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

In my city, from time to time, there are billboards and signs advertising religion. Nothing flamingly fundamentalist; just things like "Teenagers, rebel! Take your parents to church!" In 1999 there was an ad campaign pointing out that "the Bible is Y2K compatible." "If the lights go out, turn to the Light of the World." Cute stuff like that.

It occurs to me that, while there seems to be a law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a courtroom, there is no law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a city street.

So I think we can quit arguing over the whole issue. If a judge wants to display the Ten Commandments, all he needs to do is rent some billboard space in front of his courthouse.

Hopefully we're not waiting on feeling nauseous

2007-04-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, I love the ideas in the song "Waiting on the World to Change," but... the grammar in the refrain... I just couldn't help writing a parody.

Language isn't static
It changes day by day
And those changes, they're decided
By what most people say.
So when an error's really common
You can pretty much expect
That within a few years it'll be
The way that's deemed correct.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

We know we can't prevent it
And that it's silly to resent it
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

"Waiting on" means serving
That's how waiters got their name
It's not the same as "waiting for"
But it's often used the same.
If some day the dictionaries
list the two as synonyms
It just means language has evolved
To suit the public's whims.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

It's not that we don't care
But it's the only option that's there
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

"Hopefully" doesn't mean "I hope"
It means "in a hopeful way"
But some dictionaries list them both
'Cause of what most people say.
"Nauseous" means "nauseating"
It does not mean "nauseated"
But so many people said it wrong
The original meaning's faded.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

There aren't logical excuses
For objecting to new uses
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change.

Some loners just write blog posts when they're angry

2007-04-18T18:31:00.001-07:00

I hate it when someone who fits the stereotypical description of a criminal goes and commits a crime. The last thing we need is more people reinforcing stereotypes.

Today at work I heard a discussion on the radio about how we can make loners stop being loners and "become more social" so they won't commit crimes. Give me a $%@#! break.

Being a loner doesn't fricking cause violence. Yes, there are a few people who become violent because they don't like society in general, or because society in general has rejected them-- but there are millions more who just quietly cry over being lonely, and also plenty of people who actually enjoy their solitude. Trying to force them into being more social would just make them angry, and probably more likely to attack someone.

And just because someone writes violent stories (or listens to violent music, or plays violent video games) that doesn't mean he's going to be violent. You ever see Stephen King go on a psychotic killing rampage? Of all the bloody, gory, terrifying books and movies out there, how many were written by people who went on to shoot up a school? Geez.

I've been trying to convince the world of these things all my life, and now it just got twenty times harder. Thanks for nothing, VA Tech gunman.

Kira or be killed

2007-04-14T21:47:00.001-07:00

I love Death Note. Just love it. Love the intelligent plots. The attention to the detail and complexity of the magical system in the anime. And I adore L. Absolutely adore him.

And the fact that the name "Kira" is involved is only a tiny detail. That's not why I love the show. I just made that picture for the heck of it.

Anyway, I love Death Note. Just wanted to get that out of my system. I'm going to bed now.

Tied up

2007-04-05T19:45:00.001-07:00

Husband has to wear a tie for an interview. He went to this page for instructions.

I liked tying knots when I was a kid. I got interested. But here is my attempt at a Pratt knot:

I will never again underestimate men who have to wear ties...

I deserve to be pun-ished

2007-04-04T12:20:00.001-07:00

I just said to a friend, "You know, so far two of the state quarters have bison on them. Now we need one that has ten eels on it, too. Then we'll have a bison-ten-eel quarter."

He said absolutely nothing. Either he doesn't know what a bicentennial quarter is, or the pun was so awful that it didn't deserve a reply.

Probably both.

*goes back to doing random useless stuff*

There is no other holiday with dates this crazy.

2007-04-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

When is Easter? It takes a 1,248-word article to answer that question. I especially love the distinction between an "ecclesiastical" full moon and an "astronomical" full moon. Some people are verrrrrry strange...

Speaking of dates, I'm bringing oatmeal-date cookies to this year's family Easter party, in addition to oatmeal-raisin and oatmeal-chocolate-chip. I hope they turn out well. I've never made them with dates before, but I figure I need some use for the chopped dates I bought in honor of Palm Sunday.

(I also bought a coconut, which wasn't even ripe and was absolutely impossible to eat, earning me a lot of teasing from the husband, especially since Palm Sunday is named after date palms and has nothing to do with coconut palms. But I was in a silly mood. That's my excuse for most insane things I do, and it usually works well.)

Star light, star bright

2007-03-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

I found it on the way to work a few days ago. A turquoise blue stretchy adjustable strap, with a flashy thing on it. The flashy thing is yellow, octagonal, and faceted sort of like a really cheap toy jewel.

It has a button on the back. Push the button once, and two lights inside it flash alternately. Push it twice, and both lights flash together. Push it three times, and both lights stay on and don't flash. Push it a fourth time and it turns off.

When it's on my head, or around my neck (the adjustable strap allows for either) I look like some alien babe in Star Trek. (The Original Series, of course.)

When it's over my eye, I look like some android or cyborg alien babe in Star Trek. (Still the Original Series. Back then, they were on such a low budget that something like this item might very well have been used as a costume accessory. In multiple episodes. For multiple types of alien babes. With only minor alterations. Like wearing it on the neck instead of the head.)

Wearing it drives my husband absolutely crazy. He says it is the dumbest-looking thing he has ever seen. It's become a game between us. I put it on and see how long it takes him to look up from his video game and notice. Eventually, he notices, and grabs it off my head and throws it across the room. I try to sneak over to where it is and put it back on before he notices.

*dies laughing*

Now, nothing can be done by machines

2007-03-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

For some reason, today I've been thinking about a story one of my teachers told me once. Some young relative of his had wanted to participate in an Invention Fair, but couldn't think of a real invention, so he just put a name card next to an empty space, with "Invisible Nothing Machine" written on the card.

I can just imagine his conversation with the judges:

"What's that?"
"It's an Invisible Nothing Machine."
"What's it made out of?"
"It's made out of nothing."
"What does it do?"
"It does nothing."
"Why would we need a machine that's made out of nothing and does nothing?"
"It saves a lot of time and money. Building it requires no resources and no work, and once it's built, it saves humans from having to do nothing all by themselves."
"Hmm. He's got a point. If we had a machine to do nothing for us, we could spend more time doing something. It would greatly boost our overall productivity as a species."
"I say we give him a prize."

According to my teacher, the kid actually did get a prize. An Honorable Mention or something. I suppose that says something about the world, but I'm not sure what.

Don't ask, don't tell... doesn't work

2007-03-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, so now the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is coming back into the public eye. Frankly, it has always annoyed me. Clinton had some good ideas, but this was not one of them. And I think that kind of policy is useless not only in the military, but also in all the other places it's put into practice.

There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.

On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.

But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.

One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.

One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.

But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.

The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.

No more Orson Scott Card

2007-03-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

I once read a diatribe against gay marriage by the celebrated science fiction writer Orson Scott Card-- a diatribe that had a lot of big words and fancy language, trying to look intelligent, but had no real arguments. Assertions that children needed both a mother and a father, but no real explanation why.

And one overly literal interpretation of the law: "Gays already have equal marriage rights. Just like heterosexuals, they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex." (Well, if we're going to be that sophomoric, we can even go a little further and say that men and women don't currently have equal marriage rights: unlike men, women have the right to marry men, and unlike women, men have the right to marry women. How unfair.)

But I was still able to read and enjoy his work, for the same reason I can enjoy Tom Cruise movies despite disagreeing wholeheartedly with his religious beliefs. The man does not equal the actor, and the man does not always equal the author, either. I enjoyed Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon.

Sure, he had some scattered references to "every living creature's natural desire to reproduce," and I would balk for a moment at his apparent assertion that I wasn't a living creature, but then I would ignore it and read on.

But when I got to Shadow Puppets, I drew the line.

(Spoilers beyond this point.)

Bean, the main character, because of a very disadvantageous genetic condition, has decided not to have children. His friend Petra wants to have his children, and she keeps pestering him about it.

Then, at one point, they meet a man who "has no desire for women." It is not 100% clear whether he is gay or just not interested in love and sex at all. But he clearly serves as a mouthpiece for the author.

He claims he is about to get married to a woman who already has some children of her own, and spend the rest of his life living with her and raising her children, despite having no desire for her.

And he gives them this long lecture about how the only way to feel truly fulfilled in life is to raise children together with a member of the opposite sex. They don't have to be your own children, and you don't even have to like this member of the opposite sex-- but raising children with a member of the opposite sex is the instinct that's programmed into every living creature, so if you don't do it one way or another, then you won't feel that your life was worth living.

And this convinces Bean; he gets all weepy and realizes deep in his heart that this man is right. That's where I stopped reading.

When I had read Orson Scott Card's essay on gay marriage, I had taken his comment about equal marriage rights as an over-literal interpretation of the phrase "equal rights," twisting it to fit his own views while choosing to ignore the fact that gays can't be happy being married to the opposite sex. But now I realize he's even crazier. He actually thinks gays will be happier in heterosexual marriages.

Furthermore, he thinks I am incapable of being happy in my own lifestyle-- a heterosexual marriage with no children. Never mind the fact that I panic, curl up in a ball with my hands over my ears, and rock like the stereotypical autistic, if I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to be in a position of control over a child. Never mind that screaming babies and whining toddlers make me want to physically smash something if I even overhear them in the supermarket. He actually thinks I would be happier if I were raising kids.

No more. I'm not reading his books any more. That's it.

%$@#! new Starfleet Academy movie thing

2007-03-09T20:26:00.000-08:00

Don't mind the following, I'm just ranting about the makers of Star Trek and their evident inability to let anything rest in peace.

(To the tune of Beautiful Wreck.)

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Of all of those shows set in the Milky Way
TOS, you're the one I wish could have stayed.

You're the one that's least sub-par
What a beautiful Trek you are
Flying star to star,
Beautiful Trek you are.

They go crazy every seven years, you know
And so every seven years they make a new Trek show.
Except for TOS, 'cause you just got three,
Which is sad, 'cause you're still the best Trek to me.

I’m still sitting here waiting by my TV set
But there's been nothing good yet
But there's been nothing good yet

You've got Spock pon farr
What a beautiful Trek you are
You've got Kolinahr
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful
A beautiful Trek you are.

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, I like the original Trek, I do.
I like the original Trek, I do.

Yeah, you've got T'Lar
What a beautiful Trek you are

But not Tasha Yar
And not Selar
But what a beautiful Trek you are.

What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.

There are 10 kinds of dogs. Those who know binary and those who don't.

2007-02-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

Okay, remember the first dog toy I bought at Target? The creepy eyeless pig with only one front leg and one hind leg?

Well, I've found that it's not the only totally wacko dog toy they have.

The highlight of my day today was a dog newspaper.

But the absolutely awesome thing about it isn't the fact that it's a newspaper. Or the fact that it's really just a squeaky toy in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper. It also isn't the title "Doggy News," or the slogan "All the news that's fit to chew on." Nor is it the price (two dog bones), the paw-stamp with "edition" written under it, or the headline "Man bites dog" with the corresponding illustration.

It is the fact that the newspaper is written in binary.

Think of it! Dogs can read binary! Who'd have thought it? The headline in plain alphabetical characters was just to throw off computer-illiterate humans. Your dog can spend joyful hours poring through articles that you would need a decoding program to understand. Now you know why your dog gets jealous when you pay too much attention to your computer. It's because he wants the computer all to himself!

I suppose it says a lot about me that I actually went to the trouble of transcribing all those ones and zeroes into my text editor, and then went looking for online binary-to-text translation programs. But, alas, when you paste

01110110 111011011 1101 101110 111 0110 01 01101101 110110 110110 10 011 01101110 011 111011 0110 11010 01101110 11011011 1101 0110110 11011 111011 011011101 10 0110 1101101 01101 11101 0110 1101101 11101 011011101011 1101101 01101 0110 011 0010111 110110 11101 01101 01101 0111011 011011 0110101 011

into an online decoder, you get either an error message, or a line of characters that looks like this:

I guess dogs know something that I don't.

Abby and Norma updates!

2007-02-15T20:16:00.000-08:00

My web comic "Abby and Norma" is now in color, and it's now weekly instead of bi-weekly.

Just letting y'all know.

Even skeletons need a hug sometimes

2007-02-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

Maybe Romeo and Juliet really did make it to Mantua before they died.

And maybe they really lived in the Neolithic era...

article

This is even scarier than the two-legged pig.

2007-01-23T19:53:00.000-08:00

Scary article, right here.

I don't know about you, but I am absolutely terrified by that whole bunch of new laws. And don't make the mistake of thinking that they're only going to be used against people who really are terrorists. If you read enough articles, you know that the government has searched and trashed people's houses, destroying their possessions, for reasons no more valid than "She was checking out a lot of terrorism-related books from the library. How could we know she was just doing research for something she was going to write?"

Still, this is kinda funny.

I cannot BELIEVE...

2007-01-23T08:20:00.000-08:00

...that Coca-Cola stole the Ninja Kitten song! How did they think they were going to get away with that?

I mean, I'm sure that, if they'd just asked nicely, the awesome folks at Rathergood.com would have been delighted to let them use it for a price that would be almost nothing to a giant like Coke. But I guess nobody asks nicely these days.

*sigh*

Four legs good, two legs bad

2007-01-21T19:42:00.000-08:00

Transition to the new Target store went very well. I have walked to work every day so far, with no trouble-- which is very good, since our car is, we think, permanently dead now after a small accident in a parking lot, in which the driver's side front wheel was bent to an angle that a wheel simply shouldn't be at. Fixing it would undoubtedly cost more than the car is worth. It was going to die any minute anyway, and I guess there were worse ways and worse places it could have happened.

Anyway, I love this new Target. And it's so much closer to home than the one where I used to work. Part of me is hoping that when my old store finishes its transformation into a Super Target, I can just stay here instead of moving back.

On break today, I spent $4.23 ever-so-frivolously. But it made me happy. See, I found the most bizarre, fascinating, vaguely creepy product I have seen in all (both?) my years stocking shelves.

Seen from the side, this toy looks more or less like a normal pig. But turn it, and you will find that IT HAS ONLY TWO LEGS. And not "two legs" in the sense of an anthropomorphic fairy-tale pig that walks on its hind limbs and uses the front ones as arms. This pig could never walk in a million years. That's right, it has just ONE LEG IN FRONT AND ONE IN BACK.

The idea for designing this creature, I imagine, started with the thought of making an outline of a pig seen from the side, and creating a toy that was little more than a two-dimensional cutout. But then they went too far in giving that cutout some realistic features.

You will note, seeing the pig from the front, bottom, or back, that the body is fatter than the legs. Furthermore, the face is carefully designed to look like a pig's face when seen from the front-- which, of course, encourages the viewer to look at the toy from the front, whereupon the eye will wander down to the single front leg, and the brain will go "WTF?"

And he only cost $2.99... in my opinion, the bargain of a lifetime.

(The rest of the $4.23 was a little tiny pool table from Target's dollar-store section, plus some sales tax.)

I'm naming the pig "Big Brother," in honor of the cartoon on Homestarrunner.com where Strong Bad draws a picture of a one-legged dog named "Li'l Brudder." I figure that since my pig has twice as many legs as that dog, he can be called "Big Brother." Plus the fact that George Orwell's two most famous books featured (a) a society ruled by an imaginary figurehead named Big Brother and (b) a farm ruled by pigs.

(Oh, and he has a squeaky thing inside him!! He's really meant as a dog toy, you see. But no dog would appreciate the Dada-ness of it all.)

Bad brain! Nothing really rhymes with 'purple'!

2007-01-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

My dream the other night was so weird and pointless that it is not even worth describing... except that at the very end, someone showed me a Spock doll, and I responded by singing, to the tune of the "Popeye" song,

"I'm Spockie and I don't laugh,
I live in a Spirograph,
I go 'round in circles while I draw in purple,
I'm Spockie and I don't laugh."

I think that is one of the weirdest songs I have ever made up in my sleep. And now I am not going back to sleep, because I think sleep has become a hallucinogenic drug for me.

Scream Dream

2006-12-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

Superman fans, please do not take offense. I have never read a single Superman comic, and my knowledge of him is pretty much the stuff that everybody knows. My subconscious mind, though, seems to want to analyze his psyche, as evidenced in my dream last night. And it did a pretty bizarre job.

So, I had this dream where there was a character named "Screamer" in the Superman comic. She was supposed to be Superman's girlfriend (in the dream Lois Lane didn't seem to exist) and she was a superhero whose power was her ability to scream-- but I got the impression that her screaming didn't actually do anything to the bad guys, it just boosted Superman's power so that he could kick their butts.

And no one ever saw Screamer. Superman talked about her a lot, but he was apparently the only person who ever interacted with her. When he needed her help, he would go someplace where no one could see him, and then people would hear a scream, and he'd come back and say that Screamer had done her job.

In the dream, it seemed that there was a common idea among Superman fans that Screamer wasn't a separate person of her own, she was in Superman's head. The idea was that Superman did the screaming himself, and just told everybody it came from his unseen girlfriend. But it wasn't like she was an imaginary friend, and it wasn't like she was an alien consciousness trapped inside his head with him... it wasn't even a split personality thing, either. It was that Superman was in love with a part of his own mind... apparently the part of him that liked to scream, I guess.

And since the rest of the world would find that very odd, Superman personified this part of his mind as a girlfriend that nobody saw.

I do NOT know where this dream came from... except that I'm writing a short story in which a young lady experiences a sort of identity crisis, wondering who or what she truly is... and the Superman character is mentioned a couple of times in passing. And it's also the time of the month when my brain produces the craziest dreams.

Maybe I should name that part of my mind "Dreamer." And, like, lock him up somewhere.

Singing with the world's stickiest head

2006-11-25T22:27:00.000-08:00

I could write a whole blog about the songs that get stuck in my head. Seriously. A typical entry would go like this:

First I got "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" stuck in my head and then I got "Oh Susanna" stuck in my head, and since I don't know more than the first couple lines of either of them, my brain merged them into a version of "Oh Susanna" that replaced the words "Oh Susanna" with "Argentina." But it still only had the first couple lines, so my brain grabbed the first rhyme it could think of and built it into something that went like this:
Argentina, don't you cry for me
Cause my first name's Angelina and my last name is Jolie

which my brain found so clever that it considered adding more verses and making it into a satirical song about Angelina Jolie, but then realized that such a project would require knowing at least five times more about Angelina Jolie than I actually do, and I wasn't interested in doing that kind of research, so I just sang those first couple lines over and over in my head for the rest of the day.

I have the world's stickiest head. If only I could understand and remember enough of the words of any song that I could hum the whole thing sometimes.

My website

2006-11-24T23:42:00.000-08:00

Just letting you all know that my website, which used to be at zekibaka.com, has moved here. That's why my picture on blogger.com is dead-- it was a link to a copy of a pic on zekibaka.com, and blogger keeps crashing when I try to change it. Hope it at least lets me post this.

Site still has pretty much all the same stuff-- my writing, my art, and information about my books and speeches. Some new stuff on the jewelry page.

Just thought I'd let you know. Now must try and get ready for bed.

Website downtime upcoming

2006-11-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Our website at www.zekibaka.com will quite likely be down for a day or so at some point in the near future.

See, zekibaka.com is hosted by Midphase, and our other site, johnanderikaspeak.com, is hosted by Bluehost. The renew deadline for Midphase is coming up and we can't afford the extra $100 right now, so we've decided to move zekibaka.com onto our Bluehost account.

It'll still be on the same domain-- you'll still get to it by typing www.zekibaka.com -- but it'll be hosted by Bluehost and covered under the same fee we're going to pay Bluehost in February, so we'll have both sites up for the price of one.

But it may take a day or so to get back up... just letting you all know.

"Christ won eternal life for you. It's a separate download."

2006-11-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

I just got a spam email with one of those blocks of randomly generated text, which was pieced together from a religious essay and a set of instructions for some computer application... some of the juxtapositions are simply hilarious:

Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. sitemap files in your application. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John. This package is a series of sample ControlExtenders that attach to existing controls to do some really cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. Your phone is "busy". Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method. It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
It'll work most of the time," said Prosise. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. Initials instead of having to do it manually. It's still enjoyable to read.
God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. So the easiest way to do it is to split the string with a space character, and grab the first letter from each resulting string.
Of course, you can add a lot more information to your OpenSearch provider.
this is very important, Satveer.
Beats having to click a bunch of checkboxes, huh?
It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
Didn't you know, man? Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. Select the assembly, and drag it onto the Toolbox, in the tab you want the controls to be in. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
com e-mail address instead. at some moment in time, yet? Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus. He said He'd be back, and He said it first.
This is the us-versus-them trick.
"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself.
Christ won eternal life for you and said so. It's a separate download from the main "Atlas" release, but I would assume that this would be rolled into the "Atlas" releases at some point.
This is the us-versus-them trick. Initials instead of having to do it manually.
no doubt with good wishes! sitemap files in your application.

Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard?

2006-11-18T19:56:00.000-08:00

Forget Freud and his book of what things mean in dreams. Yes, dreams have symbolism, but it is different for every single freaking person.

The other night I had a dream where a lizard symbolized an aloe plant. Seriously. In the dream I had a couple of pet lizards that kept running around and getting their tails cut off in various ways. Like, I tried to keep them in my locker while I went to work, but I closed the locker on their tails and accidentally cut them off. I suppose they must've grown back, because they got cut off a lot of other ways too.

But the point is that when they lost their tails, the tail stump wasn't red, it was translucent green, like when you cut a leaf off an aloe plant. And then when I woke up, I noticed that my aloe plant had fallen off the shelf and was lying in a big pile of dirt on the floor. I mentioned it to my husband, who said that it had fallen off the previous day, but I hadn't noticed it and he hadn't gotten around to telling me.

So I must have noticed it subconsciously, and my subconscious mind was trying to let me know that my aloe plant was in trouble. Except instead of telling me directly, it had decided to symbolize it with lizards getting their tails cut off. Have no idea why it chose that particular symbol, except that I dream about lizards a lot, and I also have a lot of dreams about pets suffering horrible fates due to human neglect or stupidity. (I suppose that has to do with the fact that I had a lot of pets as a child, and some of them did get hurt or killed because of errors on my part or my parents'.)

Freud said that dreams use symbolism because there are things your mind can't handle thinking about directly. Supposedly almost anything sexual was in this category-- which is stupid, because people think about sex more than they think about anything else, and I'd certainly rather think about sex than think about lizards losing body parts. I personally think that dreams don't symbolize for any good reason, they just do it because they're confused and mix things up with each other.

Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But in any case I'm not asking Freud what it means when lizards lose their tails in a dream.

Moving and selling stuff

2006-11-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

Random stuff:

Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.

I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.

OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...

Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.

Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.

And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.

A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.

Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.

I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.

That's it for now. Got to go.