Ah… no, not yet. I’m out of breath, we’ve determined it’s neither bronchitis nor pneumonia, and maybe we should wait.

So we wait for Monday, or sommat. I’m still sick and mostly the problem is that I’m out of breath almost all the time. If I could be constantly hooked to my inhaler I would. They gave me a nebulizer treatment at the clinic, and it helped a lot (and even restored color to my cheeks, apparently), and it has helped a lot. It’ll probably go away later this evening.

In the meantime I’m thinking about either sleep or work. Probably sleep first, then work. Or it might be sleep all evening. Only my body knows at this point.

I hope it’s happy I’ve seen the doctor and we’re not dying.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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Anyways, my dream was only scary towards the end and not because of my parents. I remember fragments, but a lot more than I usually do. For instance:

• I remember trying to buy this game¹ and all its only-imaginary-for-now expansions, only it had changed to also involve tile-laying and a big plastic dragon at the villain side of the board, for the shizzle.

• Somehow this lead to a restaurant I tried buying food from… either in another dream or from something I remember during my flight from some of the Nothing in the Midwest, a lot of which felt like a dream all by itself. It was a rather strange restaurant, one of those places where you get the food from a half-door “counter”.

• Somehow this led to me working at a sort of hospital for older people, or rather, people who are sick but considered “older” so they ended up there. Probably something to do with HCR going on right now, the gods only know why. Also, I was very concerned with how to store the many, many new plastic pieces from the above game (I decided on color, by the way, in special zip-pocketed clear plastic album pages).

• The guy I was assigned to, I think, resembled a sort of amalgam of all the looks-like-40 faces of people I’ve seen and, for some reason, I keep thinking that’s mostly from author jackets as well, you know, where you can see the picture of the author in the back and it usually doesn’t look like him right now. He was nice, but frustrated.

• He got a really, really crappy touchscreen computer assigned to him. I think it was just standard procedure in possibly The Future, everyone gets an iPad-like device, even if it sux0rs and has a really ancient Mac OS installed on it. I searched the Interwebs for instructions on how to install Linux on it, to make it somewhat better, if we possibly could. He politely turned this down at the end.

• Then I got sick. Really, really sick. Blackout (in a freaking dream) kind of sick. I ended up in the same hospital of minor, kind of negligent care, because… because… I don’t know… I might have lot my job in the dream, I didn’t remember having a job. The guy I had been taking care of visited me once during this delirium-within-a-dream, and I was horrified because he was out of bed and shouldn’t be.

Then I woke up, and as short enough of breath to be really scary. I do get asthma from colds and flu, but usually not that badly. Or has it been that badly? Anyways, I took some stuff from my inhaler and am okayish now, but standard procedure for me is to go see the doctor in case either bronchitis or pneumonia have taken up residence.

I was really quite scared I was dying for a few minutes after I woke up. It doesn’t help that I’ve been having a lot of trouble swallowing pills for my nightly medication. I’m going to be seeing the doctor this afternoon.

I’m fortunately not completely disabled, and damn it if this stupid thing is going to keep me in bed and away from work (though I am working from home). I hate being sick so much. It breaks a lot of my obligations and just…. oh, I hate it.

Anyways, I’ll see what the doctor says. My regular doctor isn’t in today, so I’ll be seeing one of the other doctors. I skipped over seeing the nasty one and went with the nice but yet overreactive one. I hope she doesn’t overreact too much, but I really don’t want to see the nasty one, who usually thinks I’m making up my symptoms. I am not completely sure how one makes up a constricted throat like I had last year, but that was her opinion, and maybe there’s something in that, because surely a doctor wouldn’t be really dismissive.

Or maybe they would. Or maybe they aren’t, and I’m really making everything up in my head. I’m pretty sure the last part is not true, but I’m not completely sure.

It’s hard to think sometimes about certain things, because I remember having had to believe some quite incredible things to survive a time with my mostly illogical father. As a result, the true relation of cause and effect in life outside of my job (programming, system administration) is at times only coincidental, and what people say cause and effect is takes precedence, even if it’s technically messed up and even if I know it is.

Gods I’m messed up.

And I don’t see my bartender for a while. He has a lot of cases to work with, most of them in jobs like mine.

1. Tom Vassel does awesome board game reviews. He’s reviewing Heroscape in a 5 part series right now. I so love that game.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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The comment is from Jeff VanderMeer, and in it he says:

Yes, the comment is stupid and ignorant. Rather than righteous indignation, though, perhaps you might’ve had patience and engaged with the rest of it, or even contacted Spinrad first and seen what he had to say, started a dialogue and seen where it took you. I guess what I’m saying is I totally understand why, for example, Nnedi would shake with rage, but you’re farther removed from the center of that comment.

Emphasis mine.

This part of Jeff’s very long comment (which had mostly other stuff in it too, apart from this bit that sticks in my mind) was upon Jason Sanford getting so angry, even though he is not black, and thus not directly affected and thus should not be too angry to engage in discourse with Spinrad.

That is… an ignorant paragraph, even though it’s part of a much longer comment full of other stuff. It’s presumptuous even though you’re Jeff VanderMeer. Sorry. I don’t think it’s surprising for Jason Sanford to be so angry that it distracts him. I don’t think it’s surprising at all if anyone has this reaction to Spinrad’s essay, whatever race or culture they’re part of.

<about me>
And yes… I tend to take the lead from the privileged when it comes to “why so angry?” and I should stop doing that.
</about me>

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• Cheryl Morgan talks about markets and international SF

• Editorial: The Dilemma of the Term “World SF” Redux at the World SF News Blog by Charles Tan — in which he is far kinder than many, but at the same time doesn’t always pull his punches

• Where Is International SF? at the SFWA Blog also by Charles Tan — in which he provides a long list of recommendations for international science fiction that people can really dig into

• N. K. Jemisin dissects a specific point in Spinrad’s essay — and she does not pull her punches.

• Also a comment by Saladin Ahmed about using the downfall of Spinrad to praise other white writers who “really get it” as opposed to, you know, writers from the actual cultures involved.¹

• A Whiff of Colonialism at Publishers Weekly’s Genreville by Rose Fox

And Rose Fox’s post also has a link to Nisi Shawl’s Appropriate Cultural Appropriation, which is light years ahead of anything Spinrad has to say. I wish I had known about it, say, a year ago.

You should really read that instead of Spinrad.

I’m currently popping the Internet popcorn for tomorrow. Sadly popcorn is a bit too expansive for bento boxes. There has been a lot of fuming on Twitter and on comments to currently existing blog responses to Spinrad, and it will almost certainly explode over the next few days.

And, Norman Spinrad?

1. In my opinion, this is like committing a divide-by-zero infinite recursion of fail. It makes no sense and yet is the fail that keeps on failing.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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The Itawamba County school board announced today it would cancel the Itawamba County Agricultural High School prom after a gay student challenged the district on its policy forbidding same-sex dates.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be a teenager’s overreaction, and does indeed appear to be the school board being… I don’t even know. They actually ban same-sex dates over there. It’s actually a school policy. The ACLU is involved.

I am particularly fascinated by this part:

School officials told McMillen last month that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and also told her she could not wear a tuxedo.

(Emphasis mine.)

I wonder what school officials were thinking to accomplish with the ban on tuxedo-wearing gals. Were they thinking, “If we let the gals wear tuxedos, then we’d have to let the boys wear gowns, and that’s wrong!”?

Of course, I remember my prom. There were a lot of things wrong with it, primarily involving my father, but one of the things wrong with it was that I hated gowns. I hated fancy dresses. I hated spaghetti straps and especially the kind of bra you have to wear with a spaghetti strap/shoulder-less dress. I hated pantyhose. I hated heels. I still hate all those, actually.

But you had to wear that kind of ensemble for prom if you were a girl. Back then it didn’t have to be a school policy, it was simply an implied, immutable law of nature: Girls wear dresses, boys wear suits. Girls could wear dresses that were only as long as their upper thighs, and boys could wear suits that burned your retinas, but as long as the clothing was correct gender-wise, that was okay. (Both happened at that prom.)

And that was that.

Things didn’t change for me in college, except that I learned a lot more about the kinds of people I was attracted to (both male and female, which is worrying to someone whose sex education came only from a special field trip made in high school¹), and observe more closely the difference between male and female clothing. Especially when it came to formal wear.

No, I never got involved with anybody; I just made a trip with a guy who needed to get a nice interview suit, and he had money, and needed shopping support.² I was impressed at how sensible men’s clothing tended to be, sizing-wise; actually measured in inches by inseam and outer seam, for instance, whereas with women’s clothing you could define a “size 10″ to mean almost anything.

And while men’s clothing tended to be more or less same-y, there was no pantyhose, and there were quite comfortable shoes. There wasn’t freezing your shoulders off with some paper-thin scarf that did nothing but set off your, your, I don’t know; there were jackets, which you could take off and fling over one shoulder to look cool, or at least attempt to.

And vests. Vests fascinated me for some reason, possibly in ways that bodices fascinate others.

Granted, men’s clothing could be rather over-warm, but there is such a thing as shirt sleeves. And ties, one could definitely do without ties, but there are such things as clip-ons (now, if there was a clip-on that actually looked like a real tie…).

I did not dare mention any of this to my parents. To tell the truth, this was little more than a minute side interest compared with trying to survive my parents’ controlling intentions and abuse.

Perhaps it’s telling that literally two days after I cut off all contact with my parents³ I bought a tux.

Well. Not really a tux. My friends wouldn’t allow me to go into the men’s clothing store. So I got a women’s knockoff, which was one step away from a tuxedo anyways. It didn’t matter that the only color it was available in was shiny powder blue. It was a tux. -ish.

But it didn’t really matter. I never got to wear the tux to any of the functions for professors/students. My friends strongly discouraged it, because it would attract ire from professors, and if you’re trying to hang onto a teaching or research assistantship, you do not want to do that. So I had to get… a short spaghetti strap dress. With pantyhose. And heels. I believe they’re the type of heels that are called “fuck-me heels.”

Eventually I lost the tux, along with a lot of other things. But hell. It wasn’t a real tux anyways.

These days I work for a dot.com, so suits and dresses don’t really matter in any way at all. Everyone is in some variant of a t-shirt and jeans (or kilt). Recently I also discovered that loose skirts are wonderful and I think everyone should try them.

But really… I still want my tux.

1. I know people like certain kinds of traits in other people they’re attracted to. I prefer people who look androgynous, and are as at home in a gown as they are in a tux. Still do, it’s never gotten “fixed.”
2. I love shopping. It’s the gatherer in me. In person. Via catalog. Online. Clothes? Books? Hardware? It doesn’t matter. It’s shopping!
3. And after an exciting weekend of my parents sending me a death threat, then my parents threatening my dorm’s clerk, then my parents showing up on my friends’ doorsteps!

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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Indeed, of all the reactions to Norman Spinrad’s recent fail of the week, Nick Mamatas’ is the most reasoned, informative, and calm. Read his column on Haikasoru, “World SF, Worth Reading BEFORE developing an opinion”:

The problem is that Spinrad is just making an appeal to ignorance. He’s not familiar with the many writers of world SF, so he assumes they do not exist. For whatever reason, though he could be familiar with Japanese SF as some of it has been translated into English, he decided to ignore actually existing Japanese SF. He also utterly ignores Chinese SF, which has been a going concern since 1904 at least. China is also the home of Science Fiction World, the most widely read SF magazine on the planet.

[more at Haikasoru]

I think Norman Spinrad just decided he already knew enough, and didn’t need to do the research. Old dog, tricks, etc.

I really must add a wisdom-of-nick-mamatas tag.

As to Norman Spinrad:

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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But I got to do a little shopping in Seattle (for there aren’t any decent Asian groceries on the island)….

Yeah, baby! Furikake! That’s what I’m taking about! (Preserved bits of shrimp or salmon or egg mixed with salt and nori, goes a treat with the moistness of rice.) I ended up using twice the amount shown above.

You can mix in furikake (my favorite), roll a formed rice ball in it (certainly makes them less sticky on the outside), or use furikake as a filling.

Here’s my second-favorite rice ball mold, which makes three large cylinders all at once. ‘Tis awesome.

There are two “levers” at the sides of the mold (the pink tabs). After you fill and press the top of the mold down, you then press down on these tabs to help release the top of the mold again. Very nice!

Tada! And they’re actually pretty well separated into three rolls, too. Just remember not to pack the rice in too tightly into the mold, just fill it—the mold top will press the rice properly.

Then wrap in nori sheets! I’m so bad at wrapping things in nori. Even if the sheets of nori have perforations so that you can measure out appropriate widths for wrapping rice balls….

These two rice balls have tamago furikake in them (egg). The above rolls have ebi (shrimp) and salmon. On the left is my very bad nori wrapping.

I thought that the peanut butter onigiri yesterday were pretty good, so I did two more today. I didn’t wrap them in nori, however, because I don’t think roasted seaweed would go well with peanut butter. But I could be wrong. Nevertheless, I have one for breakfast, and one wrapped in plastic for later today.

I’m not putting this stuff in the fridge; I put the ones for lunch into a plastic container after letting them cool down so that condensation doesn’t form inside the container when I put the lid on. Standard obento procedure.

It’s so nice to get lunch out of the way, because I am so tired….

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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On the other hand, now I will remember him.

Jason Sanford has the skinny. You have to read it to believe it. It starts along the lines of “There is really no non-European SF”, then leads to “Mike Resnick is a better black writer than Octavia Butler”, and….

At the moment, the reaction is mostly tweets of anger, shock, disbelief, and HEAD ASPLODE. Just search Twitter for “spinrad”.

But Tobias Buckell¹ put it best:

Norman Spinrad. Tool.

And now, Mr. Spinrad, this is how I’ll remember you.

1. Tobias Buckell’s books are awesome by the way, and they are also all available on the Kindle now, as well as the ever-popular paper format!

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Ticinus River is a little skirmish—well, not to the Romans, I suppose—next to the Ticinus River, but all the river does is run along one side, not trapping anyone on the other side of it. Although don’t underestimate terrain on the edges of the board; in the game of the battle of Crimissos River, Timoleon only managed to not get killed by Carthaginian’s Sacred Band because his unit could get to the hills (representing bluffs) on the far edge of the board.

Anyways, returning to the Ticinus, basically it was a very one-sided battle. Publius Scipio underestimated the Carthaginian cavalry and marched straight into their red-squared horses (the heavy horses, who hit with 4 dice instead of 2 for the Roman light foot) and got out-flanked by the green-circle horses (light cavalry, who run very fast) on either side with good leaders (Maharbal¹ and Mago). The scenario claims Hasdrubal was in the thick of the battle, charging with the heavy cavalry, and managing not to die, or even get all that close to dying. However, the war council leader is listed as Hannibal, and seeing as “Hasdrubal” was competent, I’m inclined to believe the scenario is mistaken and that was really Hannibal.

Scipio did have medium cavalry, but not enough leadership (actually, more like almost not any; he was the only Roman leader on the field) in either flank to make up against the light cavalry coming straight at him. The Carthaginian side quickly got to their six flags, and the Romans only managed to get one.

It was all over very quickly. In the game, Scipio almost escaped. Almost.

In history, Scipio was able to return, wounded. He attempted to warn the other Roman leaders about what had happened. This did not go over well.

“Hah! You pansy, you got beaten by a bunch of ponies!”
“But… no… you don’t understand… red ponies, green ponies!… so horrible… ” [dies]

Actually, in history Scipio managed to survive and eventually steal some green ponies of his own. Meanwhile, the Romans did not learn to respect the ponies, much to their grief, which they apparently did not learn from until Scipio came back.

In summary: RESPECT THE PONIES.

1. I know, sounds like something cats hock up.

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It was on really nice paper. Quite upscale for a form letter. It’s a little too nice to recycle. And also a little too heavy to just throw away, though that would have been nicely dramatic.

So I shredded it.

I feel so much better.

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