On (writing) Vacation!

Yes, I'm on vacation! I'm a little ways into week 2 of a 2 week vacation from designing D&D for Wizards of the coast.

What fun, relaxing activities am I happily engaging? Why, finishing off a novel, the third one in an FR trilogy dealing with aboleths and other Far Realm nasties. Oh yes, I know how to par TAY on my time off.

Seriously though, I have been digging living the life of a "writer" over this last week. Sure, some days are harder than others. Some days I mess around online, updating twitter/facebook, and writing community blog posts when I should be writing. But, everything's coming along great. I'm hitting the daily word count I've set for myself. And even this far in, I'm finding synchronicities and plot easter-eggs I left for myself by purest of accidents which turn out to be exactly the plot twist I wanted all along.

So... back to it!

Home Sick, But Working

I've been home sick the last few days with a throat that has, apparently while I sleep, decided that wrestling sandpaper-coated alligators would be fun.

However, I have all my current work files, so never fear--Neither throat nor pain not virus nor lack of sleep stays this designer from the swift completion of his appointed pages.

On the other hand, out of fear of infecting my fellow students (and, let's face it, low energy on my part), I haven't been able to do any jujutsu or kickboxing since last weekend, and that's making me anxious.

A Terrible Beauty

In order to provide just that much more visibility for A Terrible Beauty, an old bar under new management, I'm going to lift this post in its entirety from designer and author extraordinare, Jeff Grubb (I apologize for the impertinence, Jeff).

I don't write much about my writers' group, the Alliterates, except, of course, to brag about our recent triumphs. It is not that we are a secret society or anything, bent on world domination, but that we do enforce a polite zone of silence on our discussions. Let me lift the lid, however, on one thing about the group.

We are bar-killers. At least, the west coast team is. While the midwesterners have had a very good run at their local bar, we have gone through taverns at relatively quick rate. In one case, we have closed the same bar between four and six times (sometimes it would reopen with new owners but the same name).

The bar in question is located in downtown Renton,201 Williams Ave S. (here's the map for it under a previous name) and should by all intents and purposes be a hands-down success. The location is on the edge of where the town proper meets residential, there is ample parking, and it is situated on the haunches of the new urban townhouses that have been a part of "Rising Renton". The building is a former bank with a drive-in window and high ceilings and the original vault.

The structure had become the Cedar River Brewpub by the time our merry band first arrived, the old lobby dominated by silver tanks. With its demise, it was vacant, then replaced with The Giant's Causeway, its first Irish incarnation, which replaced the tanks with a beautiful bar supposed hauled over from the old country, keeping local and Dublin time. After that it was an Irish-lite pub called Finnegans (perhaps a couple incarnations of this) with a lot more flatscreens showing sports.

And now, in a quick turnaround where one of the former bartenders has bought the joint, it is now A Terrible Beauty.

The name itself comes from a favorite book belonging to the new owner Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, coupled with a chance remark from a friend. And it originally comes from a poem by Yeats, commemorating the 1916 Easter Dublin Uprising:

Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

(Add one more piece of fate as the color green belongs now to another uprising, half a world away from Ireland).

The bar itself is greatly improved in its latest incarnation. It has 75% fewer flatscreens, the old bar is still there, and they have resurrected some of the furnishings from its previous incarnations. Its back patio (outside the drive-in-window) has a pair of gas fireplaces (ours blew out - still a couple bugs in the system).

And the food is wonderful, most of the menu cooked from scratch, and ranges from traditional to experimental. Thick cubes of Camembert cheese deep-fried as an appetizer were delicious. I asked the waitress for a recommendation and ended up with "Death by Mac and Cheese", a five cheese and garlic dish that hit the spot perfectly on a cool Monday night.

Now here's the deal - we, the Alliterates, are not enough to keep this incarnation of our local public going on our own. We meet once a month, and face it, we're writers - that means at least one of us is between gigs at any time and therefore on salads and small beer. So it is up to the rest of the motley crew in the Renton area (including those at nearby, say, Wizards of the Coast) who are looking for an after-hours place to check it out.

"The Terrible" is not so terrible. In fact it's a beauty.

June 2009

Can you believe it's already June? I can't. I'm stunned. I remember calculating as a 16 year old what my age would be in the year (gasp) 2000! Now it's nearly a decade later than that.

But so it goes, whirling ever onward, eh? I feel like a tumbleweed caught by the wind of time. I wonder how far I'll be blown?

Actually, it's not so much that I'm being blown forward. It's more like everything around me is a tumbleweed, hurtling into the future, while I stand rooted like a prairie fencepost.

Anyone got a hang glider?

What Can You Do for the Earth?

Actually, the question is, what can you do to improve the ability of the Earth to sustain you and me in the manner to which we've become accustomed?

Tomorrow, April 22nd, is Earth Day. Like New Year's Day, is a chance for you to join in with millions of others with a resolution. 

I have one easy idea for you: Cut beef and chicken from your diet once a week. See? Easy. Why does this help the Earth? Because industrial-scale farming is one of the biggest contributors to ecological decline around. Clearing land for cattle grazing alone is responsible for killing more species per year than I want to think about. 

Another easy idea: Give money to organizations that promote education about human sexuality and the distribution of birth control. Why? The root of the problem is there are more people on this planet than the planet has the renewable resources to support. And our population keeps growing. What say we try to bring that population growth curve down some? (Before some external natural force does it for us, as in inexorably will.) 

On that cheerful note... Happy Earth Day ;-).

Shall We Stop Dithering and Act on Climate?

Actual scientific consensus has it that human activity (which includes C02 release, methane release, positive feedback from increased humidity in the air due to warming over the poles, and so on) is the cause of the current climate shift, a shift which seems to be happening more quickly than any in the geologic record. Solar activity and natural variations have been ruled out by experiments. Truly, they have.

If someone decides that the bulk of the scientists who study climate are not reliable sources of evidence because the evidence is inconvenient, then evidence-based argument becomes useless with that person—they’ve gone to a place where reason can no longer touch them.

I try not to be that kind of person on a wide variety of topics, including this one. But since the scientific method is the best tool we have available to approach truth, it is the tool I apply.

And the truth that seems to be emerging is that Earthly species are dying off as quickly or more quickly than anything we’ve seen in the geologic record—we’re living in the midst of the fifth great extinction.

Unfortunately, trying to develop robust forms of alternative energy only begins to address the problems we face.

Be that as it may, I’m not willing to throw up my hands and say the problem is too big to be solved. I would prefer the human race reach cultural adult hood and move forward; and I don’t even have children.

But alternative energy is a good place to start, because C02 is the biggest contributor to climate change (according to the scientists that study climate, noted above). And there is something we can do: support alternative energy programs,and politicians who support alternative energy programs, even those that from a strictly narrow financial viewpoint will lose money. We need to widen our viewpoint beyond next quarter’s profits and recognize longer term trends. If we can’t use evidence and reason to see wider time horizons and act on our conclusions, the best climate models we have predict we’re going to crash headlong into a breakdown far worse than the current economic recession.

Time to Legalize Drugs

This Britannica article proposes that the US and other major developed countries should consider legalizing drugs.

It makes the point that whole countries are being destabilized by illegal drug trade, and we are thereby funding terrorist organizations through illegal drug trafficking.

Given this unfortunate reality, we should compare and contrast outcomes. What is the "Least Bad" policy we can adopt?

On first take, no, I don't want to see heroine on sale in the liqueur store. Too many chances for people who'd never otherwise indulge to try it out, even with underage laws and other restrictions.

But!

I'd MUCH rather see that than the illegal drug money continue to flow into the coffers of terrorists hoping to afford, oh, I don't know, a loose nuke.

So, compare and contrast--would you rather see Jim in the gutter with a needle, or more planes being flown into prominent buildings, something else we can't imagine, or something we can imagine in our worst dreams: a mushroom cloud over some nearby city.

Legalize drugs. It is the "least bad" policy when you think about it.

Great Places To Take A Date

If you're interested in places in and around Seattle I think are great places to take a date based on personal experience, check out my guest entry here at Geek's Dream Girl on the topic. Thanks e!

Is it lame to be smart?

Because I like superhero movies, I watched the movie Zoom, which turns out to be for kids a little younger than me. But I liked it... except for a couple strange bits that made me realize how prevalent the message: it's lame to be smart.

"It's lame to be smart," hmm, I think we've gone off the rails somewhere . . .

The worst scene in Zoom along these lines was when the lead Tim Allen walks into a room filled with adults in lab coats sitting at monitors doing, you know, science-y stuff. His first words? "Raise your hand if you do NOT live in your mother's basement." No one raised their hands.

Like it or not, funny or not, shows aimed at children that contain these sorts of tropes reinforce the idea that science, and by extension the scientific method/evidence-based thinking is something to be avoided instead of embraced.

The answer is simply to be on the lookout for these sorts of unintended messages in our media. If you have children, point out when you see these instances. The best remedy is a little inoculation and sunlight.

Don't forget to mail in your Ballot (for Huff!)

Please mail in your ballot today, and vote for Sherril Huff, the current King County Director of Elections. To learn more about Sherril go to http://www.electsherrilhuff.com.

To be honest, I've relied on Jeff Grubb to do the heavy lifting on researching who to vote for in this special election, and Mr. Grubb says Huff is the one. Trusting his instincts and following his reasoning, I agree.

Audible Reading Chapter 7 Plague of Spells

Wizards posted a podcast of me reading Chapter 7 of Plague of Spells HERE. Take a listen! (there is about a 10 second gap in the middle as of this posting, hopefully that'll be fixed up soon enough).

-http://media.gleemax.com/podcasts/DnD_Episode32b.mp3

Social Media: Is it Good?

My gut reaction to the explosion of social media like Twitter and Facebook is that they waste time.

Is that true? Certainly it seems like people are displacing old activities in order to spend more time interacting online.

If the displaced activity is watching TV or playing a non-social video game, I guess the interaction FB and Twitter provide is far superior.

But is the base premise even correct? Are people doing less "worthwhile" stuff because of excess connectivity?

Who's to judge what's worthwhile? Humans are inherently social creatures and being social is something that brings most of us happiness simply because of our biology. Thus social interactions, even mediated online, are enjoyable. And we should seek out enjoyment when we can in this life, I believe. It could be in some cases people might forgo actual physical interaction in order to stay home and post to their social media site.

I find it works the opposite; social media sites improve my ability to interact with a wider group of people when I see them in the flesh, if for no other reason than I have already forged a connection with them that is current. I know what they've been up to lately, they know them same with me. We have common points of reference.

Of course, "worthwhile" could be defined as doing your job in a timely manner. Do people who routinely check Facebook do worse in their jobs or more frequently miss deadlines? We require an actual evidence gathering mission with a large sample size rather than anecdotes here. All I can say is that I enjoy checking my social sites a few times a day WITHOUT it becoming an obstacle toward getting my daily work completed.

This does require some mental discipline, I won't lie. But lots of temptations to not do work require mental discipline to a greater or lesser degree, and we've figured out how to manage them--shouldn't be too much harder to figure this one out.

Or so say I.