Stained Glass Wings

12:05pm: more mutterings
+: what a wonderful modern age we live in, particularly with reference to communications technology.

+: friends.

-: missing most friends most of the time as an inevitable consequence of the size of the planet we live on.

-: poor impulse control combined with wonderful modern communications technology leads to sleep-shortness and not getting so much house-cleaning done as I had intended.

+: raccoon wandering around behind the office yesterday.

+: meeting with $boss2 and $sysadmin about needing more disk space.

-: $sysadmin still insistent that we clean up existing disks some more before he will give us another actual disk; this less than entirely useful because a) we have not permissions to clean up accounts for people who have long since left, and b) the amount of extra space we need really is more than this can possibly retrieve.

+: single-city cultural victory to the Sumerians last night.

+: patisserie open this morning.

-: $programmer not yet in because of car issues.

-: Principal development server still down because of power source issues.

+: Third part of The Third Ether feels ready to go.

-: hardware for transferring stuff from writing laptop to anywhere else is in Britain with papersky.

1:37pm: work is the curse of the drinking classes
Poll #1219892 something new to fiddle with.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

What shall I do with my evening, o great and wise internet ?

1:59pm: addendum
OK, so why do so many of you think I would like Wall-E ?

4:33pm: writing noodle: sampling error
This containing things I have been mulling over for some time, and recently again because of shweta_narayan's recent posts on race:

One has a story. The story takes place in a world that is complex in realistic ways.

Given that there is a general preference for stories to contain characters, who are individuals (ideally well-developed ones), it is inevitable that each given character will have a specific ethnicity, gender, age, somatype, sexual preference (OK, there are stories where that last need not be visible, but it would seems unlikely to fit most stories for all of those to be invisible to the reader), and... specific values of other traits where human beings vary, and where at different times in different ways some values of each trait have been considered more positive than others. (Excluding for the moment the option of setting one's story entirely among angels, aliens, AIs, or nonhumans beginning with any of the other letters of the alphabet.)

Given also a standard-sized novel with a relatively restricted number of characters (I love 253 but it does not strike me as a mode with which there is that much to be done as a general option), one is going to have a limited sampling, in one's heroes and in one's villains, of all those traits. Given any realistic world's culture and history, there will be some skews in that sampling; whatever the people of Generic Small Isolated Fantasyland Village should happen to look like, it would break my suspension of disbelief for them not to look like each other, to a first approximation.

The problem; how then to write a story with protagonists and antagonists, who are kind of inherently sympathetic and unsympathetic respectively, that is as proof as possible against people saying "This villain is ethnicity X, this hero is ethnicity Y, they are clearly meant to reflect thus-and-such real-world ethnicities and therefore you're a racist," or "This ethnicity that is oppressed in your world must be judged on how well it reflects the reality of this ethnicity which is oppressed in the real world," or "Your world does not have problem A in it so therefore you are denying that problem A happens in the real world" and so on. (There is an awful lot of discussion on this subject online to which my considered response to "well, I think X is clearly the issue that matters here" is "That's because you are an idiot", but this does not tend to make for constructive discourse so I avoid such debates.)

I write in genre specifically because I do not feel real-world settings are of necessity the best way to address real-world things worth talking about; one of the great things SF and fantasy have to recommend them is being able to talk to things from outside, or to address some aspects in depth without getting entangled in endless ramifications in other directions.

8:24pm: as you have all been waiting with bated breath for a decision...
Thus far, the successful applicants for "what to do with my evening" have been buy beer on the way home, clean the apartment, read my book, and water the plants. It all seems so much more interesting when I get people to vote on it.

The bath is coming next, probably not that hot because of it being 30 with humidity to 36. The writing may come after that, depending, but going out again will not because right now I really can't face the idea of putting clothes back on. Also, mopping the kitchen floor, which wants to be the last thing I do before either going out for a bit or going to bed.