I Hate the New Normal.

Tendonitis, they tell me: chronic, and calcified, and apparently dating from the time I dislocated my shoulder while surf-kayaking in 1991. Now, after almost two decades of peaceful dormancy the fucker decides to wake up and turn me into the One-Armed Wonder throughout the holidays— apparently provoked by too many lame-ass bench presses and one catalytic arm-flail while avoiding a faceplant on sheer ice.

It's gotten a lot better on its own over the past couple of weeks, but now appears to have stabilized in Forget all about me until you try doing an exercise and then I will fuck you up mode. Physio, they say, should take off the edge, but I may still have to change my exercise regimen. Bad enough that we're in the depths of that part of the year known as "The Plumpening"; now I've got stalagmites gumming up my rotator cuff. Fuck.

By the way, who was it that left their pants behind on my couch during Squiddance '08? The navy-blue ones with the really skinny legs and some kind of big fabric evagination where the scrotum should be?

Whoever it was, you can pick 'em up any time.

Why Sploggers Should be Slowly Disembowelled and Fed to my Cats

The Splogbots finally found the 'crawl— I got a few dozen link-farm comments ("MsPoOE Your blog is great. Articles is interesting!") scattered throughout the archives in just a couple of hours. So with great regret, I've imposed that Turing test option on potential commenters. Sorry. If anyone can suggest a less onerous way of keeping out the bogus stuff I'd be happy to consider it.

Bye the bye, I wonder why I would so gladly, and without any compunctions whatever, slowly torture to death whatever lowlife cocksucker is responsible for generating these things. Seriously. If there was a button I could push that would result in said spammer being lowered slowly into a vat of nitric acid, along with all his/her immediate relatives, I would push it without hesitation. And yet, spam and splog are really such minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things. Hit delete. Define a new filter (although that's often more of a pain in the ass than it's worth — especially when you refuse to abandon Eudora until Thunderbird gets off its ass and supports tabs). I encounter more pervasive advertising every time I walk down Yonge Street, every time I turn on the TV. I'm a biologist; I more than anyone should recognize the venerability of the parasite niche. So why do I (or, be honest: why do we) reserve such homicidal fury for the spammers?

I'm thinking, it's because we've internalized our hard drives as home. These fuckers aren't putting up billboards over the expressway — they're coming into our fucking living rooms, they're papering their crude and off-putting crap all over the inside of our exocrania. This becomes more than irritant; this becomes a violation, and it arouses a visceral desire to inflict extreme, protracted, and ultimately fatal agony on the bastards. This is brain invasion.

Or is it just me?

I'm not dead yet.

Just another couple of placeholders while I shovel sand against the tide.

Placeholder #1: the observation of a certain correlation in the skiffy community:

Group A: "Blindsight would definitely be my choice for the Hugo, if I were voting. Which I'm not."

Group B: "Blindsight is good/crappy/great for wrapping fish, but it didn't get my vote."

I suppose I should take some pride in the evident fact that my biggest fans tend to not be joiners. I like having independent readers. ('Course, I wouldn't've minded having the Hugo either...)

Placeholder #2: the observation of a certain brick-shittingly scary page on Amazon:

Right here. The new anthology from Solaris. Click on the cover image, and — oh, look. There's my name.

These guys haven't even seen my story yet. I was supposed to send it yesterday, but they gave me until Friday because I told them it was 7K's worth of steaming crap. (Which was marginally better than the 9K's worth of steaming crap it had been two days earlier, but still.) And I'm still so unhappy with the way it reads — you ever write a story where each individual scene works fine, but the overall result looks like disjointed fragments of "Red Dwarf", "Law and Order", and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" jammed haphazardly together like fortune cookies in a wood chipper? — that I'm thinking now the only way to salvage this mess is to jettison two thirds of it and reduce the narrative to a single stream-of-consciousness unfolding as the protagonist waits in a checkout line to buy chicken bullion cubes. (Yes. You read that right. That would be a massive improvement.)

As for the Solaris guys, their faith in my abilities is either so great it borders on religious mania, or so small that they've faked up an Amazon cover just to light a fire under my ass. What are they gonna do if I hand in something completely unusable?

In fact, what am I writing this for? I gotta get started.