Last week, I was sitting in the lunchroom reading the Powers Encyclopedia when the Vice President of Program Leadership walked in, glanced at the cover of what I was reading, and remarked, "That's a great comic."

Wait, what, someone at this company read Powers?! He did, in fact. And he was a huge comic book geek! We talked comics for quite a while, and he recommended to me Chew, by John Layman and Rob Guillory, which sounded interesting. I poked around the Internet and found that it was actually a huge success for a new comic; it had completely sold out several runs. Sounded like the Hot New Thing in comics. And then, in a brilliant marketing move, they put out the first trade today—collecting issues #1-5—on the same day that issue #6 came out, making it the perfect time to jump on the Chew train.

In the world of Chew, a bird flu pandemic leads to the deaths of millions...and the outlawing of chicken. The FDA is the new Homeland Security, the most powerful law enforcement agency on the planet, and they declare Chicken Prohibition. They investigate cases of black market chicken, chicken speakeasies—yes, I said chicken speakeasies—and other chicken-related illegal activity. It is as yet unclear whether other kinds of poultry like turkey and quail are kosher or not.

The newest recruit to the FDA Special Crimes Division is Tony Chu, a totally unstereotypical Asian-American. He's hired because he's a Cibopath, which means that whenever he eats something, he gets impressions of its past. If he eats an apple, he gets feelings about the tree it grew on, what pesticides were used, and when it was harvested. If he eats a hamburger, he gets feelings about...the slaughterhouse. How is this useful in crimefighting?

You know how in Pushing Daisies, Ned can bring dead people back to life and ask them how they died?

In Chew, Tony can bite into corpses and gather information from them.

As his partner, Agent Mason Savoy, says: "You're going to eat terrible things, all in the name of justice." (Agent Savoy, by the by, is described by the artist as "the lovechild of Orson Welles and a grizzly bear." As his name suggests, he has a very British way of speaking, which is a good contrast to Chu's downbeat straight man.)

There's another character of importance, Amelia Mintz, a food critic who is a Saboscrivner. This means that she can write about food so vividly that you can literally—literally—taste it. Whether it's scrumptious or repulsive, you will feel as if you've eaten it.

In the first five issues, Layman establishes the world of the comic and hints at bigger mysteries like the suggestion that there's a...wait for it...conspiracy surrounding the cause of the bird flu and a whole lot of bizarre events in issue #4 that will surely be explored in the future. The first story arc covers one smaller mystery too; this is essentially a detective comic, after all. The comic is clever, wryly narrated, and laugh-out-loud funny, though I don't know how long it will take for the novelty of the premise to wear off. Guillory's art is reminiscent of Gabriel Bá's in The Umbrella Academy (Savoy even resembles Hargreaves), offbeat and pretty, perfect for a slightly absurdist comic. Although Layman does name Y: The Last Man as an influence in that he wanted to take a high concept—CHICKEN PROHIBITION!—and extend it to its logical, real-world conclusions, you don't want realistic pencils in a book that so frequently features its main character, er, taking a bite out of crime.

Check out the first volume, the aptly named Taster's Choice, for a mere ten bucks. See if you can spot the cute Lost shout-out.

And think twice before you bite into that turkey tomorrow. You don't know where it's been.

But Tony Chu would.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Coyote link (Portland-oriented) with good info: http://www.oregonlive.com/pets/index.ssf/2009/04/coping_with_neighborhood_coyot.html

I've been anti-outdoor-cats for years, even though I was raised with "indoor/outdoor" cats. This coyote info supports my suspicions that it is unsafe/cruel to allow cats to roam out of doors. For the cats, as well as for local wildlife. (Although in this particular case I'm sure the coyote would enjoy the free meal.)

Article on cats and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest.

Cats account for nearly 40% of the animal intakes at our Wildlife Care Center, the number one cause of injury by a wide margin. This statistic includes animals wounded in direct attacks by cats, animals orphaned after cats have predated on their parents, and healthy youngsters removed from the wild by citizens concerned about imminent predation by cats. Cats are also the number one cause of mortality at our Center. Because of the trauma and infection associated with cat predation, animals injured in cat attacks have only a 16% chance of survival, less than a third of the survival rate of all other causes of injury combined. Wildlife rehabilitation centers across the state and the nation report very similar experiences and what we see is only the tip of the iceberg; numerous studies conservatively estimate that cat predation accounts for hundreds of millions of bird deaths each year.(1)

...

Those who would dismiss urban wildlife populations as ecologically insignificant fail to understand that the warblers passing though our backyards, neighborhoods, and parks are exactly the same birds that travel thousands of miles from their breeding grounds in the north to their wintering sites in Central and South America. Too often urbanites fall into the trap of believing wildlife is something only to be protected “out there” beyond our urban growth boundaries. When it comes to migratory birds, we need to be just as concerned about what is happening in our own backyards.

...

We hear from many cat owners — often the same people who are bringing us injured cat-caught wildlife — that their cat is only happy if it is allowed to roam free. This attitude has perpetuated a sickening cycle of death not only for wildlife but for cats as well. The average lifespan of an outdoor cat is less than 3 years, compared to 15–18 years for cats that are housed indoors.(3) Cat owners who allow their cats to roam free are putting their pets at direct risk from cars, poisons, traps, conflicts with domestic and wild animals, and human cruelty.

Free-roaming pet cats are a primary source of feral cat populations (via breeding or going feral themselves). More than 7,000 stray cats were delivered to the Oregon Humane Society and Multnomah County Animal Control during 2005. The total number of cats delivered to shelters statewide during 2005 (strays and surrenders) was over 49,000 — the highest annual total since 1992. Of those, 48% were euthanized.(4) The American Veterinary Medical Association has referred to the proliferation of free-roaming abandoned and feral cats as “a national tragedy of epidemic proportions.”(5) The Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon has written that “despite outward appearances, generations of domestication” have left feral cats “without many of the natural adaptation necessary for life outside. They do not ‘regain their instincts’ and they do not thrive. Starvation, disease, trauma and the stresses of continual reproduction plague their lives.”(6) Animal advocacy groups including the American Veterinary Medical Association, Humane Society of the United States, Washington Progressive Animal Welfare Society, and Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon all recommend housing pet cats indoors.

Indoor cat campaign info.

Tweaks and enhancements

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3. We've upgraded from Beacon to Facebook Connect to improve dual posting. If you've already signed up for Facebook Beacon, you're good to go. If you wish to update your Facebook Connect setting, visit Account Privacy settings and scroll down to the option labeled: "Send information about my updates to Facebook." You can choose Always or Ask each time. Remember to save (on the bottom left corner of the page). To learn more, check out FAQ 249. While we're on the subject, if you happen to be visiting that side of town, please join our Facebook fan page for a touch of home away from home.
4. You'll now receive the Writer's Block Question of the Day in the body of email notifications. To sign up for Writer's Block notifications, visit writersblock and choose the Watch Community option. Next, update your Writer's Block notification settings by checking the box to the right of "Someone posts a new entry to writersblock."
5. Paid and permanent users can now view, add, and edit Notes of commenters. Notes will appear beside the username of comment posters (instead of stars) on S1-themed comment pages.

Send some lovin' thanks to your friends with our holiday vgifts!

Photos of the week

We're so delighted with the immense talent of our growing, global lj_photophile community that we've decided to introduce a poll. Each week, we'll choose a half-dozen photos (based on user comments and staff feedback) and ask you to select a photo of the week. The winning photo will be announced in the next newsletter. If possible, please limit photo size to 350x350 to ensure that images display properly on friends pages. We want to thank you again (and again!) for sharing your passion.

Check out this week's photo poll and more fantastic user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks for joining us. To our American friends, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. To all of our international neighbors, we'll eat a little extra for you!

• 00:32 It just occurred to me that I've managed to not drive through a big clump of tule fog tonight. Woot! #
• 04:46 Live 105 plays "Kiss With A Fist" - still proving to be better than KROQ despite still being kinda lame. #

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My friend Dean's band, Faith in Phantoms, just came out with an album that is streaming at the above link. Perfect songs to get you through the day before Thanksgiving. (No, it's not anything Gothy; more like romantic, easily sing-along-able hand-crafted rock and roll.)

The first part of this is full of a lot of tedious wibbling about the morality of vegetarianism and an odd lack of arguments against the notion that vegetarian food is boring and bland. (When I started to meet vegetarians and vegans in college, I preferred their cooking as they did not lazily depend on meat to provide all the sustenance and flavor of their meals and so introduced me to exotic things like spices and vegetables that did not come out of a can, so I find this idea of vegetarian food being bland bizarre. I grew up on unseasoned meat, vegetables boiled beyond recognition, and mashed potatoes you could spackle walls with; that’s as bland as it gets.)

But from here on it’s great fun to read:

Below I offer an outline for an Eating Animals sequel entitled A 21st Century, Balls-out Decadent Explosion of Naughty Vegetarian Food Exploration Appealing to Degenerates, or for short VEGETABALLS. It will be written by an intrepid vegetable adventurer who wears a cabbage hat and lamé hotpants, a postmodern-molecular-gastronomist-Shackleton of beans who could care less about tradition and “the earth.” VEGETABALLS is for a vegetarianism of chocolate, vodka, fries, and habanero sauce that shows how you can be a selfish drunk fat slob and still do your part to limit the unnecessary suffering of animals.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

http://xkcd.com/667/

http://adam.blog.heroku.com/past/2009/11/24/science_vs_reason/

“Science” and “reason” are two words often spoken alongside each other - almost as if they were the same thing. Both are approaches to seeking truths about the world around us; they complement each other, but each is distinct.

Science is about the external world: measurement, controlled experiment, data collection, empiricism. It tests hypotheses against the hard reality of repeatable experiments with objectively measurable results. Those who practice it are called scientists or empiricists.

Reason, by contrast, is internally generated. It’s building mental models of the world, starting with your internal sense for what is right and pure, from which further truths can be deduced. Those who practice reason are called rationalists.

For most of history, reason was the only known or accepted way to arrive at truths about the world. My hunch is that this is because tools for objectively and accurately measuring distance and time - the two most basic features of the physical world - did not exist up until around four hundred years ago. Man had to look inside himself to discover truth.

When to Apply Reason

In some circumstances, reason excels where science fails. One example is our understanding of a triangle. (I’ve adapted the following from Kant’s example in Critique of Pure Reason.)

A equilateral triangle is a two-dimensional geometric shape with three sides of equal length and equal interior angles. If you wanted to seek this truth through empiricism, you’d need to go out and measure hundreds or thousands of three-sided objects. You might draw out on paper dozens of triangles, whose sides and angles you could then measure.

But no matter how many triangles you might measure, none would ever be exactly a perfect equilateral triangle. If your measuring tools are accurate enough, you’ll always see that there are slight variations between the length of the sides. Science, collecting data from the world around us, cannot tell us the nature of the equilateral triangle.

Reason wins out here because it happens in the purist and abstract realm of the mind. We can easily construct a mental model of a pure equilateral triangle, a geometric shape that has no depth, has three sides of exactly equal length, and three interior angles that exactly equal each other. We can create mathematical statements about this (and yes, that means math is not science). A single rationalist can discover in an evening of thought something that countless man-hours of science cannot.

When to Apply Science

Where does science excel, and reason fail? Reason’s downfall can be its disconnect from objective reality. One dramatic example of this comes from Aristotle, ancient master of reason-driven philosophy.

Aristotle presented one of the first physics models. He based his model on his own informal observation, and fed it through his deductive capabilities, Sherlock Holmes-style. One example: he argued that heavier objects fall at faster rates than lighter objects. This is easily disproved by dropping a heavy object and a light object of the same shape from a high place and seeing which hit the ground first. Yet it took over a thousand years before anyone thought to try this experiment.

Aristotle also held a theory that if you were riding a moving object, and you threw a ball straight up into the air, the ball would land on the ground behind you, rather than coming back to your hand. This seems intuitively correct. But a simple experiment - sitting in a moving vehicle and tossing a ball into the air and catching it - will disprove it. The forward momentum of the ball is identical to that of your hand, and it moves within that frame of reference as if you were standing on the ground. (It’s a good thing for this, because everything on earth is traveling at around 1000 miles per hour.)

Here, science can discover in a few minutes what eons of rationalist thinking could not.

Science and Reason in Business

In the end, both reason and science have their place. When making a decision in a situation where taking measurements is difficult or impossible, the only thing you can do is follow your intuition. The early days of most startups are such an environment. If you’re doing something truly revolutionary, there’s very little you can measure in the beginning to validate your theories. In fact, introducing measurement at this stage can be extremely harmful, because you make what you measure. The measurements you choose (which will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary) will shape what you make, and you will most likely end up making the wrong thing. This is why the intuition-driven entrepreneur thrives in the early stages of a startup.

In a more mature company, however, you can and should measure the hell out of everything. With a clearer path and a large enough pool of data for meaningful statistics to draw on, it’s possible to see trends and draw inferences. You know what you are trying to achieve, and most of those things can be quantified (number of users, quantity of web traffic, dollars of revenue, dollars of profit). Here, the intuition-driven entrepreneur starts to look more like a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy, a disruptive influence on a stable product. A mature company wants empiricists, careful and numbers-driven individuals who are making fine-tune adjustments based on hard data collected on a large scale and over long periods of time.

Okay, I'm reading about the dust-up about Harlequin (the romance writers, y'know) starting their own vanity publishing arm*, and as I go through the comments, every now and then one jumps out at me and breaks my heart into tiny little pieces.

These comments say things like "I know you have to pay to get published..." or "Up until I read this thread, I didn't realize you didn't pay to get published."

Oh sweet god.

You are all very smart people of impeccable taste--or at least, you're reading the blog, so I like to pretend--but just on the slim chance that any of you are not quite as informed on this topic as you could be--NO NO NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO.

The publisher pays you. ALWAYS. You do not pay the publisher. EVER. It does not cost the author to publish the book. The publisher does all that. They take the book and give you money. The only place you sign the check, to paraphrase, is on the back, is over the little line that says "Endorse here."

You don't pay to get published. The publisher pays you for the privilege of taking your book. You invest time and energy and printer cartridges. The publisher always pays you.

(This is also why you don't hire an illustrator--because the publisher hires them. And pays them. That is how it works.)

It's okay if you don't know this stuff. Don't feel dumb. Publishing is weird and arcane and I still take royalty statements to my buddy Deb and go "What does this mean?" and I still don't understand half of it. You're not dumb. Much of this isn't intuitive. You don't have to take my word for it--find the author resource online of your choice. and ask questions. There is no need to be embarassed.

I have produced...uh...if we count Digger volumes...nine books through four publishers. One of the publishers is a very respectable small press, one is a starting-out-but-getting-there small press, and two are big giant scary publishers with New York offices and budgets bigger than a third world country.

All four of them pay me money. Sometimes they pay me lots of money (at least by my standards, which are quite modest) and sometimes they pay me a couple hundred bucks. The big houses can afford to pay me mondo advances, the small presses can afford to take me to dinner.** This is fine.

The point is, they all pay me. I don't pay them. Ever.

The sum total I have spent on any book I have ever written was about two bucks worth of postage to send out the initial draft of Black Dogs, over a decade ago, and I did buy a decent pen in order to sign copies of Dragonbreath. (And by "decent" I mean like 2.99 for a pair. I am not a pen snob.) Then I lost the pen.

The only times money goes the other way is if I'm buying a couple of copies of Digger--I get free copies of each, of course, but sometimes I want to sell them at cons where Sofawolf's not attending--and in this case, they just slap the wholesale price against my royalties. This is pretty normal, and the only example I can come up with off the top of my head. (Okay, no, wait, I sent a print to my editor once because she wanted a signed art print of the Nurk cover for her office. Technically I paid for that, but I didn't stuff twenties in there or anything.)

I do not pay for those big publishing runs. Authors don't. There's a little under thirty thousand copies of Dragonbreath floating around out there. Total cost to me = $0.

If somebody is telling you that the authors do pay for these, they are either misinformed or...well...you're smart wombats, you can figure out yourself why somebody might have a vested interest in believing that you give people money for this sort of thing and who might not have your best interests at heart.

Now. Self-publishing. This is something else. If you are self-publishing, then you know it up front. (If you have to ask if you're self-publishing, there are problems already.) We can talk about this later and in lots of detail if anybody wants. Self-publishing is great for what it does well. I am a big fan of self-publishing. ( I myself have work in a self-published little anthology that our local comics group puts out every year, as a print-on-demand thing. You can buy it on Lulu, it's got some nice stuff in it, a couple of the members sell the occasional copy at conventions. I didn't buy any of the wholesale copies because I don't have table space in my usual con kit. Cost to me = $0. Profit if I HAD sold them at the table = maybe a buck or two. It's a neat little thing to have, but none of us are making money on it, and it's not a publishing credit I'd take seriously. I could talk about this longer, but we're already running long.) Self-publishing is kinda like merchandising. I would self-publish a webcomic the same way that I would get a run of T-shirts printed, I'd sell them at cons or over the internet, like T-shirts, and I would expect to make approximately the same amount of money.

So. To recap. They pay us. That's how it works. If you are paying them, then something is very very wrong.

If you're self-publishing, things are a little more complicated, but you should really only be self-publishing for stuff that self-publishing is good at. If you want to be a bestselling fiction author, that's not something self-publishing is particularly good at. If somebody tells you that self-publishing is good for that and you can make zillions if you give them your manuscript and a lot of money, they are predators and need to be ridden out of town on a rail.

Vanity publishing, which is what Harlequin Horizons is offering, is a scam. They take your money by the fistful and dangle this promise that if you pay enough, you can be a Real Writer. Well, Real Writers get paid, they don't pay. Nobody is so bad a writer that they deserve to lose money for it. If you just want readers, put it on the internet, if you just want a physical copy, go to Lulu, but please, PLEASE don't believe that writers have to pay to be successful. Please.


*There are lots of posts and comment wars. The fast and amusing one is here. The gist is that they're implying heavily to the marks that this is a Real Book with Harlequin and then turning around and telling their real authors, who are Not Amused, that no, no, it's not, nobody should think that, and the books won't actually be on shelves or anything, we just kinda found a way to make money off the slush pile. It is very sad and makes me very angry.

**And in no way shape or form should you think I'm raggin' on the small presses--I am deleriously glad they exist because a big New York house wouldn't ever publish Digger, there's just not the demand. Small presses aren't small because they can't be big, it's because they publish things where demand is small, but often very passionate. I do not know how many copies of Digger have sold, but I'm sure all for volumes are less than the initial, not-very-large-by-industry-standards print-run of Nurk. That doesn't mean Digger's bad, it's just specialized.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

• 13:10 It's really weird to glance through the @SinsOtheflesh follower page and notice people I don't directly know are currently in my hometown. #

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Two of my favorite shows had Thanksgiving episodes the week of Thanksgiving! Oh, television scheduling, how do you do it?

( Dexter )

( How I Met Your Mother )

I do wonder what sort of television show Orphans' Thanksgiving will be like this year.

---

Inspired by silveronthetree, I am also doing the First Lines Meme!

1. Pick 10 of your favorite books or series.
2. Post the first sentence of each book. (If one sentence seems too short, post two or three!)
3. Let everyone try to guess the titles and authors of your books.

1. [Character]: It's hard being left behind. I wait for [Character], not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. (The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, guessed by jeeperstseepers and latropita)

2. I was born with water on the brain. (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, guessed by insanityjones)

3. Two tires fly. Two wail. / A bamboo grove, all chopped down / From it, warring songs....is the best that Corporal [Character] can do on short notice—he's standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question. (Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, guessed by the_narration and scifantasy)

4. It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. (The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, guessed by insanityjones and latropita)

5. Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable. (Dealing with Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, guessed by latropita)

6. On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. (Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, guessed by jenepel and aderyn)

7. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it. (The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, guessed by jeeperstseepers)

8. The first time was like this. (Jumper, by Steven Gould, guessed by incidentist)

9. At first, the new owner pretends he never looked at the living room floor. (Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk, guessed by ahtrap)

10. From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss [Character] still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes that [Character] thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. (Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, guessed by musesfool and punzerel)

As a side note, I wanted to use A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but couldn't decide what the first line was.

How perfect would these be for the Good Faeries Ball at Winterfest?

I don't know how to make myself buy myself things.

Edit: I do have a beautiful pair of elfin earrings I save for special occasions, so I don't really need these. I'd rather save my money for finds at the festival, anyway.

But they sure are pretty.

me: This MLIA thing is good too. I like it but a lot of it seemed so American-teenager that I can't stand to read it for too long.
me: Once they get out of high school they'll learn that a lot of those things are a lot less weird than they now seem to think they are :)
tartful_dodger: Only if they then proceed to move to england and live in a perverse bisexual commune.
me: ::laughs:: If only
me: I realize you may have a point there

My shit is awesome. You might not even be cool enough for me to want to sell it to you.

My aforementioned attempt at a Thanksgiving dinner is going ahead this Sunday. Olly and Dan have kindly suggested it is held at their house, as they have a lot more space, a giant dining room table, and at least the possibility of watching the standard post-dinner football (of some sort or another... I hear there’s rugby on that day), though I’m sure there will also be games or some such for the rest of us.

I really really need to know who’s coming, though, so I know how much food to get (and, roughly, of what kind) and I’m hoping to do that ASAP. So if you’re interested, please click ( here and see if your name's included )