Category: The Ramble (page 152 of 462)

Summer is a much better time to go poking around and taking macro photos outside — though winter yields its own bounty now and again. Still, going through some older photos, seems like a good time to pop in here and post a couple insect macros I missed. Not great photos in terms of their clarity, maybe, though I like the composition.

Or, if you want a little grubby millipedey critter coiled in a rotten stump:

There you go. Couple more buggy photos.

Though if you really want some great photos —

Shots from the Women’s March from every continent.

Beautiful and inspiring. Hope is back — so let’s keep it back. (We sadly were not able to attend any marches — the illness my son is just getting over is the illness my wife is now in the thick of, so it did not seem wise to go out and infect like, scads of people with viral nastiness.)

NOW GO FORTH AND CONQUER MONDAY, FOR IT INSULTED YOUR MOTHER

Today’s challenge is as apt as you want it to be — the theme of your as-yet-unwritten story must be, we need hope in the face of of hopelessness. It’s a bit dramatic-sounding, but themes are rarely served by a soft touch. So, that’s your task. Tackle a short piece of flash fiction that deals with that as its central theme: why we need hope in the face of its opposite.

You’ve got, mmm, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due by Friday, January 27th, noon EST.

Post online, give us a link below, etc.

I set that as my 7AM reminder this morning.

I set it because, I dunno, maybe up until this point I’ve been hanging onto a loose and fraying thread that clearly, surely, some savior force would come in and reverse what was coming. The vote would prove to be rigged. The “OMG RUSSIA DID IT” investigation would advance to the point of no return. Obama would rip off Comey’s mask and reveal Old Man Giuliani underneath, who would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you crazy Millennials. Joe Biden would challenge malarky-havin’ Comrade Dumpkov to a ski contest on the K2 and he would win the day against the rich punks for all us underdogs and underachievers. I dunno what the fuck I thought was going to happen. Probably nothing, but maybe something.

Maybe?

Please?

Yeah, no.

No one is coming. Our plane crashed, and we’re alive, and no help is on its way.

That sounds dramatic, I know, especially to people who think this isn’t a big deal — but we’re staring down the barrel of a president whose stated intent is to sand down nearly every foothold we’ve gained in the last several decades. Worse, he’s got the run of the table with a Congress who has already begun their monstrous rending and flaying. Everything’s on the chopping block: women’s rights, health care, the free market, arts, humanities, science, education, national parks, bald eagles, anyone who has ever been marginalized, you, me, all of humanity, the whole fucking planet. Pounds of flesh cut from those who cannot afford to lose them, and given over to the vampire kings above us who want to bleed us all dry. It’s not dramatic to think that, at the very best, we’re going to experience an existential tumult over the next four years. At the worst, I dunno. At the worst we get hill cannibals, probably. Nuclear hill cannibals.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together.

That means something. I don’t mean that in a glib, WE ARE THE WORLD way, I don’t mean it to be some kind of shallow sing-a-long. I mean that our president — the one who comes with the biggest winking-butthole-asterisk of all time by being a president who won by losing, who won with the help of shady Kremlin no-good-niks, who won by surfing to the White House on a churning tide of sexual assault and racism and inane non-policies, who still hasn’t filled most positions, who wants to fill his cabinet with the swamp monsters he exposed by draining the swamp — our president is way the fuck outnumbered. This is our asterisk president. This is a president who we didn’t earn, who didn’t win, who has a historically low approval rating and a historically high disapproval rating. He works for us, and we outnumber him by heroic numbers.

That’s a real thing. That’s truth. It’s not arguable that he’s surrounded by a miasma of illegitimacy. He can earn his way out of that — he can clear the fog by doing right for all Americans, not just the richest among us — but let’s be clear, the likelihood of that happening creates betting odds no gambler would take.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together, and we can save each other.

You’ll say to me now, what does that mean? What does that mean, we can save each other?

My honest answer is, I don’t yet know. Not really. Because I don’t know what’s coming down the pike. I know the next four years will be contentious, but I don’t know if they’ll be ruinous or simply bizarre. But here’s what I think it means.

I think it means we can be there for each other. And we can be kind. We can help each other up.

It means we can use what power we have to help those who have less power.

It means making each other laugh, because oh Sweet Saint Fuck, we’re gonna need to laugh.

It means staying involved, and keeping up the pressure, and using our voice and our vote not just for our behalf but for the behalf of our neighbors.

It means sharing the things we love: art and books and movies, quotes and images and ideas.

It means knowing who our enemies are, and pointing our metaphorical weapons to those outside the trench, not to those hunkering down in the mud alongside us.

It means kitten pictures and dog videos and other forms of random comfort, and of course what I mean is otters, because fuck yeah, otters, you can’t deny the healing power of otters.

It means turning an ear to listen and offering a shoulder to cry on and letting people just wordlessly shriek at or near you for as long as they need it.

It means working around the system to find new ways to keep each other afloat — it means giving money to the ACLU or Sierra Club or it means demanding our companies do better for us even when our government won’t, it means finding loopholes and trapdoors that help us to help each other, it means empowering others to do the work when it’s work we can’t do ourselves.

It means harnessing the one-two-punch power of Critical Thinking and Empathy, which not coincidentally are also the names of each of Uncle Joe Biden’s malarky-thumpin’ fists.

It means being good stewards of this planet because we all share it, and no matter what the administration wants you to believe, it’s our responsibility not to fuck it up.

It means creating art and telling stories because stories have power, stories help us through, stories provide a narrative for those of us now and those who come later.

It means helping ourselves and practicing self-care because sometimes before you help someone else with their oxygen mask you gotta make sure yours is on nice and tight.

It means whatever it means going forward.

I’ll be here at the blog and online if you wanna swing by and say hi. Hope you’re doing okay. Fuck the inauguration. Go to a protest. Check out a museum. Read a book. I’ll see you on the other side.

p.s. fuck international fascism

Some folks asked for my Twitter thread the other day about Betsy DeVos and the array of unqualified cabinet members to be somewhere more easily shareable, so here it is.

Share as you see fit.

(Storify link here if you’d prefer to read it that way.)

Yesterday, an author — a bestselling author — went around and did a series of tweets with fake Donald Trump tweets, and these fake tweets were Donald Trump mocking this author’s book. One of those tweets has since gone around the ol’ retweet carousel around 12,000 times. In part because it was retweeted by a number of celebrities, most of whom seemed to believe that it was real. If you look at the tweet and its responses, this is a common theme — a lot of people thought it was real. Which isn’t surprising, because that’s the angle, isn’t it? Trump on any day of the week might be using his global platform as president-elect to (sigh) rant and rail at everything from automakers to world leaders to Saturday Night Live. Listen, let’s be real: if Trump one morning decided to tweet rant about like, penguins, it would not shock any of us. (“Penguins. Totally biased!! Tiny flipers and cant fly. SAD”). It wouldn’t shock us because his Twitter feed is a lunatic’s parade of rage and hurt butts, a constant pouty stream of fragile ego shrieking and wailing from between the bars of its wrought iron cage.

So, to see Obama one day talk about how important books are to him, and what writing has meant for him (seriously, he promoted The Three-Body Problem, holy shit awesome), and then the next day to see Trump railing on some random author’s book — it’s legit believable.

It’s just not true. That’s the first part of the PSA. I’m seeing it go around, so please know:

That Trump tweet is fake.

The author likely didn’t mean any harm here (though since being called on it, it would’ve been nice to see the tweets deleted or at least a public addendum suggesting that they were, indeed, fake). I assume he meant it as something halfway between a joke and a marketing ploy. And I’m sympathetic, because hey, getting word out about your book — even as a bestselling author — is a grim, strange magic. Having something go viral around your book has value, at least in getting attention — ideally, it also gets sales. Hell, I’m helping him with the job just by talking about it. I didn’t know about his book before yesterday, and now I do.

Since that time, though, not only has the tweet gone around the world a couple times, I’ve now seen other writers trying the same thing — mostly on Facebook, actually — again in the vague hopes of I guess doing a bit and also serving the Marketing Gods. And, just as with the original tweet, I’m seeing some people take the bait and think it’s real.

Here’s why this is probably not an ideal marketing strategy.

First, we live in an age of fake news, and sure, I get that maybe you’re trying to lean into that and use that as leverage for so-called “satire” (by the way, satire and marketing ploys don’t go together, and once something is a marketing ploy, it ceases to be satire). But this isn’t The Onion. This isn’t sharp, incisive comedy that is clearly fake. This looks like fake news, and people believed it as such, and even in a world where Comrade Dumpkov is who he is, it’s dangerous to put more kooky words into his mouth and to distract from the reality of the many actually awful things he says. Don’t headfuck us further. We have enough shit to worry about.

Second, there’s the creepy shine of exploitative opportunism here, because just days before, Trump attacked Civil Rights icon, John Lewis, and as a result, that icon’s sales jumped per book by a figure in the hundreds of thousands of percent. Trump is a guy who says, fuck bees, and tomorrow, everybody’s a beekeeper. Trump tells you to eat Trump Steaks and it’s like, okay, those are poison, don’t touch those, you’d be better off eating one of those Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. But the timing here is bad. You don’t really want to come across as an author who thinks, Hey, I can be just like John Lewis, and I’ll fake Trump trash-talking me, right? Even if that’s not what the author thought, it vibes that way. John Lewis is an American icon, and what he had to go through to get here, where he gets yelled at by a bloated ego-buffoon is not currency for you, for me, for any of us. Look at it a different way: would you somehow tweak and twist Black Lives Matter into a way to sell your book? Would you say BOOK LIVES MATTER to sell your book? Do you see where that starts to feel sorta gross, how it feels itchy and uncomfortable using real life and real suffering as rungs on a ladder?

Third, Trump is bad people. He’s advocated sexual assault, he’s advocated banning people based on their religion, he yells at Civil Rights icons and makes racist assumptions about their districts — I’m sure in his quieter hours, he kills and eats bald eagles while wiping his ass with the Constitution. So, looking at him, I have a hard time seeing opportunity. I have a hard time seeing him as a good marketing platform, especially because that platform would springboard from his horribleness. His awfulness isn’t a tool. If you could imagine yourself going back in time and using Actual Hitler as a way to sell your book or your widget or your whatever, then don’t do it with Actual Trump, either. We’re having a hard enough time with this guy, with fake news, with toxicity across social media to try to trade-off on that as some kind of marketing tactic. Again, that’s probably not what that author was doing here. Maybe it was, in all honesty, just a joke. Certainly I’ve made jokes about Comrade Dumpkov, and will continue to, because if we can’t laugh then we’ll chew through the rebar we have to bite on to repress the existential scream that continues to try to escape our faces. But this tweet has gotten bigger than just a joke, and maybe there are better ways. If you’re an author considering aping this tactic, nnnnyeah don’t? And if you’re the author who used the tactic in the first place, maybe now’s a good time to deal with those tweets?

For the rest of us, it is once again a good time to remember that there’s a lot of fakey-fakey stuff out there, and some of it doesn’t mean to be harmful, some of it definitely does, and it’s on us to stay vigilant and keep an eye on verifying what we read and what we spread around.

I have little reason to post that feather, I suppose, except to remind you still that Blackbirds remains $1.99 for your electronic reading doojiggers:

At B&N, Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Google Play.

And as a shiny special bonus, there’s a very nice review at Publishers Weekly for Thunderbird: “This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It’s easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut.” It also gets a shout-out at B&N’s 25 SFF books to read in 2017, so yay.

And that’s it for now.

Go forth and good luck.

Pre-order Thunderbird now: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N