Quote of the Week: I Have Always Loved You-Hoo-Hoo-Hoo

"There's a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is that it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received -- which factor, unfortunately, the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge. A friend of mine reports that all the women he's polled have been enthusiastic advocates of the bold romantic gesture, but this, he suspects, is because they're automatically picturing John Cusack making it, not Steve Buscemi or Peter Lorre or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Often you don't know whether you're the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives."
 - Tim Kreider, "The Creature Walks Among Us," p.12 in We Learn Nothing

The Anti-Woody Allen

This is today's 9 Chickweed Lane, a well-drawn but molasses-slow and idiosyncratic at best comic strip; if its creator allowed commenting on the comic itself, I probably wouldn't bother to post this here:

(click to embiggen)

So, this young man -- I gather he's supposed to be in his twenties -- has an erotic fantasy harem entirely made up of women old enough to be his great-grandmother? The youngest of them is Kelly, who's also been dead the longest (since 1982).

Also, please note that all of these women are dead, and have been dead since at least 2000 -- sure, we'll assume that he knows them all through old movies, but does he live entirely in old movies? (In this strip, that is sadly a possibility.)

Please, creators, remember the old rule: just because you like something, or identify with it, doesn't mean your characters should.

Tiptree Award Winners!

The awards keep rolling along, and this last week saw the gala announcement of the winner of the Tiptree for 2012.

There's a tie this time out, and the joint winners are The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam.

The Tiptree jury doesn't release a shortlist ahead of time -- I think it's because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by making them "losers" -- but they do announce a list of losers with the winner, which strikes me as even worse. (But I'm not them, and it's not my award, so they get to do it their way.)

Those works that were almost good enough to get a Tiptree -- good enough to be mentioned specifically as losing the Tiptree -- for this year are:

• Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts
• Roz Kaveney, Rituals
• M.J. Locke, Up Against It
• Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
• Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath
• Ankaret Wells, Firebrand
• Lesley Wheeler, “The Receptionist” (in The Receptionist and Other Tales)

Congratulations to Kiernan and Salaam, and, to all of the also-rans, try harder next year!

(via Cheryl Morgan, who is completely not to blame for my idiosyncratic take on this)

In the Spirit of the Season

Hey! I just discovered that the Dollyrots' wonderfully snotty "Valentine's Day" is available, right now, for free on NoiseTrade!



Grab it and enjoy it.

And then, if you like it, I'd recommend their middle record, Because I'm Awesome, because it is -- particularly the title song and their cover of "Brand New Key."

Speaking of that, I had to tell The Wife that "Brand New Key" was entirely an extended metaphor for sex recently -- I thought everyone had gotten that memo by now.... 

In Which Robots Are Not As Effective As They Think They Are

Inspired by James Nicoll, I ran my two blogs through two sophisticated analysis engines of the Internet -- aw, who am I kidding? They're both probably hack-jobs put together by a couple of geeks in their spare time, like everything else on the 'net. But it's amusing anyway.

Antick Musings:

• GenderAnalyzer: I am a woman, or at least 51% female
• AgeAnalyzer: I am somewhere between 36 and 50

Editorial Explanations:

• GenderAnalyzer: 88% -- as close to "ineluctably" as you can get -- masculine
• AgeAnalyzer: I am still between ages 36 and 50

That's a huge gap in my gender between two things I write regularly -- 39% of difference. Is it because EE is mostly made up of short posts and dripping in sarcasm? Or is it the stench of politics that drives women away?

Interestingly, the collective wisdom of the crowd is that AgeAnalyzer is less correct -- 59% of the votes are currently "no" -- even though that's not my experience, and it has some wide bands (though still not as binary as male/female).

Does this mean anything at all? No, of course not. But it's yet another tool to poke through things that look like data, which I suppose is moderately useful, at the very least as a way to waste time.