HSU IT Department

All that and more, here in this very entry!

A friend of mine has opened an Etsy store to sell her awesome fabric tote bags. My favorite is the Star Wars one. If you need a tote bag, make this your first stop.

Signups are ongoing over at sshg_giftfest -- there's still space for both authors and artists/crafters so hop on over! I'm thrilled that we have lots of people returning from last year as well as some new faces. Also signups are open at hoggywartyxmas, so start thinking xmassy thoughts!

This past weekend Mr Psmith and I went to the State Fair where we saw, among other things: llamas, sheep, goats (why are their testicles so enormous? why???), adorable baby piglets and monstrous full-grown pigs, and many many flavors of dairy cow including an adorable Jersey calf being raffled off. I wanted to enter but sanity in the form of Mr Psmith prevailed. As always, the food on offer ranged from standard to startling, the latter including a "Gators and Taters" food booth, kangaroo spiedies, and Shark-on-a-Stick. Sadly, we did not get to see the draft horses -- Percherons, Belgians, Friesians, etc. -- which was our main reason for going, as the barn was closed for some reason, drat the luck. But we did get to see the arts and crafts building (quilts! cross-stitch! handmade lace! paintings on sawblades! tiny model rooms!) and the sand sculpture, which is always amazing. One side showed a train going into a tunnel watched by some woodland creatures, including a very alarmed-looking beaver.

My life continues to be far too busy, and sometime between now and the end of September, we have to pack up our entire house. Eek.

Go on, you know you want to :) And don't forget to grab a banner to help spread the word!

Sign Ups begin Sep 7 at sshg_giftfest

Heh heh:

Yes, it's a vending machine that sells Moet & Chandon champagne.

And leave some prompts!




mini_fest 2015 Schedule:
Prompting: August 10
Signups: August 20
Submissions Due: November 20
Posting Starts: December 1

A group of authors have banded together to petition the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon and its stifling of competition in the market for both physical and e-books. I'm very glad to see this and I hope it leads to action on the part of the DoJ.

The letter says, among other things:

In recent years, Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America's readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.

The statistics they cite are pretty stunning: Amazon now controls the sale of more than 75% of online sales of physical books, more than 65% of e-book sales, more than 40% of sales of new books, and 85% of ebook sales of self-published authors.

It's more than a little worrisome that one single corporation has that much say over what is easily available to the general public. Not to mention their detrimental effect on small independent booksellers, who throughout history have been far more sensitive and responsive to local and non-mainstream interests. When the giant gorilla in the room only offers you best-sellers while sitting on and squashing everyone else, it's a little bothersome. Not to mention the fact that Jeff Bezos has admitted in so many words that he doesn't give a rat's ass about books; all those books are loss leaders to Amazon who just uses/sells the data thus gathered. As the longer version of the letter puts it:

The idea that Amazon would intentionally use its power in a way that vitiates the book industry strikes many Americans as counterintuitive, much like choosing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But Amazon's goal has never been to sell only books. On the contrary, Amazon executives from the first spoke of their intent to build what they called "the everything store." Amazon analyzed twenty product categories before choosing books as the company's debut "commodity."

The letter goes on to put the situation in historical context with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, anti-trust laws going back to the 1866 Telegraph Act preventing a monopoly of that particular brand-new information highway, and the recent FCC Net Neutrality rulings.

While Amazon contends that its goal is to serve consumers by eliminating middlemen in publishing (which it calls the "gatekeepers"), Amazon's executives have also made clear they intend to make Amazon itself the sole gatekeeper in this industry. But what's at stake here is not merely monopoly control of a commodity; what is at stake is whether we allow one of the nation's most important marketplaces of information to be dominated and supervised by a single corporation...The conviction that antitrust law plays a vital role in protecting freedom of expression continues to this day. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the Turner Broadcasting case, wrote, "Assuring that the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order, for it promotes values central to the First Amendment," and that, "[t]he First Amendment's command that government not impede the freedom of speech does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict, through physical control of a critical pathway of communication, the free flow of information and ideas."

So for myself, I'm boycotting Amazon and any possible way they might make money off me, including all their brands and subsidiaries. I'll still use abebooks.com to find used books, but I'll go straight to the seller and buy direct from them so Amazon doesn't get a cut. I'll still use goodreads (because damn it, I was there BEFORE the behemoth ate them) but I won't use any of their links to buy anything.

Now I just have to talk Mr Psmith out of renewing his Amazon Prime membership and get him to drop his Amazon credit card...

Neil Gaiman's voice reminds me of Alan Rickman's. It makes me wonder if they grew up in the same part of Britain. (Also, y'know, he's talking about everything from fairy tales to quantum physics, so there's that.)

"What do you do when you've finished your quest? What do you do when you come home? And that's always the question that never gets answered properly in any fairy tale, and it's always the place where -- unless you can believe in happily ever after, and I've not seen one yet -- where you always have to go as an author."


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Alan is still my One True Voicegasm, though :)

From Lawrence M. Krauss, internationally known theoretical physicist. Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, Chairman of the department of Physics and Director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University, author of over 300 scientific publications:

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Which of course makes me think of this:

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