HSU IT Department

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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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Everyone's doing it, so I might as well too. Since all the other questions were about movies and tv, I stuck with movie/tv characters for #3. Unsurprisingly, it was hard to limit myself to five (you'll notice that I cheated a bit on the first one...), although in the case of five favorite characters I actually had a tough time coming up with five. There are a lot of characters I like, but very few stand out above the others as favorites.

1) 5 Favorite Movies
(a) Gigi
(b) A Fish Called Wanda
(c) About Last Night
(d) The Heiress / Witness for the Prosecution (tie)
(e) Anne of the Thousand Days / A Man for All Seasons (tie)

2) 5 Favorite Television Shows
(a) Star Trek (original series)
(b) The Office (UK version)
(c) Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(d) M*A*S*H
(e) Twilight Zone (original series)
Note: I binge-watched both Mad Men and Breaking Bad recently and could hardly force myself to stop watching so as to get some sleep, but it's too soon to know whether they'll be long-term favorites.

3) 5 Favorite Characters
(a) Spock
(b) Spike
(c) Jean-Luc Picard
(d) Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins
(e) Sally Albright
Note: I wanted to include Stephen Colbert, but I wasn't sure if he's a character so much as a persona. Regardless, he's definitely one of my favorites.

4) 5 Favorite Stars
(a) Audrey Hepburn
(b) Michelle Pfeiffer
(c) Maggie Smith
(d) Patrick Stewart
(e) Alan Rickman

5) 5 Things that make you smile
(a) Unexpected gifts
(b) Christmas (even though I'm an atheist)
(c) John Cleese, in any role
(d) Puns/clever wordplay
(e) Kittehs being kittehs

On Saturday American Pharoah (yes, that's really how you spell it) became the first horse in 37 years -- and only the 12th in history -- to win the Triple Crown. (If you really couldn't care less about horse racing, you might want to skip the rest of this because I'm about to squee like a horse-crazy little girl!)

THIS IS HUGE, PEOPLE!!

First won by Sir Barton in 1919, The Triple Crown* is American thoroughbred racing's greatest feat: three races (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont) in five weeks with the last one, at a mile and a half, the longest and most difficult. As a kid I had all the winners memorized, their names like a roll of drums and trumpets: Sir Barton, Gallant Fox, Omaha, War Admiral, Whirlaway, Count Fleet... I remember holding my breath watching Secretariat back in 1973 when he broke a 25-year drought, and then Seattle Slew just four years later.

And then nothing. For DECADES. A few times someone came close but it had been so long that there was actually talk of changing the requirements, an uneasy suspicion that thoroughbreds had been so intensely bred for speed that they were too fragile to hold up to three races in five weeks, never mind that grueling mile and a half length of the last one. When American Pharoah won the Derby last month and then the Preakness (in a pouring rain), yes, there were hopes -- but we were all used to disappointment.

So when he took the lead right from the gate yesterday, I was so excited I could hardly speak coherently; I yelled, I screamed, I jumped up and down, and yes, I cried as he came sweeping up to the wire like he had wings. He didn't just make it look easy, he made it look inevitable.


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A friend of mine, who knows a bit about thoroughbred racing, did a lovely post about what it means to the horse racing world, and even the relatively staid New York Times let a bit of excitement show through.

So yeah, this totally made my weekend :)

* I speak here of the US version; England, Ireland, Canada and many other countries have their own, equally challenging, Triple Crowns.

The Mythopoeic Society just announced their nominees for this year, and I want ALL THE BOOKS. The Gospel of Loki and Songs for Ophelia (because poems!!) both look outstanding, plus there are the two scholarship (aka "meta") categories with tasty things like Michael Saler's As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality and Monika B. Hilder's C. S. Lewis and gender series. ::drool::

minerva_fest always results in a bouquet of fabulous stories, so run on over and leave some inspiration :)

Minerva_Fest!

(banner by featherxquill; art by Kit466 [used with permission])

My god am I glad the last two months are over. Major projects behind or plunging into crisis mode at work (again, or still, depending on your point of view), a visit to my mom (which was lovely but included much discussion of legal/estate stuff, which always depresses me), a conference whereat not only was I on the Board of Directors but I had to teach a brand new workshop I'd never taught before, my godson graduating high school (there is NO WAY he is that old, it's impossible), taking on co-mod responsibilities for my online writing group, an overflow of editing work for my freelance clients, Marvin the laptop died and I had to migrate my entire life onto Marvin II...arrgghh. I'm sure there were other things but I must have blocked them out in a vain attempt at mental self-defense. They'll probably surface later and cause me to leap up screaming at some awkward moment. In the middle of dinner, say, or while at the theatre.

Somewhere along the line, though, I did manage to watch the last season of Mad Men -- what a wild ride that was! -- and last night I finally got caught up on Wolf Hall. I want to have Mark Rylance's babies.

Now all I have left to do is finish my sshg_promptfest fic which is due in nine days, get ready for my trip west for nursedarry's dad's 100th birthday (!!), and write a paper for a conference in August. It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

And of course I have to catch up on what's new with all of YOU, my flist. So, what's the single most interesting thing that's happened to each of you in the past two months, since I abandoned you all in the middle of March? Tell, tell!