I've found that living on a boat is fairly normal, as things go.  My days are pretty regular: take kids out on a sail, teach them marine science, work on boat, go to sleep.  Or, you know, some combination of the above.

My free time is limited: days last at least eight hours, normally nine or more.  When I'm off, all I want is to sleep.

I live with my coworkers, and sometimes that gets trying, but normally it works out.  Sometimes, someone pulls out a guitar and we sing and learn to harmonize.  Or sometimes, they want to hang out after work and I'm like, but I just spent all day with you!  Or we all sit in our own little bubbles in the common area, doing stuff on our computers.

As adventures go, this one is fairly mellow.  It's a job.  A strange job, a different job, but a job nonetheless.  I'm not traveling on a daily basis; I'm in one place long enough to explore it and learn the culture -- well, when I have free time.  It's a different kind of adventure.

I finally got around to reading the Hunger Games, as they've been referred to me multiple times at this point. 

The Hunger Games was surprisingly catchy. I expected to like it, after so many people told me I would, but I hadn't thought it would be so absorbing. The beginning feels a bit simple, but the amount of raw emotion that's written into the story from the start just pulls you in. As the book continues, the first person POV really grows into its strength and the book ends wonderfully -- making you want to start the next one immediately.

Catching Fire was great, but at first I didn't like it as much as Hunger Games. About a third of the way in the plot picks up and I started becoming more absorbed. I kept feeling like Katniss was really dense during much of this book, but it was a realistic part of her character, so I didn't get too annoyed. And then the book ends on a cliff-hanger so you're definitely going to want to have the third one on hand.

Mockingjay slides into being darker and having more adult concerns and considerations out in the open. I think it's a natural progression from the first two, and nothing is ever presented in a way that breaks Katniss's character from being realistic. In fact, I think first person POV was an interesting choice for this book especially -- Katniss being fairly unobservant and out of the loop, and yet a very important character nonetheless. I liked this one from the start, though I would have preferred the end of the book to be a bit more coherent (I feel like it got a bit confusing due to the POV and Katniss's mental state at the end).

Overall, I think it was a very enjoyable series and it's definitely up for a reread.


( Spoilers... )

When the wind blows from the south, the mists come through the crack in the hills.  Everyone shuts their windows.  Everyone bars their doors.  Everyone but us.

We open the windows, invite in the mists and the things that live in that silvery gauze.  We give them tea made with rosemary, lavender, and anise; all wild, of course. 

In exchange, we receive the stories.  Tales of where the blue goes when it disappears from the sky, what color the hills become at night when the darkness swallows them whole.  Tales of the green leaves and the grey cranes.

When the morning wind blows the mists away, we pour the rest of the tea into the waves, close our windows and doors, and crawl into our beds for a few hours of sleep.

The rest of the village knows, of course.  They can see the silver sparkle in our eyes.  They say nothing during the day; but sometimes, in the blue hours of sunset, they come to our doors for silver simples and twists of rosemary and anise.  Sometimes, if they're lucky, they hear snatches of stories as well.

They are not brave enough to open their doors to the mists, but they do not shun those of us who are.  And that it fine with me.

In this village live three,
the townsfolk, the mists, and me.

asakiyume wrote this interesting post that talks about police tactics. In the post-9/11 world, with the Patriot Act still at large, I think it's important to read and just be aware of. She also links to a video which is an hour long, so I haven't had time to watch it yet.

Even innocent actions and behaviors can be interpreted as incriminating. The very fact of being brought in for questioning puts you at a disadvantage. The everyday events of anyone's life can be made to look sinister under the right light--and that's not even adding in other people's mistaken memories, attributions of actions, etc., and not even assuming any deliberate ill will. If you do add in any of those extra factors, then things get worse.

The police are also permitted to lie to you to induce your statement. We've seen this in cop shows. The Mentalist does it all the time, but so do most of the shows: a scenario is set up that makes the accused think something that's not in fact the case; she or he then confesses (or does some other majorly incriminating thing). In the cop shows, this is presented as okay--clever, even--because the detained person is actually the guilty party, or, when they aren't, then that fact is eventually recognized, the person is released, and the cops go on to catch the actual criminal. In real life, however, often the bewildered accused person is tricked into confessions or other incriminating statements and is not released. The wrong person is brought to trial and may even be convicted.

She has excerpts from Beyond the Blue Gate, the memoir of Teo Soh Lung, a Singaporean lawyer who was detained in the late 1980s on charges of being a Marxist conspirator. Also, the discussions in the comments are very interesting.

Link from ysabetwordsmith.

A link to a short article and pictures about gender differences in posture.

Poll #1817124 Names for almost-common things
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8

What is the midway at a fair?

What do you call the part with the games and rides at a fair?

Where are you from?

If you have a vanilla (or sometimes chocolate) cookie with icing, and one half of the top of the cookie is iced in vanilla, and the other half of the top of the cookie is iced in chocolate, what do you call the cookie?

She always had a bit of red about her.  Earrings, socks, her watchband.  For the longest time I didn't notice, but one day her scrunchie was red when she was wearing blue.
"Your hair tie doesn't match," I said.
She shrugged.  "It's red."
"But why not wear a blue one?"
She rolled her eyes.  "I need to have something red."
I shrugged, and didn't answer.  But after that I began to notice the red.

Are there rules of genre fiction (specifically scifi/fantasy or spec fic) that genre readers instinctively bring to any genre story, that literary fiction readers wouldn't bring?*

Do you think people who read lit fic are more apt to be confused when confronted with a spec fic story for the first time?

If you were writing a spec fic story for someone who had never read one before, would you change anything about it?  Why?


*These rules could be understanding different words (that are actually English), understanding that there could be multiple universes or planets or planes or existence -- or any other "rule" you can think of.

Dragons today are too big for heroes to slay on their own.  It takes an army.  Armies are bigger and take more time, but if led by a competent captain, they'll find the dragon.  Eventually.  Meanwhile, all the hero can do is stand there waving his arms and dodging fireballs.  The hero has become an elite messenger.  The captain is the one in charge.

But even armies are not alone.  They need supply trains, water carriers, farriers, laundresses -- all the necessary items to support an enterprise so large.  Without them the army would collapse, unable to reach the dragon let alone kill it.  Sometimes it seems that the water carriers do more work than the hero.

When I was little I didn't know that water carriers existed.  You turned on the faucet and boom! out came the water.  What would you want to carry it for?  But then I learned about plumbing and reservoirs and water treatment facilities and somehow water carriers didn't seem like too much of a stretch.  If you can have a dragon, you can have a water carrier.

When I was little I wanted to be a hero.  I wanted to find a problem, wave a sword, and fix it.  When I learned that heroes no longer existed I didn't believe it: of course they do, look at them up there, waving their arms and jumping around.  All that jumping's going to fix the problem, you bet.  Then I realized that they were jumping around to avoid being hit by a fireball.  Definitely not fixing a problem.

In fact, it wasn't even the hero that found the dragon to begin with.  It was a peasant, of course, or a lone adventurer, or a survivor from a devastated village.  The peasant came to the hero and the hero went and looked at the dragon and said, damn, I'm screwed, and called up the army captain.

Then the army captain gathered all the soldiers, poked and prodded the water carriers and farriers and laundresses, and got that huge bulk of people all moving in the right direction.  When the hero got fed up and wanted to know what was taking so long he found them moving down the road at a brisk trot, having not only isolated the den of the dragon, but actually formulated a plan for how to slay it.  Imagine that, he thought, a plan.

As I grew up I realized that water carriers were necessary.  That even the captain had to start out as a water carrier in order to learn the business of armies and how much effort actually goes into slaying a dragon.  As I grew up I realized I didn't want to be the hero.  I wanted to be the captain.