I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

OK, I found a group of musical creators that call themselves “Hidden Citizens,” and literally every song is bombastic trailer music and I am so here for it. There’s an album of bombastic covers of both bombastic and non-bombastic originals which are largely unnecessary, but the originals are all clearly written to be trailers for movies insisting that they are EPIC. Or maybe for video games. Here’s one with Ruelle and another with Jung Youth (actually is a trailer song) and another with the most banal lyrics yet, their is-that-allness a laugh-inducing contrast to the end-of-the-world seriousness of the music. I am in awe.

E.K. Johnston, The Afterward:( Happily ever? )
Adrian Tchaikovsk/y, Walking to Aldeberan: Space horror novella. ( Read more... )
Yoon Ha Lee, Hexarchate Stories: ( short stories )
T. Kingfisher, ( Swordheart and Jackalope Wives )

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black: Short stories of the if-this-goes-on variety. ( Read more... )
Harry Connolly, A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark: ( magical aunt )
R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic: ( and here my troubles began )
Zen Cho, The True Queen: ( sisterhood is powerful )

Slate has a letter from Rose Wilder Lane to Laura Ingalls Wilder about the Little House books, and it’s amazing.

You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact…. Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate that.
… Maybe it is a fact that you girls lived a whole summer within easy walking distance of your cousins, out on an empty prairie where there were no other neighbors, and had nothing to do with them, but such a thing absolutely can not happen in fiction. You will just have to take my word for it. Not once in a thousand million times will such a thing happen among actual human beings actually living, and a writer can’t make it happen in fiction without providing some terrific motive for it. The mere fact that you did it has no bearing whatever upon the question. I can not imagine why you did it. Neither can any reader, and I tell you that … in fiction you have to explain them. You have the brief scene in which Laura threatens to kill Charley with a knife, but that has to be cut out. A 12-year-old girl whose cousin wants to kiss her does not normally threaten him with a knife; she laughs and kisses him, he’s her cousin. Or if she’s shy or doesn’t like him she just escapes, and the incident is not important enough to mention. Here you have a young girl, a girl 12 years old, who’s led rather an isolated life with father, mother, sisters in the country, and you can not have her suddenly acting like a slum child who has protected her virginity from street gangs since she was seven or eight. Maybe you did it, but you can not do it in fiction; you can not make it credible in under ten or twelve thousand words, and if you do make it credible it’s not a child’s book.

Eliza Rickman, Pretty Little Head: second great song I’ve discovered thanks to WTNV.

( technopeasants, parenting, fandom )

Brought to you by procrastination: I have at least one song of X length in my library for the range 2:33-5:43. If allowed to skip one second, I can go from 2:06 to 6:38; two, from 1:40 to 6:56; the shortest song in my library is 0:31 and the longest is 10:55; the greatest gap between lengths is 39 seconds (the gap between Meat Loaf, Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are and Sisters of Mercy, This Corrosion).  What are your shortest and longest songs--actual songs, not other things you might have in your music library?

( I did not like the new show Intelligence )

Head Like a Hole mashed up with Call Me Maybe. You’re welcome. (Batman Maybe is better, but this will do.)

From the hazel orbs files, this footnote from a recent copyright opinion about whether one romance novel infringed another might be of interest:

The parties debate the extent to which the heroines’ eyes “change color with their mood and emotions in critical scenes. (Merrick: ‘emerald flames at him’, ‘eyes darkening’).” Regardless of the degree of similarity of change, this is not truly a description of the characters. Their eyes do not literally change color depending on their moods. This is a literary device meant to express the well-known idea that one’s eyes can express thoughts or emotions. The expression of that idea — a shift in eye color reflecting a change in mood — is generic and not protectable.

( Pat Conroy is reflective; Neil Barofsky is mad )

Thanks to shoofus for the virtual panda!

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette’s Jekyll & Hyde, a delightful bonus track on the iTunes version of havoc & bright lights. That album, plus the new Pet Shop Boys, made me realize that putting together b-sides is getting to be as complicated as it was in the bad old days, what with Amazon and iTunes having different versions (and often enough different prices, though Amazon is going to $1.29 on some tracks too).

eBay wants to force you into arbitration (which you will never be able to afford a lawyer for, much less win) unless you opt out. ( details )

The awesome Steve Burt (disclosure: I’m proud to call him a friend) gets a full story in the NYT, in which his practice of focusing on the poets he likes and not spending time on criticizing those he doesn’t gets some attention.

Not unrelatedly, George Orwell on “Why I Write."

My favorite vid from Vividcon was bradcpu’s Ride to California.  I love how it uses “California” as a metaphor for the heroism of the Avengers; I can’t explain exactly why I love that so much, but the vid is great fun.

( Charles Stross, Richard Morgan )

Resolved: If I make headway on grading, I will allow myself to write the [guest character]/girl!Dean snippet that came to me immediately after I watched 7x20.

Not actually spoilery for Game of Thrones: Anna Holmes: "I marvel at the semi-medieval society’s standards for personal grooming, which seem to anticipate the Brazilian waxes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: I call the pubic hair pattern so often seen on Westerosi women 'the King’s Landing Strip.'”

V.v. sad to discover that, on closer listen, lyrics of Call Me Maybe are not “all the other boys try to change me.” I thought it was a song about finding a good boy, not finding a distant boy!

Nice description heard at ROFLcon: you became an engineer because you like working with your hands and dislike working with your arms. (Zach Weiner’s choose your own adventure, also the theme of the con program.)

My worlds collide (copyright law v. vampires). Best fannish answer I ever got was on a question featuring Jack O’Neill, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson & Teal’c. Since the question involved O’Neill’s property, one student put in a side comment about the fish pond.

Unpack the gendered notions of work and value suggested by this quote about music hitmakers, which comes after noting that producers are almost always men and top-liners are usually women: “The producer runs the session and serves as creative director of the song, but the top-liner supplies the crucial spark that will determine whether the song is a smash.”

1. The new US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking feedback on how to make mortgage disclosure forms more understandable. If you have a few minutes, go and vote for the alternative you find easiest to understand.

2. I am seriously amused that Patrick Stump’s song This City, now free on iTunes, includes a lyric using the word “gentrification.”
( Civil War, understanding comics, economics and economic collapse, funky numbers )

Another Chuck story for me, in Yuletide Madness: In the Middle
Casey's the only smart one in the bed. I love Casey’s distinction between his partners’ types of stupidity.

The Opposite of Swarb, Connie Willis--Bellwether
Delightful fandom meta in great Connie Willis voice. The puns alone are enough to make the story fun! Now I kind of want to write a Five Cage Fights … fic.

( Chris Hedges on why America sucks, with bonus fat phobia )

( more on the financial crisis, Henry Jenkins on emotion in pop culture, David Rakoff essays, film music, cheapness )

( Pretty Little Liars, the book )

Your internet is not my internet: I read about this new Facebook stuff and it just makes me confused. Filters are exotic and nobody knows how to use them? And so Facebook is going to let other people decide what my Groups are? Why can’t I manage my friends myself and filter out specific people when I need to? (I take it that hidden somewhere in the bowels of Facebook settings, deeper even than privacy controls, you can do this, but that they expect Groups to become dominant.)

The LJ/DW solutions seem so intuitive and elegant, whereas Facebook’s prompting for me to add people to various Lists has been terrible. Am I just wanting those kids to get off of my lawn? (I should also note: I declared LJ bankruptcy and gave up on updating my friendslist/filters there. I haven’t been filtering at DW, though I also have not been adding back journals that seemed to be for reading purposes only. I expect I will have to start filtering soon, though. So it’s not as if manual filtering is easy. It’s just so much better for what I want to do than automatically being added to groups!)

( reviews: Ilona Andrews, music in Buffy, and digital images )