Friday links and miscellany

1. WordPress.com has stopped working in Google Chrome. After contacting WordPress about this, they said it’s a known problem. I am a bit torked off about this, because of the way I Use The Interwebs. Firstly, I am torked off because it had worked fine until they “improved” something. Grr. Second, I am torked off because now I have to open Firefox in order to post. I know, I know, this is a trivial gripe. It’s still a gripe, though, because the only computer I have is an Asus Eee PC 904. It’s a wee little thing, with wee little Ram. If I run Zune in order to update Lockheed, I close all my other windows. I can run Twhirl and Google Chrome with about six tabs open, as long as I don’t try to stream video. To watch Hulu, I close Twirl and I turn off Google chat — they use too many resources. So, to be in Chrome, checking Google Reader and writing and glancing at LiveJournal, and to see something I want to blog about, I have to go boot up Firefox.

I’ve gotten used to Chrome, dammit. Firefox seems horrifically slow and clumsy to me. And let’s not even discuss the paroxysms of rage that I undergo when forced by my job to touch an IE browser. They are all so damnably slow.

So here I am, in Firefox, writing this. Meh. WordPress? Fix this, please?

2. Did anybody else see this article about the new Knx.to service? Here’s the key paragraph:

“To enable the application, you sign into your Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more. When a friend calls you (or you call a friend), the technology will automatically scan all of your social networks, identify if the contact is a friend, and will pull all the most recent photos, Tweets, status updates, and more into its search pane. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.”

So, you are a professional recruiter or headhunter. So you add in to your 17 social networks the names and i.d. information of every resume you get, everyone you are scouting at colleges, all the employees in your specialty at other companies. And you plug in all into Knx.to. And you contact them — which gives you an instant picture of the things they are saying about theirs lives, jobs, and friends at the moment of your call. Wow. That’s a tool.

I can’t say I’m shocked or surprised. And . . . . and I’m not even really opposed. I mean, the difference between what we had available eighteen months ago in terms of social stalking and what we have now strikes me as the difference between the illegal mix tapes everyone made when I was in college and the illegal downloadable mixes people send via SendSpace. It’s a matter of degree, not kind.

3. Ariana Osborne is delivering a lecture series on the Get Excited and Make Stuff Movement. I highly recommend it.

4. Warren Ellis is putting a human face on the internet. Photos of people who read his board, get his email newsletter, and follow his blog. Hundreds of people. Because, as he says, the internet is made out of people. Behind each comment, each photo, each torrent, each blog entry, there is a person. And they all have faces.

5. M is over his cold, but K now has it. We’re hoping she’ll be well enough by tomorrow to do her two flamenco performances.

6. M lost his third tooth! One of the top front ones, so he now looks EXTRA goofy and cute.

ATC FAQ, part 1

It came to my attention yesterday that I haven’t explained much about my actual job here. I’m an air traffic controller, and people frequently have some questions about that. So here’s the intro FAQ for what I do –

Is it really stressful? Mostly, no. Training to be a controller is stressful. It’s two-to-three years of hell. The hours I work are stressful. My sleep and meal schedules have been shot for the last ten years. But the work is usually not that stressful. Eighty percent boredom, seventeen percent engaged but not difficult, two percent challenging, and one percent oh-shit.

When do you work? I work Friday night, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and Monday and Tuesday mornings. Except once a month when I work the early morning shift on Monday, and then come back Monday night to work the overnight shift into Tuesday morning. (I’m doing that today, as a matter of fact.) That’s the mid shift, or the day-mid. I work more or less the same hours every week, but we can swap among ourselves on the shift. So if I need to work a little earlier, I can trade with a controller on an earlier shift. We’re interchangeable parts; it’s pretty convenient.

What airport do you work at? I don’t work at an airport. I work at one of the En Route Centers. At Minneapolis Center, we control the airspace over Minnesota, North Dakota, and parts of South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and a bit off Kansas. We control all the airspace not controlled by a major airport. Once you get above 23,000 feet, or thirty miles away from a major airport, you’re talking to a center.

Wait, how does that work? Air traffic control is like zone defense in sports. Each controller has a chunk of airspace that they watch. Planes in that sector are my problem; planes outside of it are someone else’s problem. I hand aircraft to the next sector, electronically. When you accept it, I ship the plane to your radio frequency. In this manner a plane from Minneapolis to Grand Forks talks to M98 clearance delivery, M98 ground, M98 departure, MSP departure, ZMP 10, ZMP 11, ZMP 24, GFK arrival, GFK tower, GFK ground. (I may be a little wrong on who they talk to at Minneapolis airport; I don’t work there.) I’m certified on seven sectors covering northern Minnesota and the Dakotas.

So, do you sit in front of a scope all day? Nope. When I get to work I check who’s been working a sector the longest and I get them out. They explain to me what’s going on, what all the planes are doing in the sector, and any special considerations. Then I sit down and assume responsibility for the sector and they go on break. I work for a while, as people on break come back and ask each of us if we want to go, usually between an hour and two hours of sector time. Then I go on break for a bit.

Who flies in North Dakota? Actually, a lot of people. The northern U.S. is full of private general aviation aircraft doing a variety of things, in no small part because towns are so far apart. In addition there are a number of Air National Guard and Air Force bases; their planes Do Stuff. We see a lot of traffic from Europe to the U.S. West Coast — the great circle routes from Germany to California fly right over North Dakota. Ditto FedEx planes from Tennessee to Alaska and the Pacific Rim. And there’s all the flights to and from places in Canada. We also handle aircraft from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago and the East Coast. Plus all the local Minneapolis traffic and feeder flights. It’s pretty seasonal, though — summers are crazy-busy, winters are pretty quiet.

So, there’s a bit of a FAQ — and now I get to pack up my computer, finish this break, and head back to the sector before I go home.

Shivering Sands

Yep, I got my copy of the new Warren Ellis book of essays, Shivering Sands.

Order it here, now!

This is stuff that a long-standing Ellis fan, like me, has already seen. But having it all in one place is priceless. Here, in my hands, I am holding some of Mr. Ellis’s great rants on the future, on the purposes of fiction, on what culture is and how we make it.

These essays, rants, and rambles over the last half-handful of years have been inspirational for me. Seriously. All that urging to get out there and do, and make, to get my vision of the future, my interpretation of the now out there and into the world — all those rants became part of my Personal Creative Vision, ™. So, yeah.

I don’t know if anyone else is affected by Mr. Ellis’s writing the way I am. I know a lot of people think it’s funny, or angry, or profane. And it is. But I find it painfully, painfully hopeful. It’s the hope of Orbiter, a book I cannot read with sobbing loudly. It’s the hope of Transmet — that we can be, we will learn to be, and we are GOING to be better than our worst, base natures. It’s the raging, furious hope of Planetary — that we will steal back control of our lives. These essays in Shivering Sands are some of that hope. Yes, there are obscene, profane metaphors. Yes, there’s humor. But I find the book is more accurately — to me — summed up by the last line of “ratStar”:

“If there’s no exit, then you make one. Break open the top of the maze and let starlight in.”

Resistance is futile.

There’s a meme running around on LiveJournal, where people ask one questions and one answers them. So these are the questions posed to me –

1. What is the best thing for you about being a parent? The worst?

The best? That’s easy. There are these *awesome* people living with me. They are continually surprising and delightful, and watching them achieve things is the best part of my day.

The worst? My life is not autonomous. In some unavoidable ways, I kinda belong to these kids. I have made commitments to them which limit my freedoms. Now, I could blow off those commitments — I have a number of exes who would probably expect me to do so, honestly. But I haven’t so far. And, oh, it is frequently tempting. Tempting in ways small and large. I could skip out while they are in circus class and go see a movie. I could not read to them. I could stop taking them to classes. But I don’t do those things. I do the things I’ve committed to doing. I hope I continue to do so.

2. Describe the moment when you decided on your career path.

My ex was friends with a controller she’d met at The Townhouse (the gay country-western bar,) and wrangled us a tour to the center. I thought it looked interesting, and I got a copy of the study guide for the air traffic controller hiring exam. I worked my way through the study guide and practice test in a nigh-holy-fire. This, this is what I was good at. THIS is the only thing my brain is good at, besides mapping dungeons in RPGs in my head. (Well, not the only thing, but I thought so at the time.) I knew that atc was likely to be the only job that actually *used* my skills that I would encounter.

3. Tell me one thing that you refuse to regret from high school.

I can’t bring myself too regret any of it — even the appalling parts, even the obvious mistakes — because that’s just who I was. I don’t regret being me. I shake my head in dismay, I yell backwards through time at myself, but I don’t regret myself. I could wish for wisdom, I could wish to not be so vastly and consumingly self-absorbed, but the whirling highs only existed in a framework of crushing lows. I don’t have either of those, these days, and I thank heaven for that even keel. But I wouldn’t strip my former self of any of the glory, any of the eternal youth, any of the brilliant intellect and dazzling wit my friends and I possessed. We were untouchably golden and basely corrupted, we were going to save the world and we were going to kill ourselves, we were going to be utterly original just like every other teenager in history. None of us actually managed to die while we were in school; that was my goal, my standard of success when I was fifteen. Since we met that goal, I find I can’t regret any of the rest.

4. Tell me something that you’ve promised yourself you will do before you die.

I hate to phrase this in the form of a negative, but I have promised myself to not give up on getting published. Actually getting published is not entirely in my control. But I don’t want to quit.

5. What’s your favorite travel experience?

I don’t really like travelling that much. But in the nine months the ex and I lived in Costa Rica, there are a number of moments that stand out as good. Eating ceviche in a beachside cabana on Bocas del Toro, on the Caribbean coast of Panama. Hearing howler monkeys outside J.L.’s cabin. Dancing at San Jose’s gay bar on women’s night. Good stuff, good memories.

beating like a hammer

1. I think my current favorite song is “Help I’m Alive” by the band Metric. (Title of this post is from that song.) Here’s the song on Blip.fm, I think. (If the links at Blip work the way I think they do, that is.)

2. The soundtrack for writing this next project is all my my Tegan and Sarah, Silversun Pickups, and Metric albums in a random mix. Beware the emotasticness! I think I found the plot engine in this setting I like, and I think I found the pov character. We’ll see.

3. I started watching the live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire last night. I’ve seen the anime, and I recently read this Heroine Content review of the live action film. I don’t have a complete opinion yet, as I fell asleep before finishing the film, but so far it’s . . . . interesting. Like Skye at Heroine Content, I couldn’t get the anime out of my head. I was a little meh on some of the revisions made for the sake of streamlining. But, that said, I am really loving the actors. Particularly Colin Salmon. The special effects are, um, well-intentioned. A mix of classic puppetry and latex masks with computer-game-style cgi. They are not making the mistake of showing the latex-and-rubber monsters too much, thank goodness. But, even so, I applaud Allison Miller’s ability to look threatened by a wet rubber mask.

4. On Nancy_clue’s recommendation I bought and read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I really liked it, was grabbed by the character of Lisbeth Salander. (I know, I know. Predictable Sigrid is predictable.) It was interesting, though, reading a book in translation. This is not something I usually do. I spent a lot of brain cycles trying to figure out what the town and place references were telling me, that I was missing. What kind of suburb is that? What sort of neighborhood? Where is that town, again? What meaning, what cultural context, would natives of Sweden be getting from this book that I am missing? What do the clothing and furniture references mean? What do they say about the character that I am missing because I’m not from Sweden? Anyway, the book is good, the plot was interesting, and the characters fascinating. If you like slow, inexorable mystery-thrillers, I recommend it.

5. At my workplace, when we are on break, we can be paged back to the area if we are needed. The page is over a building-wide loudspeaker system. Pages are of the format, “Ellis, Sigrid Ellis, Area 4. Sigrid, Area 4.” It’s a practice among some controllers, though, in my area, of paging people back using the names of controllers who are no longer employed here and who were known for incompetence. So you get “Insult Name, real first name Insult Name, Area 4. Real first name, Area 4.” That’s just how we role, here in ZMP.

Peabody Testing, 2009

Today was a homeschooling milestone — the first time the kids took a standardized test. It was fascinating for me and J. Just fascinating.

We’d hired a tester to administer the Peabody Individual Achievement Test. This test is given by a tester, who asks the kids questions. There’s a reading component, a math, spelling, and a general knowledge section. Each section has 100 question, gradually increasing in difficulty. The tester just keeps asking questions until you get a certain number of them wrong. That raw score is then converted into equivalent school grade.

There weren’t really any surprises for us. Not in a “wow, the kiddo did really bad” sort of way. We immediately realized that we need to focus our math curriculum to include how to solve word problems — both our kids were a bit baffled by them. Not by the arithmetic involved, but by how one tackles a word problem at all. No, what surprised us was how good the kids were in their areas of strength. K’s reading and M’s general knowledge were massively beyond their purported “grade level.”

Now, the Peabody has had some criticisms leveled at it, as regards inflated values and scores. And, that’s fine, really. I am not intending to use the results for bragging rights. (Except to my mother, who I called to inform of the manifest genius-ness, talent, grace, and attractiveness of her grandchildren, all of which she knew already.) But it’s an interesting benchmark, in a homeschooling environment in which we don’t do much testing. At all.

Both the kids sat still and concentrated just fine. Neither kid seemed really upset by skipping questions. Nether seemed to know how to game exams — how to eliminate the least likely answers and make a guess with better odds. Both kids liked the tester and said they enjoyed the experience. K was a reading master, tackling sentences and words more complex than we tend to give her. M was a fact-spewing machine in general knowledge, and generated complex answers to bizarrely random questions.

It was a good experience all around. We’re going to use the same woman and same test next year, which is the first year we have to report anything to the state. And, in the meantime, we’re going to teach the kids how to solve word problems.

Oh, and we’ll add in a little bit about sports. The sports-general-knowledge questions stumped both the kiddos.

Public and private

So, I have had (until today) two Twitter accounts. There’s the public one — sigridellis — and there’s the one I’ve given out to family and people I know in person. The original idea was that I’d use the private one to talk about things that are of interest to people who’ve met me and my family, and the public one to talk about my writing, my blogging, and public culture.

But the thing of it is . . .

The thing is, that’s not how I actually use the internet. Maybe some people — maybe some of you reading this — manage to keep a distinct public – private dichotomy online. I’m not that person. If I really want something to be private, I don’t put it on the internet. Not even in email, if I want real, actual privacy. (There was a local semi-scandal around here a bit back, with relationship failures and accusations in various directions. Email were forwarded, IMs were screen-captured and sent around, deleted journal entries were recovered. In short, I took the lesson to heart — Nothing, nothing at all, that I’ve ever put on a computer is truly private. I rely — as do you — on the kindness of friends and strangers to not forward my dirty laundry to the world.) (Those of you holding my dirty laundry have my thanks.)

And the thing of it is, I paid attention to the blogs and Twitters I tend to follow. I don’t follow the celebrities who do nothing but linkspam, however much I like said celebrity’s work. I do follow the ones that reveal a little of themself — who bitch about baseball, or complain about awkward filming locations, or whine about meeting deadlines, or share Cute Kid Anecdotes. I like the sense — however illusory — that I know these strangers a bit.

I also follow people who answer back. Not to me, necessarily, and not every time, of course. But the people who make some conversation out of Twitter. And, for me, I converse when I get comments quickly. I do not go back and “catch up” on Twitter. Whatever I missed is gone. So timely Tweets to my phone are vital for conversation.

The upshot is, the personal has infected my public Twitter. And as far as I know, nothing bad has happened. So why, then, ought I keep one private? I can’t think of a good reason.

So this marks the end of the dual Twitter life for me. I’m dumping my private one and keeping sigridellis. If you are following the private one and not the public, and want to keep following me on Twitter, I suggest you switch over. And, I’m going to make sure my public account is following all of those from my private account. What this means is you’ll hear a little more whining, a little more chatter about my kids. It means those of you following both Twitters right now will no longer get duplicate information.

It’s always defriending amnesty around these parts — not everyone wants to hear about my kids, or the hours I work, or the incredibly amusing things I think when I’m sleep deprived. Who knows? I may discover that there is some purpose the private Twitter serves, and start one up again. But for the meantime, what you see is what you get.

No NaNoWriMo for me

Nope, nuh-uh. No National Novel Writing Month for me. But I am reading all this conversation and discussion of NaNoWriMo, and have decided to use all that talk to re-focus on script writing.

Over at iFanboy, Josh Flanagan talked recently about The Will vs. The Fear — essentially, about all the excuses we use to not write. In his article he nailed my current excuse:

“Why should I work on that script? I don’t have an artist for it.”

My my my my my. My goodness, yes. It has been desperately hard for me to work on scripts this fall. I don’t have artists lined up to work on them, I don’t know anybody willing to work for free or on spec (that I haven’t already cornered into working on something,) and I don’t have any money with which to pay an artist right now. So, surely writing scripts can wait?

Hah.

No.

The answer to that is, no, it can’t wait. Writing gets better with practice. I have to keep practicing, whether of not the work ever sees the light of day. And, besides — when I do meet up with an artist who is interested in collaboration, I want to have scripts, right? I want to have pitches and proposals. I want to have a raft of projects to choose from.

I’d Twittered that I was going to write a four page comic each day during November. This is patently ridiculous. But I figure I can get another four or five short projects done this month. Since Halloween I’ve finished the first drafts of two four-page short stories. Neither of which have artists and neither of which are likely to see print. But that’s okay. I’m putting in the work, getting the writing done.

Ixtab for sale!

My latest comic, Ixtab, is now available for sale!

As the blurb says:

Ixtab is a reigning rock-queen, making her Mayan cultural heritage the cornerstone of her music and her act. But how does that fit with the family that adopted and raised her? Written by Sigrid Ellis. Art by K.C. Solano. Technical assistance provided by Erik Nelson.

This project came out of the iFanboy Sequentially Ever After Contest. I wrote a ten-page script and asked K.C. Solano if she could do a bit of art for the contest. She did, and our entry won an honorable mention from iFanboy.

But Ixtab means a bit more to me than that. Ixtab is a result of my decision to use my comics writing to make comics more inclusive. To make, in comics, the invisible visible. To write stories about the breadth of humanity, to include people of color and women and children and the elderly, to include people with differing levels of physical and mental ability, to include a variety of genders and sexual orientations. To, simply, put my money where my mouth is and make the world a tiny bit wider, a tiny bit more open, with each thing I write.

Ixtab tells of a girl adopted from Guatemala by a white family. It tells of the importance of names, of myths, of families made and found and lost. It’s also about a goth rock star who is not on drugs, not sleeping around, who has a plan and the passion of being a teenager.

Ixtab is for my daughter, who loves Pink and Britney Spears and Paramore, who loves macabre stories about dismembered heads, who notices that she is often the only dark-skinned child in a group of white people, who loves her flamenco class and likes to sing and play the piano.

Karla Xiomara, this comic is for you. The first of many, I hope.

Lost and Delirious and Show Me Love

While home yesterday, laying in bed with a sinus infection and headcold from hell, I watched a lot of tv, including Lost and Delirious and Show Me Love. Spoilers for the movies follow.

I hope everyone reading this remembers the emotions portrayed in these films. Not the steady, day-in-and-day-out love of established relationships, no. That gut-twisting, breath-stealing drug we call “falling in love.” That thing that makes Agnes smile fondly at Elin, even while their classmates pound on the bathroom door for them to come out. That thing that makes Paulie dress up like k.d. lang and ask Tory to dance. That thing which makes acts of madness seem plausible, sensible, and well-reasoned. And then there’s the dark mirror of falling into insanity — the betrayal. That is a crazy that leaves a mark. When the one your entire heart and body ache for mocks your passion and turns you away.

I hope everyone remembers that feeling because sometimes it’s the only explanation for insanity. Anges makes a (thankfully half-hearted) attempt at suicide after Elin’s friends mock her. Paulie succeeds in killing herself after Tory’s final rejection. But even discounting these love-driven acts, there are the lesser moments of insanity. Agnes shouts insults at Viktoria. Paulie not only fights a duel, but gets into screaming arguments with her teachers.

Surely we all have done insane acts. Insanity fueled by a chemical soup poisoning our judgment and spurring us to leave our families, move to a new town, and reproduce with strangers. Insanity driven by that unreasonable thought, “if she just knew how I feel she’d love me back!”

In the name of infatuation and it’s twin, rejection, I have written poetry. Written fanfic. Written original stories. Shorted myself on sleep. Walked unnecessarily in rain and snow. Driven places I didn’t want to go. Forgotten to eat. Burned mementos. Buried mementos. Flushed mementos. Spread lies. Spread truths. Sabotaged the relationships of others. Sabotaged my own relationships. Failed homework assignments. Missed work.

None of these things seem that extreme, which, frankly, I think is good. But I remember the moment, I remember doing some of those things, and I remember the feeling that I might very well die right there on the spot if this person I so desired did not look at me kindly. I remember the feeling of seeing that person happy with someone else. It’s a tribute to the actors I remember those feelings when I watch Lost and Delirious and Show Me Love, and I’m glad I remember.

And I am more grateful than I can possibly explain, that I am no longer fifteen years old.