Quotes

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers …

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.

Tarantino – you can criticize everything that Quentin does – but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to – they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better – there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

– A bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman. (via faramirs)

I said it on the Nerdist Podcast, and I believe it. It’s as true for any area of the arts, not just writing. Perhaps it’s true for life.

(via neil-gaiman)

Advice I try to consider every day. Neil Gaiman is a precious human being and if you write or art or do anything you really should listen to this.

(via dragonmaw)

he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist — simply a book-ist

Like everyone else he had a label, since at that time nobody could live without one, but his ‘ism’ was of a non-committed kind: he was not a royalist, a Bonapartist, a chartist, an Orleanist, or an anarchist — simply a book-ist.

Victor Hugo’s description of Pere Mabeuf, a friend of Marius’
On Tumblr (Re-Reading Les Mis)

when did he find out he wasn’t allergic/start eating normal foods?

itswalky:

I guess I should start from the beginning for the benefit of everyone.

When I was a kid, my little brother had allergies.  He was allergic to basically everything.  Milk, wheat, sugar, corn (specifically corn syrup) , mold, you name it.  He was seriously down to eating rice bread and water for a duration during his childhood.  We stopped celebrating Halloween and the candy parts of Easter and Christmas.

We would often travel downstate to Indianapolis to doctor specialists to get his arm full of shots to determine what all he was allergic to.  Just welts up and down his arms, trial and error.  It was excruciating for all involved (but proooobably moreso for my brother.)

When he hit his teenage years, suddenly these things were no longer a concern. He ate what he wanted, and things seemed to be fine.  The end, right?

My brother told me tonight, casually in conversation while driving around, I guess for the benefit of my wife but assuming I knew, that all that was a lie.  My brother was not really allergic to all those things. He was a little lactose intolerant and he did have a problem with mold, but my mom decided that he was allergic to everything, and constructed this world centered around finding more and more things he was allergic to.  But my brother eventually rebelled and ate what he wanted and OH HEY i guess it was all bullshit.

So that was a shock of a thing to learn.  It makes so much sense now that I think about things.  My mom fakes her own allergies all the time, and what she can and can’t eat depends on when you ask her and it never lines up with what she actually eats.  And once in my early twenties I told her that I had a bad reaction to eating bananas and she lit up like I’d given her this amazing gift.  I thought it was odd then but now oh my lord.

Anyway.

Jesus Christ.

WTF.

Yeah, I couldn’t watch He-Man, but my brother fucking ate rice bread and water for a few years.

Holy crap. Not only is that seriously awful for your brother, but actions like this actually harm those of us who do have severe food allergies. People who encounter this type of faking and see it exposed are that much less likely to take us seriously.

On Tumblr

Reading up on the Paris catacombs. How did Hugo manage not to include these

This Creepily Beautiful Chapel in Czermna, Poland, Is Constructed Out of Thousands of Human Bones

eighteenbelow:

kelsonv:

eighteenbelow:

Shin bones decorate the ceiling, skulls line the walls and over 21,000 bodies are buried in the basement

Warning for gruesome photos, natch.

I’ll be honest: if I was in the area I’d defnitely visit, but it would still creep me out a bit.  I’ve handled real human bones as part of an osteology course and that didn’t bother me, but the sheer number of these would give me the willies.

When I visited Rome, I visited the crypt of the Capuchin monks. The monks used their order’s bones to create amazing patterns in a series of six rooms. It was creepy and yet fascinating. The motto that stuck in my head, which is listed on the Wikipedia page, is “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be…”

Those guys definitely had a flair for the dramatic; I’d like to see that too.  Also want to see the catacombs in Rome and Paris, but I don’t know if those are open to visitors these days.

Reading up on the Paris catacombs.  How did Hugo manage not to include these in Les Miserables somewhere?

On Tumblr

Parsing the Veronica Mars Kickstarter Issues

The Bird and The Bat: Parsing the Veronica Mars Kickstarter Issues

thebirdandthebat:

Most Kickstarters are, for lack of a better term, exclusive events. If you don’t participate in the 30 days they’re up, you’re out of luck. There are some exceptions to this of course, many comic book Kickstarters now offer retailer incentives so people can actually purchase books in a shop if they’ve missed the end date. But the Veronica Mars film will not be exclusive to backers and that seemingly makes it less special to those who did back it. But that doesn’t seem to be an issue for fans, they just want to see the movie.

Um….what? People have it in their heads that crowd-funded business ventures are supposed to only produce things for their investors and nobody else?

I think they’re missing the point of a platform called Kickstarter.

Edit: I should add that none of the Kickstarter projects I’ve backed have given me the impression that the product was going to be given exclusively to the backers. So whether “most” is true or not in general, it hasn’t been in my (admittedly limited) experience.

Hazards of April Fools by email: I started reading the latest EFFector newsletter, not realizing it had arrived on April 1, and the first story was almost believable:

Hazards of April Fools by email: I started reading the latest EFFector newsletter, not realizing it had arrived on April 1, and the first story was almost believable:

MPAA Announces Kickstarter Campaign for Film Decrying Internet’s Impact on Creative Works

In a statement posted on its WordPress blog this week, the MPAA announced that it will respond to the Internet’s “destructive” effect on creative works with a new PSA, to be funded on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. “Rampant content theft — or as we call it, creativity murder — makes it impossible to promote ideas online,” according to a Tweet from MPAA chairman Chris Dodd. “For a pledge of $50, backers will receive an exclusive DVD copy of ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked’ in 3D.

The rest of them were a little more obvious.

Why Venus looks so much brighter than Jupiter.

Why Venus looks so much brighter than Jupiter. (This is something I don’t usually think about, but over the past month, with the two planets in the same area of the sky, I’ve really noticed it.)

Originally shared by Philip Plait (The Bad Astronomer):

Venus still blazes Jupiter, but 10 times as bright

Venus and Jupiter are still near each other in the sky, and will be for the next few days. Just go outside after sunset and face west; you can hardly miss them!

Venus is the brighter of the two by a long shot. That might seem weird; after all, Venus is about the same size as Earth, but Jupiter is over 11 times wider (and 140 times the area)! So why is Venus brighter?

Math! At least, math + geometry + science. Let me show you…

Jupiter and Venus still blaze in the west

[Image credit: Robert Blasius at fotografie.robert-blasius.de as part of Astronomers Without Borders]

Vaccination saves lives

Stop Antivaxxers Now – Phil Plait

Vaccination saves lives. Not just the lives of those who get vaccinated, but those around them who can’t because they’re too young, immunocompromised, or have other medical reasons that they can’t.

(If you’re wondering why this is on an astronomy site, it’s because the author makes a point of promoting science education and fighting against pseudoscience across the board.)

Originally shared by Vineet KewalRamani

Vaccination as altruism

There are people in society (the immunocompromised, newborns, elderly) vulnerable to deadly viral infections that the rest of us can easily prevent through vaccination.

But if 75 percent to 95 percent of the population around us is vaccinated for a particular disease, the rest are protected through what is called herd immunity. In other words, your measles vaccine protects me [the immunocompromised NY Times Op-Ed writer] against the measles.

Obviously people will first act in their own interests, but if there are no scientifically credible data showing harm by particular vaccination, and benefits are clear to the vaccinated and also to society at large, why not do it to help protect another?

For the Herd’s Sake, Vaccinate