Headache like whoa. St00pid weather. (I wore flannel pajamas last night! In August!)
Melty 'songbrain
Lots of crap contributed to yesterday's difficulties, and I'm not at liberty to disclose most of it. Just - yesterday was a difficult day in the areas of Other People's Stuff.
Not that anyone asked
In the post-Worldcon talks, I've seen a bit back and forth about editors and small presses, and FWIW - the smaller publishers whose books I'm always willing to take a chance on are Pyr and Night Shade. I've seen things that are not my taste come out from them (rarely), but I've never seen anything bad, and I've seen a lot of really good and innovative stuff.
There are others, but I'm not caffeinated yet. Those two are the ones I mentioned to Adam last night.
Wind Tunnel Dreams
$80 so far. Thanks, guys! Story will continue through Friday.
One of the interesting things about writing seven years ago is that the soundtrack is different. Sara's music is Counting Crows,
s00j, little Concrete Blonde, Peter Gabriel, et cetera. Doodle intersects with her on a lot of things (His Song is Counting Crows' "Anna Begins"). Axis and Griffin are totally different, though. And the pace is different. I'm used to more of a meditative flow from PYH.Link Soup
* Mark Spitz is a bad sport.
* I don't usually link to lolcats, but many of you will love this one.
* Skeksis Chamberlain action figure!
* Sachiko Kodama is a physics geek turned artist whose intimacy with the laws of magnetism has led her to create art out of magnets and oils filled with magnetic particles. As the magnets interact with the magnetized water, she's able to create amazingly weird, oily shapes that mutate and flow seemingly without reference to gravity. This is in an art show at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Trey, you must go to this.
* Iron Man: The End.
* Yam pony!
Link Soup, Daily Science Edition
* Disrupting the brain's retrieval of drug-associated memories may prevent relapse in drug addiction, according to new research in the August 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers reduced drug-seeking behaviors in rats by blocking specific receptors in the brain during the recall of drug-associated memories. The NMDA-type glutamate receptor blocked in the study is important in learning and memory. The findings suggest potential new strategies to treat drug addiction in people.
* Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. In an article published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet.
* Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have for the first time engineered 3-D materials that can reverse the natural direction of visible and near-infrared light, a development that could help form the basis for higher resolution optical imaging, nanocircuits for high-powered computers, and, to the delight of science-fiction and fantasy buffs, cloaking devices that could render objects invisible to the human eye.