So now we find ourselves at a crossroads. A crossroads of hate and terror. How do we respond? How do you respond? Do we lash out with anger, hate and mistrust. Or do we, as Lincoln begged, appeal to the “better angels of our nature?”
Usually when tragedy occurs, we see our nation come together. I was saddened, yesterday to see far too many retreating to their over-worn policy corners and demagoguery. Let me be clear, there are no simple policy answers to this tragedy. Beware of anyone who tells you that they have the easy solution. It doesn’t exist. And I can assure you this — that calling people idiots, communists, fascists or bigots on Facebook is not going to change any hearts or minds. Today we need fewer Republicans and fewer Democrats. Today we need more Americans.
But just because an easy solution doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The greatest generations in the history of the world were never innately great. They became great because of how they responded in the face of evil. Their humanity is measured by their response to hate and terror.
- Lt. Gov. Cox speaks at vigil for Orlando: 'My heart has changed'
QOTD: Go totally insane with joy
Jun. 10th, 2015 12:47 pm
[A]s neuroscientist Head says: "Everything you do for a dog to help them age well, you should do with them."
So eat the best food you can afford. Go for a walk, even if it's raining. Take a lot of naps. Keep your teeth clean and your breath fresh, so that the people you lick will not flinch. And when someone you love walks in through the door, even if it happens five times a day, go totally insane with joy.
David Dudley
QOTD: Always kind of internally flapped
Jan. 6th, 2014 05:01 pmSome people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped. And so ... when there's actually something real to be concerned about, it's actually less anxiety-provoking than these irrational things. It's also fairly typical ... of certain kinds of anxiety disorder sufferers, particularly people with panic disorder, [they] are exceptionally good at hiding it. They're able to convey an impression of competence, calmness and confidence, which is maybe substantially real ... but there's an internal fear. ... The gap between that and this façade where people see you as competent and effective — you're always afraid of being exposed, which is in itself anxiety producing.
- Scott Stossel
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. I pulled down a handful of my mother’s old books, from when she was a girl, and I read about schoolgirls having adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly they were up against smugglers or spies or fifth columnists, whatever they were, and the girls were always brave and they always knew exactly what to do. I was not brave and I had no idea what to do.
I had never felt so alone.
Gaiman, Neil (2013-06-18). The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel (Kindle Locations 843-847). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
(Huh, I have never noticed that the Kindle app adds the attribution when you cut and paste. Handy, that.)
QOTD: Panda-ering
Jul. 8th, 2013 08:16 pm"My wife is a musician named Kaki King. When we first met I told her she was cute and she said 'you ought to see me in a panda suit.'"
-Jessica Templin
I think that is going to be my go-to response to compliments from now on: "You oughta see me in a panda suit".
Cat Valente (talk of body image issues and weight loss, in case this is a topic you wish to avoid):
There was a lot of carob, is what I’m saying, and I will go to my grave insisting that carob tastes not of chocolate or treats but a fallen world and your parents’ lies.
Desiree at Pull Your Socks Up!:

If someone invited me to an event requiring a dress code, I'm not sure what I'd wear.
I'm so steeped in dressing to please myself that an evening frock, tail coat, floral tiara or a tutu have simply become daily wear.
Does it make special events less special?
I have no idea ... I rarely go anywhere fancy.
Neglecting a clothing collection due to a sparse social calendar doesn't sit well with a vintage-aholic, thus my decision to wear what I love every single day, everywhere I go.
I figure if I'm lucky, I've got another 40-odd years on this planet.
That's potentially a long spell of "greige" track pants and hoodies if I fancy merely existing in a half-life.
Sod that, I'm wearing it all!
I'm gonna grow old disgracefully.

John Scalzi, on his experience at the RT Booklovers' Convention:
In the evenings, I would be hanging out at the bar with other writers and friends and I would look around and every other person around the table would be a woman. And I would go, huh, and then go back into the conversation.
This is something that I think might be worth noting out loud: At a largely female-oriented convention, as a man, I was never excluded, resented or made to feel unwelcome. There were folks who were surprised I was there, but that surprise was always “Oh! Cool! You’re here!” rather than “Why are you here?” And that, of course, is a salient difference. No one questioned my reasoning for being there, or suggested, say, that I was a Fake Romance Boy, or quizzed me about who my favorite romance author was or if I could recite that author’s bibliography to their satisfaction. I certainly wasn’t skeezed on. On the contrary, people went out of their way to ask me if I was enjoying myself and to let me know they were glad I was there. When I admitted ignorance about certain writers or genre details they were happy to expand my knowledge, and they wanted to know more about what I did and my own experiences as a writer. I met lots of new people and made new friends and in many ways it was one of the best convention experiences I’ve had in a long time.
This leaves wide open and hanging the question of why was it so easy for the folks at the RT Booklovers’ Convention, fans and creators both, to welcome a stranger of the opposite gender into their midst, while other enthusiast communities that skew male still have creators and fans who blow a gasket about women doing their thing in that genre. It’s not difficult to be welcoming and friendly. I wish the genres I am actively a part of could do as good a job of it as romance and the RT Booklovers’ convention did for me (and, I will note, the other men I saw at the convention).
(If you've wondered why I've been so quiet here for ages, and/or why I haven't been doing a lot socially, the first paragraph is at least a partial explanation.)
Allie at Hyperbole and a Half, Depression, Part Two:
If you never read it the first time around, her post Adventures in Depression is also excellent for understanding what it's like. [Edit: For me, at any rate.]
Allie at Hyperbole and a Half, Depression, Part Two:
At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.
But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they'll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you're having this weird argument where you're trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they'll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.
And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
If you never read it the first time around, her post Adventures in Depression is also excellent for understanding what it's like. [Edit: For me, at any rate.]
QOTD: Good jeans
Aug. 15th, 2012 09:56 pmGood jeans require exhaustive evaluation, diagnosis, and a prescription. If you accept jeans dispensed by any random idiot off the street, you may experience muffintop, cameltoe, saddlebags, thass (a malignant condition caused by rear-pocket placement that makes one's ass appear to start at mid thigh), fugliness, public humiliation, and death. You should not use jeans dispensed by any random idiot off the street if you have a functioning brain and/or a shred of self-awareness.
If you or a loved one has been the victim of jeans dispensed by any random idiot off the street, you may be entitled to compensation. Call 1-800-SUEHISASS to see if you qualify for participation in a class action lawsuit.
- Ren, in comments at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
(no subject)
Dec. 20th, 2011 05:32 pm[M]ost of my friends hadn't had a daddy like mine, who said things like, Don't confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby, when I'd gotten tangled up with class heartbreaker Tommy Ralston. The more he'd hit on my girlfriends, the harder I'd worked to keep him. It was like I was addicted to whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me. (Mac, in Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning)
*blink* *blink*
It was like I was addicted to whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me.
Damn. There's a smack upside the head. Surely didn't expect to get a peek inside my own head like that while reading a paranormal series about fighting Unseelie. [Edit: In particular, there's a situation I find myself in where that sentence above as written is pretty much spot-on what is going on, now that I step back half a step and take a look at it. It is, in many respects, absolutely terrible for me and my mental health, and yet I haven't been able to extract myself from it due to lack of any serious attempt.]
(no subject)
Oct. 30th, 2011 11:16 pm*cackle*
Yes, yes, dodgy conspiracy theory. I don't care, I'm going to see it anyway. Or even perhaps because of. I love dodgy conspiracy theories.
Which brings us back to “Anonymous,” Roland Emmerich’s new costume drama that has English professors tying their tweed blazers into knots. After his success with the documentaries “Godzilla” and “Independence Day,” Emmerich has now brought his CGI touch to the Soul of the Age. (And if you think that soul was Shakespeare’s, I’ve got some moon rocks I’d like to sell you.)
[...]
I have no dog in this fight. In graduate school, I studied American literature, not British, so I was busy trying to show that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a warlock. (Never found a single piece of evidence to disprove that claim.)
Yes, yes, dodgy conspiracy theory. I don't care, I'm going to see it anyway. Or even perhaps because of. I love dodgy conspiracy theories.
Last night Neil & I took the dogs for a long walk along a corn field beneath a nearly full moon, it was bright and we had flashlights, and I wondered how easily it would be to get lost in a cornfield. At which point Neil vanished into it and I followed and for some time all I could see where the tops of corn stalks wavering in the moonlight, the occasional flash of something big and white running past me, and nearby cornstalks lit up by my flashlight if I turned it on. I could hear the footsteps and the rustling shiver of the leaves, I followed the noise, after a few minutes I saw a flashlight ahead of me and came from the rows into a stand of trees.
"The rows sort of make sure that you go in a straight line," Neil said.
I'm still not sure how easy it is to get lost in a cornfield on a moonlit night, but I know how marvelous it is to try.
-kylecassidy, "From the turret at Castle Gaiman"
QOTD: This looks shopped
May. 4th, 2011 12:01 amA photographer consulted by CNN said the gruesome photograph is most definitely not real.
"I have seen a great number of poorly Photoshopped images in my time as a photographer and I can tell by the pixels that it is a fake," said Kenna Lindsay, a New York-based photographer who works with composite images.
-Widely distributed death photo of Osama bin Laden is fake, cnn.com (I grabbed caps for when they realize what they did there.)
Neil Peart may or may not be human: Listen to this and fast-forward to the 3:52 mark. That sounds like the drum fill of some kind of advanced alien species. My theory: Neil Peart was sent here from another planet to kill us, but he discovered a drum set, joined Rush and totally forgot about it. So technically, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson saved the world. You're welcome, Rush haters.
- Peter Hartlaub, An open letter to my wife, who hates Rush
If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don’t think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.
- Edwin Land to Polaroid employees, December 23, 1942
- Edwin Land to Polaroid employees, December 23, 1942
QOTD: F-ing trees, man.
Nov. 22nd, 2010 06:44 pm“We had actually had the luxury of having lunch before to talk about another movie, and it was a really bad movie that I did. She dodged the bullet. And then I was still able to … I don’t want to tell you what movie … alright, The Happening. F— it. It is what it is. F—ing trees, man. The plants. F— it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”
- Mark Wahlberg
- Mark Wahlberg