The Hugo vote breakdown (original) is now online. Bujold fans like Gaiman, no surprise. You can always get so much out of poring over Australian Rules voting results. Perhaps a better use of time would be reading the Hugo nominated stories. You won’t find the novels there, but almost all of the other fiction is online. Nice. I remember when Clarinet did a CD containing all the stories (and some of the novels), and that was a big deal.

I’m going to like living in Boston. There’s apparently a bus trip down to the 9/21 RoH show; Dick Togo’s gonna be wrestling a tag match. Also: Low Ki, American Dragon, Steve Corino, Mike Modest, Donovan Morgan, Takao Omori, Christopher Daniels, the SAT, The Amazing Red, and Jay Briscoe. And Spanky. Yeah! Addendum: I’ve set up a LiveJournal Boston-area wrestling community. My enthusiasm runs wild!

In a fit of automation, I have abused the excellent MTMacro plugin to create an tag. <amazon title=”Monster Manual II” asin=”0786928735”> would be blithely transformed into the appropriate link to Amazon. I do this, yes, because I’m too lazy to build affiliate links by hand each time. The macro code, for those even lazier than I: <MTMacroDefine name="Amazon" tag="amazon"> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<MTMacroAttr name="asin">/unofficfengshuih/ref=nosim/"><MTMacroAttr name="title"></a> </MTMacroDefine> Mind you, I’m also too lazy to implement this in all the site templates, so until I get unlazy and do a bunch of editing, the feature’s pretty worthless.

Somehow I missed the news that John Malkovich was playing Ripley in an upcoming adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. Excellent casting choice; I have to remember to keep an eye out for this.

49% of Americans think the First Amendment goes too far. (original) No, there’s not really anything I can add to that.

The road signs are marked with secret codes which instruct the military where to go when it’s time for the coup. Quintessence of the Loon has more of the same.

The Hugo Award results are in! BEST NOVEL (486 ballots cast) The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (HarperCollins/Eos) American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Morrow) Perdido Street Station by China Mi

I watched Magnolia again last night. Well. Part of it; I had forgotten, unsurprisingly, how harrowing it can be and it was rather late, so the whole three hours was not in the cards. I actually hadn’t seen it since the first time I saw it, in the theater. After that three hours, I said to myself, “It’s going to be a while before I can watch this again.” I still agree with myself. On the other hand, I’m also even more certain that I need to, and that I want to, and that I want to think about Magnolia much much more. ...

I have very fond memories of The Westing Game. Today, I stumbled across a link to an Ellen Raskin page (original) of rare quality. Turns out she was a graphic designer and an illustrator as well. The page includes scans of her original manuscript for The Westing Game and a pretty extensive discussion of her typesetting directions. Good reading. There’s also, of course, a bibliography and biography.

Ernie the Attorney made an offhand comment about programmers as artists (original) the other day, which got me thinking, although I half suspect it was meant to be tongue in cheek. Still… artists? I’m not sure; I think the various tribes of computer professionals (programmers, system administrators, network administrators) are more akin to court wizards. We are comfortable and fluent with devices that almost everyone’s forced to interact with every day. It’s a prestigious position; the unwashed are constantly reminded how much they need us. It’s also a set of occupations that until fairly recently has been taught in the medieval style. All the best sysadmins I know learned from other skilled masters. We have no formal apprenticeship system, but the trappings are all there. ...