Month: March 2004

…is now available online at Ellison Webderland: Julie Schwatz Obituary. (Thanks, ME.) Read it at your earliest, copy it at your peril.

Quick replies:

• The sidebar has been narrowed, you should be able to see it in most screen resolutions.
• Bold and Italics can be done using HTML– <b>bold</b> and <i>italic</i>, respectively.
• Yes, you can use a fake email, I suppose. But when we put in the “View all comments by this person” part, it will be checking by the same email address. So be warned– multiple emails will make it harder for people to look up your comments.
  We also reserve the right to put in a more secure system which would require a real email address, should we start getting idiots back.
• The link to my blog has been fixed. My fault, not Peter’s.

Any other comments?

Continue Reading “Meet the new blog, answers” →

So now that you’ve all had a chance to see it, we hope that overall you like the spring cleaning changes and upgrades around here. Personally, I like the pop-up window format…although, if you don’t, then you need only click on the “time of posting” link rather than the “list of replies” link and you’ll get full screen.

First and foremost, Glenn says a large acknowledgement is owed to Patrick Nielsen Hayden over at Electrolite for assistance in setting up certain aspects of the blog. You could do a lot worse that spend time visiting his blog, or his wife Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light. And I’m not just saying that because they’re editors at Tor, for whom I’m working on a new novel.

Other changes you’ll notice are along the sidebar, including:

• A calender of posts.
• A vastly improved search capability.
• Recent comments.
• Recent entries.
• Recent entries from Kathleen’s No Strings Attached (did I mention that Kathleen has a new blog? No? She has a new blog) and Glenn’s View From Above.
• Archives for But I Digress… and Cowboy’s Pete TV Roundup.
• And a link to a PayPal button for donations.

Yes, the link to the PayPal button was already there, but Glenn just blew his weekend converting the site over. And that’s not even counting the time spent recently having to unsnarl the place after trolls hit. This site gets pretty time intensive, not to mention the expenses this place incurs ranging from set-up to ongoing fees. If you’re at all interested in helping to keep it going and support it, take some time to donate via Paypal.

And Glenn will be paying attention to all comments regarding aesthetics, but first priority over the next days will be concentrating on improving functionality.

For those of you that have asked about our listing email addresses: you can hide your email address from the general public by putting in your URL. If you don’t have a URL of your own, then pick some worthy website to promote. We recommend the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, http://www.cbldf.org.

Thanks for the continued support, and be sure to hit the tip jar on the way out…or in, for that matter.

PAD

Out this week as we learned the true nature of the Shard. Whad’ja think?

PAD

You know, there’s plenty of people on the internet with whom I have specific disagreements about a variety of things…and it would never occur to me to e-mail them for the purpose of picking arguments with them.

So why is it that every six months or so I get some numbnut who writes to me to try and explain why I’m wrong about something–always substituting his or her opinion for anything resembling actual supportable fact. Invariably they become increasingly belligerent, accuse me of being intolerant of other’s opinions (even though *they* contacted *me* to explain why *I* was wrongheaded) and then ride off on their high horse so they can tell others on the net how Peter David was mean to them.

Don’t misunderstand: When it came to carving out a public persona, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. Nevertheless, I just can’t grasp the mindset of people anxious to go the extra yard just to harangue somebody. I wouldn’t go over to an NRA board to hassle the gun people. I wouldn’t e-mail McFarlane to needle him over his loss to Gaiman. Maybe I’m just lazy. Or tolerant. Could be they’re interchangeable.

PAD

So Caroline is watching “Play With Me Sesame” at 8 AM on Noggin as she usually does. And it starts off with the following: Ernie looking into camera and saying, “We’re going to go swimming today…but you’re not going to need a bathing suit!”

Which made me go, “Hmmmm. Ernie’s into child pørņ.”

And then Ernie said, “In fact, you’re not even going to need water!”

Which made me go, “Hmmmm. Ernie’s into heavy drug use.”

At which point he said, “All you have to do is what Ernie says!”

Which made me go, “Hmmmm. Ernie’s a control freak.”

And then I had a mental picture of toddlers trudging forward, glassy-eyed, arms oustretched, intoning, “We must do what Ernie says…”

I think I need to get more sleep.

PAD

There is a small brouhaha going around over the tremendous likelihood that the allegedly true story of Frank Hopkins, as depicted in “Hidalgo,” is BS (or, more appropriately, HS). People are shocked–shocked–to discover the historical Hopkins exaggerated his exploits a little. A lot. A whole hëll of a lot.

Well, I took Ariel to see it before I’d heard anything about the brou or the ha ha. And I’m watching thisl film and thinking, “An annual horse race of 3000 miles? The width of the United States? Across scorching desert? On a single horse? No frickin’ way. I’m not even sure there’s that much Arab desert *to* ride across. And by the way, he makes a side trip to rescue an Arab princess? Aw, c’mon.”

I pretty much came to the conclusion while watching that anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together should think of “Hidalgo” as nothing more than a live action version of those old wild west pulp magazines, and that all claims to the facts being unvarnished–as those magazines likewise claimed–should be given equal credence. Certainly the extreme flexibility of “truth” vis a vis the old west is integrated into the movie’s own story, ranging from the Wild Bill show depicting the slaughter of 300 surrendering Lakota at Wounded Knee as a brave victory for the white man, or an Arab’s perception of the west coming entirely from what he’s read in the greatly exaggerated wild west magazines. A deconstruction of the film’s own veracity, as it were. It’s annoying that Disney didn’t market it that way: It could just be billed as “Based on the tales of Frank Hopkins” and that would be perfectly fair.

Taken on that basis, “Hidalgo” is a rousing film with a nice kid-friendly message about not losing touch with your roots. It features a portrayal of Arabs that depicts them as fairly arrogant at first to the upstart cowboy but, ultimately, is pretty flattering (which is a nice change from the Arabs=terrorists mindset we currently have.) Plus there’s no twenty minute sequence of some poor Jew getting flayed and, hey, y’know, there’s horsies.

PAD