Author: dave-o

The end draws nigh! EXPIRATION DATE chapter 7 is here! #FreeReadFriday

… and, SPOILER ALERT: the *FAKE NEWS!1!!*, “ghost SWATs” and Boltzmann brains have arrived!

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Chapter 7 is here, as is every every previous chapter—free online and downloadable as PDFs, courtesy of the fine folks at Arbor Teas (who’ve also furnished discussion questions for book groups and connected with the Ann Abror District Library for special Summer Games points and badges.

Also, I’ll be doing a little Q&A here once the final chapter of Expiration Date drops, so if you have questions, please feel free to drop me a line.

More from Our Man in Brussels

Sorry it’s taken me so long to post an update from our man in

Arthur et ses bons amis
Arthur et ses bons amis

Brussels, Arthur Lacomme.  As you’ll recall he and his pals built some frikkin’ awesome! costumes/instruments/noisetoys for the Carnaval Sauvage de Bruxelles.  You can see more pics and vid on Arthur’s website.

I love a lot of things about both this Carnaval Sauvage de Bruxelles thang and Arthur’s contribution to it, bot most of all I love their costumes. When I was very little my mother was a docent at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and so my earliest memories are of that museum, and especially their collections of Native American and African ritual art and “material culture.”  I’ve always loved the dance costumes they have in their collection (similar to those shown below, which are in the AIC), and the dances that went with them, which were exuberant and otherworldly to me (much like the sounds that I like to dig out of unsuspecting electronics).

(Picture Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)
(Picture Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Arthur also pointed me to a few of his fellow Brusselers (Brusselman? Brusselsprouts?) similarly pushing out into the fringes of the Good Noise.  I’m loving this!

Here’s Why the Eye:

 

and this is Hoquets:

PRO-TIP: Get both of these vids playing simultaneously in separate windows on your computer; the sounds layer-up in a fun way.

Call on yr house rep to cosponsor these bills and help wrangle our cantankerous President🇺🇸📞

The good news is that there are plenty of signs that there is finally some  bipartisan appetite to roll back the unhealthy post-9/11 ballooning of Executive power in the federal government (a less noted, but more significant, example is explained here and here). 

Bravo!

But our specific current PotUS needs some specific, itemized reigning in.  Here are two legislative items (the first a House Resolution, the second an actual bill) that aim to do just that.  Both could use more cosponsors—and could likely get them from either side of the aisle right now.

  • H.Res.456 – Objecting to the conduct of the President of the United States (the name kinda says it all on this one)
  • H.R.3228 – Free Press Act of 2017: “To require the President to provide frequent press briefings covering the official business of the President to the White House press corps.”

In light of the President allegedly drafting his son’s fake excuses for meeting privately with foreign agents to coordinate with smearing a political opponent and, prior to that, his alleged involvement in coordinating with Fox News to produce a Fake News story smearing that same opponent, compounded by the President’s ongoing public (not at all alleged—’cause we all saw him doing the public parts, and confessing to the private parts in newspaper interviews) attempts to channel, limit, and outright detail the FBI investigation into his coordination with Russian agents to smear and defeat his opponent, these two legislative items are just about the least congress can do right now.

So call your reps and ask them to do them—or, at the very least, call them and tell them what you think about what’s going on.  Today, during your lunch break or on your commute or whatever.  It literally takes under five minutes; you can just call, say you’re a constituent, and ask:

“Is Rep. So-and-So cosponsoring  H.Res.456 and H.R.3228, which seek to hold the President accountable for questionable actions and force him to regularly communicate productively with the press?”  

If so, then thank them for their work.  If not, then thank them for their work and reiterate that you really, really think your rep should be cosponsoring these items.

Now go! Hit the phones! 

Thanks!

usa-american-flag-waving-animated-gif-26

Call yr reps!🇺🇸🔥📞 Today’s Topic: EPA funding

This is an easy one: the budget currently under consideration cuts the Environmental Protection Agency’a funding by ~30%. Right now the EPA has one (1!) toxicologist serving the six-state region that includes Michigan (where we just had an enormous lead-tainted-public-drinking-water problem). That’s down from four toxicologists a few years back—and even with 4x the staff they were overburdened.

It simply isn’t possible to assure safe air and water with the EPA running at two-thirds power—and if we want to increase domestic manufacturing, then we’re going to need to be even more diligent than we are today. Call yr reps and urge them to push for full funding of the EPA.

Oooh! Chapter Six of EXPIRATION DATE has dropped…

… and it’s got a humdinger of a hook at the end!  I don’t want to ALERT your SPOILERS, but Columbus, Ohio is gonna have issues, folks.  Serious, serious issues.  Just sayin’!

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You can read this chapter—and every one that preceded, and every one that follows—for free online, courtesy of our dope-fly pals at Arbor Teas.  If you’re down with book groups, Arbor Teas is even furnishing discussion questions.  If you’re an Ann Arborite, you can earn special EXPIRATION DATE points and badges in the Summer Games!

The first five chapters of EXPIRATION DATE are waiting for you!

The good folks at Arbor Teas have now released the first fifth chapter of my latest ExpirationDatenovella, Expiration Date. (All current chapters are available for free online in both a lovely web versions and nice, tidy PDFs, perfect for offline, ebook, and tablet reading—click on the chapter’s “Print” button to open and save that PDF).

What’s more, the good folks at the Ann Arbor District Library have included Expiration Date in this year’s Summer Games: You can earn points and badges by sussing out clues found in each chapter (scroll down to the “Expiration Date” section of the badge list to get started).

We have four chapters to go, oh my Best Beloved—and, trust me, you have no frikkin’ clue where this one is going (but, SPOILER ALERT!: Bram and Lizzie do indeed die on October 10, 2017, around 8am.)

BONUS: Wanna know more about how the sausage gets made?  You can check out this interview with Gabie at Tea End blog.

o_O #politics #pathetic

If the man who said this had never amounted to anything more than the local pay-toilet impresario, I’d still be appalled that someone with so little appreciation for the rudemnts of American politics had risen to such a station.

“I’m not going to own it”? Pathetic.

Meritocracy? Fuck meritocracy.

Trump on repeal-replace failure

Trump suggests Republicans will let ACA market collapse, then rewrite health law

“There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” in the July/August F&SF

It seems I’ve been talking about my novella “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” without being super-duper clear that it’s out on newsstands and availableMagazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/Aug 2017 for download in the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  My bad!  The story is being met with a degree of enthusiasm that I hadn’t really expected, and that’s sorta had me spun.  So, here’s the nitty-gritty:

 

Wanna Buy a Copy?

  • The July/Aug F&SF is now in bookstores throughout the US, including most Barnes & Noble locations. 
  • To buy it online:

Wanna Help Spread the Hype?

  • Tweet (retweet it!): 
  • Facebook post (share it!):
  • Goodreads link (review it!)
  • Nebula Awards: F&SF makes every story they publish available to SFWA members on the password-protected Nebula Forums.   If you’re an SFWA member (or know some), feel free to hit them with that link and they can download and read “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House” (and tons of other great stories) for free.

Wanna Know About How the Sausage Gets Made?

Take 5 Minutes to Tell the FCC to Preserve Net Neutrality

Long story short:  “Net Neutrality” means that, just as the phone company must route all calls with the same priority and quality, broadband providers (like Comcast and AT&T) must treat all web traffic the same, and not, for example, make connections to Netflix super crappy so that you feel obliged to pay for OnDemand in order to watch Mad Max: Fury Road or Sophia the First.

You have until July 17 to tell the FCC how you feel about that.  Submitting an official comment—one someone actually reads and takes seriously—is super easy:

  1. Go to this link and click “Express” (to get a form you can fill out and submit right there) or click “New Filing” (to upload a document you’ve already written).
  2.  Express your feelings about Net Neutrality hitting on one (or more) of three key points:
    1.  How has Net Neutrality impacted your life? Do you have an online business that would be FUBAR if Amazon got priority connections?  Did a service that organically arose as a result of the net being an equal access zone improve your life (examples: Things you’ve learned off of YouTube, clients/jobs you’ve connected with over LinkedIn or Monster.com or a freelancing community, relatives you re-connected with via Facebook or genealogy websites, supportive communities you found in this forum or that sub-reddit, etc.)
    2. What do you understand you are buying when you pay for broadband? Is it more like a telephone line—a “telecommunications service” that creates value by giving you a clear connection to the information and services you want—or is an an “information service” in and of itself, that is, a service that creates value by giving you information?  (Under FCC rules, telecommunications services require greater regulation than information services.)  If you go online and go to YouTube to watch a video, then Facebook to kibitz with pals, then check your Gmail, your broadband is a telecommunications services.  If, on the other hand, you boot up your laptop, rub your hands together, and say “Ah!  Time to go check the Comcast website for the latest news and weather, then go to the Comcast Cat Video service to watch some cat videos, then head on over to ComcastBook to chat with my pals!”, then it probably makes more sense to call Comcast an “information service.”  (Yes, I realize most of the “Comcast information services” I listed don’t exist; that’s the point.  They offer few “information services,” and most other ISPs don’t even offer those.)
    3. Competition.  If your current ISP decides to start blocking YouTube traffic and slowing Netflix to a crawl, can you just lickety-split change services to one that treats all traffic equally, or is it hard, expensive, or impossible to switch, or even shop around, because competition is too scarce?

(Ars Technica has a great article going into detail about this approach to discussing Net Neutrality with the FCC.  Highly recommended read!)

Here’s a draft of my comment:

I do not believe that the FCC should reclassify broadband as an “information service.”  As a consumer, it’s plain as day that I’m purchasing “telecommunications service” from Comcast when I pay for my broadband access.

Although I’ve had broadband Internet access through either AT&T or Comcast for at least 15 years, I have never used either company for any of their “information services.”  I currently use Apple, Amazon, and Google for cloud storage, FastMail and Apple for email hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.net for web hosting, DynDNS for domain name services, ArborDomains for domain name hosting, the University of Michigan for my VPN, and Verizon, Skype, or Google for telephony.  Heck, even though Comcast *does* offer cable TV and streaming video, I don’t use that service (they dropped the only channel I wanted), instead relying on Netflix, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon.

Comcast actually does a pretty good job of providing me with a telecommunications service–but to call that an “information service” is as obtuse as calling the highway system a “grocery service” simply because the grocery store has produce delivered via truck.

When I pay Comcast, I’m paying them for fast and reliable broadband service, connecting me to the many “information services” I want, value, and pay to use.

Thank you for your time and attention.

All Best,

David Erik Nelson . . .

Go forth and tell your government how you want them to handle regulating this vital public utility.