Somebody That I Used to Know – Walk off the Earth
This is really cool – aside from being an awesome song, watching 5 people play the same guitar all at once is pretty unbelievable.
New Year’s Resolutions – 2012
A bit past the first of the year, but I had to spend some time working out what I want to do, and that took some time. This year I have three resolutions:
1) Follow the 12 month writing resolutions plan that I wrote about previously.
2) Keep up with rowing in the new year. I don’t anticipate that being a problem, given that I’m taking a class and there’s stuff I have to learn, so I can’t really opt out. And also I LOVE rowing. The endorphin high after practice is amazing.
3) And produce more than I consume – a goal I looked at in April of last year. I considered trying at least 1 day and preferably 2 days to produced more than I consumed. I promptly forgot that I made the goal, but I didn’t do to badly at it in November, at least. I do enjoy television, but I need to kick some shows off the roster. And for the past year, I knit while I watch TV, so I’m at least keeping the producing and consuming neck and neck there.
I always have the impulse to attempt New Year’s Resolutions, even though I often give them up part way into the year. And I’ve been plenty pragmatic about it in the past; attempting to take on funny goals, or to consider them as aspirations and things to strive for.
I’m going to do the same this year – I’m not going to beat myself up or give up in disgust if I don’t accomplish each task every day; this is about building new habits, and that takes trial and error, so I need to fail and retry to succeed. So if I miss a day, I’ll start over and try to get to a place where I’m doing the new thing most of the time.
Steph’s Top 40 Tunes from the 80s
I put this playlist together several years back when I had a big 80s party, but after that I managed to lose it, except that I had a copy on CD, thankfully. So here are my favorite 80s tunes, mostly in order from “pretty cheesy” to “really good.”
- Love’s Been A Little Bit Hard On Me / Juice Newton / 3:21
- Johnny Are You Queer? / Josie Cotton / 2:53
- Breakaway / Tracy Ullman / 2:43
- Tired of Toein’ The Line / Rocky Burnette / 3:52
- You’re My Favorite Waste of Time / Owen Paul / 3:07
- What I Like About You / The Romantics / 3:05
- I’ll Be (500 Miles) / The Proclaimers / 3:46
- Like A Prayer / Madonna / 5:58
- Video Killed The Radio Star / BuGgles / 3:21
- One Night in Bangkok / Murray Head & Anders Glenmark / 4:15
- Dancing With Myself / Billy Idol / 4:57
- Goody Two Shoes / Adam Ant / 3:34
- You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart / Eurythmics / 3:56
- Veronica / Elvis Costello / 3:17
- I Melt With You / Modern English / 3:58
- Bullet The Blue Sky / U2 / 4:38
- Orange Crush / R.E.M. / 4:01
- Punk Rock Girl / The Dead Milkmen / 2:44
- Knock On Wood / Amii Stewart / 3:47
- I Beg Your Pardon / Kon Kan / 4:02
- Erotic City / Prince / 3:59
- A Little Respect / Erasure / 3:31
- Just Can’t Get Enough / Depeche Mode / 3:39
- It’s A Sin / Pet Shop Boys / 5:02
- Blue Monday / New Order / 7:32
- Kids In America / Kim Wilde / 3:33
- Don’t Leave Me This Way / The Communards / 4:37
- Under The Milky Way / The Church / 5:02
- Pictures of You / The Cure / 4:51
- Should I Stay or Should I Go / The Clash / 3:08
- Blood and Roses / The Smithereens / 3:40
- Unsatisfied / The Replacements / 4:05
- Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now / The Smiths / 3:37
- Under The Killing Moon / Echo & The Bunnymen / 5:50
- The Beat(en) Generation / The The / 3:09
- Stigmata / Ministry / 5:48
- Institutionalized / Suicidal Tendencies / 3:32
- Love Is a Stranger / Eurythmics / 3:40
- Love Will Tear Us Apart / Joy Division / 3:24
- Bring Me Edelweiss / Edelweiss / 3:42
Apps I may need someday
The Business Model Toolbox combines the speed of a napkin sketch with the smarts of a spreadsheet. It enables you to map, test, and iterate your business ideas – fast.
With the Business Model Toolbox you will be able to:
- – Sketch your business model using the practical methodology from the best-selling book, Business Model Generation.
- – Add ballpark figures for market size, revenue streams, and costs – faster than any spreadsheet.
- – Test the profitability of your ideas with a quick report and breakdowns by offer, customer segments, and costs.
Why I need may this: I can see this being useful for getting my writing distributed when I get my novel finished. I have a kind of elaborate plan for this including a marketing website that I need to build, with downloadable ebooks that I sell myself from the site as well as purchasing from amazon and barnes and noble.
A personal database app – ReadWrite reviews 4 of them for the iPad.
Why I need may this: I keep running into a frustration with tracking things accurately – I’ve been wanting a way to track my word counts in writing, but also some other things based on date that simply entering things in a calendar doesn’t help with. A calendar lets me enter information, but doesn’t sum it up for me in a query – “How many times this year have I put flea medication on the dog?” is one of those queries I’d like to have. (also, “how many times have I cleaned out the fish tank?” and “how many times have I visited the library?” “How many times over the last 5 years have I gotten an oil change” are other examples.) I’m wishing there were a journaling/calendar app that would do these things, but I haven’t found one, and think I may need to just build a database that does something like this, although the very idea makes me really weary, frankly.
You are awful, too
Whenever you confront, or see confronted, sexism on the internet, there is almost always a chorus of people doing a couple of things in response: 1) excusing the behavior of the people who are sexist, or 2) trying to defend the community in which the sexism is taking place by arguments such as “not all XX people are sexist; most of us are great people except for these few idiots.” or 3) saying things like “if you participate anonymously, you don’t have to deal with the sexism, so hide your identity and you’ll get to participate fully.”
Kate Harding blogs about a specific incident that fits this pattern – a 15 year-old girl who considers herself an atheist and wants to be part of a discussion on atheism posts on reddit in an atheism community about the book her mother got her for Christmas – and the girl gets an enormous number of rape threats and sexist, predatory comments from men who participate in that in the atheist community.
Skeptic blogger Rebecca Watson caught on to what was happened to the young woman on Reddit and wrote about it on her site. Subsequently, the comments on her post were filled with people excusing the behavior of the reddit folks as satire, people suggesting the girl should only post anonymously so she wouldn’t be subject to abusive comments, and people explaining that this is just the way the world works and we can’t change it.
Kate’s response on her site to the excuses in the comments on Rebecca’s blog is phenomenal, and worth saving for the succinct and appropriate answers to a number of common troll-isms, man-splaining and excusing behavior that serves to shelter misogynist abuse online.
I don’t want to seize a massive block-quote of her words because it wouldn’t be fair use, and her writing is also almost too succinct to paraphrase well, so please just go and read her post, and note that I love everything after this paragraph:
“I love that “you are awful, too” bit so much, I’d like to expand on it.”
Writing Resolutions
Wordplay has a nice list of 12 writing resolutions – 1 for each month of the year. Pretty good stuff, and I plan to adopt them.
In January, I resolve to…schedule a regular writing time.
In February, I resolve to… create a roadmap to publication.
In March, I resolve to… stop procrastinating.
In April, I resolve to… edit an old story.
In May, I resolve to… send my story out for critique.
In June, I resolve to… enforce my writing time.
In July, I resolve to… streamline my writing process.
In August, I resolve to… fact check my story.
In September, I resolve to… do one thing to build my author’s platform.
In October, I resolve to… interview my characters.
In November, I resolve to… get organized.
In December, I resolve to… exterminate clichés.
Bonus: Year-Long Resolution:
This year, I resolve to read at least one book on the craft every month.
Friday Night Lights
While I’m working through my CD ripping project, I’ve been knitting and doing some marathon Netflix watching. I can’t remember what prompted me to start watching Friday Night Lights, but I’ve been working my way through the first several seasons – and it’s GOOD. The writing is amazing. I wish I’d been watching this all along. The problem is that after watching the show continuously, I’ve started talking with a Texas twang. It’s a little embarrassing.
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