After Indy molted most recently, I noticed his newest trick (one of my previous snakes was named Houdini): a new mark above and behind his left eye that looks a lot like... an eye. Seriously, it's a scale that's spherical and shiny, mostly separate from the rest of the scales and it looks almost like an eye. The thing is, it's not an eye. He looks kinda scruffy because he's still in mid-molt, but I think you can see the "second eye" behind the eye. I am going to be a very sad panda if this turns out to be some kind of malignant anti-snake thing.

High maintenance, low maintenance.

We'd like another ball python. One, Indy is young enough that we can introduce another snake without any undue stress on either snake. Two, we really like having Indy around, and I think we'd like to have another one to play with, and this time we have the chance to get a morph (when we got Indy, I had just my experience from years ago with ball pythons to draw on; I didn't know there were morphs today!). I really like Spider morphs:

And I am a huge fan of clown morphs:

(shamelessly stolen from Anthony Caponetto Reptiles)

But as we're looking around through the endless morphs at probreeders.com–who breed Gila monsters, too–out of Escondido, California (I seriously need to get back there to visit them), wifey finds the exotics and latches right on. She likes the Albinos–the higher contrast ones–but not the blue-eyed-lucies. She likes the Axanthics and some, but not all of the pastels. But the one she really wants is this half-leucistic "crystal ball" python:

Note that this animal is leucistic. It has blue eyes, not orange or red. It is likely the offspring of two platinums, which can sometimes lead to what's called a "blue-eyed-lucy" or a full leucistic snake: no pigmentation, blue eyes, totally white. Wife immediately latched onto this snake and wanted it. I am not sure what this morph is called because I think this is actually a failed attempt at a Lucy. But she's still a really pretty snake. So I'm wondering if somebody's willing at Pro Breeders to try to make another semi-Lucy for Sandy. Partly because I found out today that Clown morphs are really expensive, especially the pretty ones like Caramel Clown morphs. So, so pretty. The cost is probably pretty high for both, so it may be a toss-up. The silly but beautiful colors of a clown, or the regal and subtle colors of a crystal ball.

And then I get a Boa. :D

Indy

Is now eating one small mouse a week. This is awesome. I have a great eater. Ball pythons are notoriously bad eaters, but Indy is not one of them. He's going to chill out some as he needs to shed, and the Fall is coming up but by then he'll be many mouses bigger. I am so pleased with this snake, I really think that before he gets too too much bigger, we're going to get another hatchling (who won't be too small compared to him) to be his buddy. (and ours, we love Indy so much, we'd really love to have another. Sandy wants a Mojave or a Pastel morph)

Anyways, that's the snake sync.

Holy wow

I don't like the Mountain Dew energy drink, Amp. I detest it. But, Amp Lightning, this new yellow one, is fucking awesome. I can't really link to the drink itself, or to a place to buy it... it's one of those things where you just gotta go to the corner market and see if they have it. But there are a couple reviews out there.

Lemonade. Energy. Drink.

zomg

walls, bouncing

So here's the deal with the ads

I cannot get Google to display 100% public service announcements or charity banners or anything like that. But, Google does this on their own a certain percentage of the time, which they decline to state. It is higher on lower traffic sites which don't mesh with their advertisers (hint hint, I don't really attract a lot of advertisers). So I am keeping the ads because in the ads there will be PSAs sometimes and I can't display them otherwise. If somebody has a better solution, please let me know. I would really like to hear it.

Thanks,
alex

River of Gods

I have been reading River of Gods for a little while now. It, like Windup Girl, started kind of slowly, and both have a fair amount of muck to wade through. So it was so going to start. I'd never read an Ian Mcdonald book before (although I own a copy of The Dervish House, which might have been a better place to start, given I had just finished Paolo's book), so I didn't know what to expect of the author except that Charlie Stross speaks well of him, Iain Banks blurbed him, and in general, he is well regarded in the community. So it was a gamble, but I think a safe gamble, and when I saw the cover and it said "It's 2047: Happy Birthday, India!", I think I was pretty hooked. Windup Girl convinced me there's a lot of material to be developed there (in literature and literally) that just hasn't, and there are so many possibilities, we may even see a sub-genre akin to steampunk. What would it be called? Shivapunk is too limited, as is tikkapunk or hindipunk. Asiapunk is silly, because there's so much already written about China and Japan. Well, someone is going to have to coin a term, because technology is going to develop very, very differently there than here.

Which brings me back to McDonald. I haven't finished the book, but already he's blown me away with some of the speculative technology that isn't really that farfetched. The one thing that irritated me was the use of the term "google-watt". I am not going to assume he means "googol-watt" (that is, 10¹⁰⁰) because that power output, even for short durations escapes our abilities, even in 2047. Promise. And why intentionally spell it "google-watt"? Is it specifically playing with the term? Or is it meant to just mean some giant wattage? Why not then riff on Back to the Future like many geeks do and say that it uses eighty jiggawatts! I just failed to see the point.

But the rest of the ideas... spot on, Ian, spot on. I can tell I'll be reading a lot more of your books in the future. Good stuff, and thanks for contributing great fiction to the genre. we need it.

I am so pleased

That technology has caught up with science fiction (or if you like, the public has caught up with NASA), and meal replacements are now generally available to the public, often with enhancements for one's performance, like big hits of a B stack or maltodextrin (a sugar) and of course caffeine. What better way to take on the rest of the day than to skip lunch and instead tear open a pouch and suck down a "meal," that improves your performance, includes the nutrients that junk food wouldn't have included, takes less time, and costs less? What's to lose?

Sure, you may say people like Ensure and Slim-Fast were doing this years ago, but the product they provide, to this day, is the bare essentials of a meal. They offer no enhancement over bare nutrition. For active persons, this is not a suitable meal. If I want to work a twelve-hour shift, or I want to go for a run on lunch, or I want to go walk eight miles after work, I need more than just bare essentials. I need lots of carbs. Sugars, electrolytes, ketones, and so on. The stuff of these so-called energy drinks, only in extended form. And we're engineering them.

Folks, less time eating is more time working. Eating engineered food out of a bag is better for you than eating whatever tripe you'd be eating at the fast food joint you eat your breakfast and lunch at if you're a working stiff.

Let it also be said that I am a 100% full supporter of whole foods (note lower case w and f) and farms like Polyface and Stonyfield (who is also making meal replacement drinks). I think they're doing the right thing for Americans. I wish more farms would. I wish more stores would locally source their food, seasonally source their food, and I wish more Americans would learn how to cook and just fucking do it (I made my own dinner last night, thank you very much). The fact is, they aren't, or they're time constrained, or they can't make pasta puttanesca in the office on lunch.

So, bring on the meals-in-bags, folks. I'm waiting because eating with utensils is SO old fashioned.

Consider it fair warning

Anybody caught wearing these at my place may get their leg humped.

Dr Martens Air Wair Ellen Plaid Womens Slip-on, UK 6 US 8, Purple

(yay, i just figured out how to use the amazon associates referral thing!)

The snake has graduated

I may not yet have mentioned Indy here before (apologies if I haven't). He's a ball python, and when we got him he was a hatchling, probably not more than a few weeks old. Since then I think we've had him seven weeks (making him maybe ten or twelve weeks old?). He eats like a pig! This is good, because they are notoriously finicky eaters. He is about nineteen inches in length now, and at his widest, maybe the circumference of a standard US quarter.

The pet store (we do not know if he was captive bred or anything about his parentage, and for this I feel very guilty) said they were feeding him frozen pinkies once a week. So we bought a box of six frozen pinkies with the snake and set him all up in his tank. Now, I've had two ball pythons before Indy and they were much bigger (I've inherited full grown snakes from people; I've never had a hatchling). This regimen of one pinky (a pinky is a just-born mouse; it's about the size of a gummy bear) per week struck me as a way to keep the snakes artificially small for their container, which was quite small.

So, I fed him another one. I waited two days, and I fed him another one. Soon enough I'd fed him four, and I was waiting for the excrement to come out. But we were using Aspen White, and he kept burrowing in it, I realized that he was actually burrowing in the Aspen White and leaving his mess in there. He seemed fine. He seemed aggressive even–he would hold an "S formation" until he was thoroughly convinced I was handling him and that he wasn't being fed (we feed him in the bath tub instead of in his tank so that he doesn't confuse my hands with possible food). Perhaps it was the heat of summer, but I was convinced he was hungry. So I fed him the rest of the pinkies and I resolved to feed him a "hopper" (this is a mouse that has developed legs and a tail but can't really move around on its own, hence the term) in a month, because I wanted a hungry snake, and a good, aggressive strike on the animal.

As it turned out, I was handling him today and more than once he held that S posture and I was worried he would bite a finger of mine. He appeared to be very hungry. Very aggressive. When I put him down on my lap he immediately "went hunting" and burrowing, looking for things to eat. I had intended to wait a month from the last pinky, to really get his appetite up there, but with the way he was acting, he needed to be fed now. We went to the local pet shop and they didn't actually stock hoppers!! They stalked pinkies, fuzzies (which are only marginally bigger than pinkies), and small mice, which are substantially larger than the pinkies and fuzzies. I had confidence Indy could eat one, but it certainly was a big meal. Biggest thing he'd ever eaten, to be sure. And I'd be awfully embarrassed if he cut his mouth on prey that was too big for him or he just couldn't eat it. Here he was, a hatchling by rights, and we're feeding him a mouse that looks for the most part bigger than he does. His head at least.

But that's what snakes are good at.

That's him with just the tail remaining and you can see all the skin under his chin stretching to accommodate the mouse. I always think it's so cute when just the tail is sticking out. It's like they're feigning innocence. Honestly officer, it's just a cigarette! I don't know nothing about no mouse!

A note about frozen vs live I have always fed my reptiles live food. I found it to be a hassle, but I loved to watch the purity of the struggle: the snake vs the rat, seeing the snake do what it has been doing for time immemorial, and to see the passion in the rat, to see the struggle for life. For me, it's always been important to see and be part of that. That was part of owning a snake. So my first question when I got a snake that was eating frozen food was, how do i get him off this frozen food?

Well, the question is complicated. First, ball pythons in particular are finicky eaters. Thankfully Indy eats like a pig and will hopefully continue to do so, but Russell at the family-owned pet store near by convinced me otherwise. He said, live food is a hassle. You gotta buy the animal(s) (if you have multiple snakes or other reptiles), and then you have to make sure the feeder animals don't hurt the reptiles, you gotta watch the whole thing to make sure that the reptile is safe, and it's pain in the ass. He said, you've got a ball python. Imagine he goes off feed, and you've got him on live feed. What then? How do you know that rat you just put in the tank isn't going to main your snake instead of your snake striking and eating it?

Going and staying frozen, he says, means you can just buy six-packs of mice or rats or whatever from us and feed him when you're ready, just defrost em in warm water, and if he doesn't feed, refreeze it. Put it this way. If he goes off feed and he's on frozen, you always have the option to go to live food. And you don't have that when you're on live. You're never going to get a live-food reptile to go back to frozen. Just won't happen.



So while I really wish I could feed Indy mice I think I can live with mousesicles for now. I'm just so happy my baby boy (yes, he's been sexed, he's a boy) is eating baby mice instead of those trashy pinkies. I've been thinking of getting a boa. If I get a boa, the boa will be on live food. You betcha. But that's a long ways off and I think Indy may get a companion (a Mojave or a Caramel morph) first.

Shefari should probably be excused

given its auth system is tits-up. I finished Windup Girl and have taken on River of Gods (and almost wish I hadn't as there's just as much muck and ick in the latter and the former, but thankfully, it doesn't get in the way). Not bad for a firang, I guess. I've also picked up some new books, but I'm going to let Shelfari sort itself out as it's tedious to do here.

I've been writing. Holy cow (heh), have I been writing. Many 2500-3000 word days, and I like them. Two of those days were back-to-back and constituted a short story I thought was for sure crap, so I sent it off to my editor to be burned with annotations like "I don't like this part," and "help me fix this," and "this is nowhere near strong enough," thinking she'd just say, listen, you wrote it in two days. Relax, and focus on something more productive like the book.

Instead she marked the thing up from top to bottom and really likes it. This is a 5000 page story (which is kind of a limit for short stories) so it took her a long time, and she wants me to polish it off and likes it as much as one of the other pieces we worked on and were quite happy with (that got published twice). And she's not asking me to hack away at it to make it shorter. I'm aghast.

So I've been splitting my time between this short story that needs a little loving and this novel that just needs a few more chapters written before it can have a partial draft sent to the editor.

Boy this is fun. I wish it paid by the word to write, rather than to sell books. :)

The Windup Girl

I was late in catching the craze on this one because I generally shy away from steampunk. But even the anti-steampunk people were saying, dude, you gotta read this book. And I recall it winning or being shortlisted for mumble number of awards.

Still haven't finished Windup Girl, but I have a feeling I will today as it's building to a climax bringing just about every single thread together (that I can think of), and I may even be up late reading it. But as it goes with books one really likes, I'll be left with a book I've just finished, and I'll want more. Which probably means I'll have to get Ship Breaker, too.

It's very strange that Paolo Bacigalupi got me off a Hemingway kick, one that I was loving (Under Kilimanjaro), and that was reading as research for a book that I am writing (Meat), but his writing is very enchanting. If I could describe it simply, I would say that it is a lot like reading China Miéville without all that horrid twisting of language and continual mood-setting words like ooze, filth, and ichor. It's dystopic to be sure, and while I think there are some very positive themes in the book, in general, it's kinda gross. But Miéville wrote books that were very charming, even as the settings had a certain filth and decrepitude–intentional of course–to them that I personally found pretty vulgar. So it is with Bacigalupi. He writes an environment in which sanitation has mostly been lost and disease runs rampant, poverty is the norm, and he writes it in such a way that we can observe and not feel as though we have been swimming through it when we put the book down. Perhaps that was not his goal. It seems to me that was Miéville's goal, and for that I rather thank Bacigalupi.