The Long and Short of It
Mar. 9th, 2026 02:48 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed
I promised Krissy that I would not buy any new guitars in 2025, and that was a promise I mostly kept (I did buy one guitar, but it was for her). However, it is now 2026, and last month I turned in two full-length books, and I thought therefore it might be okay to treat myself. That said, I pretty much have every guitar I might ever need, in most of the the major body shapes, so if I was going to get any more of them, they needed to fill a niche that was not otherwise occupied.
And, well, guess what? I found two stringed instruments that fit the bill! What a surprise! And as a bonus, neither is technically a guitar.
Small one first: This is an Ohana O’Nino sopranissimo ukulele, “sopranissimo” being a size down from the soprano uke, which is typically understood to be the smallest ukulele that one might usually find. The O’Nino here is seventeen inches long from stem to stern, and is absolutely dinky in the hand. Nevertheless, it’s an actual musical instrument, not a toy, and if you have small and/or nimble enough fingers, plays perfectly well. It’s not going to be anyone’s primary ukulele (I have my concert-sized Fender Fullerton Jazzmaster for that), but if you’re traveling — and I often am — and want to take along a physical music instrument — which I sometimes do! — then this is very much the travel-sized uke to tote around.
There are even smaller ukes available, but those do start being in the “is this a musical instrument for ants” category of things. I’ll stop with a sopranissimo.
Almost literally on the other end of the scale we have the Eastwood BG 64 Baritone Guitarlin. The one type of guitar I did not have in my collection was a baritone guitar (which adds an additional four frets to the guitar on the low end, allowing for a lower/heavier/twangier sound). This particular baritone is one of an esoteric variant of guitar known as a “guitarlin,” in which the guitar adds frets on the high end to be able to access notes that one would only usually find on a mandolin. So, basically, this instrument goes from baritone to mandolin over 35 frets, which is, to be clear, an absolutely ridiculous number of frets to have on a single instrument. I can already see the serious guitarists out there despairing about the intonation in the mando frets, but those people are no fun.
I was traveling when my guitarlin arrived and I haven’t yet been able to play around with it yet, but here’s a short video of the guy who helped design it fooling about with it:
(And yes, I got the one with the tremolo, because of course I did.)
Between these two instruments my collector itch has been scratched for a bit, and I look forward to messing around with both in the upcoming months. I won’t say I won’t get any other guitars ever, but at this point it’s getting more difficult to find where the gaps are in what I have, so I do imagine my acquisitions will slow down rather a bit. Let’s hope, anyway. I’m running out of room in the house for them. Although I guess I do have a whole church, don’t I. Hmmm.
— JS
smithsonian_hist_arc_feedSGA: Fieldwork by Rheanna (and Homework by busaikko)
Mar. 10th, 2026 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mific posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fancakeCharacters/Pairings: Ronon Dex/John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Dave Sheppard
Rating: Teen, Gen
Length: 3158 (Homework is 963)
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: Rheanna on AO3, busaikko on AO3, susan_voight on AO3
Themes: Siblings, Friendship, Going home, Established relationship
Summaries:
Ronon starts his e-mail correspondence with Sheppard's brother more or less by mistake.
For some reason, after his father's funeral Dave Sheppard keeps getting e-mail from Ronon Dex.
Reccer's Notes: This is a remix of Homework by busaikko, and they can be read in any order - this is basically a rec for both fics, Fieldwork being from Ronon's POV, and Homework, which is just as good, from Dave's POV. Ronon's in a relationship with John and as part of learning English he starts emailing John's estranged brother, Dave. Rodney then gets involved as Ronon goes to him for help. The characterisations of Ronon, John, and Rodney here are spot on, and it's both funny and moving - a wonderful set of stories.
Fanwork Links: on AO3: Fieldwork and Homework
Alternate DW links: Fieldwork and Homework
Susan_voight podficced both stories, both separately and collated.
DC Minis #19 – Dark Science High School (Part 12)
Mar. 9th, 2026 06:30 amdresden_codak_comic_feed
New to Dresden Codak? These mini-comics alternate with my MEGA-COMICS!
The current storyline is Dark Science and you can catch up right here.
The post DC Minis #19 – Dark Science High School (Part 12) appeared first on Dresden Codak.
The state of the bullshit right now.
Mar. 8th, 2026 06:50 pmnumb3r_5ev3nBecause this crap has infected every single aspect of the tech world, due to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Bannon, and their other cronies roped late 2000s-early 2010s techbros into their schemes, and used them to steer modern culture and subculture in the direction that they wanted it to go in.
Like, the fanfic for the Tron franchise I am working on right now concerns two rival tech companies. And I can't work on it or even think about it without thinking about the cancer and the rot that is going on currently in real life tech culture.
Like yeah, I can pretend that there isn't anyone like Jeffrey Epstein in the Tron Universe, and that none of that horrible shit happened, and tech in this fictional world evolved along very different lines: and this is obviously the way I *should* actually be handling it. Because there is not an IGE or a Microsoft or a Starlink or Tesla or a META: There's Encom and Dillinger Systems.
But like...the villain of the last movie is a whole techbro, borrowing from a stereotype that is only familiar to us because of how prominent it has become in real life over the past decade or so, thanks mostly to the mechanizations of the worst people.
It's hard for me to write this now without considering everything that has been revealed about the Epstein Web's malign influence over every aspect of the tech world over the past 20 years. Because a lot of the reason we are where we are right now - in regards to AI and "Web 3," is because of them. Just ignoring it feels disingenuous. It feels like whitewashing. Even though: of course technology in the Tron universe progressed along very different lines, because real, actual AI (not the fake bullshit slop we have now) and digitizing actual real-world matter into the computer have existed since 1982 in this timeline. This is science fiction, happening in a world that still feels very much like our own. I mean, the thing I tell newcomers to the Tron franchise is: "imagine if the Technological Singularity happened in 1982, but only a few people were aware of it, or noticed."
BUT, and a youtuber called attention to this aspect of the latest Tron movie without realizing that this is what he was doing: Eve Kim, the character portrayed by Greta Lee in the latest film, is basically Buckaroo Banzai, complete with her own stalwart band of comrades who are the Tron universe's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai's own Hong Kong Cavaliers. She is a globetrotting hacker gamer biker CEO of a tech company. And while some dorks were of course screaming "Mary Sue!" there is no way as a Buckaroo Banzai fan that I can't just pick this up and run with it, it's perfect.
And THIS is why the Seth Flores character didn't grate on me the way he did on some people in the audience: he's kind of the equivalent of Perfect Tommy and New Jersey at once? And holy shit, the "It's cowboy time" line from the character Ajay Singh: HE'S RAWHIDE. (Or New Jersey?) Holy hell, it's THEM in another universe and incarnation.
And YES this makes the titular Ares the equivalent of Penny Priddy. Just try to get that image out of your mind once it's popped in there. and YES, I know how all of this sounds in light of Jared Leto's involvement in the Tron Ares film, and the allegations against him. (I fucking hate this timeline.)
Anyway my fix for that during the time the film was in theaters was to just imagine what the movie would have been like if the titular Ares had been played by Keanu Reeves instead. (Because of course the Billionaire Techbro would want to make his Supersolider look like John Wick.) That, or Trent Reznor; mainly because of the soundtrack. Some of the fanart I have seen of peoples' fancasting of Trent Reznor as Ares is phenomenal. I have become a fan of the "Young Trent Reznor as Ares" idea since I first saw it, but especially since the remix album of the OST dropped last week, and then I went and saw NIN live in concert.
EDIT:But this all just dovetails back into the reality that the harm of women in children is inextricably woven into the creation media designed to be art, designed to entertain us, due to it being normalized, systemic, and endemic in our culture. Many of the artists whose creations got us through the 2000s and 2010s have turned out to be predators. The only real exception I can think of is David Lynch, who was actively trying to alert us that it was going on, through the creation of his own art and media.
And I can't help but wonder what a Tron movie by David Lynch would be like.
IDK chat, I'm going to have to figure this out. I mean, I'm going to write it regardless. But yeah.
Hell, maybe in this timeline, Livejournal and Myspace are still around. I think it's a lot more fun to imagine a timeline that doesn't involve any of the current horrors, even if it does feel dishonest somehow.
As Canadian As Possible Under the Circumstances
Mar. 8th, 2026 03:07 pmfairestcatI had a celebratory citizenship/birthday party last night, surrounded by the family and community I've joined/built here in Canada and it was so lovely and affirming and energizing in exactly the way I needed right now.
I know. I never write, I never post...
Mar. 8th, 2026 02:55 pmfairestcatI'm quite sure I know many people in at least some of these places and I'd love to see as many of you as I can make happen!
As I noted to Ian just now, seeing things is great and awesome and absolutely something I want to do, but the highlight of travel for me is seeing people, especially ones I've known for ages but never met in person.
Tentative schedule currently is:
- arrive in Paris the morning of May 26th
- May 26-June 5 - various locations in France including but not necessarily limited to Paris and Limoges.
- plane from somewhere in France to Birmingham the morning of the 5th of June.
- June 5-7 VidUKon in Birmingham
- June 7-??? - various locations in the UK including London and Portsmouth, other options depending on people and travel options.
- ??? - Train from London to Brussels
- 2 days later - sleeper from Brussels to Berlin
- ??? (tbd quite soon) - fly home from Berlin.
I'll be buying my flight home in the next couple days, at which point all the dates between Birmingham and Berlin will firm up at least a bit.
This is going to be my first time in Europe since I lived in Berlin for three months in 2000. I've never been to France. I've never been to Belgium. The last time I was in England was a high school trip in 1997. It's all both incredibly exciting and kind of terrifying.
Also, while I've done some solo travelling in the US and Canada, both my previous trips to Europe I was always travelling with at least one other person. So that adds an extra layer of nerves.
So, where should I go??? Who should I see??? How much can I vibrate out of my skin with nerves and excitement between now and the end of May???
There Is No Selling Out Anymore
Mar. 8th, 2026 05:42 pmscalziwhatever_feed
A couple of days ago the New York Times published an essay from writer Jordan Coley called “How Selling Out Made Me a Better Artist,” in which Coley discovers that all the less-than-amazing pay copy he’d written over the years, from marketing to puff-piece articles and everything in-between, actually made his creative and/or more serious journalism work better, not worse. The still-lingering debate of “art vs commerce” weighs heavily in the piece, as do issues of class and race (Coley is black and comes from a working class background, unlike many of his Yale University contemporaries), and how they both impact how one make’s one’s way in a creative trade.
I encourage you read to read the piece (the link above is a gift link so you can read it at your leisure). I don’t know Coley, or have read enough of his work to say anything about it one way or the other. But I certainly remember my freelance writing years (roughly from 1998 to 2010, when the novel gig finally become remunerative enough that it made sense to focus on it primarily), and my willingness not to be proud about how I was making money, because I had bills to pay and a family to support, and there was no financial support system for me to fall back on. My experience with freelancing certainly resonates with his.
In fact, if I do have any judgements to make against anyone in the “art vs commerce” debate, it’s with the sort of person who would look down on anyone who has to work for a living while also trying to write/create things of significance. One, of course, it’s an immensely privileged position to take, and one that is increasingly at odds with the reality of making a living in the writing field, or in the arts generally. It’s never been a great time to be a professional writer, ever, but these days the field is being aggressively hollowed out both from above (newspaper/magazine/Web sites laying off staff positions) and below (“AI” being used, usually poorly, for a gigs that writers used to do). Anyone who looks down their nose at someone else’s hustle to exist, can, genuinely, go fuck themselves. Short of writing hateful material, here in this capitalist hellscape, a gig is a gig.
Two, and as Coley points out in his essay, the experience of the hustle is in itself fertile ground for writing. It makes you develop a range of writing tools you can employ elsewhere, it puts you in situations that you would not have otherwise been and allows you to mine those experiences for later writing, and it makes you get out in the world and see it from the point of view of people who might not have come into your orbit and situation. That includes any day job, not just ones related to the arts. As a writer, and as a creator, nothing one ever does, professionally or personally, needs to be wasted. It’s all fuel for the creative engine.
With all that said, I think it’s important not to construct a strawman opponent, just to burn it down with self-satisfaction. Coley’s battle with “art vs commerce” was more about his own internal battle than it was against the opprobium of others. I have run across a few snobs in my time who seemed to look down at people who had to work for a living, but it’s only been a few. The vast majority of the creative folks I know are entirely comfortable with the idea that you have to pay bills, and sometimes that means doing less than 100% creatively fulfilling work in order to keep the proverbial roof over one’s head. Whether that has to do with me mostly working in genre literature, which has always been the domain of jobbing writers, is a question to be answered some other time.
The point is the internal discussion of “am I wasting my life paying bills when I should be making art” is these days as much if not more often the issue, than any external question about how one is spending one’s time. For myself, I tended to resolve this question as such: The fact of the matter is I am only really ever creative a few hours a day, three or four hours tops, and often less than that. So why not spend that creative downtime, you know, making money? Concurrent to this, the stuff that I was doing to make that money were frequently things I could bat out fast and with facility, enough so that often my train of thought was “I can’t believe how much I’m getting paid to do this.” I wasn’t cheating anyone or ever turning in bad product. It was just, you know, easy. I was delighted to make easy money! I would do it again!
Anyway: If you’re a writer or creator, never be ashamed of what else you do. It’s 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as “selling out” has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely “selling out” in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don’t believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.
Short of that, get paid, have those experiences and develop new tools. All of it will be useful for the art you do care about. That’s not selling out. That’s learning, with compensation.
— JS
What If We Kissed Under the Chihuly
Mar. 8th, 2026 03:58 amscalziwhatever_feedThis particular one is found at the San Antonio Public Library, and it’s a doozy. They tell me it’s disassembled every couple of years in order to clean it. I could never do that job. I would break everything and have to live in shame for the rest of my days.
In other news, today’s Pop Madness convention at the library was lovely. Martha Wells and I had a full room for our conversation, and my signing line went on for a while (thank you to everyone who stuck it out). Plus I ate some absolutely amazing empanadas. It was a good day.
— JS
Global Women's General Strike
Mar. 7th, 2026 07:14 pmsathari posting in thisfinecrewMDZS, the Brindlewood Version
Mar. 7th, 2026 11:28 amelfOr rather, based on one small detail of MDZS/The Untamed, using a modern-AU setting: Investigating the death of Lan Furen. (Adventure title: Lost in the Clouds. Complexity 7. Would be 6, but the death is 30-ish years old, so they're working with some difficulty.)
Brindlewood Bay has a different approach: Instead of "GM decides on the details of the murder and sets a bunch of clues that the players have to find and figure out," the GM sets the location, a list of suspects, a list of clues - and the players then come up with their own idea of who did what. Then they roll. If they roll high enough, they were correct and have solved the murder. (If they roll almost high enough, they were correct but now there is a complication - the murderer is getting away, or attacks them, or someone is in danger because of what they've revealed, etc.)
I don't have to decide what happened to Lan Furen to have it as the base of a murder mystery here. I just have to figure out who might've been involved, invent some clues, and throw them at the players.
( It's been more difficult than I thought. )
View From a Hotel Window, 3/6/26: San Antonio
Mar. 7th, 2026 12:33 amscalziwhatever_feed
Inspiring view, isn’t it.
I’m here in San Antonio specifically to be part of the Pop Madness Convention at the San Antonio Public Library tomorrow, March 7. I’ll be there along with Martha Wells, Robert Jackson Bennett, John Picacio and other cool folks, being on panels and signing books and all that good stuff. If you’re in the San Antonio area tomorrow, come down and see us!
And if you’re not in the San Antonio area tomorrow, I mean, have a good Saturday anyway, I guess.
— JS