Christy Marx

This is from grist.com:

Life Magazine ad breaks my brain
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!

From a sharp-eyed reader comes this ad for Humble Oil (which later merged with Standard to become, yes, Exxon). It may win the All Time Millenial Award for Maximal Irony. It’s from a 1962 edition of Life Magazine, available on Google Books (click for larger version):

oil melts glaciers

How right they were ...

Fifteen years. It's hard to believe it's been fifteen years.

I've been doing exercise walks pretty much every day, anywhere from 1.7 to 2 miles uphill and downhill. Today I went in mid-afternoon and it was gorgeous. Cloudless blue sky and cool, brisk weather. I took the path through the wild part of the park, the way Randy and I went for the tough hike, though I didn't hike to the top of the hill this time. But on the way back, I did see a coyote. He was a pretty thing with shadings of dark fur. He was nosing around on the side of the path not far from the entrance to the domesticated part of the park. He saw me, but wasn't at all worried or bothered. I stood about fifty feet down the path and watched him for a couple of minutes until he casually slipped into the bushes and vanished like a ghost.

I also heard an owl hooting, but didn't get to see him this time.

Yesterday involved doing two unexpected things. One was fun; one wasn't.

Unfun was turning on our computers in the morning and having no internet. The antique (by electronics standards) DSL modem had given up the ghost. Or its transformer had. Either way, it was dead, Jim. We quickly ran to the nearest Best Buy to replace it with a New! Improved! DSL modem. Hooking up the new modem to Randy's machine was easy. Figuring out how to get my wireless network adapter to find the new encrypted signal was a bitch, but I finally managed.

I'd been complaining for weeks to Randy about how shitty my wireless reception has been. WoW has been especially bad with lag times going way into the red for no apparent reason. Webpages were taking forever to load. Things are running more smoothly and quickly now, but it was still an expense we could have done without.

In the afternoon, we set off for the usual 1.7 mile walk, but decided to explore. We finally found the path that took us to a particular fire road that we've seen in the distance and thought would make for a good hike. It was a tough hike, is what it was. It added about another mile to the walk and most of that was STEEP uphill and down, like a 45 to 60 degree angle kind of steep. It was worth it. At the top of the hill, we had a spectacular panoramic view of the entire bay -- the hills above San Francisco, the city and bridge, and the rest of the east bay spread out before us.

Between those two things, that pretty much wrapped it up for the day, topped off by a Guild run in the evening. Speaking of WoW....

( WoW geekspeek )

PLANNED PARENTHOOD ACTION FUND
Don't let the anti-choice Stupak amendment become law.
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hcr09foc_af/3833s82o77k375d?source=hcr09foc_e1_af
****************************************

You're furious, and we hear you. Tens of thousands of Planned Parenthood supporters have expressed disappointment, sadness, and anger since the House adopted the anti-choice Stupak abortion ban to its health care reform bill.

Believe me, I'm just as angry as you are. And I want to take the outrage that supporters of women's health are feeling and turn it into action. If we join together, we can still stop the Stupak ban and other efforts to undermine choice. The first step is simple, but it will be effective: sign our petition to President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and Speaker Pelosi.
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hcr09foc_af/3833s82o77k375d?source=hcr09foc_e1_af

If the Stupak ban becomes law, it will outlaw private abortion coverage for millions of women and prohibit coverage in the public option. That means that millions of women who currently have abortion coverage will lose it -- and millions more will be locked out of the comprehensive coverage they have long deserved, even if they are paying for the entire cost out of pocket. It will be the most far-reaching restriction of abortion access in decades. We have to stop it now.

Take action to stop the Stupak ban before it's too late. Click here to sign our petition:
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hcr09foc_af/3833s82o77k375d?source=hcr09foc_e1_af

When you speak out, lawmakers listen. On Sunday, I asked Planned Parenthood supporters to contact President Obama and ask him to stand up for women -- and more than 30,000 of you answered the call. The next day, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to women's health and stated plainly that Congress must pass a health care reform bill that does not impose any further restrictions on women's ability to choose a health plan that meets all of their health care needs, including abortion care.

Now, our focus turns to the Senate. We are demanding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ensure that language similar to the Stupak ban does not become part of the Senate bill. Help us make it clear that the Senate must protect women's access to complete reproductive care, including abortion.
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hcr09foc_af/3833s82o77k375d?source=hcr09foc_e1_af

Those of us who support women's health and right to choose must come together and demand that women be treated fairly under health care reform. We need to tell our leaders -- including President Obama, Majority Leader Reid, and Speaker Pelosi -- that women must decide for themselves what kind of insurance coverage they can buy and what kind of health care they need. Anything less is unacceptable.

Please, sign our petition right now:
http://www.ppaction.org/campaign/hcr09foc_af/3833s82o77k375d?source=hcr09foc_e1_af -- and know that
this is just the first step in what will surely be a long fight for women's health. Over the coming weeks, I'm going to ask you for help again and again. And on December 2, thousands of supporters will gather at the Capitol to speak with one voice and tell our leaders: health care reform must protect access to abortion coverage. I hope you'll stand with us, today and throughout this crucial campaign.

Thank you so very much for all you do for the women, men, and teens who rely on Planned Parenthood.

Sincerely,

Cecile Richards, President
Planned Parenthood Action Fund

P.S. This fight will continue to stretch our resources in every way. If you can help with a contribution, we promise to put it to good use. Thank you.
https://secure.ga0.org/02/hcr09emergency_af/ncpqr4DsqEcKD?source=hcr09foc_e1_af

Yesterday I took my walk late in the afternoon. Around 5:20, dusk had settled in when I heard a soft hooting. I looked across the street and saw a large owl perched atop an air vent at the peak of a roof. It was too dark to make out coloration details, but his shape was obvious as he looked around this way and that. I am quite sure it was a Great Horned Owl based on his size, bulky shape, but most of all the prominent "horns" on his head. I started to walk across the street for a closer look, but that was when he took off. A very cool sighting, that was.

My father joined the Navy late in the war (around 1944), though of course he had no idea it was late in the war. He simply wasn't old enough to join at the beginning of the war, but enlisted as soon as he could. I asked him once, many years ago, what his personal motivation was for enlisting. He gave me a baffled look and said, "That's what you did."

It was a clearly defined war with a clearly defined sense of who was right and who was wrong. For a man like my father, it was as simple as that. Our country was at war. Soldiers were needed. That's what you did.

Today's armed forces are profoundly different from those of WWII. The "wars" and enemies and conflicts they must deal with are profoundly different. One thing remains the same -- the men and women who serve deserve our respect and our support -- not only for the time they serve, but for the rest of their lives, especially given the life-altering injuries and trauma that many of them will endure for the rest of their lives.

Veterans of all ages and of all wars, for whatever reason you chose to serve, I thank you.

I did a short interview and can now say I've been featured on the Huffington Post. LOL!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-remington/interview-with-christy-ma_b_352365.html

We're having a long run of cool, but sunny days. Pleasant, if a bit monotonous.

I spend most of the days networking, researching job possibilities, dealing with email, and yes, I will confess to playing more WoW than before. {g} My little tabby girl, Zoe, has been a total lap fungus. She's the only one happy about this turn of events.

For several weeks, we've had a mother squirrel (obviously nursing) show up in the back yard, grab a couple of peanuts and apparently vanish into the rosemary bushes right outside the kitchen door. That made no sense because there's nowhere for her to go. We finally figured it out. One day after she'd grabbed her peanuts, I went to the front window and sure enough, there she was. She scoots along the side of the house, across our front yard and runs across the street to the house opposite us. We worry about her running back and forth across that street because people drive like such lunatics and she has a tendency to stop about three times while making the crossing. I expect her babies to show up in the yard any day now.

Or maybe they have. We've seen quite a few very young squirrels lately. One had the most gorgeous tail. It was lined in exceptionally long white and black hairs. There's one little squirrel that has some kind of neurological problem. He falls to the right when he tries to sit up and has trouble keeping his balance. He also has some kind of deformity on one front paw. But he comes by regularly to scoff up large amounts of seed.

I saw another black squirrel while taking a walk yesterday. It was about a mile from here, at the edge of park. Beautifully coal-black. We haven't seen the one that would come to our back yard for months now.

I find Facebook totally non-intuitive and a PITA to use. I've set up a "fan" page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christy-Marx-Clubhouse/200249107558?v=info, but {sob, choke}, I have zero fans. I'm pathetic. Nobody loves me. Okay, the page is only an hour old, but we writers are so insecure.

I had a hearing test today and was surprised to learn that after about 30 years of raging, constant tinnitus, my hearing remains quite good. I've lost a little bit in the highest frequencies, but that's not unusual.

The ringing in my ears is pretty loud and never stops. Sometimes it gets worse and it's like having my head inside a giant bell and certain electronic tones can drive me nuts. It runs in the family: my dad has it, my brother has it.

The doc pointed me to a website for the best info on tinnitus, though from what I've read over the years, there isn't anything much to be done about it. Ah well, I've lived with it this long and it's not like I have a choice.

I'm coming up on the deadline of the book I'm editing, so I've been flat out working on that -- along with the never-ending job search, of course. We were both passed over for one particular job for which either one of us was eminently qualified. Their loss. ;)

Please be sure to add your clicks to the Breast Cancer Site.

There's a massive tunneling project for a new water system going on in this area. Large, multi-part dirt haulers travel the main road past our house, going between the freeway and the constructions site. As they get to our house, the road begins the downhill bend. These monster trucks have brakes that sound like the horns of the Four Horsemen trumpeting their arrival. We've been woken up around 7:30 am nearly every morning wondering if the Apocalypse is upon us. Glargghhh.

It really would be nice to find jobs that allow us to move to a quieter area.

Watch Jeopardy tonight and see my friend Christine Valada compete!

Here she is doing a promotional "howdy": http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide/thisweek/

Who knew being unemployed would require non-stop work? I've done nothing but work on versions of my resume, network with recruiters and zillions of friends (and tons of kind, thoughtful game biz people),and try to keep up with email. Splah.

Thanks to everyone for the commiseration on the job situation. We're networking like crazy. We have a game recruiter to contact today, someone we've known from the Sierra On-Line days, believe it or not. Someone asked if there are other positions at the company we could try for. The answer is yes, but it's a long shot. On our way out of the building, I stopped into the appropriate office and made my interest known.

I took a couple days off to escape reality and plunged into reading the final Harry Potter book non-stop. It was a fantastic series and I'm deeply impressed by what Rowling managed to pull off in a "childrens'" series. She did some wonderfully subversive things of which I wholeheartedly approve, teaching hidden but effective lessons about bigotry, genocide, the cost of freedom and the price of war. She didn't shy away from death. There's a lot of death on those pages, mostly deaths of sacrifice. She also didn't shy away from showing that adults are capable of making huge mistakes that they regret and try to atone for ever after. The books are rich, deep, multi-layered and complex. The fact that they did so astoundingly well in the age group gives me tremendous hope for the future.

Most of the imitators who are trying to duplicate her success fall into the trap I see so often of seeing the surface elements, but missing what's at the core that truly makes it work. We worked on one of them in fact, a short-lived animation series called UBOS (The Ultimate Book of Spells). The creators of that series seemed to think that it was enough to have a bunch of kids in a secret school of wizards. Harry Potter is about so much more than that. Rowling also didn't write down to her audience, not for one second, another mistake I see being made by her imitators.

I see the same thing with the way manga and anime is "adapted" in this country. These unique forms of Japanese storytelling aren't about the size format or number of pages or how panels are laid out or what the visual animation tricks are. Those are the surface elements, easy enough for people to see that don't understand what lies beneath them. The core is about the nature of the stories and what those stories have to say. Some of it seems wacky to Americans or is simply so culturally different that adapters here can't get it. But it's those elements that make it what it is, not the visual cues alone.

I've evaluated the various elements that Rowling used to make these seven books effective and compelling, but ultimately, I could use all of those elements without achieving the same effect unless I could weave into them the same depth and richness that gives them their heart and soul. And y'know what, you do that by caring about what you write, not by trying to imitate someone else's success.

Here's the reason for silence from my direction for the past couple of days. Thursday was...tough. Randy and I and a lot of other people are suddenly unemployed. It's an unpleasant shock, to say the least, but typical of the game business.


Gazillion Confirms Layoffs At Romero-Led MMO Dev Slipgate Ironworks

October 16, 2009

Slipgate Ironworks, the California-based MMO development studio founded by id Software veteran John Romero, has undergone a round of layoffs and a change in project focus, as directed by parent company Gazillion Entertainment.

Gazillion confirmed reports of the layoffs to Gamasutra, although the company declined to specify the number of jobs lost. The design and scope of the game has been accordingly pared down.

"As part of our focus on reaching the widest possible audiences with breakthrough MMO entertainment, we decided to change the format of our project at Slipgate Ironworks to better achieve this aim," a Gazillion representative told Gamasutra in a statement.

"The game we'll launch will build on the efforts to date with a smaller core team and the other Slipgate staff are already in discussions around the many open positions across our slate of projects."

Romero, a prominent member of the game development community since his involvement with Doom, established the studio in 2005 soon after leaving Midway. Although certain technical details about Slipgate's planned MMO, such as its usage of the BigWorld development suite, were made public, gameplay details have not been discussed.

Earlier this year, Gazillion revealed its late 2008 acquisition of Slipgate. The MMO-oriented publisher also owns Colorado-based NetDevil (Jumpgate Evolution, Lego Universe) and California-based Gargantuan.

Though weblog Kotaku suggested that around 50 staffers might have been let go, Gazillion's statement today offered no concrete explanation of the company's scope change or plans. But the publisher did suggest it will begin releasing titles next year: "2010 will be an exciting year for Gazillion as we bring several groundbreaking MMOs to markets worldwide," the statement reads.

Smartpop has relaunched their website and this week they're featuring my essay about Jean Grey from The Unauthorized X-Men book. It's a way of drumming up interest in the books.

It will only be up for another few days, so catch it while you can: http://www.smartpopbooks.com/essay/full/962

There are no less than four duplex-halves for rent on my street at the same time. That's significantly more than I've seen in the prior two years. I know that our previous neighbors had to move out because they couldn't afford to live in this neighborhood any longer. We're paying what I consider to be sky high rent. I wonder if landlords can afford to keep the rents so high in this economy and whether this churn in rentals is a sign that the area is overpricing itself? I sure think it is.