Sarah Monette's Blog, page 64

OctoCam!!!11!1!

In case you felt like you were getting too much work done today, the Hatfield Marine Science Visitor Center at Oregon State University has installed a camera in the tank of their giant Pacific octopus: OctoCam.

THERE IS AN OCTOPUS IN MY COMPUTER! I AM BESIDE MYSELF WITH GEEKER JOY! (And may have to disable my capslock for the good of humanity.)

OCTOPUS!!!!!

Storytellers Unplugged for June

"Finding the Story in the Story" is up at Storytellers Unplugged.

a trip to the zoo

Today I dragged mirrorthaw to the Henry Vilas Zoo, where I took innumerable blurry pictures.

The high points:
the ennui of the orangutan
Cyber, the zoo's (breathtaking) new Amur tiger. (You can read more about Cyber here.)
the tapir
portrait of a rhinoceros
the giraffe wants to see my credentials, please
the grizzly bears, who just kept offering good shots.
the Galapagos tortoise and its prey
the buffalo
the furry boulder--I mean badger
prairie dogs engaged in a little mutual grooming
the river otters

5 things on a Sunday in June

1. Yesterday, I wrote letters to Senator Feingold, Senator Kohl, Congresswoman Baldwin, and President Obama (email to the president, paper letters to the legislators) about the oil spill and BP's abhorrent behavior. This is the first time I have ever written a letter to any of my elected representatives, and if it does even a particle of good, I will be passionately grateful.

2. Because my mother-in-law asked, I went out yesterday and took pictures of various portions of the yard: roses, lilie...

5 things

1. cmpriest has a pair of wonderful posts about the oil spill and what you can do to help.

2. The Planckendael Zoo in Belgium has a snow leopard cub (I particularly recommend the second video, in which Laila demonstrates her ferocity upon a hapless rubber glove.)

3. So in January, the local high school's Future Farmers of America chapter has a seed sale. Everything they don't sell, they donate to a local small animal welfare group, who then has a plant sale, which I went to this afternoon. I ca...

After a year and a half, his reign of terror is over.

The albino bristlenose plecostomus, who killed every tank mate he had and thus was clearly an Evil Albino, died sometime last night. For all that he was the psychopath of the Ancistrus world, I was fond of him, and I hope tiny algae-eating albino fish go somewhere really awesome after they die. In his case, I hope he gets to turn into the dragon he always wanted to be.

Boy is it quiet in here without the aquarium going.

UBC: The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers

Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.


I am disappointed in this book, and disappointed on several levels.

To start with, I am disappointed with Oxford University Press, which should damn well be able to copy-edit better than this. There are mistakes scattered throughout the text that a good copy-editor should catch: missing or incorrect apostrophes; using "criteria" as the singular; a s...

Auction results

topknot , your bid of $150 is the winning bid in the debsliverlovers auction.

Email me at:

semonette (at) gmail (dot) com

with your PayPal receipt, your mailing address, and the name to which you would like the books signed (if any), and I will get your books in the mail as soon as I can.

Thank you, and thank you to the other bidders, also!

5 things

1. The Columbus Zoo has otter pups, and video of the mama otter teaching one of her babies to swim (via Zooborns, and it's heresluck 's fault I was over there in the first place).

2. via @catvalente, this unspeakably awesome cartoon about angler fish. No really. Go read it.

3. "White Charles" is in the table of contents for Paula Guran's Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010 . w00t!

4. Fountain pen geeks, do any of you have comments on Noodler's black inks? I like my black inks REALLY BLACK, an...

inspiration, craft, sprezzatura

Inspiration vs. craftsmanship. Five minutes. Go.

It occurred to me today that one of the places from which the idea that craftsmanship and devotion to craftsmanship are unworthy of artists might be coming is the Renaissance idea of sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look easy. Sprezzatura is all about disclaiming effort, about presenting the appearance of not working hard to achieve perfection, and it seems to me like there's a point of slippage between sprezzatura as a pose, equally...