Seeds of Change for Review
June 27, 2008 at 11:56 am
Filed Under Books, Science Fiction | Leave a Comment
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This must be my week for getting advanced reader’s copies of books. I received a copy of Seeds of Change today from the editor, John Joseph Adams. He’s made some electronic PDF copies available to bloggers and some others for review. Given the guidelines from him, I won’t have the review up until August, a couple of weeks before the book comes out.
The book description is:
Imagine the moment when the present ends, and the future begins - when the world we knew is no more and a brave new world is thrust upon us. Gathering stories by nine of today’s most incisive minds, Seeds of Change confronts the pivotal issues facing our society today: racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. Many serve as a call to action. How will you change with the future? These nine stories sow seeds of change across familiar and foreign territory, from our own backyards to the Niger Delta to worlds not yet discovered. Pepper, the mysterious mercenary from Tobias S. Buckell’s Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, works as an agent for change - if the price is right - in “Resistance.” Ken MacLeod envisions the end-game in the Middle East in “A Dance Called Armageddon.” New writer Blake Charlton imagines a revolutionary advance in cancer research in “Endosymbiont.” Award-winning author Jay Lake tackles technological change and the forces that will stop at nothing to prevent it in “The Future by Degrees.” Other stories by K.D. Wentworth, Jeremiah Tolbert, Mark Budz, Ted Kosmatka, and Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu range from the darkly satirical to the exotic. All explore the notion that change will come.
Ken MacLeod has been a favorite author of mine for most of a decade. I’m a big fan of Tobias Buckell and his work (including his blog) and I just finished Jay Lake’s Mainspring a couple of days ago. Overall, this looks to be a fine collection of authors and an interesting focus for an anthology. I expect that I’ll enjoy it.
One Sangha
June 26, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Filed Under Buddhism, Spirituality, Technology | 6 Comments
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I am starting a Buddhist group blog now, called “One Sangha,” if I can recruit some fellow bloggers for it. I had made some noise in that direction with OpenBuddha, which still has an empty blog sitting there. On some discussion with a friend, I was donated the OneSangha.org domain that he had registered but wound up not using.
My goal is to get a group of between four and seven bloggers who are Buddhists to all contribute posts written for that blog. They can be on any Buddhist topic or ideas, news, or other items of interest to Buddhists. The overall intent is one of unifying the different strands of Buddhism together, hence the name. We are all, after all, one sangha. There are not multiple sanghas (well, except in practice, pun intended). One of the great joys of the current age for Buddhists is that we have access to the traditions, practices, and teachers of all of the surviving forms of Buddhism with very little actual effort. This should be a golden age for Buddhism and we should be taking advantage of the opportunities it brings to enrich our understanding of how we practice Buddhism for ourselves but also the possibilities for a Buddhism in the centuries to come. I think this is a fairly noble ideal.
I would like to have the bloggers express the diversity of Buddhism. Ideally, I think the blog should have a practitioner of one of the major Mahayana meditative traditions, like Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen, a Pure Land tradition (which means probably a Japanese school), a Vajrayana or Esoteric Buddhist practitioner (probably of the Tibetan variety), and a Theravadan or Insight Meditation practitioner (since the latter schools are drawn from the Theravadan tradition). Obviously, there will probably be overlap and more people than that but that would express the kind of variety that I would like to see. People signing up would work with me (as I plan to blog as well), on codifying the thrust of things. The blog will not be a platform for sectarianism, which I will say from the outset. That would completely go against the “One Sangha” intent. I would expect that people would blog at least one post a week, which is a fairly low requirement. If we had five people, that would be a blog post on most days of the week, which would work out well.
I don’t expect that the people participating to necessarily be academics or accredited teachers (such as monastics or priests), though those would be more than welcome.
If this sounds interesting to you or if you know someone who might be interested, please feel free to comment. You can also e-mail me as “albill” on the domain of this blog, “arcanology.com” and I will receive the message.
Remodeling and House Work
June 26, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Filed Under Daily Life | Leave a Comment
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This is a boring homeowner post. Be warned!
R and I have some money right now that we’re wanting to do useful things with, investment-wise. Our home has, at a guess, lost 10% in value since we bought it a year and a half ago.
While I still have the rebuilding of our brick porch to consider (yowza!), I’ve thought about having our bathroom or kitchen remodeled/redone. Both were partially done by previous owners, who did a kind of craptastic job with parts of it. For example, the tile floors are cracked in places because the subflooring had more flex than the large tiles could accommodate.
Then there is the back room, which is a separate addition off of the back deck. It is where the washer and dryer live but most of the space is used as a meditation/ritual space. The flooring is nasty, cheap vinyl (with a rug over it right now) and the subflooring isn’t the greatest. Since one of the main crawlspace access points is underneath the room, I’ve seen it from below often enough.
So, it wouldn’t hurt to invest some money into redoing or improving parts of the house. I have two general questions though, and they are both Bay Area related:
1) Where does one find reliable people to work on these things in the area? - As we all know, contractors are a dime a dozen but, as we learned with our old house, they often mostly suck. I’d like to find some reliable in the East Bay to do work for me on this stuff, like a kitchen remodel.
2) What are ecologically sound resources for this work? - There is an “EcoHome” place nearby that focused on ecological building materials. Before I had any work done, I’d want to talk to these people.
In the short term, I think I’d like to see our kitchen redone to be actually nice and the floor and walls ripped up in the back room and replaced with a nice wood floor, clean walls, etc. and a real partition for the laundry machines so they aren’t simply behind the curtain that we put up.
We also have two tiny windows (roughly two feet by two feet) on either side of our fireplace in the living room. We’ve thought of having these replaced with nice glasswork or something but we have no idea of where to find people for that sort of work.
Any thoughts or suggestions from people?
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