Slushpile Physics

There's a thread and post over on Making Light about editors and rejections and slushpiles. And it's... kind of astounding, really. I mean, okay, I know, on an intellectual level, and on a visceral level, how people will ignore the most bleeding obvious things. I work retail. People will put things back in places that are HARDER TO GET TO than where they got it from. But reading how almost 75% of the stuff submitted to most publishers is barely in coherent English...

And then even in the last 1%, the ones that show talent and creativity and so on, 3/4 of those don't fit for reasons unrelated to the books, it's just. I dunno. Encouraging in some strange way. Mainly because of the fact that most of the submissions they get don't even come in the right format or the right language. Which I can totally believe, looking around at much of the Internet, but the thought that somebody would write something like a myspace post in l33t and send it in on lined paper to a publisher just pretty much boggles my mind. And makes me feel sorry for the interns and the editors who get to sift through the dreck.

The fact that the comments thread includes comments by many authors whose names I recognize from books I adored has nothing to do with anything other than making me squee about how awesome the Internet is.

You Can't Make This Up

Okay, so Sean Hannity, the hacktastic Fox news dude, has a new show. And on this new show, he's basically stolen an the idea from Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" segment and Stephen Colbert's "On Notice" Segment. Only his is called Enemy of the State".

Now, leaving aside the happy Orwellian name there, and leaving aside the fact that Hannity's not an actual part of the state apparatus, for all that Fox is the Republican Party Propaganda Channel, what makes it the stupidest is this. The stupidest part is that the first person Hannity names as an "Enemy of the State"? Sean Penn, the actor. Um. Yeah, okay, great sense of priorities there.

Other than that though, this is just another outgrowth of the right-wing culture of hate and declaring your enemies to be traitors and inhuman scum, which has reached ridiculous heights of venom and stupidity over the past decade. That and they must be trying to put parody out of business, because how can you even try and parody something that's already completely stupid on its own?

A Quote

"The difference between riot and revolution is if the troops fire." - The Internets

So, Music

Anybody have any good suggestions for music like from Firefly? Because the music in Firefly was awesome. The music in Serenity wasn't bad, but it wasn't the same kind of awesome mix of cowboy/asian/middle eastern/etc music that Firefly had. There's the soundtrack, but that's only one disc. And it's not nearly enough if for background music if I end up running a Firefly/Serenity RPG, really. I have a little bit of international music that might suffice, but I need more. Suggestions, anyone?

Also, Steven Brust is apparently writing/has written a licensed book set in the Firefly universe. I'm excited!