Patricia Briggs – Mercy Thompson Reading Order

For anyone who’s interested, here’s the reading order of both the Mercy Thompson and Alpha & Omega books. I was able to find lists for either individually, but they really need to be read together, since they intertwine a bit.

• “Seeing Eye” (from the anthology Strange Brew, introduces backgrounds of characters from Hunting Ground)
• Moon Called [Mercy Thompson]
• “Alpha and Omega” (from the anthology On the Prowl, actually takes place during Moon Called, basically the intro to Cry Wolf)
• Cry Wolf [Alpha & Omega]
• Hunting Ground [Alpha & Omega]
• “Star of David” (from the anthology Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, features character from Moon Called, probably after the book)
• Blood Bound [Mercy Thompson]
• Iron Kissed [Mercy Thompson]
• Bone Crossed [Mercy Thompson]
• Silver Borne [Mercy Thompson]
• River Marked [Mercy Thompson]
• Fair Game [Alpha & Omega]
• “Fairy Gifts” (from the anthology Naked City, introduces character later seen in Frost Burned)
• “In Red, With Pearls” (from the anthology Down these Strange Streets, features Warren and Kyle, timing’s a little vague but definitely before Frost Burned and after Silver Borne)
• Frost Burned [Mercy Thompson]

Other stuff:

• Homecoming (Mercy Thompson graphic novel – I don’t have it, so I’m not sure. I’ll update this if I find out)
  
• “Gray” (from the anthology Home Improvement – characters aren’t from any other story, so it doesn’t fit into the framework)

Flowers for Jesus?

So, this florist in Washington state is getting sued AGAIN for refusing to sell flowers for a gay wedding. This brings up many questions regarding the boundaries of religious exercise and its impact on other people.

When Ingersoll entered Stutzman’s store in March to buy flowers for his upcoming wedding to Freed, Stutzman told him she could not serve him “because of (her) relationship with Jesus Christ,” according to the lawsuit filed last week by the attorney general.

But what if I decided I couldn’t sell product Y to Stutzman BECAUSE of her “relationship with Jesus Christ”? If I decided that her religion (or method of practicing it) offended my religious beliefs? I’d be willing to bet money that she’d be crying “discrimination” and “intolerance” at the top of her lungs for DAYS. So what makes it ok for her to do the same?

We have non-discrimination laws to make very clear the limits on how beliefs like this can be expressed. You can believe same-sex marriage is wrong as much as you want, and you can refuse to go to weddings. BUT this stops when your beliefs infringe on someone else’s rights.

Also, does she check for adulterers? People getting married twice? People who had sex before the wedding? (I believe all of these people are supposed to be stoned, not get nice flower arrangements) Seems rather arbitrary, what she decides is against her religion.

Protected: Camp NaNo – Prologue (882 words)

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Some randomness

Hopefully I’ll be getting a new computer setup soon – I end up not ever doing anything online because it’s such a hassle getting my cranky laptop to do anything…

ABC’s ‘This Week’ with Cardinal Timothy Dolan (that link goes to the first page, which has the video of Dolan’s interview. Here is the link to the portion of the transcript with his interview) is such a lovely person. “We want you to be happy, but only if you do it our way. We’re not against you, just against any way you might be able to be happy.” But the thing that bothers me most is that, regardless of what they think religiously, why should that matter to the rest of the nation? Why should we have laws based on what YOUR religion says is what god wants? There are plenty of other religions that think god wants gays to be able to marry. And there are plenty of people who don’t believe in god at all. So why does YOUR god get to decide for all the rest of us?

An article from the Christian Science Monitor on the shifting opinions about gay marriage. Some quotes are encouraging – on the right, someone pointed out that this is the government getting involved in a religious matter and the government shouldn’t be stopping a couple from getting married. Also, Rush Limbaugh thinks there’s a “gay mafia”. Every time I think about that very much, I start to giggle.

A photo of the day from CSM from March 30 shows that young men doing stupid things (often in motor vehicles) is universal.

Amazon apparently just acquired GoodReads. This makes me sad. I have the two separate for a reason.

And an increase in deaths from the abuse of painkillers is going to make life even more miserable for people with chronic pain. Right now I’m in a position of not being able to do anything about pain due to fibromyalgia (I’m on something to help, but there aren’t any painkillers I can take that don’t cause rebound migraines – so when it gets too bad, I take ibuprofen and then suffer the headache the next day in a miserable cycle), and it sucks. It would suck even more if I knew there was something that could help me but I couldn’t get it because of overkill in response to the abuse of painkillers.

And this managed to simultaneously amuse me and piss me the hell off. I will absolutely agree that women in college are less often looking for their MRS degree. Plenty of people meet the person they marry in college, since they’re meeting and spending time with people of like interests, pulled from a larger population than they were exposed to in college. But this idea that the mother brings up (admittedly she’s crazy, but bringing up something that I’ve definitely seen other places):

Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal.

Issue 1: why is there a double standard? Why is it ok for men, but not women? Issue 2: why do we care about education so damn much? My longest relationship (and among the most healthy/stable/not-with-a-crazy-person) was with someone with less education, although certainly not less intelligence. But not only does education not equal intelligence, but there are different types of intelligence. Yes, I’m technically a rocket scientist (had a college orchestra director who used to yell at us for messing things up, since we were all ‘rocket surgeons’ and ought to be able to figure it out), but I can’t cook worth a damn. And thus, I have mad respect for people who can. Are they “more intelligent” because they can figure out how to boil an egg? I guess that’s ok, though, since I’m female and a guy should be ok marrying someone less intelligent…as long as he doesn’t mind a wife who can’t cook…

On science in SFF (aka my “nuclear=magic” & nuclear misconceptions rant)

This post brought to you in part by Requires Only That You Hate’s recent links post, who linked to this review of ‘Hitman: Absolution’, which links to the Prometheus link.

Although I haven’t seen it, I just read a really good article on the science of the newest Aliens movie, Prometheus. It contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it or if it bothers you to read spoilers before you see a movie, don’t click. This is “Fixing Prometheus” by Mike Brotherton. This brings me to something that has recently bugged the hell out of me.

I understand that science fiction is fiction. I am willing to suspend my disbelief in certain aspects. After all, I read fantasy all the time. But within both science fiction AND fantasy, it is important to be internally consistent. If you establish a fact, you have to keep it until the end, unless you have some reasonably plausible explanation. And in science fiction and in some fantasy (set in OUR world or in a version of our world that leaves some or all of the science intact), you can’t just ignore current science because it’s convenient. You can extrapolate to future science/engineering. You can extrapolate to future applications of CURRENT science/engineering. But you can’t take the current stuff and just have it magically have a different outcome/result/application than is allowed by physics. Not only will you make some of your audience either chew through their tongues keeping quiet or start yelling at the screen (depending on if viewing at a theater or at home), but you often make people believe things about science that AREN’T TRUE.

As a nuclear/aerospace engineer (my degrees are nuclear, but I minored in aerospace and all of my research that I’ve done voluntarily, rather than assigned by a class or for money, has been in nuclear space propulsion), most of my angst comes from the use of “nuclear” to mean “magical stuff we don’t want to think about”, although there are occasionally bits of aerospace stuff or just general science – I can’t watch MythBusters for this reason. They don’t do actual science because they don’t use the scientific method, which has led to at least one of their conclusions being wrong. In determining if rolling a car’s windows down vs running the AC mattered to gas mileage, they only used a single, non-highway speed. Since the effect of having the windows down is going to change non-linearly with speed (not exactly sure what it would do with turns…that would take more math than I’m willing to dust off), not only can they not make that call based on a SINGLE DATA POINT, they couldn’t even make a complete determination of efficiency with TWO points. There are other episodes where their conclusion is likely right, but for the wrong reasons. Thus, I annoy the hell out of anyone I’m watching the show with when I start arguing with the TV.

In a brilliant, historical example of the damage the misuse of science can do, the movie The China Syndrome was released 12 days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. The movie (totally not worth watching – go watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb if you want a good nuclear disaster movie. My college chapter of the American Nuclear Society watched both and were terribly disappointed with The China Syndrome), combined with a complete lack of any clue about how nuclear anything works, contributed to the fear of what was happening at TMI. In the movie, the concept of the “China Syndrome” is that in the worst case of a meltdown, components would melt through the containment and into the earth “all the way to China”. This is wrong, on multiple levels. Not only would a meltdown NOT go through the earth, but a meltdown alone wouldn’t even make it through the containment (case in point: THREE MILE ISLAND). Chernobyl had no containment beyond the immediate reactor vessel (along with design flaws that made the reactor more likely to have problems and which made the tests that caused the explosion – which was NOT a nuclear explosion, it just spread a lot of nuclear material around in the STEAM explosion) and the issues in Japan from the earthquake/tsunami weren’t caused by a meltdown. Damage to components in that caused the meltdown, not the other way around (also, while there was detectable increases in radiation readings in the area, if you’re concerned about them, you should probably not consider moving to Denver or other high-altitude areas. You should also refrain from eating bananas and brazil nuts – you can find them with a geiger counter! Easier than you can find uranium and plutonium, too.)

And this brings me to, most recently, The Dark Knight Rises. Warning: this goes a bit long, since the issues in it hit on several levels of irritation at both public policy, the use of “nuclear”, and the utter lack of understanding of what “nuclear” is. Apparently, when taking me to see the movie, the ex knew I was going to get angry at the screen when this came up…Also, my use of parenthetical thoughts gets a bit out of hand, so I’ve put all of them in green to try to make it easier to follow.

Sooo…it’s only been a MONTH…

Two days after my last post, I had a grand mal seizure, adding much fun and doctors’ visits to what had already been lovely fun times. I was totally lucky in that I was at the ex’s mom’s place, and both of them are ex-EMTs and she still works in the medical field. She caught me on the way down, so that cut way down on the bruises, and they knew what to do afterwards. They called 911 while I was out (although by the time the ambulance got there, I was on my feet and remembering things), but I apparently didn’t breathe long enough that I was a bit blue (with a light complexion, it doesn’t take much). And I learned that memory loss is a scary, scary thing. Of all of it, that was the scariest – first, not knowing where I was (by the time I remember anything, I knew the people around me, although I apparently didn’t for a bit), then just not knowing why I was on the floor or anything that had happened that day. It all came back eventually (I’m missing random stuff from college, but that could easily be from time or other stuff), but I remember the feeling of trying to think back to things and them just not being there. Also, I’m eventually going to be the death of some poor neurologist (or his groundbreaking journal publication, which I think I’d prefer, since it would mean he had SOME clue of what was going on) – apparently the seizure makes no sense, given the anti-seizure meds I take for other things. But just for grins, we’ve added another into the mix. 

I’m going to try to post more, as I try to put some kind of structure into my days, now that I can’t even drive anywhere to get out of the house (law says 6 months of no driving after a seizure, which seems reasonable, but feels like an ETERNITY). It’s very, very hard for me not to become nocturnal, since that’s always been my preference anyway. Even when I got up early (for me) for work regularly, it was always a struggle.

Back from the Mostly Dead

I’ve been out of it for a bit – I’m seeing a new doctor for the migraines and he wanted to take me off the painkillers I’ve been using, because they may be causing rebound headaches. He seems to have been right, to a point – I’ve been having fewer of the really, really bad days and smoothing out to a constant lower pain level, but withdrawal has been just a lovely process. The still here, though. I’m in the process of moving AGAIN – the boyfriend/fiance of the last 4 years and I are splitting up (totally amicable, we’re still going to be good friends; really, the last year or so that’s been where we both have been emotionally but driving each other nuts in living together and the stress of my health getting worse and worse, partly because I can’t really do much, so I’m pretty hermit-like, and partly because the financial side of things, since my salary was providing most of the rent/utilities/etc). So I’m moving across town, with my mom.  The crappy part of moving in with her (we get along fine), apart from just the basic fact of moving back in with a parent at 28, is that she’s allergic to cats, so I have to leave them with the ex until I can get my own place, whether with disability of some sort or getting better enough that I can start working again.

Oddly, or maybe not so, is that I’m almost afraid of the migraines getting better. They’ve dismantled so much of my life that I’ll have to put it back together from scratch. Realistically, now that I have some real world experience, I don’t think I’d be happy with anything but research, and that in the core design/neutronics/nuclear physics area. Ideally, I’d like to go back to space propulsion reactor design, but I don’t think there’s much happening there right now. And I learned my lesson with my master’s – I definitely don’t want to do anything with the radiological assessment/dosimetry/shielding area. And GT has, since I graduated, gotten some huge grants to work on core design, so that would help. But I’d still have to start from a) being out of academia for 3+ years, and b) restarting life, really, since I’d want to get my own place and get used to not living with someone, unless I got a roommate.