Brains: Today We Have Cookies!

It was a gorgeous Autumnal day this morning. Cool, crisp, and with that special clarity that only happens in here as Fall comes around and the winds start blowing toward the southwest. Too bad it's mid-July, but we Seattlites don't really miss summer. We don't even understand summer ("Seattle Summer" from Almost Live, featuring Bill Nye as a "drunken beach loon", 1:40), right?

Anyway, today's list of newsie things:

HHS moves to redefine hormonal contraception as abortion

( The bounds of reason. )

California Conservatives Turn On Each Other Over Gay Rights

( The harder you squeeze, Lord Vader... )

AFA: If we lose California, we lose everything

( The End of the Culture War? )

Christianists Wringing Hands Over McCain's Gay Adoption Stance

( He just blew his chances with Evangelicals... )

PZ Meyers bags one

( Don't send death threats over the Intertubes, children... )

WND: How Dare Atheists Publish In Christian America!

( Who is responsible for this outrage? )

The perfect chocolate chip cookie?

( Mmmm... )

Understanding Closures in Modern Programming Languages

( Only half the story here... )

Writing Exercise: What Does Your World's Wikipedia Contain?

I actually have been writing, and pretty steadily the past couple of days. Not fabulous amounts, maybe 500 words a day or so, but at least I'm getting somewhere. At least, I think I am. There are moments where I turn to Muse and say, "Where are we going with this story?" and she puts her hands up and with that "I don't know, I thought you knew" look.

Right now, the story du jour is a Yowlerverse story about a married couple living in Seattle who decide to rent out their mother-in-law basement apartment (hey, it's seriously "write what you know" time!). Their first inquiry is from a woman named "Leema," and the protagonist, Tracy, spends the first few paragraphs trolling through websites trying to figure out what questions would scare off even legal hispanic apartment renters. She's more than a little stunned-- and feeling a metric boatload of liberal guilt-- when a pair of beautiful Bastet show up on her doorstep.

The looks-younger, is-older character, Meer, is an exotic model with her own website. She reveals this to Tracy because she wants to "borrow" Tracy's husband as a chaperone for her first photoshoot in six months. Meer reveals that she's not like most Bastet-- she's not bisexual, and really is madly in love with Leema. She shows off an ugly scar along one shoulder and down one arm where a former fan stabbed her after she admitted to a reporter that she really wouldn't be interested in a male lover, ever. That was eight months ago.

I'm not sure where the story goes from here. I'm not even sure who the protagonist is. It might just die on the vine, but after 4,000 words or so, I hope not.

But it occurred to me, as I was writing the story, that I needed a lot more backstory. I needed it to go somewhere permanent and stop residing within my brain.

As an exercise, I decided to write the Bastet Wikipedia page. It's not anywhere remotely done, but it's a fun exercise. With headers like "Definitions," "Distinctions from H. Sapiens", "Origins," "Culture," "Sexuality," "Health and Life Span," "Issues Facing Bastet Today," "American Bastet," "European Bastet," "Bastet in Asia," "Bastet and Muslim Societies," "Population," and "Prominent Bastet," there's a lot to fill in.

So, if your characters live in an Alternative Earth, what do their Wikipedia pages look like?

Rails: Okay, that's just stupid

I have long asserted that if you can't handle SQL or Javascript, you shouldn't be programming rails. And I don't mean a little bit; you ought to be able to eat, sleep, and breathe Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and Ruby before you begin to sell yourself as a Rails programmer.

I am not a Rails programmer. Even so, I ought to be able to do simple things. Yet today I was stymied and went for my sledgehammer, the SQL statement.

Here's the layout: Stories exist. Stories belong to serials. Stories may optionally belong to arcs. Arcs theoretically belong to serials, but there is the "no arc" setting which, unfortunately, is global across the Journal Entries and my Other Stories archive, since there are plenty of standalone Journal Entries and most of the Other Stories stories are also standalone rather than complex. (That's a joke. Zoner will get it.)

So I wanted to be able to find all arcs that belong to a series. That's a simple statement in SQL: select distinct arcs.id, arcs.title, arcs.blurb from arcs, stories where stories.serial_id = 1 and arcs.id = stories.arc_id order by stories.pubdate. You see, arcs and serials only have a relationship through stories, not with each other.

There seems to be no clear way to do this in rails. It should be something like Arcs.find(...), but that didn't work at all.

This is on top of my discovering that yes, you can define your own pluralization rules, but you cannot override the ones inside Rails. "Series" will always be unpluralizable. If you try that, it works great until you trip over a call that dives beneath your application to the appserver layer, at which point Rails's internal pluralization rules take over and you're screwed.