Technogirl @various:

Teresa's last name is Nielsen Hayden. Since you like snark, I'll suggest that you can guess what someone's last name may be by looking at their whole name, and then subtracting the first word. Doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot.

I'm a member of several fora (related to 3d art) that rely on in-your-face moderation, smackdowns, bannings, deletions, etc. Joining up requires agreeing to the moderation policy/TOS, which is linked on the front page of any artist forum worth visiting. People who get banned too many times sometimes end up starting their own a which all run along similar lines. The ones that thrive have strong, obvious moderation - many of them have online stores that generate a pile of dough, and allow them to pay a rafts of moderators to keep things civil. www.renderosity.com, which is all about control and internecine warfare, has been going strong for over a decade (thousands of members) and is a lot of fun...if you can play by the rules. I offer this as an example of the part of the internet where Teresa's moderation style is the norm. You don't have to like it, but it's not as startling as you think.

Full disclosure: longtime kool-aid drinker here, want Teresa to edit my book someday, etc.

Pipenta, Google "harlan ellison stage."

"Half-ass suicide." Ouch. Successful suicides often have hesitation marks, too.

themindfantastic @#43:

I don't expect writers to have politics I like, but I also don't expect them to bootstrap their way into government advisory roles. The SIGMA group seems to be doing that pretty successfully--Greg Bear was on the Daily Show a few months back talking about how much fun it was working with Homeland Security. So instead of political opinion merely informing the text, it is the text.

I don't exactly think of Niven as just a jerk, now, and what Teresa said at #15 is true - my elderly parents have said things to me that would stun their younger selves. I emailed him years ago to ask for some writing advice and he answered back with some that was very helpful. I met him a few years back, when "Stars our Destination" was still a live bookstore, and he seemed very nice, although quite shy. He was wearing a button that said "once you have removed the pin from Mr. Hand Grenade, he is no longer your friend."

Which is why it's so distressing to hear of him advocating being cruel to people.

Niven is why I started reading SF...this is soooo disillusioning. Not that I thought he was a liberal or anything, but I didn't think he was, y'know, evil.

I'm just thinking about how public art is approached here in Chicago. We have a lot of sculptures in public spaces, but we get to have some fun with them. When the White Sox went to the world series, all of the horses and lions downtown were sporting official white socks for the duration. Kids jump and play on the Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. I think if anyone tried to modify, cover, or speak harshly to "The Bean," they'd be run off by a mob, because it's so beloved...but nobody calls it by it's proper name ("Cloud Gate") because nobody cares what the artist wants.

The trick, maybe, is to have at least some sculptures that people really love, and to encourage people to have fun with them and enjoy them. That way people respect your city's public sculpture program and don't mess with the less popular sculptures you deploy.

Unless, of course, they have a semi-private space inside them, like Monument with Standing Beast (AKA "Big white thing at the Thompson center"). Those always become public urinals, no matter what.

Presumably using the mouth and the anus is also sexual misconduct in Buddhism if heterosexuals do it. Woo, bring on the hand jobs!

Magnus, they don't make that PEZ gun any more, but it's really cool! My friend's a collector and has one. What makes it really excellent is that not only does it teach children to play with real guns, it also can injure and choke kids all by itself.

I don't think they make bubblegum cigarettes any more either.

FYI - His friend also posted photos: http://willthedutch.blogspot.com/2007/06/farewell-burma.html