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Minerva Zimmerman

A Clarification Re: Boobs

Earlier today, I tweeted this. This actually garnered some comments about my “boobist” thinking.

I just want to set the record straight.

Boobs are awesome. They can be a pain (literally) to tote around one’s self, but I am firmly (perhaps jiggly?) in the pro-boob camp.

My complaint has to do with bad science and boredom. I am not suggesting we take out all boobs in games. I’d love to see more variety of boobs in games, sexualized male characters, and gender-neutral characters in games. I think sexy has its time and place, and I have no wish to do away with it. I am not a fan of games where stuff is done TO female characters rather than BY them, so I don’t play them. Likewise, if someone makes a sexy male vampire who gets nearly naked every time he transforms and the camera lovingly pans across his muscular thighs, I am not going to force brodudes to play it at gunpoint.

Much the way that most gamers want realistic physics in their games, I tend to want realistic biology even in mythical or alien species. There is a biological reason for boobs. That biology doesn’t make them less awesome, but there’s world-logic to them. If you break the world-logic by giving an avian species breasts, I want an in-game reason for it. Does that species undergo body modification for fun or profit because the universe is human-centric? That’s an interesting reason for non-mammalian species to have breasts.  There is a whole gigantic non-human world of species out there to draw upon for ideas.To simply make “breasts” the default for “female” is boring, not to mention LAZY game design.

 

 

Minerva Zimmerman

Are you aware you stopped dying at U?

Well, yes. There are reasons for this– some good, some pretty dumb. The main one was I went from “how am I going to die this week” to “I… really don’t want to kill myself even fictionally right now,” which I think is a pretty good reason not to write something like that. If you ever find yourself arguing “Well, I really SHOULD kill myself off” it’s probably not a good thing, no matter the context. The other was when I erased my fictional self and broke the 4th wall, I felt like it was a good place to change what I was doing. No matter what I did I couldn’t really bring my fictional self back in the next episode, but I wasn’t quite sure what I should do instead. Once I figured it out, I was in the middle of a major deadline push and didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. I then pushed past burnout and got dangerously close to burn up.

For the months of November and December I’m taking a break from writing deadlines and doing stuff that helps me recharge. A little writing vacation. I’m playing video games (something I never do when I have writing projects), working through my to-read stack, cleaning the house (holy crap, deadlines sure breed dust bunnies), and getting around to stuff I haven’t done. *clears away cobwebs off this blog* Which writing here happens to be one of. I’m not going to claim to write here on any schedule (we all know that isn’t going to happen) but I do have several things about writing and research I’ve been meaning to post. Eventually I will even write the conclusion to Museum Mishaps where Intern Tilly goes in search of the now entirely missing Minerva.

I also have some other fiction I want to post, but I haven’t decided if a blog entry or a downloadable pdf would be best for. Any thoughts?

To sum up: Contrary to what it might appear, I did not actually really real die.

Minerva Zimmerman

Holy Carp, A non-fiction post

I really wish I had a better reason for not getting the Museum Mishap up last week or this week’s on time. The sad truth, is simply I haven’t been sleeping. Turns out human brains don’t process things very well if you don’t let them defrag and reindex every so often. More often if you’re past your “best by” date.

I have many things I want to tell you, and fictional tales to tell. I’m not falling off the face of the planet, I’m just faceplanting on my bed instead of being able to write. It’s getting better, but I’ve gotten up to get a glass of water and forgotten what I was doing four times before getting to the kitchen. A potentially huge weight off of my ability to sleep was lifted yesterday, the puppy is sleeping most of the way through the night if we let her sleep in the bed, and hopefully new stuff will get the pain management under control.

If anyone has me on RSS I just wanted to let you know I’m still alive, just tired. It should get better soon.

-M

 

Minerva Zimmerman

Schrodenger’s First Aid Kit

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Minerva jumped back in her seat and stared in horror at the YouTube video. She’d expected a bit of a bang and a puff of smoke, not the vigorous explosion she’d just seen. She looked over the article again. “Used as a burn treatment” — who the hell used something that could become explosive as a burn treatment? “Found in Boy Scout first aid kit…” Well, at least they didn’t have any Scout first aid kits at the museum. 

Minerva went back to perusing the new emails from the Collections mailing list. She sat bolt up with an unpleasant thought; tabbed over to Google and typed in, ‘WWII first aid kits picric acid.’ 

“Oh crap.”  

Picric acid in liquid form was fine. Picric acid that had evaporated even partially was highly explosive, friction and shock sensitive. It was used in some, but not all WWII military first aid kits. 

“What is it?” asked Tilly. 

Minerva looked over at her intern. “We’ve got to go open a bunch of first aid kits.”  

***

Minerva took a deep breath and slid the last first aid kit off the shelf. Four other kits had been checked and cleared. None had contained picric acid burn compresses. One had even been empty. Minerva’s gloved hands stuck to the metal as she tried to readjust her grip without tilting the box. 

“It’s sticky,” Minerva said. 

“Why?” asked Tilly. 

“Don’t know. Smells like iodine.” 

Minerva lowered the metal box to a table, keeping it level and setting it down very gingerly. Her hands peeled away covered in a sticky black liquid. She un-did the metal latches, wincing as the box jostled with each movement. She tried the lid. It didn’t budge. 

Tilly had backed up a step with each movement Minerva made with the box. 

Minerva took a deep breath and looked to her intern, now in the doorway to the room. “I want you to go downstairs and look up this item in the catalog. See if there’s any additional information.” 

Tilly didn’t need to be told twice. She was down the stairs and out of the blast radius within seconds. 

Minerva pulled out her keys and tried to carefully leverage the sticky box open. The rubber seal schlurped as it was parted from the metal lid. 

Minerva really hated rubber gaskets. 

She raised the lid enough to get her fingers under and wrench it open. The small paper boxes inside were soaked with various liquids, one of which was odorously iodine. The vials of smelling salts had also broken soaking into several adjacent boxes of gauze pads. She scanned for the “Burn Treatment” box and squinted at the chemical description underneath, obscured by yellow crystals. 

Minerva used one gloved finger to wipe away crystals away from the letters, dragging unstable crystals of picric acid along the paper, like striking a match. 

It was a closed casket funeral.  

 
Minerva Zimmerman

Worth a Thousand Words

 

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Minerva cleared a space on the counter and set down the metal tray containing scissors, tweezers, and a bbq lighter. The museum was applying to a grant for improving their photographic collection storage. One of the questions asked if they’d ever tested their collection for the presence for nitrate film. She was about 99.999% sure there was some in the collection, but hadn’t actually tested for it– until now. Luckily the grant didn’t require knowing what percentage of the collection was nitrate film, just if they had any at all. 

She looked at shelf after shelf of archival boxes stuffed full of paper envelopes. The envelopes were full of prints and negatives arranged by subject. Minerva frowned, shrugged, and grabbed the box marked “Automobiles”. Might as well start at the beginning. 

Minerva opened the box and fished out the two envelopes that indicated they held negatives. The first was full of contemporary, drug-store developed negatives from a car show in the 1990s. She set it aside.  The second envelope was jam-packed full of oversized negatives and had a slightly chemical vinegar smell. She leafed through them until she found a 5×7″ negative of a man standing next to an early automobile, maybe a Holman. The negative had an unusually wide margin to the left of the image. Minerva carefully trimmed off 1/4 of this edge to square up the border in line with the other 3 sides. No one would even notice its removal. 

Minerva picked up the trimmed edge with the tweezers and held it at arms length over the metal tray. She picked up the bbq lighter and clicked it on. The slightly blueish flame of the bbq lighter didn’t quite touch the negative before the whole thing flared up in a gigantic flare of yellow flame. 

“Jesus!” Minerva jerked back and the flaming bit of cellulose nitrate slipped from the tweezers and landed on the pile of negatives on the counter.  They quickly caught fire and the flames shot several feet up and caught the shelves of archival boxes on fire. 

Minerva Zimmerman

Incredibly Short Voyage

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The mold spore happily made mycotoxin. It was a very successful mold. There was plenty of food for to digest and the air was quite moist. It enjoyed its existence growing on the side of this cardboard box in this warm, damp space. 

One day a bright light shone down like fiery death and something moved the mold spore’s world. The box moved and the spore swayed on its filament. Suddenly, the box dropped sharply against the floor. The spore’s filament snapped and the spore went sailing into the air. It rose and fell with the air disturbance from the falling box. Suddenly a sharp current caught the spore and propelled it into warm darkness.  

 

Minerva sneezed and wiped her hands on her pants. “Ew, mold.” She went looking for a dust mask as she reached into her pockets for her inhaler. 

Minerva Zimmerman

…and on the Third Day she gibbered

I’m stealing the title of this entry from a comment by Nate Crowder on Twitter, because it is incredibly apropos.

Guys. Guys! I turned in The Place Between manuscript’s finally final edits. Like, they won’t let me touch it again. Not even to straighten its collar before it toddles off into the world. Which it will be… soon.

It should be heading off reviewers soon, and I’m gearing up for a flurry of self-promotion. Hopefully, not so much that you’re sick of me, but enough to reach people who like female superheroes and tricksters but wouldn’t be able to differentiate me from my good doppelgänger (I’m the evil one) in person, much less online.

Exciting things are afoot!

Minerva Zimmerman

One Possible Digital Future

So, I had a thought. I’m always doing that– thinking. If I was one of the Big Publishers what would I do to ensure that I would continue to exist into the foreseeable future?

Well, digital isn’t going away. I don’t think print is going away anytime soon either, but its place in the market is shifting and too much of Big Publishing is still reliant on print, so I’d focus my big moves on digital and assume that the print stuff will sort itself out without a lot of help. I’d want to make sure that Amazon had reasonable competition in digital books. I’d need to make new readers.

So one of the most persuasive arguments against digital is that it makes the initial buy-in too high for those in lower-income brackets. Once you get a device that views digital books it makes the over-all cost of reading lower, but the initial buy-in is much higher.

Now given all of these things it seems totally logical that the Big Publishers should support a program to design, manufacture, and give away an e-reader designed specifically for school children. Make an e-token system that works across the digital book stores of all the major publishers and give out so many digital tokens to each schools to buy books initially, and make it easier and cheaper for schools to buy new books in the future. Make it so parents and relatives can buy e-tokens for individual students. Have e-tokens as prizes for give-aways and marketing participation. Basically subsidize a generation of new readers.

Is it reasonable? Yes and No. There are serious problems. Publishers don’t seem particularly inclined to work together. To my knowledge none of the publishers have looked into the hardware side of things. It would be years to put together and work out. It would be a serious outlay of resources that would not be recouped for many years. In the long run I think it would pay for itself in spades. I think it IS possible and it would well, improve the world overall. The best way to do it would likely to create a non-profit organization (funded by the publishers) to design, create, and distribute the e-readers and digital tokens. The digital store would have to be its own corporate entity possibly with each publisher running its own section of it.

The scary thing (for Publishers) is that Amazon could probably start putting a project of this scope together tomorrow. They have the hardware, they’re making the connections, and they have the digital distribution thing down. Amazon is already the main distribution channel for ebooks. It has already made the jump to publishing print books. I don’t think Amazon is a monster (I live in the middle of nowhere I buy A LOT of things off Amazon. I couldn’t live without them at the moment.) but I strongly believe competition makes for a better market and I see a possible future where the Big Publishers hand Amazon years without viable competition simply by not acting soon enough.

Minerva Zimmerman

Tagged For Questioning

I was just futzing about on the internet like a bad writer when I should really be editing this novel… and noticed I got tagged for a question meme. Now, I’m not one to look a procrastination horse in the gift mouth, so onward to the questions! 

If they were making a movie about your life, who would you choose to play you?

Benedict Cumberbatch 

 
If you could be given another talent or ability, what would you want it to be?  Have you ever – really – tried to perfect this ability in yourself?
 
I wish I could pick up languages in a snap. I have studied both German and Spanish but have poor retention. 
 
If you could take one trip back in time, when and where would you go?
 
Hmm, well if I undo any of my life’s mistakes I wouldn’t be who I am now and I might cause a time paradox, so that’s a bad idea. I am probably the worst person to send back in time ever. I have a hard enough time dealing with not mucking up my dealings with the present. 
 
Do you have a favorite movie that you can watch over and over?
 
Dune, Blade Runner, Master and Commander 
 
If you could choose to stay a certain age forever, what age would it be?
 
I would never choose this. Lack of change always causes problems. 
 
What is one of your favorite quotes?
 
“We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” –Frank Tibolt
 
If you could be any fictional character, who would you be?
 
I am not entirely certain I am not a fictional character. 
 
What sound do you love?
 
Rain.
 
What superpower would you like to have?
 
Ability to split my consciousness and bilocate. 
 
Do you have a favorite artist? Who?
 
I do not have a favorite, I have too many favorites to name. 
 
Have you ever wanted to invent something to make your life easier? What?
 
Boozffins: Muffin Booze delivery mechanisms aka carb-loading and drinking at the same time. 
Minerva Zimmerman

FABULOUS PRIZES!

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The gods of package delivery caused a completely bizarre but good for YOU snafu. You see, I’ve ended up with an extra T-shirt that I’m free to give away. Being that I ordered one for myself because I was thinking it’d be funny to wear to the Finding Home: Community in Apocalyptic Worlds reading… as I now have two stories about tardigrade-unicorns. So in honor of my story “Unicorn Chaser” I’m going to give away the T-shirt along with some random goodies.

How do you enter?

  • Comment on this entry, send me a message on Twitter (@grumpymartian) or email me  (minervazimmerman at gmail dot com) or give me some other means of communication I can use to get back in touch with you between now and Midnight Sunday January 15 PST
  • The comment/message/email MUST mention something about unicorns or tardigrades

What can you win? 

  • The t-shirt is as you see above, a black babydoll style size XL. I normally wear a M or so but prefer the larger size in the babydoll style myself. If you are a manly man… you could use it to pretend you’re a cable news reporter on location and thus a member of the tiny black t-shirt brigade. The random goodies are random and will likely be strange, but in a good way.

Who can enter?

  • Anyone. I will mail it worldwide, though the content of the random items will be slightly less weird if I have to fill out a customs form.

How will the winner be chosen?

  • I will compile all of the valid entries and assign them a number and use a random number generator to pick a number of the grand prize winner! I will then contact the winner to get an address.

Wait what… Unicorns and Tardigrades? Yes. If you’re confused you can listen to my story Muffin Everlasting in a podcast from Timid Pirate Publishing:

“It was surreal, even for me, to watch a sparkly unicorn the size of a kitten wobble its way across the incubator on little pearly hooves. The incubator automatically monitored the unicorn’s vital signs so my team and I knew what tweaks to make in the next series of prototypes when this one ultimately malfunctioned. The unicorn flicked its ears and opened its mouth. It had no teeth. I watched as the unicorn’s tongue extended into a pastel pink proboscis and probed the air of the incubator. Knowing the guys over in marketing, they’d just play up the product’s safety: ‘Synergy Creatures Mini- Unicorn has no teeth to bite little fingers.’ ”