Take up the Rich Man’s burden
Like you should have in 89–
You let Afghanistan smolder
And you wasted precious time;
We told you of the danger
We told you what to do,
You’ve dithered long enough
It’s time to see it through!

Take up the Rich Man’s burden,
Afghanistan is in your hands.
There is no other nation
that can unite the warring bands.
Forget about the British,
The Russians, and the Greeks.
Forget about the Mongols,
The Persians, and the Sikhs.

Take up the Rich Man’s burden
and forget the failures past–
You have more money than they did
The nation you build can last.
You’ve made the same mistakes and worse it’s true
but it is not too late,
Afghanistan’s masses are calling to you
Will you leave them to their fate?

Take up the Rich Man’s burden–
There’s no imperialism in this sentiment,
Just keep at it a few decades more
And we’ll be ready for self-government.
Ignore our recent history
Ignore our far history too
We haven’t quite worked out how to govern this place
But you’ll keep trying, won’t you?

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• Literary Analysis

I wish I could write more for GRTM, but most the time I’m busy writing stuff for school. I’ve decided once in a while to post something I’ve written for school and if you think its boring, that’s cool there’s plenty of other good stuff to read on this site.
-NATE

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired magazine) takes a look at the success of online business such as Netflix, Amazon, Ebay, Google, iTunes, etc. and attempts to illustrate how these companies have changed business as we know it. What these companies have in common is that they appeal to a niche market. Anderson calls this market “The Long Tail”. The democratization of production and distribution, along with sophisticated aggregation provides consumers with more choice now than ever before in history.

The theory works like this- if we take any product and rank it by popularity there will almost certainly be a curve that resembles the image below. The black portion consists of what we would consider the “hits”. These would be the products that we are used to seeing in our movie theaters, Blockbuster videos, Wal-marts, Targets, and Best Buys. The traditional rule in business was that 20% of products made up 80% of sales.

What these online retailers did that was so revolutionary is that they found a way to tap into “The Long Tail” (the green section of the image) through the Internet, thanks to new methods of production and distribution that broke the bottlenecks that traditionally distorted markets. When these companies were able to offer the products in the long tail they also realized that where there was supply, there was demand. And even though this demand was considerably smaller than the “hits”, those small demands for these unique products added up.

Once these companies were able to build in searches and recommendations that helped users navigate this new flood of choices, they quickly realized that we are not as tied to the mainstream as we were led to believe. When we were given these choices we gladly indulged in our niches. We started forming our own tribes around these niches. And interestingly, we started demanding more out of our “hits”.

I’ve observed this phenomenon even in my own consumption of media. Though I still have limitations on my free time and attention span, I listen to way more music than I ever did before and watch television that I never would have even thought to watch a few years ago. I also notice that I see more things I “like” than I ever did before. I listen to what Netflix recommends to me, and it is eerily spot on almost every time. I scour Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic before deciding whether or not to spend $10 on the latest Hollywood Blockbuster at the theater or stay home and watch that episode of 30 Rock I missed on Hulu (a show I only got into because of word of mouth recommendations by friends). I have The AV Club and NPR’s All Songs Considered podcasts that expose me to new music I’ll never hear on the radio. In fact, by now I’ve given up on the radio almost entirely, because its just not playing what I want to hear. I live almost entirely in The Long Tail, and the strange thing is that I feel more connected to others than ever!

At this point “The Long Tail” theory becomes not just an interesting statement on business, but a fascinating lens through which to look at culture. We see the long tail in information with the advent of Wikipedia. We have observed the changing landscape of news with the rise of the blogosphere and the immediacy of tools like YouTube and Twitter. Some are terrified by this, others are overly optimistic. Where should the library stand?

As I read The Long Tail I continued to ask myself what it means for libraries. Anderson even has a section where he criticizes Dewey because physical goods “force us into crude categorization and static taxonomies”. His example of how Dewey handles religion is one example that caused me to cringe. Anderson also writes extensively throughout the book about the limitations that geography can have on a traditional brick-and-mortar building.

With all of this in mind I still came away from this book very excited about where libraries can fit in and in some cases already do. I won’t go into my personal predictions about how the library could or should implement “The Long Tail” into its design. That could be a whole separate series of blog posts. However, the principle of users desiring choice and information about their choices seems to encourage limitless possibilities for what libraries can provide their users in regards to not only materials but guidance. I think Anderson’s “Long Tail” rules seem surprising well aligned with the vision of libraries.

Long Tail Rules
1. Move inventory way in…or way out.
2. Let customers do the work. “crowd-sourcing”
3. One distribution method doesn’t fit all. (comforting to hear)
4. One product doesn’t fit all. (also very comforting to hear)
5. One price doesn’t fit all.
6. Share information. (I think libraries can adapt this one pretty easily!)
7. Think “and” not “or”. (YES!)
8. Trust the market to do your job.
9. Understand the power of free. (A library’s bread and butter!)

What a great set of principles for libraries to be thinking about. Anderson even specifically addresses libraries with an amazing quote that I hope to always keep nested in the back of my mind.

“A future-proof library makes no assumptions about the information landscape of tomorrow.”

This was a great read, and I personally think it should be required reading for future librarians. It directly addresses shifts in information, culture, and consumption of materials. If that doesn’t sound like research librarians should be interacting with, I don’t know what is.

As far as Gather Round The Mic is concerned, we are certainly a niche. On any given day you could run across an awesome suggested music playlist, a conversation on infinity, or an interesting and honest take on feminism. Who knows what niche that fills!? I guess that’s for the aggregators to decide. It just feels good to be participating directly in The Long Tail.

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An original piece by GRTM contributor Colin Flanigan

As I sat in the bathroom cubicle,
	which was like a beehive,
but without the bees (which is an abstraction)
	my heart
felt, (after a line break)
	like a white-hot iron.
	(which is a simile, signified by the word "like")
A white-hot iron,
	which,
in its fiery rage,
	was personified -
by my insinuating that a laundry iron could feel rage -
	spat sparks upon the laundry
and the fabric (which is a synonym)
	of my soul
because you said
	"I love you-
but I am sick of your explaining everything."

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BIG TREES!!!

“Trees, trees, trees,”
Thought the lumberjack.
There were trees all around.
More than he could shake a saw at.

Then, it happened.

He got married.
No more cutting big trees like a big, lumberjack man.
Nope, now he’s got to hold his wife’s purse, again,
while she tries on yet another smock.

“Well, if you like trees so much,” the lumberjack’s wife asked,
“why don’t you marry them?”

So, he did.

He got the papers (which were made from trees)
and he got her John Hancock
and he was divorced and then he married the trees.

A week later, he was hauled off to jail for sawing
his wife in half.

BIG TREES!!!

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And I’m not talking about normal, every day terrible. Not some commonplace children’s-television-show dreck. I’m talking about something truly unique in its ability to be bad. Something so poorly executed, so poorly thought out that it defies nearly every well-regarded law of its form; logic and craftsmanship, talent and skill. Something so pure and truthful in its misguided creativity that you cannot bear but to stare at it like it’s some sort of horrible car-crash or one of those faces that truly only a mother could love. I delight in finding these hidden gems of wonderful badness, and there’s nothing quite so refreshing as trolling through a thrift-shop or used media store and finding that one completely unnecessary object that will sufficiently make my day, sometimes my week.

And so, I bring you Something Terrible, a column I plan on writing every now and then, perhaps monthly, about a work so terrible that it can only be appreciated when examined as a work of total genius. Hopefully, by reading it, you too will find enjoyment in these frankensteins of art and culture I’ve learned to love so dearly, and maybe even be inspired to take up your own study of the banal and insipid in search of something truly inspired.

Now, without further ado – Something Terrible, O.F. [Object of Fascination] #1: Bad as I Wanna Be: The Autobiography of Dennis Rodman.

As any of us growing up in the 80′s-90′s know, Dennis Rodman was – oh, how to put it – that weird and wild man who played for the Chicago Bulls, lived constantly and bizarrely under the shadow of the almighty Michael Jordan, and was widely regarded as one of the strangest men in the world of sports at that time. I knew kids on my block growing up that were Dennis Rodman fans, but back then I generally imagined that those kids must have been simply unaware of just how utterly bizarre he was. After all, the man married himself, didn’t he? He’s a basketball player, not Salvador Dali – he’s not supposed to be that eccentric.

But, like most of us who grew up in the 80′s and 90′s, I am now grown up. As a young man of some experience, I have dealt with my fear of the bizarre creature that is Dennis Rodman, and have come to appreciate him as both pop-culture icon and as a figure of strange and inscrutable wonder. Which is why I have a hard time not discussing his autobiography as anything less than some bizarre form of literary genius – however misguided and accidental it may be. Allow me to elaborate:

From the very first sentence in the very first chapter (titled “New and Improved: One Night, One Gun, One Decision”), Dennis promises to be nothing less than real with you when he states:

“On an April Night in 1993 I sat in the cab of my pickup truck with a rifle in my lap, deciding wether to kill myself.”

Here, the reader is notified of several facts about this book in the following order:

1. This is serious.
2. Dennis Rodman is serious.
3. Dennis Rodman is seriously overdramatic.
4. This sentence of the book is printed in 16-point Bold Impact font.
5. The next few paragraphs of the page are in uniform 12-point Times New Roman font.
6. …What?
7. *turning the page
8. There are three different sections on this page where for the duration of a sentence the font changes to sometimes 14, sometimes 20-point font ranging between Impact, Arial, and…is that Comic-Sans?
9. Dennis Rodman has no idea how to write a book.
   And finally,
10. This book is genius

Although it might be appropriate to say that the book begins with “guns blazing”, it is perhaps even more appropriate to say that it begins with “guns being held in a truck and pondered over to a sound-track of Pearl Jam and a sincerely laughable amount of self-pity”. It outlines Dennis’ decision not to kill himself while sitting in his pickup truck and listening to Pearl Jam (his favorite band, a fact to which he refers to about thirty times throughout the course of the text) outside of the Pistons’ stadium in Detroit, MI. He was playing for the Pistons at the time, and tells us that though he was following his dream of being a star basketball player and making a ton of money on a winning team, he simply wasn’t being his true self. He tells us how he used to be a janitor at an airport, and how he, in a strange way, misses that sort of life. He tells us how his life is incredibly and seemingly irreparably screwed up because of his fame and his money and whines incorrigibly about the same things that every incredibly successful person seems to complain about with an air of melodrama and self-pity that is the trademark of only the most insincere of writers.

But in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t so much the raw content of the book (the melodrama of Rodman’s struggle with success, drugs, sex, romance, etc.) that is so entertaining. It’s all pretty standard fare, in that respect. But the over-production and shameless hyperbole of it all, the schizophrenic typography and relentless way in which he constantly refers to the reader as “bro”*,

(“Everyone was gone. My teammates were gone. My child was gone. My coach was gone. I was alone, bro, all alone.”)*Chapter 1, p. 4

alongside other incredibly entertaining tendencies that all filter into what I like to call “the Dennis Rodman experience” make this book an incredibly unique read.

It is more than apparent to the reader that Rodman, as many stars do for their autobiographies, has dictated his story to a ghost-writer who wrote down what he said, then went back and filled in the blanks, plugging them all into some semblance of a cohesive order. The result of this method of writing is that every few pages there is a paragraph that just doesn’t seem to fit; a place where the ghostwriter has obviously tried to squeeze in an artfully crafted description or relaying of events which inevitably falls flatly and dumbly on its face, tripping over the long and dirtied shoelaces that are the rest of the text. This all ads to the aforementioned schizophrenic nature of the text, and when all of these elements are tied together it results in a work that is instantly humorous, loathsome, shocking, and so self-sabotaging that one cannot help but describe it as utterly endearing. At times, despite this book’s many faults, it even manages to be strangely inspiring.

If you’re looking for something provocative to make you think and write and experience the world around you in a better way, something profound to mull over for the next several months, there are many better suggestions that I could make to you. If you’re looking for something uplifting and inspiring that speaks to the irrepressible human spirit, I have no suggestions here for you. I hear Julia Roberts is in a new movie and it’s based on a book – look into that. But if in the midst of reading those surely classic selections that you are choosing for the above reasons you find yourself over or under-whelmed, I would thoroughly encourage you to take a minute to indulge, to jump into the giant vat of self-sure insanity that is this book and just stand a while, basking in the glory that is this beautiful, abhorrent monster of a biography. I promise, you’ll feel rewarded when you do. It may not be a work of genius in quality, but – much like its author – in terms of absurdity it is head and shoulders above the competition.

*Author’s Note: If you’ve enjoyed this article and would like to read more editions of “Something Terrible”, please feel free to comment with suggestions of terrible things to be reviewed (Films, Music, Artwork, Literature – anything, really). They are much appreciated.

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Is that Burt Reynolds catching a football with no pants on? You bet! Check out this website dedicated to the worst library books librarians have found lurking in the stacks. Dear Lord, what were some of these publishers thinking?

You may have to recover after sifting through so many terrible book covers. I suggest something more refined, such as the poetic works of Tem Jhoenz. Now that’s highbrow!

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Rarely does a day goes by where I don’t sulk for at least half a minute because I can’t figure out what my writings are a cheap re-hash of. If only there was a machine that could analyze my writing and tell me which author I am most similar to. WAIT A MINUTE!

I Write Like is a free statistical analysis tool that “checks what famous writer you write like by analyzing your word choice and writing style and comparing them to those of the famous writers.”

The only information I could gather as to how it works is the little blurb above where you paste your writing. It says it analyzes word choice and writing style. Basically…don’t take it too seriously, but it is a lot of fun.

Curiously, when I ran our contributors through the algorithm it repeatedly came up with David Foster Wallace (which is a-okay by us!). This was the official breakdown after I fed one post from each contributor through the test.

David Foster Wallace- 4
Mario Puzo-1
Chuck Palahniuk-1
James Joyce-1
Dan Brown-1
Stephen King-1

Can you guess who’s who?

I’ll post the results later this week along with which piece of writing I sent through the magic writing do-hicky.

Oh, and if you’ve never read any David Foster Wallace do yourself a favor and READ THIS COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS HE GAVE TO KENYON COLLEGE! It’s so incredibly good.

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All pop culture is a window into a society’s psyche.  Film noir was a response to the horrors of World War II and the emergence of women in the workplace.  Punk rock countered the rampant commercialism and over-production in music during the mid-late 1970s.  The cultural revolution of the mid- late 1960s is, almost definitely, the most drastic societal shift of the past century, when the baby boom generation came of age and almost everything changed.  This shift was evident in the music of the time (the rise of rock and roll), the literature (Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Allen Ginsburg, etc.), and the films of the moment.  Mark Harris’ book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood studies this sea change by looking at the whole of film, and the general culture, through a narrowly focused lens – the movies competing for the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1968 Academy Awards.

Those five films run the gamut of what Hollywood had been and what it was about to become.  Dr. Dolittle was a throwback to the epic musicals that had been the studios’ bread and butter for the preceding decade, enormous productions that would cost the wealth of a small nation, but would make up half of the studio’s yearly revenue. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was literally “old Hollywood” (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) welcoming in “new Hollywood” (Sidney Poitier), dealing with the hot-button issue of race with a simple farcical comedy that was nowhere near as forward thinking as it thought it was. Like Dinner, the winner of the big award that year, In the Heat of the Night, dealt with racial issues, but with a more enlightened and serious view, with echoes of the philosophies of Malcolm X and black pride, with a protagonist that doesn’t simply turn the other cheek to racism, but fights back.  The two watershed films from the year, though, were Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, both dividing the culture mostly along generational lines – you either “got it” or didn’t. They were intensely personal and idiosyncratic films, not easily pigeonholed, and that was off-putting to much of the culture.

Harris tells the story of these films from their inception up through Oscar night, and it’s as rife with human drama as it is with cultural and film analysis.  The productions of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are true underdog tales, almost failing to be made or released multiple times, and Dr. Dolittle is a rampant comedy of errors, with a disastrous production plagued by bad weather, uncooperative animals and an insane, drunken Rex Harrison.  The intricately drawn profiles of Mike Nichols as a Hollywood outsider turned golden boy, Dustin Hoffman as a long-suffering theater actor, and Poitier as a reluctant representative of his whole race, are fascinating and insightful, and there are countless more like them. There are also revealing you-are-there style anecdotes, most noteworthy being a Hollywood party thrown by Jane Fonda, where Poitier and Bob Hope taught a little girl to tap-dance, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson smoked pot, and Henry Fonda asked the band to keep it down.  The band just happened to be The Byrds.

A true appreciation of the craft of film-making is also evident, with incredible passages about the groundbreaking editing of Bonnie and Clyde, the pioneering cinematography of In the Heat of the Night, or the effective direction by Nichols in The Graduate, not to mention a lesson in the influence of other artistic movements, such as the movies of the French New-Wave or British Free Cinema, or the music of the British Invasion. Harris has written for Entertainment Weekly, so his prose is incessantly readable, yet his research and knowledge are still scholarly and thorough. If you have an interest in film, society, and how the changes in each can be reflected in the other, add this to your list of books to read.

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Anyone can pinch their own nipples.
Virtually anyone.

My dad pinches his nipples
while leaves fall.

You can do it anytime,
even in the

F
A
L
L

When spring comes,
and leaves don’t fall anymore,
my dad still pinches his nipples.

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Webcomics are a difficult phenomenon to get into, not the least because googling “webcomics” turns up a tidal wave of poorly drawn manga and comics that can be described as “adult” solely because they feature naked people. Scraping the surface reveals some material worth showing your friends for a chuckle, but if you’re interested in comics in general, there’s a lot of life to be found online, and usually completely free. Webcomics are built on community with other artists, and they tend to have a bunch of links to artists they like and want to support on their site. There’s a level of experimentation and freedom available online that just isn’t possible in print, and while this can often lead to disgusting or unreadable places, there is gold to be found. (Even so, somehow a lot of really great webcomics still stick to pretty traditional styles.) All that and you won’t have to spend a dime, so put down your electric horn and get out of your horseless carriage! The ones I chose are simply ones I like and have read a lot. They aren’t necessarily better than other good ones, and this tiny list tends almost entirely toward humor. (Don’t get me wrong–there are good dramatic comics, but these are a few I’ve been reading for a long time and helped to fuel my interest in webcomics in general. It’s a personal list.)

(I rewrote this a few times, and I alternated between spelling “webcomic” as one word or two. I think it should be one. Go fly a kite, spell check.)

Dinosaur Comics — this one’s been around for about seven years, which is an epoch in webcomic time. If webcomic time was parallel to real history, 2003 was when those monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey yelled at a big black box and killed each other. Apparently ignoring all of Scott McCloud’s optimism about the “infinite canvas”, Ryan North’s comic features strips that never change, except the dialogue between T-Rex, two other dinosaurs, God, and Satan (off-panel). The parallels between this and traditional newspaper comics are begging to be made, but I doubt most newspapers would carry a strip evidently drawn in Microsoft Paint where a tyrannosaurus talks about basically anything, including but not limited to philosophy, language, comics, and sex. But the drawing power isn’t the narrative (which is virtually non-existent) or the artwork, but the frequently intelligent and funny dialogue. I’ve included links to a few strips I think are especially good, which I hope will be helpful, given that there are over a thousand DC strips. Then again, since there are so many, and there’s no reason to start in any given place (except, as usual for webcomics, the first ones tend to be the weakest). But anyway, you could try this one, or maybe this one, or one of these. (A helpful hint to even more fun times: if you hold your cursor over the strip, a lot of comics, including this one, will have some hidden text (alt-text) that’s usually pretty damn funny.)

Achewood — This is one of the best webcomics on the internet. It hasn’t been great the entirety of its run and it seems to be getting weaker as time goes on, but Chris Onstad has created one of the most interesting and original comics, online or no. He has a wildly diverse cast of characters, and while he often took them in surreal directions in the latter half of the strip (which I don’t consider a bad thing by any means) much of the humor and pathos of the comic comes from those characters’ detailed and richly realized histories. This is one that you absolutely must spend time with to appreciate. Achewood follows a core cast of about 6-10 anthropomorphic animals, with countless others coming in and out. The characters Onstad has spent the most time on are Roast Beef, a depressed computer programming cat, and Ray, his business-savvy and incredibly wealthy friend. There are gigantic story arcs that alter the course of the strip, but there are also plenty of one-off strips to start on. Again, the first year or so was shaky, but there are still a few gems hidden throughout as the strip found its footing and began to find a voice for each character. I think this is probably the best place to start, but eventually anyone interested in getting into Achewood should get around to the Great Outdoor Fight. Onstad elevates what had previously been a brilliant strip to a pitch-perfect blend of brilliant dialogue and a fascinating story. Check out the drop-down menu on the site, which conveniently puts you at the beginning of most of the best story arcs. I’d also recommend any of the three or four times Beef goes to Heaven. (James Kochalka did a guest strip once.)

Nedroid Picture Diary — When Nedroid (drawn by Anthony Clark, who also does the color for The Adventures of Dr. McNinja) started, it really was more of a picture diary, but when Beartato and Reginald came into being, it became mostly about them and a few others. Clark is a gifted cartoonist, and manages to achieve a lot with very minimal expressions. (He references this simplicity in this self-deprecating comic.) The “diary” aspect allows him to experiment with alternate versions of comics and other formats that wouldn’t normally be as possible if it was a more traditional webcomic. There are a few short arcs, but for the most part they’re one-shot jokes, so any place is good to start. Here are a few I like. (The last link in that chain is a good example of the freedom to do alternate versions of strips that are occasionally even funnier.) The alt-text is essential. Clark knows exactly how to use them to make a funny joke even better. His humor is unwaveringly silly and child-like, occasionally tempered with the surreal.

Hark! A Vagrant — Kate Beaton has stumbled upon an apparently bottomless well of humor: weird jokes about historical figures. She is a born historian, and can see the humor in fairly obscure events like Kierkegaard’s caricature in Danish papers and people’s responses to St. Francis. Her general tone can be described as sweet and goofy, even when she’s exposing negative characteristics of famous historical figures (like Edison and others’ theft of Tesla’s ideas). Her simple artwork belies a genuinely gifted artist, who has matured dramatically since she started.

K.C. Green — is prolific. His current project, gunshow, has been going on since September ’08, but he’s been making comics online since ’03 at both Bee Power and Horribleville. There are great comics buried in both of those, but unfortunately, (in the case of Bee Power) because they’re older projects, he hasn’t undertaken the task of organizing them beyond an unintelligible index. (Bee Power was worth the effort if for no other reason than to produce this comic.) His sense of humor reminds me of Brian Posehn. They’re both conscious of their geekiness and aren’t afraid to make incredibly juvenile jokes. They both also possess a self-deprecating streak, and weed-induced willingness to laugh at the dumbest things possible, tempered with the ability make it funny even if you aren’t high. There are striking similarities in his art to guys like R. Crumb, who would take earlier humor comic formats and take them in more shocking or profane directions. Another parallel is Horribleville, which was autobiographic and sometimes extremely honest. The only thing I would criticize about Green is his lack of organization. I’d love to see a “best of” archive that compiles his old projects onto one site. Regardless of quibbling web design problems, his work is fantastic. (He also has one of the funniest title pages to a story arc I’ve ever seen.) Here’s a good example. Read the four or five after it, too. Somehow pun after pun on the words “egg nog” starts out dumb and becomes painfully funny.

pictures for sad children — The title doesn’t even hint at the void-black humor of this strip. James Campbell says his comic is about “a bad feeling you get when you are feeling good, or a good feeling you get when you are feeling bad.” The artwork is extremely simple, using stick figures, black lines, and white and gray spaces. This is a fairly common style in webcomics, and its quality depends entirely on the artist. Campbell uses the style’s inherent repetition, uniformity, and simplicity to emphasize the bleak and oppressive world his characters inhabit. (K.C. Green, Kate Beaton, and many others have made pretty great guest comics, at PFSC, too.)

I couldn’t resist making a longer list, so here are some to take a risk on. And really, you’re risking nothing, except a second or two, and what were you going to do anyway?

Axe Cop

Dresden Codak

A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible

Double Fine

demian5

Gunnerkrigg Court

Return to Sender (I can’t resist commenting on this one. The artist is Vera Brosgol, a shockingly gifted artist who started on RTS when she was in high school (as far as I can tell, she’s about 26 now). It’s a serial instead of a collection of one-shots like a lot of the ones I listed, and has no resolution. She’s said she won’t ever return to it, and understandably s0–think back to the projects you started when you were in high school, and how embarrassed you’d be if people saw them. It’s not incredible, and her work in the Flight anthologies outstrip it, but it’s still a fun read while it lasts.)

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