domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

I’m sick, so bullet points, some of which will be expanded upon at a later date.

• We saw Pixar’s Up on Monday, and it’s prompted me to get going on my long-threatened series of posts on why I don’t like Disney. So far, it’s looking like it’s going to be about seven posts, probably spread out over the course of two or three weeks, both because it’ll take me a while to write it all and because it’ll probably get posted with other things too.
• This is something that I would like every author, publisher, and other content producer/provider in the world to understand: number of (pirated) downloads of a book do not equal number of sales lost. Some game companies have found that for every a thousand pirated copies they thwarted, they only saw a single sale. To rephrase, one in a thousand people who pirated the game were willing to purchase it. I don’t expect that number is terribly different for books. Additionally, talking endlessly about your “lost sales” and how “those pirates” are hurting you financially is absurd. Your readers–the people who are going to be reading your blog or newsletter–probably aren’t pirating your books, and the ongoing discussions of piracy read less as a productive discussion and more as whinging about the inevitable. You want to sell more books? Write better books. Market yourself. Build a relationship with your readers. Stop whinging. (I have much more to say about this at a later date; someone remind me.)
• Thankful and grateful are not interchangeable. You can’t–or, at least, shouldn’t–say things like “Gratefully, he got home before it started to rain.” Gratefully means with appreciation or with thanks. Thankfully means with thanks or “let us be thankful for”. People get this wrong all the time, and it drives me crazy. You want “Thankfully, he got home before it started to rain.” You’re saying “Let’s be thankful that he got home before the rain started!”
• I’ve started knitting a new pair of socks! A friend of mine gave me some lovely sock yarn, and though I’m not yet done with the shawl for my mother, which is taking forever, I decided that I needed some easy knitting, which for me is always socks. I’m not far on these, but I’m really enjoying them.
• It’s rained for the last three days, and my garden looks fantastic. Nothing’s died yet! It’s amazing.