Seriously, No One Dusted In Here?

You leave something for a few weeks and look at it! Anyway, many weird, not all bad things have been going on, limiting my Internet activities to occasional spews at my usual hangouts, if at all. I got to swim with sea turtles, which was something I’d always wanted to do, did not expect to be doing and am very aware that most people will never get to do (although that is probably a good thing for the sea turtles overall.) I had to do a lot of work stuff, and say goodbye to things and people, I got sick, yada, yada. The New Year turned, as artificially created new years do, and I got to have mine with fireworks.

While I was dealing with all that, the world of people who like SFFH and talk to each other about it hummed along. One of the things it hummed with was a return by fantasy author Jim C. Hines to recreating ridiculous SFF book covers of women, only this time in a very huge way. Jim decided, after people kept pestering him to do more of them, to make a fundraiser out of it for the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation. Aicardi Syndrome is a rare, very nasty and deadly  childhood condition and so Jim set a number of financial goalposts and as each one was met, he would do another cover pose (a couple of them were comic book covers cause people had specially asked.) The poses included two pose-off contests with fellow author John Scalzi (both of which Jim won,) and a group photo staged at ConFusion of Jim, Scalzi, Patrick Rothfuss, Charles Stross and Mary Robinette Kowal recreating a truly horrendous Baen Books cover. Jim, I think, seriously underestimated the interest in this endeavor — he raised just over $15,000 for the Foundation and had to risk his back in many cover poses. You can see the whole thing here (warning: it’s not for the faint of heart,) including the pose-offs and the group shot which is one of the most coolest, horriblest things I’ve ever seen.  Jim is still arranging some of the poses promised and there will be a 2014 calendar that you can buy down the road, raising further funds for the Foundation.

Another fundraiser that’s still going on for another week or so is the medical fundraiser for SFF author Jay Lake, who has been fighting cancer for some time. The fundraiser was to raise money so Lake could have a gene sequencing procedure to give him a better chance and to help pay for all the wonderful medical expenses incurred in the U.S. medical system. The gene sequencing goal was reached and right quickly, but the family is hurting and further contributions are most welcome.

And one more now on-going, and this is a fun one because you simply can use some of your charitable giving that you might have been planning to do anyway. John Scalzi has been having gnat-irritation visits from pals of a fellow SFWA member to whom he’d once given a promotional break, long ago, without knowing the person was troubled, shall we say. This author and his friends are white male power enthusiasts, I guess you could call it, and they come over to troll the comment threads in Scalzi’s Whatever blog.  Scalzi has developed various clean-up methods for this intrusion into his lair, including recently kittening, a method he borrowed from his friend The Bloggess, which is spreading out virally. This author is a bit obsessed with Scalzi and talks about him a lot on his blog, whereupon his pals then descend on Whatever to thump their chests and misunderstand wolf biology.  (We only get to see the “polite” ones, which are sad enough.) So Scalzi decided to make a fundraiser out of it. Every time this author mentions Scalzi on his blog, Scalzi will be giving money to charities that help people who this author hates, $5 a mention, up to a max of $1,000. Scalzi is going with four organizations, and you can also chime in and give directly to those groups or ones of your own choosing, preferably groups helping women, non-whites, educational funding and scholarship, religious tolerance, etc. You can do it on the mention scale up to a set amount or just go ahead and give a set amount if you want. I’m going to be doing a .25 a mention up to $50 donation to Kiva.org, which is a non-profit group that, as I’ve mentioned here before, funds micro-loans to entrepreneurs trying to feed their families all over the world. You can pick who you loan the money to through Kiva and then when that person pays it back, you can loan it out again to another person. The organization basically stands for everything these people hate. So that’s a good one that some people are doing. Already the pledge count is pretty high, but the higher it gets, the better the fun of turning one of the most negative things about the Internet into a positive that helps people. If you can’t afford to give any money — and many cannot — you can still help out if you like by volunteering for charity groups like homeless shelters, women’s groups and the like. It’s a really nice way to start the year.

Stuff on books and movies and whatnot to come. Hope the shortest month finds you all happy.

Investing is a Risk, But Betting on Humans Ain’t Bad

Over on the Blog Roll I have, you’ll see a link to Kiva.org, which I’ve talked about before:  http://www.kiva.org/

Kiva is a major non-profit micro-loan coordinator. Non-profit and community investment organizations around the world, including some in the U.S., loan out small amounts to entrepreneurs all over to improve and expand their businesses. These organizations work with Kiva who holds money from individuals and teams in accounts, allowing those accounts to pick which loans by these organizations they’d like to help fund.  You can, through Kiva, essentially loan US$25 out to say a pig farmer in Cambodia, which is pooled with other people’s $25.  Over a set amount of time, the pig farmer will pay back his loan in installments. When you get the $25 back, you can loan it out again — to a beauty salon in the Phillipines or a pet groomer in California or a farmer in Kenya. For about the cost of a pizza and sodas, you can help an endless chain of people.

One of the loans I had made, in Afghanistan, had defaulted. It was my first time this had ever happened (and given the state of Afghanistan, not an enormous surprise.) The guy there I’d loaned to had paid back about half the loan by monthly payments, and then stopped. As the months went past, I figured I was going to have to write it off as a donation. It doesn’t happen often on Kiva that someone defaults but it can happen when people are struggling wherever they are.

But today, I got word from Kiva that payments had come in for my loans and there along with payments from other loaners, were two of the missing ones from the guy in Afghanistan. He’s not caught up yet, but it was enough so that I was able to make a new loan to another entrepreneur. More important than the news that maybe the late loan will eventually get paid back, was just that it was a sign that the guy was okay, still going and maybe business was turning around for him. I had bet on him and it might not work, especially in Afghanistan where we don’t know what’s going to happen. But maybe it made things a little better. Maybe it helps put food on someone’s table. And from there, who knows what can happen. Betting on humans ain’t bad, especially compared to the alternative.

Anyway, it made my day sunnier. If you can spare some cash, it’s a great deal of fun and you get to keep doing it as long as you like. You can even join some crazy teams that count your loans as part of their pool efforts such as Nerdfighters: we aim to decrease world suck, or Dumbledore’s Army or World of Warcraft Players: We like to help people out in the real world too! Because we’re just that silly.

 

 

 

Happier Holidays

This year, there’s a mild blizzard going on outside my house, I am hopelessly behind in holiday preparations and house cleaning, the radical right in the U.S. have successfully held the population of the country hostage in return for more cash for their rich corporate masters, a pattern being repeated in numerous countries, millions are still out of a job and running out of savings — and yet it is so much better for me and my family than it was last year when people I loved were in danger and financial desperation, when we lost a great deal, and fear was our regular companion. And so I am grateful, even as many things in life remain uncertain and fragile and as I hope that things grow better for 99% of the population of the world. And so this post is about good stuff and helping gifts and all that squishy, humanitarian, reaching out garbage that supposedly has something to do with many holiday celebrations in the depth of winter (or summer if you’re on the lower half of the planet.)

Three organizations that are helping the poor move forward against the odds and to which you might want to make a donation if you see so fit:

http://www.liftcommunities.org/

http://www.povertybridge.org/

http://www.goinspirego.com./

In North Carolina, a group of anonymous donors is once again dressing up as Santas and giving out $100 handshakes on the streets to those in need:

http://news.sympatico.ca/unusualnews/anonymous_secret_santas_hand_out_hundred-dollar_handshakes_to_those_in_need_in_us/d006adf0

If you want to get some do-gooder gifts this year, in addition to those geek gift suggestions from earlier, here are some suggestions compiled by Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/02/christmas-gifts-2010-9-gi_n_791413.html#s197866

One of those suggestions — Heiffers International — which helps people in under-developed parts of the world to be animal farmers and feed their families — is a pet project of fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss. Every year, he runs Worldbuilders, a donation-and-auction campaign to raise funds for Heiffers International to which numerous SFF and comics authors contribute all sorts of interesting and signed things that would make great gifts. Plus, let’s face it, the idea of buying someone a chicken for the holidays is just innately comical. You can check it out here:

http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2010/11/worldbuilders-2010/

My daughter came to me and said she wanted to spend some of her saved gift money to buy a whistle. Turns out she meant a metal whistle pendant from Falling Whistles, an organization trying to help rescued child soldiers and child slave laborers in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa. The youngest child soldiers, you see, are not given guns. They are given whistles, told to blow them, and stuck out in front for the enemy to shoot at. Falling Whistles is working to save these kids and help them with the difficult road they face once they are rescued. To support this effort, you can choose from a selection of different whistles or buy a T-shirt. Or just make a donation.  You can find more information here:

http://www.fallingwhistles.com/main/

And lastly, there is Kiva, an organization I’ve been contributing to for over a year now. Kiva works with non-profit organizations all over the world to provide micro-loans to small entrepreneurs and entrepreneur groups. The minimum loan you can make is US$25, but once the person you loaned that $25 to pays it back, you can loan it out again to another entrepreneur. Not many charity contributions go that long in their effect. And you can team up with people you know to do it — have the whole office sponsor someone or your church. Kiva has a link in my Links column, but here it is again, if you are interested:

http://www.kiva.org/

These of course are just some of the good causes and organizations out there. (Unicef will also let you buy a chicken.) But after having to watch the naked greed on the news lately and hear well off people complain about the prices of e-books, hearing about these people trying to build good things in the world made me feel better and reminded me of the resilience and hope we all need to get through life.