Drywall Party, Day 2

I’m not as sore as I thought I would be. Worst is my hands, from carrying all those 12- and 8-foot panels. We’re not done, mostly because we ran out of time. My brother Joe headed home after 9 last night, and we had most of the big work done. I’ve only got two places where I really need an extra set of hands to put panels up, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, I’m also about 1 or 2 8-footers short of what I need. I’ll see as I continue to cut up “scrap” to see where it fits, but as of right now I’ve got a five foot chunk of wall that needs to be filled and no spare five foot chunks of drywall. I would have had such, but my last 12-footer cracked not-quite-in half. I think it cracked along the forks of the lift that dropped them on my lawn, being the bottom-most panel and the one that took all the weight.

One of the few things I did not take a picture of was how alarmingly the stack of 12-foot panels bowed when being carried from the truck to my backyard on the forklift.

The backyard is now clean again, though there’s a pile of debris on my back deck. I’ll clear that up sometime soon and throw most of it away.

Here’s a picture of my brother Joe with my son Tony.

Having Tony around was, oddly, one of the best parts of the day. He didn’t get in the way all that much, almost never picked up anything he could hurt himself with, and enjoyed the hell out of being around the guys and helping out. It was heartbreaking to hear him cry when my wife finally took him upstairs and gave him a bath. But afterwards, he fell asleep on her on the couch, and as of 9am this morning, is still asleep.

The project progressed pretty much as expected. The nice part was finding plenty of places, especially in the hallway, where cutting an eight foot panel resulted in having parts for two different sections of wall. There’s a lot of sanding and mudding left to be done, as well as a few sections of drywall that need to be placed–most notably in the bedroom closet.

This morning we’re not going to be doing anything but vacuuming the carpet outside the areas where we worked and making sure everything is pretty tidy otherwise. I’ll have work to do to get this all into a paintable stage, but that can all be done in an hour here and there. I’ve neglected some things this past week in order to get all this into working order and ready to go, so I’ll also need to go back in the direction of just sitting at the keyboard and doing some of this kind of work to make up for it.

Below the cut, three more pictures of the drywalled office, bedroom, and office closet. The bedroom is the workshop-looking area as that was what it became for much of the project.

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SFWA Follies: Aftermath?

So John Scalzi came out of hiatus a little early to offer his much-anticipated thoughts on the whole SFWA/Scribd kerfluffle. As an outsider, I agree with him for the most part, though I have no way of assessing the intent of individuals. As I said originally, Burt claimed agnosticism during the election discussions, but putting himself on point for this problem seems to speak to his views and intent.

Aside from that, there’s two fundamental problems that seems to be getting lost in the inevitable ideological debates. One is that the methodology that garnered the search results was deeply flawed. It returned results not copyrighted by the authors in question, and that means it failed, period. The other is that, no matter how much one might applaud the efforts of copyright vigilantes, demanding the takedown of a work one does not represent is just as bad as allowing the persistence of the works one does. I thought Doctorow framed that well, and while this is one of his personal hobbyhorses, it’s also an unassailable black-and-white position. He’s given blanket authorization for just this kind of distribution, and it’s a violation of his rights to sweep him up with the rest.

So, it’s nice to see that SFWA is going to take a good, hard look at members’ will and, hopefully, move forward accordingly. My biggest concern is that some of the biggest names (that is, those who can throw the most weight around) will be against any kind of liberalization or marginalization of the “ePiracy” mission. It remains to be seen how that will play out, and given the issues and actors involved, it seems certain that outsiders will be able to see it play out.

Incidentally, Kat Allen provides a nice analysis of the ePiracy Committee cessation motion.

The bottom line, though, is that this has been a public relations disaster of the highest order. Kudos, as Scalzi said, for Michael Capobianco getting a statement out so quickly–but it relies heavily on the passive voice and offers vague assurances. Good on him for not throwing Andrew Burt under the bus, as they’ll likely have to work together at least the rest of the term, and hooray for the notice on the ePiracy Committee, but it seems that many people who are used to dealing with the chaotic nature of SFWA are unconvinced that any of this means anything.

SFWA, as a whole, lacks the will to do anything about the disaster. An individual president may have the will, but I can virtually guarantee that Capobianco is catching hell in the private SFWA forums from the anti-piracy hardliners for the latest pronouncement. In that way, the leadership really is in a bind, but to refer to the other baseline facts, it’s a bind of their own making. Someone, somewhere mentioned the slow response time of SFWA’s legal counsel–but the piracy thing is not an issue that needs to be handled with great expediency. The communication between Burt and Scribd carried on for more than a week, and if the legal counsel can’t be arsed to get back to SFWA leadership in the span of weeks–then it’s time to go shopping for a new lawyer. I can’t help but feel that much of this needless public relations agony could have been avoided with better use of legal resources.

And that’s just an outsider’s perspective. But there’s not many better ways to assess one’s public image, hm?