It's been a while and there's much to report: SteelyKid will be eleven months on July 7th and has been very busy.

( SteelyKid at almost 11 months )

(This post was drafted piecemeal over quite a while. Today's development: a diagnosis of Coxsackie virus, a.k.a. hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Umm, well, she's had it since at least Saturday night, so maybe her time out of daycare (and our time out of work) will be shorter?)

From Tiger Beatdown:

Desdemona [*] is not the person you want to bring into your "ladies cheat too" argument.

Truer words.

[*] ETA: from Othello, people.

Posts about the first two chapters of The Two Towers: "The Departure of Boromir" and "The Riders of Rohan". Also a highly idiosyncratic list of LotR related books at the Tor.com store.

Chad's book How to Teach Physics to your Dog is coming out in six months, and to celebrate he's giving away two bound galleys (uncorrected proofs). Either caption an Emmy picture or write a short poem involving dogs and physics. See the linked posts for details.

I have at least two. Tell me a joke and one's yours. (If necessary, in the morning I will ask a random number generator.)

We're discussing the movie of Fellowship over at Tor.com.

So I've started reading Journey to the West as translated by W.J.F. Jenner, thanks to the e-book files by Arachne Jericho, and I'm having a great deal of fun; but I'd definitely like some annotations and background information. And lo and behold, I see that Anthony C. Yu's translation has extensive annotations. But looking at the samples, I don't find that the prose flows as smoothly or is as, well, fun. I don't suppose anyone's read both and has suggestions? (Maybe a secondary reference source?)

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I was thinking about watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles the other day, and a rather belated realization struck me: I don't actually like time-travel stories. Rather, time-travel stuff—causation and multiple futures and crossing timelines and all that—I can't get my head around it and I don't really care.

So given that and the cancellation on what is apparently a cliffhanger season-ender, should I bother? I've watched about ten minutes of the first episode.

Edit: it's the combination of the time-travel and the lack of resolution that are particularly making me think I could skip this.

If, like me, you thought keeping a full backup of your LJ and comments meant you were safe in the event of a hacker or catastrophic system failure . . . well, not really. If entries on your LJ are deleted, you can't automatically recover them: you have to re-post entries by hand [*] from your own backups (you can't get the entries off LJ's servers); and comments are an altogether more complicated question. (You could paste them into the body of a post if you have them backed up with a separate program, like LJArchive. Or if you've imported all your journal into a Dreamwidth account, you could crosspost each existing DW entry to LJ with an auto-generated pointer to the DW entry and its imported comments, which would still suck but would be at least semi-automated; so I recommend importing your LJ into DW as a backup. (You can private-lock all the entries in one fell swoop if you have a paid account.))

[*] Edit: I think if you use LJ-SEC for your backups, you can then bulk repost the entries, but you still won't get comments.

I therefore suggest taking five minutes to:

1. Check out what e-mail accounts are associated with your LJ and remove any you no longer have control over;
2. Set a secret question for LJ—I suggest making up your own;
3. Check the strength of your existing password, and change it if necessary (tips and strength checker);
4. Back up your LJ (and any communities you maintain); and
5. Do the same for your e-mail account(s).

Nothing can make you 100% safe, but might as well do what you can.

I appear to have not linked here to the last three LotR re-read posts: Fellowship II.8, "Farewell to Lorien"; II.9, "The Great River"; and II.10, "The Breaking of the Fellowship".

Behind the cut, an embedded video of Chad reading from his forthcoming pop science book How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. This excerpt is a dialogue between him and Emmy about the Copenhagen Interpretation, and the video features the two of them and a cat in a box.

( video )

Enjoy the weekend, long or otherwise!

I have just used the dead-simple remote access program TeamViewer and the anti-malware program from Malwarebytes to, I hope, eradicate the nasty Personal Antivirus from my mother's computer, and TeamViewer in particular is going to be the Best Thing Ever now that I am my mother's tech support. I highly recommend it.

(I say "I hope" because the computer needed a reboot and I told her that she should go on with her grocery shopping as planned, so I can't see the results until she gets back home.)

But speaking of tech support, does anyone have any idea why her Windows XP machine won't automatically reconnect to a network drive? Dad set up her backups to an Iomega networked external hard drive, and the thing refuses to reconnect when she restarts her computer even though it's been told to save the username & password and automatically reconnect or whatever, which leads to the failure of backups and much aggravation. Frankly I'm thinking that I will just move the external hdd to be directly connected to her computer, since there's no need for it to be networked any more—it has a USB port, I assume I can do that—but in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

The game of identifying cool lines from speculative fiction novels over at Tor.com seems to have died down, without my getting to use these lines I'd picked out, so rather than let them languish in a file until the next time the game comes around, here they are:

1. These deus ex machinas have a way of sneaking up on us literary types.
2. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and "were to be regretted."
3. Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.
4. The National Symphony's performance of Handel's Messiah had started at eight thirty, so the choir was winding up the "Hallelujah Chorus" when the lead tenor turned into a wolf.
5. Truth won't always out, the wages of sin are bankable, and those who live by the sword perish mostly of syphilis.
6. Let the fairy-tale begin on a winter's morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff.

Identify a quote, and you get to post your own. Written speculative fiction only please.

( as shown in this embedded video )

An extremely mixed bag, today:

Of the recent attempts at suppressing discussions of racism that I'm aware of, I think literally and repeatedly ripping down an entire protest display takes the cake. The poison-filled cake of racism, privilege, and oppression, that is. (This was a student protest at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities Dance Program, ripped down by other students, and the university administration's response was to call the destruction "the changes made by another group of individuals." And . . . nothing else. That would be the icing on this particular cake.)

(Edit: okay, my metaphor got away from me. The protest is actually about pervasive institutional problems, in which context the administration's non-response is more than just icing. But the ripping down (because it will help the discussion! Um, wtf, over?) just infuriates me.)

sparkymonster has a helpful summary with more. Support the students through their petition, passing the word about the protest, or joining this Facebook group.

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Baby sloth!

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tool_of_satan has an interesting thought on what gives LotR its quasi-mythic feel in this thread on the non-European epic fantasy post:

This is a complicated question, but I think part of the answer is Tolkien's use of deep time. Things that happened thousands of years ago have direct consequences that the characters need to deal with, and there are people around who were actually alive back then, mixing with the mortals. Furthermore, we (and the hobbits) are told much less than everything about the ancient people and events - the critical bits, of course, and there are allusions to many other things, but one ends up feeling there are many other stories that could be told, which I think helps make the ones that are told feel more real. (I haven't read the Silmarillion or any of the other posthumous volumes, I should note.)

(Underlined emphasis mine.)

For me, I suspect this may be a matter of the golden age being twelve: it's certainly de rigueur these days for epic fantasies to build or at least suggest elaborate historical and mythological backstories for their worlds, and I mostly feel like they're, well, there because they're de rigueur, and I'm not sure the underlined detail of the execution is enough to make the difference. But I'm also not very interested in epic fantasies now, so my reactions might have been different, back in the day.

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There's a reboot of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime and you can watch it free and legally, with official subtitles, at Funimation. (I recommend a downloader like Orbit, because the streaming is very rocky.) I've been watching but don't really have an opinion yet; it's based closely on the manga which I've been reading, so it's familiar enough that I don't know how it'd look to a new person or in comparison to the first anime. Well, okay, the first episode was filler and kinda dumb, but the manga rocks so I have hopes.

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Songs that make me happy lately: "Toe Jam," by the BPA featuring Dizzee Rascal & David Byrne (ETA: YouTube video of version we actually like; NSFW (but rather clever) for happy dancing naked people with black bars over women's breasts & people's pubic areas); and "Say Hey (I Love You)" by Michael Franti and Spearhead (choose song title in sidebar).

* * *

I've also watched the pilot of Leverage and enjoyed it. I am morally certain that it was pitched as "Ocean's Eleven meets Robin Hood," and indeed the wish-fulfillment is blatant, but my love for capers is fierce, and I suspect that these lawless elites aren't going to be violent, which makes it easier for me to take. Note that the aired order is not the intended order; see this blog post from the creator for the proper order ('ware spoilers after that in the post).

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Two Dreamwidth invite codes; comment if you want one; if necessary, will pick at random and ask for e-mail.

(Decided against crossposting (and asking people to comment only there) until a few more wrinkles are ironed out. Am filtering out people here who are fully cross-posting, and have adjusted LJ "friends" list to try and match DW access/subscribe lists. Now going to look for missing subject pronouns. Goodnight, everybody.)

Now up at Tor.com.

For values of "the world" = Kate, that is.

A story about Vincent after The Unknown Ajax. Because he's the second most interesting character in the book, and I want to know what he did with himself after.

(This random thought brought to you by listening to it on audiobook and just getting to the really good part.)

(Oh, and a gen story, or at least if not, then paired with a new character.)

ETA: gone. More later.

( Read more... )

Recommend to me, o LJ readers, non-European epic fantasy. Specifically, I'm looking for something that would answer the question, "Gosh, I liked the way The Lord of the Rings took elements and themes of existing mythologies and cultures and used them to give depth to a really epic fantasy story. What about something like that, but not using Northern Europe, or at least not principally using Northern Europe?"

I am aware of David Anthony Durham's Acacia (which I haven't read yet). And, I suppose, Jordan's Wheel of Time, though I'm not sure what I think of it in this regard (partly because I don't remember a lot about many of the societies). I am also aware of Bridge of Birds and The Orphan's Tales, but they are not epic fantasies. And I already have looked at 50books_poc's links and the Carl Brandon Society's reading lists.

What else—if anything?

ETA: I forgot, in print, please. (And good, though I thought that was implicit in "recommend.") And secondary-world fantasy, by analogy to LotR.

( I. What It Is )

( II. How You Can Use It )

( III. How I Plan to Use It )

I kind of suck at remembering to post links to new chapter discussions here, huh?

Fellowship II.5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dûm”, last week; Fellowship II.6, “Lothlórien”, today.