I'm leaving Wales and will be (planes willing) home in Montreal tonight. Normal communications will be restored as soon as possible, both here and over at the new exciting Tor blog where I'm going to be posting regularly about what I'm re-reading.

I'm delighted, amused and honoured to announce that Ha'Penny has won the Prometheus Award -- actually, it's better than that, because it's co-won with Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator and you can't imagine how lovely it is to co-win something with a splendid book by an author you've loved for years.

I'm amused because of all my online arguments with Libertarians. I am so not a Libertarian. Ask zsero. But I am anti-authoritarian and I suppose I have written a book about the moral corruption of an authoritarian society, and if they think that's good enough to give me an ounce of gold (an ounce of gold, how cool is that?) then good for them. As they've given it to Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross before, they're obviously looking at the book, not the author. Oh, and another cool thing -- this is the first time the actual award has been won by a woman. The Hall of Fame award has been given to Le Guin and Ayn Rand, but the annual award has been won by a man since 1981.

I'll be at the award ceremony, which I believe is Wednesday afternoon at Denvention.

(zorinth is torn between the idea of me keeping the ounce of gold to be a coin on my eventual dead eye in my eventual archaeologically interesting tomb, or melting it down to buy him a new laptop.)

( complete Prometheus award press release )

In addition to the books, I have some loose comics that I have replaced with trades, and Buffy DVDs:

Comics:

* Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, issues 1-7 (1-5 by Joss Whedon, 6-7 by Brian K Vaughn)

* Welcome to Tranquility, issues 1-9 + 11 (by Gail Simone)

* White Tiger issues 1-6 (of 6), by Tamora Pierce

DVDs:

*Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 1 box set

*Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2 box set

Chicago people get first dibs on the DVDs, 'cause they are heavy. For all items, I may request reimbursement for shipping charges.

So, today I modified my tactics, from intelligence-gathering + single combat to one of diplomacy combined with WMD. I went over to JewelOsco before work and availed myself of their bug-killing products. The selection wasn't great, but I got some Raid and a fly-stick (kind of a 3D flypaper thingy). I sprayed around the windows in the bedroom, hung up the fly-stick, and left the screen open a little bit. The idea being, I'd rather they fly outside than hang around in my apartment maybe laying more fly-eggs, and if they *don't* fly outside, then they can die from the poison. Or get stuck on the sticky thing.

I'd say that this was a moderate success; when I got home from work, there were 3 live flies in the kitchen + living room, and three dead flies around the windows in the bedroom. Nothing on the glue stick--apparently it is not as alluring as the great outdoors, nor as powerful as Raid.

And, to make myself feel better after the trauma of dealing with this infestation, I bought myself those boots.

After dinner, I guess I'll resume my efforts to locate the source of flies in my bedroom. (gross)

( Corn! )

Every time I see the X-Files trailer, it's like a time warp to being fourteen. Oh, my heart.

1. livelongnmarry has raised over $43,000 -- and is still counting!

2. Someone tipped off George Takei and Brad Altman, and they sent us a message of thanks and support!

3. Adrian: still awesomest boyfriend ever.

4. I have trimmed and dyed my hair red. Well, red-brown. It looks good, if I do say so myself.

5. Virginia Avenue Project summer camp is this weekend. I am not sure if I'll internet access or not, so if you desperately need me between Thursday and Sunday, call.

...or maybe a nice boiled crayfish?

Marvel at the awesome, epic badness that is the trailer for Valkyrie. Tom Cruise IS ... well, a Southern Californian who strides in to save Hitler's Germany from Hitler. He is cocky. He is perky. His hair is attractively tousled. He has an eyepatch, and by that you know that he is this man. (Apparently there are no Googlable pictures of von Stauffenberg after the war wound that cost him his eye, his right hand, and two fingers of his left hand.)

The title is a direct quote.

Contrary to the trailer, the movie is no longer scheduled for release in Summer 2008; instead, it's in February 2009. February is the canonical dumping-ground for Hollywood movies that will not succeed.

I hope the cuts work because I am doing this via email and won't be able to
correct it till I get home. But I don't think it's very spoilery anyway.

( Read more... )

Paul Park, The Tourmaline (2006): intriguing sequel to A Princess of Roumania. It is a middle book (second of four) and feels intermittently like one; it’s also an amazing piece of craft.

I’m fascinated by the story and looking forward to #3, but my first reactions are about the writing, not to what it instills or evokes….

The next time someone asks for an example of pervasive alt-history effects well considered, I’ll have to remember to point them to this ongoing story. Here’s a simple fragment, for a story set primarily in the northeastern U.S. and Romania: “On the mantelpiece under the portrait of her husband stood a celadon jar, a gift from the Maharajah of Hokkaido, a Korean nobleman who long ago had come to hear her sing” (mmpb p. 24). Several layers of pintucks: one must infer either an Indian empire or a Korea that adopted more of Indian culture than its fourth-century uptake of Buddhism; either this long tentacle of empire or a strong Korea holds the northernmost island of (our) Japan, which is not (in our timeline) one of the disputed bits at all.

Be it noted that most such scene-establishing clues in Princess and Tourmaline are far subtler.

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

If there are one or more people on your friendslist who make your world a better place just because they exist, and whom you would not have met (offline or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

I posted comments on Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day yesterday; today I tracked back to find Niall Harrison's review over at Strange Horizons. (Niall is coalescent on LJ, btw.) He liked it a lot more than I did. It's certainly a more thoughtful review than mine, but then Niall reviews books professionally; me, I'm just a hack banging out comments between meetings and memos. Also courtesy of Niall, a 2005 interview with Mary Doria Russell, in which she talks about writing Dreamers of the Day. (This may be one of those moments where I feel kinda dumb. But hell, I can live with that. And I still think that as a story, it's kinda crap.)

My favorite comment yet on OTW. If only more people found it all deadly boring, we'd be free of so much of the wank!

Speaking of which, otw_news has put up draft versions of the Terms of Service, including the Content Policies and Abuse Procedures and all that. If you're interested in the archive project and how it's going to operate, now's your chance to comment on those policies. My key take-aways are that no one under 13 will be allowed to upload content or access content rated above a certain level without clicking through an explicit warning, and that content depicting sex by characters under the age of 18 should be tagged as "underage" but the archive will give writers a lot of leeway in that determination. (I.e., a story like rheanna27's latest SGA story, where Sheppard and McKay temporarily inhabit their 16-year-old bodies, wouldn't necessarily be tagged "underage"). There are other important points, as well, but I read the posts a couple of days ago and I've forgotten a lot already. There's a lot of good discussion in the comments to these posts, anyway, and I encourage people to check it out.

Also OTW-related, looks like Laura Hale has decided to get dirty. Way to go, hon--that's really taking the high road, isn't it. The sad thing is that fandom is so large, there are probably people out there who will (a) agree with her argument, not seeing that in certain circumstances anyone could be called a BNF; or (b) never hear about it, and continue helping her with her hopeless attempt to steal underpants profit from other people's creativity.

Which is a funny coincidence, because I'd just read this thread this morning. The meat is down here. "[S]he wants to sell it and whatnot." O Rly? I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Count-down till someone outs Laura to her employers, assuming she has any: three, two, one... (and no, I'm not suggesting anyone do it, but not all fans have a sense of perspective when they feel threatened).

Too bad I'm writing tonight, because this is going to be interesting to watch. How long until the cat macros show up? (And yes, I do take fannish outing seriously, but honestly I am so unsurprised by this.)

( Cut for bitter )

A few things that make me happy:

• Icelandic/Danish folksingers celebrating the sun comming back for summer.

• Going through our complete Iceland trip pictures.

• A gallery of pocket sundials.

• Dark skies over Racetrack Playa.

• That there is an ICD-9-CM code for being injured while on a spacecraft.

• Yotsuba in a happi.

• Beaker and the Swedish Chef singing the "Habanera" from Carmen.

Why should only usenet newsgroup readers suffer?

Back from Readercon and also an excellent vacation in Connecticut. Corambis is due July 31st, so (a.) expect intermittent at best blog activity until then and (b.) if something happened while I was gone that you want me to know about, please post a link in the comments. Because the whole catching-up-on-LJ thing is just not happening.

Here's the situation: I have been using my tv as a monitor for my computer, and it's been working pretty well. However, this becomes problematic once Jim moves in and wants to watch TV while I want to be on the computer. Since my home computer has a wireless lan built in, I figured that I would get myself a laptop, so that I could work in a much less obnoxious fashion than taking over the living room.

Jim's dad has offered me a two year old Toshiba with the following specs:

12 inch screen
Intel Centrino Duo, 1.66 GHz
100 GB HD
1024 MB Ram
DVD Burner
Windows XP
3 USB 2.0 ports, 1 VGA port, Ethernet port, 1394 Port, Modem
Secure Digital & PCMCIA Slots

However, since I am doing consulting work for my old company, and have had to set up a business to do that, I can pay for a new laptop through my company account, since it's a legitimate business expense. This means that I would be paying for it in pre-tax dollars, which means effectively that it's a nearly 40% discount. It looks like I could get a new machine for about the equivalent of $600 ($1000 is pre-tax money).

My dilemma here is: old and free vs. shiny and not-free?

Yesterday was crap from the time I woke up until I went to bed early. I don't know why. I wanted to jump out of my skin from all the annoyances. It started with a heartbreaking dream about losing first one camera, then its replacement, and all the photos I took with both. It felt like a big old metaphor, but I didn't have time to think about it, because I was late to work so I had to slam out of the house and drive like a fool to catch my train.

I was in line to buy a coffee at the new Peet's (they are selling coffee inside the BART stations downtown now! It's so civilized!) when a woman cut in front of me to buy a muffin. I said, trying to keep my voice even, "Excuse me, you are cutting in front of me." She replied, "I'm busier than you are." I was so astonished I couldn't think of a comeback. I still can't!

By the time I got home I was in such a foul mood from weirdness and boredom that I could barely stand myself. I watched a little tv with John, played with the Sims a bit, amused the cats with the new feather toy, and did a bunch of navel-gazing. Early to bed, or early for me, to try to sleep off the bad mood.

Like magic, I have woken up in a good mood, breathing easier, less troubled by ephemera. Somewhere something opened up. I can feel it.

Last night's Middleman was about a boyband, and featured less than five minutes of actual boyband members. That's how you know a show is trying to keep me happy.

According to the Middleman, it's Recap O'Clock.

( Hawks of the Luftwaffe, that's it! You've cracked it! )

rachelmanija will be glad to know that, when I woke up at 5am the other morning, to a noise that sounded like a constant mechanical clicking, I stumbled all the way out of bed in an adrenaline rush before realizing that it was the neighbors' garden-watering doohickey (on a timer) and not, as I'd been dreaming, the stove's clicky-lighter trying and trying to light while gas filled the kitchen.

So, I am secure in the knowledge that even when I'm asleep I'm alert for the possibility of my house blowing up. Hyperalert for the win! If only it hadn't been five o'clock in the morning.

By the way, anyone not certain about trying e-books (and not wanting to unpocket hard-earned cash in case the experiment fails) can find a rich variety off free offerings for the rest of the week on Tor.com--I don't know if this link will work here but if it doesn't (I'm not sure about the whole log-in thing) just go over there, and looked for "E-Book Bonanza".

I spotted one by S.C. Butler called Reiffen's Choice, opened it, read a couple of pages (the formatting is really clean and easy on the eyes) and loved it, so one click and I've got the book right here.

Kui Long and his older brother Tao Tie are two of ten dragon sons, though I'm not sure if the dragon bit is metaphorical or a reference to them being youkai or if they can actually turn into dragons, as we only see them in youkai and human form. The world is the same as one in a later Nan Kongyuu series (Blue Sky Prayer or Cang Tian Qi), and it includes youkai/god figures/supernatural beings, reincarnation, resurrection, and curses. Much like other Nan Kongyuu works I like, this series is mostly a set of interconnected short stories, in which the two dragon brothers interact with humans, often to the detriment of the humans.

And slowly, we get more backstory on the brothers and why they are wandering around the human world instead of living in the palace with their family. The themes are fairly familiar now that I've read all of the manhuajia's backlist: loneliness, the need for human connection, human cruelty and human kindness, and the blessing and tragedy of being a removed, supernatural being. I wasn't particularly invested in the beginning, although the first story was nicely written and very pretty to look at. Then suddenly, I was invested in a sweet couple, in a resurrected young man who had committed suicide, in all the characters who love despite the hurt it causes them.

It helps that Nan Kongyuu continues to hit my buttons with stories on resurrection and reincarnation that don't take the easy way out. On the other hand, Tao Tie's backstory could have used more fleshing out; I felt the tragedy was appropriately angsty, but that there should have been more reverberations in the present-day. And though I loved the story featuring a boy born without legs, it would also be nice if being differently abled in shoujo manga did not always equate having the bestest angst of them all. That thought should probably be an entire entry in and of itself...

Anyway, though this isn't as good as Lonesome Eden or White Garden, it's still got gorgeous art and sweet yet melancholy relationships, and I really, really, really wish this manhuajia were scanlated or licensed or even just on people's radars. I like her a lot, and I'm really looking forward to whatever she's working on now.

The second half of the romantic fantasy Sasharia En Garde! is Out through Samhain in e-book form.

Justine Larbalestier posted a thoughtful riff on why young writers might consider studying if they want to be writers. [edited to fix]

I do believe that if your heart is set on that, or you know of a program you feel is going to be just the ticket for you, then of course you should go for it. There are so many roads to learning writing skillz.
( Read more... )

Day 4 of migraine. Not a painful one, but ALWAYS NAGGING THERE IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD.

You know, you find the weirdest things on the internet.

Like Beeker singing Coldplay.

( The penguin version. )

I took Adrian to a fantastic production of Sondheim's Assassins this weekend, in a 99-seat theatre with us in the front row and the assassins two feet away at times. Gorgeously disturbing at such close range, with the music apparently one guy backstage with a keyboard but excellent singing and clever staging. Also very funny.

The Proprietor was particularly creepy, laughing in unnerving delight as yet another assassin took his or her shot. The Balladeer, a woman in a slightly hippie-ish embroidered dress, gave the role an unusual and effective malicious edge. The other Balladeers I've seen embodied naivete and foolish optimism. This one played it as if she knew exactly what sort of corrosive effect her promises and lies were having on the poor losers she sang them to. The two of them, plus an intense Zangara and a barking mad, eye-bulging Squeaky Fromme, were my favorite actors.

Generally the cast was excellent, though I think John Wilkes Booth could have used a little more gravitas, perhaps by casting someone a bit older than he historically was.

( Read more... )
Czolgocz turned out to be the guy sitting next to Adrian! So when a woman came in at intermission, kicked him in the knee (not hard), and swore at him, he at first thought she was also an actress. Nope, just a random crazy audience member. I completely missed this, having been in the bathroom, but he told me later. He loved the show; I knew he would if it was at all decent, and it was excellent.

swan_tower (Marie Brennan) announces a theme song for her novel Midnight Never Come; at her post you can find the two download links, one for the final version and one for the earlier draft.

I had a lot of fun composing this, not least because it meant reading the novel. *g* ( Read more... )

Meanwhile, I need to get working on copying out the sheet music for the final draft for swan_tower!

I closed all my windows before going to work today, and came home to about a dozen flies buzzing around. So, it seems that they are either coming in through a crevice I don't know about, or they are hatching somewhere in the apartment (EEEW). Fortunately, I have the Excalibur of fly-swatters, so the fly population is currently zero.

If there was something dead and/or rotting in here, I'd smell it, right?

In an effort to track down the source, I have closed all the doors. We will see which room they respawn in.

I suppose I should be glad it's not cockroaches?

[UPDATE] THEY ARE SPAWNING IN MY BEDROOM!!!!! WAAAAAAHH!!!

but I wanted to remind everyone upset about Act Three of Dr. Horrible that Joss Whedon did not create this thing solo. He had co-writers: two brothers, Zack and Jed, and Jed’s fiancée, Maurissa Tancharoen.

Joss might be the most famous one of the bunch, and he’s been doing the visible interviews, but if there’s blame, it’s shared. Okay? Okay.

I’ve watched only Act One so far, but I’ve read enough about Three to feel reluctant to watch it. amaliedageek has antidote!fic, also, which I’m waiting to read till I’ve seen Three….

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

A recent blog post by a friend of mind has got me reminiscing about my days back at university.

It's hard to believe that 20 years ago, this was me:



Did I ever tell the story about my friends and I stealing the Queen's Greasepole?

Sherwood Smith, The King’s Shield (2008): third of an expected four books featuring Inda. Aside from being glad to see certain characters again and enjoying the story, I loved seeing the long-term effects of command-training suppression appear alongside the long-term effects of traditional, alternative-to-official forms of training (the siege bits).

While reading the book’s first half, I was thinking about hiraeth, the Welsh word denoting a longing or yearning for home.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at the stack. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes, the best way to come up with a solution to a problem is to complain about it for 5 minutes.

Thanks for the nice comments on the meta, folks. I daren't get too involved in meta these days because I can't reply for hours (or sometimes days), which is dangerous in the speedy comment-and-response world of LJ-based fandom. So I'm happy to see that I didn't start a firestorm with my post about how I'm not particularly upset. Yay.

I took some time this weekend to read some SPN fic, and found some excellent gen stories associated with the SPN/J2 Big Bang. I don't have time to scare up links right now, but newredshoes' The Syncretist was particularly great, with a John Winchester who is a magnificent bastard all around, a cool OFC, and an excellent sense of place.

Speaking of fic, ever realize that a story you're working on is just not working at all? ... yeah, like that. So it's on to take two on my Summergen story. This one will be lighter and fluffier, and hopefully won't be as hard to write. The problem with the first one was that the story I wanted to write with the prompt wasn't one the recipient would have liked, and as a result I was fighting with myself the whole way. The one I'm writing instead is easier all around, but hopefully will be both acceptable to the recipient and fun for me to write. (Note to self: This is why you write to challenges and not ficathons. Remember this.) Ten days omg! ::flails::

One of the bosses brought in a tray full of Mexican pastries today. Which are dangerously yummy: they're brilliantly colored (hot pink cookies!) but not as sweet as American pastries. Nom nom nom. Damn, now I'm getting that post-lunch blood-sugar drop. And yet more cookies won't solve that problem! Argh.

*

( Recent reading: Naomi Novik, Sherwood Smith, Mary Doria Russell )

So, I went and saw Hellboy 2: The Golden Army last night Thursday, that being the FDA-approved manner of preparing for an interview the next day (more about that later), and, well.

First, Irrelevant Reaction: Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the primary result of seeing a movie called Hellboy 2: The Golden Army would be to have Barry Manilow stuck in my head for twelve hours.

Actual, Cogent Reaction: I liked it, but not nearly as much as I thought I was going to.

I think the biggest problem was that, while each of the individual elements of the movie all worked, more or less, taken as a whole the movie just failed to gel. You’ll likely find this weird, but I got the same sense from Hellboy 2 that I got from Cable Guy, in that neither of these movies could decide what they were.

Cable Guy, you see, couldn’t figure out if Jim Carrey was Jim Carrey, Wacky Comedian, or Jim Carrey, Creepy Psycho, and therefore whether it was a comedy or a suspense thriller, and as a result managed to be just dumb, mostly. In the same way, Hellboy 2 couldn’t decide whether it was a comic book action flick or a lyrical fairytale, and as a result managed to be a very pretty, very frenetic mess.

A movie can decide to be a cross between genres or types, of course, but there’s a difference between deliberate genre-busting and waffling, and you can almost always tell which is which. Cross-genre pollination is one of those things where it's usually an all-or-nothing proposition; if it works, it's brilliant, and if it doesn't, it... isn't. And to a certain extent, of course, whether it works or not is in the eye of the beholder.

For my money, I beheld something that was almost brilliant. But not quite.

For added confusion, HB2 also couldn’t decide whether it was a comedy or a drama. And before you throw horrible words like “dramedy” at me, let me add that those are not quite the words I mean, but I'm not sure how else to put it, except to ask: were we supposed to take these characters, and in particular the various romantic entanglements, seriously or not?

I'm just saying, throwing in a "guys get drunk and angst about women over Barry Manilow" scene, when the "guys" in question are, basically, a big red demon and a talking fish... that's kind of a lot, there. You really don't want to hang out too close to that line between "laughing with" and "laughing at", trust me. Not in this genre (either one).

And if the movie doesn’t know how it wants to treat these characters, how are we the audience supposed to figure it out?

I think, personally, that we were supposed to take them seriously, but with characters as outlandish as these and in the absence of definitive clues, your modern-day American audience is going to go for the opposite, sorry.

I think this was a clash of cultural aesthetics, really. Guillermo del Toro is best known in the U.S. (at least until The Hobbit comes out) for his Spanish-language film Pan’s Labyrinth, which if you’ve seen needs no introduction, and which if you haven’t, well, sorry, because (a) you’re missing out, and (b) you probably won't get what the problem is I'm having here. But Pan's Labyrinth had an extremely distinctive, whimsical-yet-grotesque, fairytale-to-the-nth-degree mien, that del Toro enthusiastically brought to play in the wise-cracking, tongue-in-cheek, John-McClane-in-big-red-demon-clothing style of Hellboy 2 and - well, it wasn't chocolate and peanut butter, so much as it was chocolate and...fried chicken.

By which I mean, it's probably not the grossest combo you've ever come across, nor is it necessarily completely unpalatable, but it is definitely very very weird, and you're definitely going to raise an eyebrow at such a concoction when it is plunked down in front of you. Are you really supposed to eat this, or is the chef just fucking with you?

The styles were just a little too incompatible. One is meant to be entirely irony-free, while the other is nothing but irony, and never the twain shall meet, sort of. Maybe it's easier for some people to switch their sense of the ridiculous on and off like that, but for me, I kind of had whiplash by the end.

I salute the film, however, as a valiant try, and I think that if he had had even slightly less antithetical narratives to bash together, del Toro would have made a fabulously awesome film. Maybe next time.

A recent posting by nineveh_uk regarding Wimseyfic and, specifically, Wimsey/Torchwood crossovers reminded me that my April 1 fic "Feast of All Fools" is still languishing over on IJ: it went up during a particularly disturbed period on LJ so I didn't cross post.

Anyway, fwiw, I present
Feast of All Fools

Jill Paton Walsh Lord Peter-verse/Torchwood
Lord Peter Wimsey copyright of the Sayers' estate, Torchwood copyright the BBC
PG (mild violence)

The original author's notes read as follows:
This comes out of my having a bad cold. And reading the Jill Paton Walsh A Presumption of Death during it. And me being quite cross. And my partner making an observation (*explained below) about literature in general. And my responding with a further comment**.

( Read more... )

It was, by and large, a good Readercon. Had a good panel ("Fantasists as Modern Philologists"), a good kaffeeklatsch (a full table, and we didn't have to bring in our own posse to do it); a good time at the Kirk Pollands, and a good reading (as in, a decent audience, unlike the poor souls before and after -- they have my sympathies, since we've been in that boat ourselves more than once. If you aren't one of the field's known Rock Stars, readings are always a crap shoot.)

More another time, when I'm not posting on the road.

Sun Day
Originally uploaded by lucy huntzinger

From today's New York Times, an article on the emergence of micro-mini PCs, which do nothing but surf the Web.

“When I talk to PC vendors, the No. 1 question I get is, how do I compete with these netbooks when what we really want to do is sell PCs that cost a lot more money?” said J. P. Gownder, an analyst with Forrester Research.

“We’re sitting on the sidelines not because we’re lazy. We’re sitting on the sidelines because even if this category takes off, and we get our piece of the pie, it doesn’t add up,” said Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management for Fujitsu. “It’s a product that essentially has no margin.”

• Pr1me refused to enter the workstation market because the profit margin was too low and "customers don't want the limited function." By the time I left, Pr1me had created a workstation offering that would ship in 12 UPS boxes.
• ParcPlace-Digitalk refused to abandon the site-license per-seat model because that was where the large revenue stream was. ParcPlace-Digitalk had no response to the free Java language; an internal response died for lack of resources.
• Rogue Wave was based on providing class libraries for C++, also on a per-seat model. Java had free class libraries. Rogue Wave never figured out how to thrive in the Java world, again because of the lack of revenue stream.