starlady | Entries tagged with but where's starfleet academy?

I was biking home and stopped at a light and the people in the car next to me had the radio tuned to the game, loud. "What's the score?" I asked them loudly.

"Four-nothing!" the driver hollered back, ecstatic.

"Awesome!" I said, grinning.

A guy biked up on my other side and turned his head. "What's the score?" he asked, and I smiled wider when I saw he was wearing a Giants championship cap.

"Four-nothing!" I told him, and he smiled too.

This book review is part of the A More Diverse Universe BlogTour. You can see the full schedule here.

A More Diverse Universe: Celebrating People of Color Speculative Fiction Authors

Lo, Malinda. Adaptation. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine.

I won an ARC of this book at Mythcon 43 by virtue of the fact that I knew that Mulder's sister was named Samantha, which is perhaps all the comment I need make on Mythcon 43. I've really enjoyed Lo's previous books, and though this one is a decided change of pace in several ways, I loved it too.

Adaptation is set in the near-future United States, San Francisco to be precise; rising senior Reese and her debate partner David are prevented from flying back home by a series of bird strikes causing plane crashes across the continent. Driving a rental car home through Nevada, they encounter a bird strike themselves, and after they wake up in a military hospital and finally get home to San Francisco, it quickly becomes clear that everything has, somehow, changed.

It was highly difficult to put this book down - Malinda talked at Mythcon about how she was inspired by her love of The X-Files, among other things, and how it was easier to write contemporary than pseudo-medieval fantasy dialogue, and it turns out that she's pretty handy with witty verbiage. I also really liked Reese; I sympathized a lot with her dilemmas, both practical and romantic, and the other characters are also very nicely drawn. Although Reese isn't herself a person of color, plenty of her friends including David are, and one of the things I really enjoyed, now that I live here, is how Lo brought out the reality of San Francisco and its diversity without being didactic about it. Without being spoilery about it, there are also several queer characters, and I particularly appreciated the way several characters' bisexuality is handled - realistically, and with acceptance from other characters rather than more stereotypical, skeptical attitudes. Lo's love for the city and its inhabitants shines through alongside the menace of the men in black.

Oh, are there a lot of men in black in this book. There's also a love triangle, conspiracy theories, and some plausibly creepy biological horror - the book opens with a quotation from Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and that's all I'll say on this point outside of a spoiler cut. Suffice it to say that this book is smart, sexy, and un-put-down-able, and I can't wait for the sequel (next year, sadly!).

( Spoilers must adapt to survive )

unjapanologist came to visit for like a week. I put her on the train to Nebraska last Wednesday, and I am going to write down what we did before I forget it all.

# Asian Art Museum and Matcha - I got us in for free to these, and we had a good time. I really like the current special exhibition, Phantoms of Asia - it integrates with the collection and challenges museum norms in some interesting ways, and the Matcha evening party event we went to did more of the same, including an event where we could try on food costumes (a boysenberry and a can of curry powder, respectively), a video installation of Tina Takemoto's Björk-Geisha performance, and the Great Tortilla Conspiracy in partnership with the guy who did the asiansart.org website offering quesadilla printed with a design skewering the Phantoms exhibit "consuming the cosmic." I think critiques of the AAM are valid, on a number of levels, but what I liked above all about Phantoms was the way it showed that "Asian art" (whatever that is) isn't just dead stuff in museums, but living means of expression today.

# The USS Hornet - N likes boats, so we took a Zipcar and drove down to this one. I have been to a beer festival on the USS New Jersey, but the Hornet is a massively larger aircraft carrier. For me the coolest thing was seeing the Airstream quarantine module that the poor schmucks from Apollo 11 had to chill in for three weeks after splashdown…and the video of Nixon talking to them during his visit, oh god, Nixon. But it's well worth a tour, and our docents (including a guy who flew off a ship of the same class) were very good. And we had some fantastic views to San Francisco from the flight deck.

# Sausolito and Muir Woods on the hop-on, hop-off bus - I have previously driven to Muir Woods (which is a fun drive if you like driving and have a decent car, and is still fun even in a crappy Zipcar Mazda hatchback), but the advantage of the bus is that you can take the ferry back from Sausolito to San Francisco, which is only $5 with Clipper and is fantastic. Going over the Golden Gate in an open-top bus is also fantastic, and the bus lets you off at Vista Point for more pictures. I love Muir Woods - we had a little less than an hour there, because we had to take the second-to-last Sausolito bus, but it is a little slice of an older, more primeval age and it is beautiful and even 45 minutes is fantastic. Also in Sausolito we had fantastic fish tacos and we saw the cockatoo and its person! The cockatoo sits on your arms and eats seeds from your mouth and your hand and it was so adorable! And then we took the ferry back to San Francisco, which was also amazing, because we had fantastic views of the Golden Gate and the ferry goes right past Alcatraz.

# The Oakland A's - The age of Moneyball is no more. The Rays trounced the A's, 8-0, which made me glad I'd gone for the "value deck" pricing, which also included a $6 concession discount, so the beer was actually not totally unreasonable. But, even though the game was mostly painful, we had a good time up in the cheap seats with the other embittered cheapskates. (N: "Why are they booing the Oakland players?" Me: "Apparently we hate everyone.") It was just like being back in the old Vet back in the day when the Phillies sucked, minus the batteries being flung onto the field and the rioting, of course. And I do have to hand it to the field sections, which were full of some hard core fans - at one point they had the whole stadium doing the wave for about five minutes straight in the eighth inning.

This happened a while ago, but what the hell--I met up with

epershand and

eruthros last month, and we had fun just wandering around. I later cribbed half of our itinerary for showing my friend M around, so double bonus.

# Marnee Thai--om nom nom delicious. We got there a bit too late to get the homemade dumplings, but the next time I went there it was much less crowded because their credit card machine was down, and the dumplings were delicious. Ep says this is one of the best Thai restaurants in the city, and I believe it.

# The Conservatory of Flowers! I have a decided weak spot for these turn of the 20thC sorts of places, and we paid the recently raised admission fee and had fun wandering around inside cooing over the carnivorous plants. As a bonus, they currently have an exhibit on Playland and the old San Francisco West End, and since we are all interested in local history (and I know very little of it) we had a lot of fun squeezing every last drop of information out of the displays. Also then we went and had Its Its, which I will grant are pretty darn tasty.

# Ep and I went to The Rice Broker, which has replaced the lamentably departed Spork, the other night. Apparently Spork had to close because the building is slated for demolition (!), so The Rice Broker is ultra-temporary. Our verdict: good food, though not necessarily for the price; if it were staying around long-term they'd need to step up their game.

# We also went to a nice coffee shop right by the Asian Art Museum, which I can't remember the name of but which will come very much in handy this summer.

Two of my favorite authors today posted tributes to Steve Jobs that, I think, get to the heart of what made Apple products in general and Steve Jobs' visionary insight into the actual nature of personal technology so singular. Along the way, both Duane and West articulate again, almost in passing, what makes me love their work so fiercely.

Diane Duane, A farewell: Steve Jobs

Michelle West, Steve Jobs

I won't pretend that I don't feel an additional layer of sadness over Jobs' death in light of the fact that he died of cancer, a year younger even than my mother was. Jobs was a visionary, but that's not why he deserved more time here; everyone does. But it's also undeniable that the outpouring of emotion at his death--which I don't discount or find mawkish or put-on--is the perfect testament to the personal connection with technology that Jobs envisioned and then created. And that is, unquestionably, the most fitting tribute possible.

Current Location: SAN

Steve Jobs, a true visionary and another too-young victim of cancer. I like to imagine that he's in the place where the Apple logo doesn't have a bite out of it now.

Current Location: at my MacBook

Anyone interested in seeing the Houdini exhibit at the CJM?

Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare. Dir. Kenneth Kelleher.

I trekked out, along with a motley crew of awesome people, to the Presidio to see S.F. Shakespeare do Cymbeline, which is one of the romances (i.e. later, Jacobean, tragicomedy) and that almost no one in our group had either seen or read before. Seeing or reading it before would not, I think, have done anything to alleviate the utter ludicrousness that is the plot or make it more sensible. I literally said "This is ridiculous!" out loud when they handed out the programs and I read the plot summary, a sentiment that was aptly echoed by Cymbeline in the play in Act V when he says, dumbfounded, "Does the world go round!?" If I start saying this, rest assured, what I mean is, "What the fucking fuck!?"

I'll let you read the Wiki article to attempt to grasp the plot; what I want to talk about is the production, which was nothing short of amazing. The costuming and set design went the route of a sort of Dickensian steampunk look and feel, which worked very well in context (I support modern AUs in Shakespeare costuming in perpetuity), and the actors and the director all performed things with a sort of giddy OTT attitude--though not, let me hasten to clarify, emotionally one-note--that really made the ridiculous plot shenanigans emotionally credible. They also made the very smart decision to have just about every actor but Emily Jordan, who did an amazing job with Innogen, double parts, which certainly helped sell things like Innogen mistaking her stepbrother's beheaded body for her husband's, since they were both played (brilliantly) by Craig Marker. The music was also amazing, a mixture of very well done settings of the music in the text (music is such an important part of the romances, seriously, they're half-masque in some ways) and playing of samples of contemporary things--I recognized at least one Magnetic Fields song, which is fitting since I tend to blame Stephen Merritt's score for the "Coraline" musical for the toy piano that featured (in a suitable way, yes) in the set design in this production.

It being the Presidio, I'd be remiss in not mentioning the weather, or more precisely the fog, because fog in the Presidio does not mess around, and is doubtless the reason why the grass we were sitting on was the cushiest grass I've seen in the state of California. It was a bit chilly by the end, but by no means intolerable since I'd dressed appropriately. There are lots more performances this month; if you can check it out, you totally should!

Happy Constitution Day, Norway! At my alma mater there will be cake for everyone today.

So on Sunday morning I got up ridiculously early to bike to the BART and get my butt on a train for downtown San Francisco to run the 100th annual Bay to Breakers 12K. I finished in 1:24:57, well within my personal goal of 1:30:00. The Bay to Breakers race is notorious for many things, among them the Hayes Street Hill between mile 2 and 3, which rises at about a 12% grade. Looking at my split times, I actually sped up on the second half of the course, after the hill; at the top of the hill my split time was 11:45, but at the finish line it was 11:24. Compared with the 8K I ran last year (split time 7:19), there's a lot of room for improvement, but I was pleased that it wasn't, on the whole, anywhere near as much of a challenge as I thought it would be. If anything, I took it too easy. (Fun fact: when I was at the crest of the hill, the winners were already at the finish line.)

The other thing about Bay to Breakers aside from the hill and the rather lovely course through the city's microclimates to the finish line on the Great Highway, with the Pacific slamming onto the shore in front of you, is that it's basically a giant excuse to have a citywide party. Those of us who actually ran it got a bit less of this, and this year the city also enforced the alcohol regulations and barred floats from the race course, which I understand put a bit of damper on things. Still, I have to tell you, it was one of the most awesome things I've done: the weather was perfect, if just slightly on the chilly side, the sun shone bright (except for the 2/3 of a mile that it rained in Golden Gate Park), and the people flinging tortillas at the start, the Elvi (plural of Elvis), the sharks (they run the course backward), the people running naked, the tons of people running in costume, the people cheering us on from their houses as they blared music and drank at 8am--it was all really, really fun.

McGuire, Seanan. Late Eclipses. New York: DAW Books, 2011.

This is the fourth book in Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye series, and at this point I am confident in stating that a) the books have thoroughly transmogrified themselves from their rather obviously urban fantasy origins in Rosemary and Rue, and b) I like this series a lot. I would, however, urge people to read the first book and skip the second, which is unquestionably the weakest of the four thus far. I think this one might be the strongest, though the third, An Artificial Night, is really good too.

( The one who can is the one who must. )

I think it's possible to see McGuire becoming a better writer as the series goes along, and I'm very much looking forward to the next book, One Salt Sea. Nothing will be the same for Toby and her crew from here on out, but change is the way of everything, even those who are immortal. For those who like filk, you should check out "Oak and Ash and Rowan and Thorn," a filk by Cat Faber about Toby at the end of this book that was covered at its release party and that is quite awesome.

So, two weekends ago I went to FOGcon. Short version: It was pretty awesome, especially for a first con! I feel fairly confident in predicting that next year will be even more awesome.

( The City in SFF )

In conclusion: When can I register for 2012? Also, next time I'll probably spring for a hotel room with some people, shuttling over from the East Bay and back was a pain in the arse.

My roommate and I went to San Fran for the Giants' victory parade this morning more or less on a whim, and it was pretty awesome: a beautiful day in San Francisco, a happy crowd, a great series win, and then we walked to the Ferry Building and had lunch and gelato by the water before heading back. Hard to be disappointed about the election results in some ways, since it all pretty much went down the way Nate Silver and Fivethirtyeight told us it would. That said, I'm already looking forward to 2012. The next two years are going to be…interesting.

Happy birthday,

shveta_writes!

Happy birthday,

janni!

Clarkesworld Magazine has a lot of awesome content in this issue, including a story by N.K. Jemisin.

Cat Valente has been on a roll this week; I particularly appreciated her points in this post about steampunk.
And the Apex Magazine Arab/Muslim issue is out!

babarnett has a Jon Stewart photo that sums up my feelings about many things.

boundbooks has George Takei's contribution to the It Gets Better project.

I think by now most people have heard about Fiction Alley's attempt to save itself via the Pepsi Refresh contest.

rydra_wong has the link to vote for a cause that is not Fiction Alley;

futuransky has a brilliant post on neoliberalism, charity, and corporations.

And now to class, and then to read about the Sino-Soviet split. In the meantime: don't lose hope.

Happy Friday, everyone! And Happy Birthday,

rachelmanija! May your day be as awesome as you are.

I have two things to share that made me smile: first, via Twitter, Bryan Lee O'Malley has drawn Wallace Wells as (a slightly tipsty) Astro Boy. (Happy Halloween, All Hallows, and Samhain to those who celebrate it.)

So I'm a baseball fan, and it just so happens that there's a World Series on, and that my tied-for-second-favorite team (the Phillies, of course, being my first, and the Hanshin Tigers being my other favorite) the San Francisco Giants are up 2-0 against the Texas Rangers. They scored seven runs in one inning last night. Seven runs! And in that same inning, the entire ballpark sang along to "Lights" by Journey, which is a song about San Francisco, and it was pretty cool (though for those of us watching on the TV, not immediately apparent):

This post also has video of the entire ballpark singing "Don't Stop Believin'" which as I know from Wiscon 34 can be magical in a sing-along even with 40 people, let alone 43,000.

So, yeah. I'm glad to be here in the Bay area, and I'm going to see Janelle Monáe and Of Montreal tonight! Woo-hoo!

Current Mood: sentimental

I did two awesome things yesterday.

I made a Darker Than BLACK AMV! Or rather, I finished and posted my Darker Than BLACK AMV. Yes, this is a shameless plug for everyone to watch it, I'm quite pleased with this one.
Went with my housemate to see the Arcade Fire at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. Ah, the Arcade Fire are still so AMAZING. It was really interesting too to hear what a difference two months' touring makes in their sound, and in the songs they played--"Month of May" just keeps getting faster and more perilous, in particular, and I swear that siren sound effect was not used at all at the Philly show. The tambourine man (I forget his name, sorry) also climbed part of the scaffolding, which was awesome. They also played fewer songs from the new album and more from Funeral, though not all of the ones I expected; they did play "Crown of Love," which almost sounds incongruous compared to the majority of their oeuvre these days. It was a great show, and I loved it, but I was (like Wyn), sort of annoyed with "you laidback motherfuckers" as he characterized the crowd, who WOULD NOT get up off their asses until like the last two songs of the set and the encore. Come on, people, seriously--though I do think the theater itself (which the classics snob in me is compelled to point out is actually Roman in design rather than Greek) works against people getting into the show completely, and the fact that by the end people did is a testament to the band again. Still, I never thought I'd find a venue harder to get riled up than the Mann Center, though I suppose at heart the Philly crowd was also "better" in the sense of "more willing to get into it," too. Oh Bay area, of all the times to be a stickler for propriety… Still, awesome. Next time I see them I'm buying a shirt, since that's two shows at which I've resisted; I'm wearing my shirt from the Neon Bible tour today. If you can still see them, you TOTALLY SHOULD.
As we were leaving the theater some obnoxious girl walking behind us was complaining about people walking around in T-shirts; since I am contrary by nature and also proud of my tolerance for what's called "cold" here and would be "mild" anywhere else in the country, I took off my hoody immediately and ostentatiously. My housemate, who was wearing a peacoat, sort of boggled at me, but I was fine all the way home.

Current Location: carrel sweet carrel 24

This is an impromptu linkspam; I'll find a review of something to put up tomorrow. (Irony of grad school: as my Japanese reading comprehension goes up, my time to read goes down: thus, translated manga! I never would have believed myself.)

naraht is proposing an AO3 Comment Fest! There are various suggested ways to participate at the post, but the important thing is, make an effort to comment on fics at the Archive of Our Own. I think we all know how awesome it can be to get a nice comment delivered at random.

upstart_crow has the table of contents for Steam-Powered, aka The Lesbian Steampunk Anthology. I am so freaking excited for this book, I can't even tell you. N.K. Jemisin's amazing story "The Effluent Engine" is already available online, and I want to read the rest so much.

The Rumpus has a map of San Francisco in quotations. San Francisco's a pretty cool (and very literary) city, and I'm thrilled to live near it.

McSweeney's has extracts from H.P. Lovecraft's brief stint as a copywriter for the Whitman samplers (you know, those collections of candy you can buy at drugstores). I laughed fiendishly, rather than in eldritch terror.

Hmm, I think that was it. All right, I'm going to go read things, including manga.

I was productive yesterday (as I have not yet been today, alas) and so I went in to the city for two parties last night: the first,

seanan_mcguire's release party for An Artificial Night at Borderlands Books, and the second,

damned_colonial's couchwarming party.

Both were a lot of fun--at the Artificial Night party I had rosemary shortbread and obtained a Chimera Fancies pendant of mine own and talked with Seanan McGuire about kitsune in the Toby Daye books, about which she had very thoughtful and cogent things to say, and I got to hear the fabled S.J. Tucker perform, along with some other highly talented musicians, and talked about books with other party-goers, principally the WTFRage of E.Moon and the GrrArgh of The Windup Girl being nominated for the Hugo (and then winning, but its winning was a foregone conclusion once it was nominated; the Hugo electorate is not particularly volatile). That was all one sentence. The couchwarming party was even better, though--many wonderful geeks of various stripes, good food, good fun (and also fanvids, because would it be a couchwarming party without fanvids? no, it would not). *waves to party people*

Took the very last BART back with

anatsuno and then did shell out for a taxi from the BART stop to my house--at the advice of one of my fellow party-goers, I think I'm going to start using the paid 24-hour bike parking next to the station for when I come back late from the city. It is a practice I can live with on multiple axes, anyway.

And now I must go translate things. Maybe shower first.

If anyone is interested in attending (chronological order)

# a great glass pumpkin patch

# gamelan

# story time with Laurie King

# Clinic (the band)

# story time with Gene Yang

# kabuki

# kabuki interpretation of the Chevalier d'Eon

# Britten's Albert Herring

let me know! I am interested too.

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It's a magical world

Go Giants

Malinda Lo, Adaptation

California with N

Swanning around SF with E and E

(More on) Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

Think different. (If Time has a heart…)

[bay area] Houdini?

Cymbeline, in the Presidio.

Bay to Breakers 2011

Late Eclipses.

FOGcon!

We won! No, I mean the Giants.

43,000 baseball fans can't be wrong

mountains beyond mountains

I promised some content; here it is.

& on that last October day the truth shall set us free

Bay Area things

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May 2013

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