We won! No, I mean the Giants.

[starlady]

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. 

Comments

[royalarchivist]

My wife and I are coming to your neck of the woods this weekend!! We're glad the Giants won the Series because it means the city will be in a good mood for our first ever visit. Also: congrats on the win! XD

Cat Valente's post is completely awesome. I want to love steampunk but it just gets too much wrong for me to fully embrace it. Like the lack of "punk" in it at all. :(

Fiction Alley should have taken its case to Kickstarter, not Pepsi Refresh. Tsk. I hope they don't win.

[starlady]

Hah! Well, technically speaking I am across the Bay, but that's close enough for most purposes, particularly the World Series. Just make sure you bring a jacket of some sort, it's always colder in San Francisco than it is anywhere else in the Bay. (And everyone is in a really good mood, it's awesome.) I do love the city quite a lot already.

Yeah, I agree. Steampunk is very shiny, aesthetically and literally, but it hasn't really taken China Mîeville's critiques of fantasy to heart--it is still up there in the clouds with the aristocrats, and it should be down in the mud with the proletariat. And the steampunk I've written has this problem too.

[royalarchivist]

Ah, well, close enough is good too! :D (We'll definitely have jackets with us, since we're coming from Seattle, land of layer-wearing). I'm glad you love the city; it would be terrible to move to a new city and hate it. :\

My steampunk stories suffer the same problems, even when I focus on middle class people (who spend more time with aristocrats than the masses... *sigh*). Michael Moorcock coined the term "steam opera," which is more appropriate in at least 99% of the "steampunk" I've read, seen, or experienced.

I'm unfamiliar with China Mîeville's critiques of fantasy. Do you have a link? I don't like his New Crobuzon works, but I simply adore Un Lun Dun and am interested in his opinions on fantasy. :)

[starlady]

Well, I think the New Crobuzon books are in some sense his most pointed attempts to put his critiques into action, bringing fantasy out of the aristocratic, the premodern, the countryside into the proletarian, the modern, the urban. But you can see it in Un Lun Dun, with its damn-the-quest-narrative and elevation of the sidekick to protagonist status; it's subtler in The City and the City, I think, and I've only just started Kraken. But this old interview gets in to some of it, and there's some others in the references on his Wikipedia page.

[royalarchivist]

Thank you for the link! It was a great read. :)

In fairness to Mîeville, my inability to get into his Bas Lag books has nothing to do with his writing or the books themselves. I carry a lot of baggage with them that makes me negatively predisposed to them.

Un Lun Dun tells me that I love his writing and ideas, though. :)

[starlady]

Well, he's writing more books--Embassytown comes out in the spring--so at least there'll be more non-Bas Lag things for you to read. :)

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

And now to class, and then to read about the Sino-Soviet split.

Ooh. Back in like sophomore year of undergrad, I read more about the nuances and actual political machinations of that than anyone in sophomore-year undergrad has any reason to.

...my basic reaction then being 'those ungrateful bastards.'

Of course now, I remember almost nothing other than that, yeah, the split happened...and a decade or so later, quite a few people in the Soviet Union were absolutely convinced that the next Big One would actually be against China, not the West.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)