Things Deep and Shallow

Spring growth in the bookpile

2015-10-28T08:01:07Z

Moar booksss!

Finally finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, just in time for various parcels to arrive...

Excited about quite a few of these (well, all of them, but I've been waiting for some to be published):--

Probably first pick from the pile is Ancillary Mercy, third of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. I want to see how things end up for Breq.

The two Patrick Weekes books are sequels to The Palace Job from the previous bookpile, which was honestly the closest novel I've read to replicate the delight of a good caper/heist movie (ie full of twists, turns, double-crosses, plans going to shit, making new plans up on the fly, competence porn, etc etc and also with a talking warhammer and a unicorn).

And it's always a joy to have a new Max Gladstone book. The titles indicate their place in the chronology of the Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead; Two Serpents Rise; Full Fathom Five), so this one actually takes place before the other novels (unless we eventually go into negative numbers?).

Anything you're looking forward to, or reading right now?

Media Mondays: too much book

2015-08-24T10:28:59Z

So I've just started reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell because I keep seeing gifs of the BBC miniseries across my tumblr dash, and while I'm not exactly spoiler-averse I do like to keep *some* surprises/want to read before watching...

The thing is a goddamned brick. I can't take it anywhere, and it's too fat to comfortably hold in my hands, so I read it lying flat on sofa or bed or floor and curse the fact I got it before ereaders were really a thing. (Yes, this has been sitting on my To Read ~~pile~~ ~~shelf~~ bookcase for almost a decade. Hush!)

But, uh. Still reading, despite its unwieldy mortal form. That's gotta say something for the prose, yes?

The Reading Pile sprouts in autumn

2015-04-26T23:40:23Z

SO. I finally moved into my new place a month ago, and have been unpacking and moving things around and generally settling in.

There are many small rituals that go into making a new space feel like home (first cup of coffee made, first meal cooked, first night's sleep in it, planting things), but now I've come to the best one: buying new books!

I have been So Good(-ish) these past months during selling and moving, because more books were just one more thing that would have to be packed and stored and unpacked.

And now? Booksss, precious!

Ave atque vale, Pterry

2015-03-13T11:46:57Z

Ah hell, Terry Pratchett died. One of the wisest, wittiest, most clear-sighted writers I ever read.

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

The End.
— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) March 12, 2015

Farewell, and thank you.

And another year comes around

2014-12-31T13:51:04Z

I've just come in from the dark, where I've been drinking a piña colada and staring up at the stars in the remarkable peace of the countryside. For all that my astronomical knowledge is hazy (Southern Cross, Probably Venus, False Southern Cross, ...Other Southern Cross?, Other Other Southern Cross, No Wait The Real Southern Cross What The Hell Were The Others, Too Many Stars!, Etc), the new year looks pretty nice from here.

Happy 2015! May the year ahead be brightened by unexpected moments of delight and lasting contentment. Internet hugs to you all.

Folklore Fridays: Ah yes, the vampire's old enemy: a stone

2014-11-28T09:44:05Z

There's a zillion bits of weird folkore surrounding the creation and disposal of vampires (of which, yes, the sinister occurance of vampire watermelons are my favourite). But ask me for citations, and I draw a blank because "I read it several years ago across several sources including a 19th-century collection of vampire folklore, no I don't remember the author (probably Montague Summers?)" doesn't really cut it academically. Which is why it's really neat when new research of actual "vampire burials" hits the science magazines.

The article is Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland, and has two photos of burials using a sickle or stone to stop the body from rising again, plus much tasty data and references. The authors were testing the hypothesis that the vampire burials in a cemetery in Poland were of outsiders, but found instead that they were local people:

"These data indicate that those targeted for apotropaic practices were not migrants to the region, but instead, represented local individuals whose social identity or manner of death marked them with suspicion in some other way. Cholera epidemics that swept across much of Eastern Europe during the 17th century may provide one alternate explanation as to the reason behind these apotropaic mortuary customs, as the first person to die from an infectious disease outbreak was presumed more likely to return from the dead as a vampire."

(And because it's that time of year in the library and proper citations are our friend...
Gregoricka, L.A., Betsinger, T.K., Scott, A.B., & Polcyn, M. (2014). Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland. PLoS ONE 9(11): e113564. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0113564)

'Afterparty' in Volume 12.2 of The Review of Australian Fiction

2014-10-30T22:23:56Z

The latest issue of the Review of Australian Fiction just went live with my short story 'Afterparty', a tale of resurrections, resolutions, parties, crushes, last dances, first kisses, ghosts, gods, magic and mayhem on that most spectacular of nights, New Year's Eve in Sydney. I'm thrilled to be sharing a table of contents with Clarion South buddy Jason Fischer, who has written 'Percy's War', a World War I story where one German-Australian soldier finds his battle on a very different front.

You can buy an ebook of the issue at the link above, or a get a subscription for 6 issues/3 months. RAF publishes two stories every two weeks, and has published some excellent writers in previous issues.

Anyway, hope you enjoy undead gorgons and water sprites with unspoken crushes on them.

Whatever Wednesdays: Delia's gone, but I'm settling the score

2014-10-14T23:13:33Z

Song of the day: The Body Electric, by Hurray for the Riff Raff. A bluesy-folk response to all those murder ballads where women are killed.

“I also feel like, first and foremost, I have this feminist lens that I see the world in. And I feel like folk music is so great because it’s a conversation throughout the generations. So I thought it was fairly important for someone like myself to add my voice into these old songs. and also just give these characters a voice, give Delia a voice. [...] And just give these women characters their humanity back." [x]

Whatever Wednesdays: om nom nom

2014-09-17T12:08:09Z

Two things that have tided me over this week:

1/ A more-ish recipe for macaroni and cheese that uses an egg/cheddar/cottage cheese/sour cream mix instead of a bechamel sauce and is thus 500% times less bothersome to clean up. Good hot and cold and reheated. (The recipe as stated serves eight, which I... didn't notice until I ran out of dish to bake it in. Many was the meal of leftovers, and I didn't regret it once.)

2/ Equal parts soy and rice wine vinegar plus a drizzle of sesame oil, over pretty much any salad or vegetable. Had it over grated carrot, then regretted only making a snack-sized serving. The only dressing that has ever made me go back for more leafy salad. This is basically a simple dipping sauce for dumplings, repurposed to make other things delicious.

Folklore Fridays: it came to me in a dream

2014-09-05T00:28:11Z

A tale from the Solomon Islands gives the origin of the Baegu language as this:

One night a woman, Fala, dreamed of a new language, and when she woke up she could not remember her old language. She could only speak in the language of her dream.

(Source: Solomon Island Folktales from Malaita, collected and translated by Kay Bauman)

The story goes on to describe the founding of a village with her husband and the spread of their new language, but the dream-language stands out. Traumatic, world-altering Babel-fall crept across the borders of sleep and stole her tongue.

Whatever Wednesdays: music like a net across the desert

2014-09-03T01:29:23Z

I came across Sahel Sounds through a Kickstarter raising money to create the first Tuareg-language fiction film (a homage to rock film Purple Rain called Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai or... "Rain the Color of Blue with a little Red in it"). Sahel Sounds is an ongoing project by "guerilla ethnomusicologist" Christopher Kirkley to share field recordings and explore new models of cultural transmission taking place in contemporary West African music. Since at the time I was reading up how people were using mobile phones and other devices to access library materials and conduct their research, one part particularly caught my eye: the widespread use of mobile phones to carry and share music. Kirkley has compiled several albums, including Music From Saharan Cellphones.

"In much of West Africa, cellphones are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.
The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights -- music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They're also songs that tend towards this new world of self production -- Fruity Loops, home studios, synthesizers, and Autotune."

It strikes me as a very Gibson-era cyberpunk thing to have data being shared across a vast network of interpersonal connections and chance encounters, one Bluetooth transfer at a time. The web, embodied.

Media Mondays: the unfortunate state/fate of women in Known Space

2014-09-01T00:15:43Z

Recently read Larry Niven's Ringworld for the first time. Enjoyable enough as a sci-fi exploration novel, though the treatment of women (Teela Brown and Prill) is hella sexist in a way that made me want to rewrite great swaths of it. Yes, of course the logical deduction on learning that Halrloprillalar Hotrufan was one of three females among thirty-three men on her long-ago spaceship is that she was only there for the menfolk to have sex. Because apparently women wouldn't be scientists/engineers/navigators (?!?), and also the future hadn't invented the fleshlight. Or hands. Or homosexuality. Or friends with benefits, married couples who work together, polyamory, sexbots, or literally any other means of pleasurable sexytimes than bringing a prostitute along for those dreary interstellar journeys.

Even being off-stage doesn't spare the kzinti women from this weird pigeonholing - they are "nonsentient" and good only for breeding. (For all its faults, I did like Dean Ing's short story "Cathouse" in the first Man-Kzin Wars anthology, because it starred female kzin brought out of stasis from Kzinti prehistory. Even if they had been palace concubines, at least they were sharply intelligent proto-feminists who'd plotted the overthrow of the hypermasculine society which unfortunately won out.)

I don't know. It's a funny, myopic view of the future, but it's harder to laugh it off right now when I've just read through the ridiculous gamer backlash against Anita Sarkeesian's most recent Tropes vs Women In Video Games.

Try A New Thing In Spring

2014-08-30T23:10:06Z

The weather is changing, there's budburst and new leaves in my garden, and I'm sick of not posting and then having things build up and then not posting because the resultant post would be HUGE. So. Trying a new thing: Media Mondays, Whatever Wednesdays, Folklore Fridays.

Mondays is for things I've been reading or watching or listening to. The media decompression and recommendation zone.

Fridays is for bits of weird history and folklore that I come across. Could vary from tidbits to mini-essays.

Wednesday is for other things. Good old Miscellaneous. (Which should be on Mondays but NO YOU CAN'T HAVE TWO THINGS SCHEDULED FOR THE SAME DAY WHAT MADNESS IS THIS?)

There won't necessarily be a post on every Mon/Wed/Fri, but the idea is to have a space set aside for topics that come up regularly, that I either haven't been posting about because saving them up for a monthly wrap-up turns the task into an unwieldly hellthing (the Read/Watch list), or because it seems weird to ramble about household imps with no context.

Head above the waters

2014-03-18T10:35:51Z

"I suppose I should write a blog post again one day" is the new "I suppose I should whittle some furniture out of a tree again one day"
— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) March 16, 2014

Ahahaha whoops it's March.

Things have been both quiet and busy, because of work and also because I'm writing, which means even my media consumption is down. (The highlights: I *have* read some good books recently - The Other Tree by D.K. Mok; The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany; Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers.
I've read the first five issues of Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin's pay-what-you-want comic The Private Eye. It's sci-fi detective noir set in a future where privacy is a sacred right and everyone has secret identities...
I have the Veronica Mars movie queued up to watch.
Let us not speak of how far behind I am on every tv show ever.)

Also, something I should've mentioned a couple of months ago is that I have a story - Fimbulwinter - in the most recent issue of Lore. It's a small apocalypse story about a boy named Pyry, and the three other people left in his world.
And the wolves, of course. You can't forget the wolves.

And that will do for now.

Not a tortoise

2013-12-03T14:00:32Z

"The rangers say they will be bolting down their camera in the future."

Comic rec: 'Out of Skin' by Emily Carroll

2013-11-11T09:23:01Z

I really love Emily Carroll's drawing style and the gorgeous (and often intensely creepy) stories she tells (Anu-Anulan and Yir's Daughter, His Face All Red, The Prince and the Sea), so it is with a great and ghoulish delight that I share her latest haunting tale: Out of Skin.

Still aten't dead

2013-11-03T13:23:28Z

...despite my long absence. Livejournal may not be my daily home on the internet any more (that's been supplanted by tumblr and a more efficient rss feedreader), but if I ever leave for good you can be sure I'll make one last post.

There's any number of things to talk about, but why not start with the video that finally got me blogging again? Vsauce continues to unpack interesting questions in delightful vlogs, and this one's about the many ways that people disappear:

"It is not against the law to go missing under your own volition. You might have debts to pay or contracts to honour, but if you are an adult, the act of disappearing is not illegal in and of itself. You have the right to go missing. But believing that no one would miss you? That is ridiculous and unscientific - statistics would suggest otherwise. [...] There is a lot of information out there. There's even a word for it - infobesity. It takes a lifetime to even experience some of it. It's easy to think that everyone knows everything that you know. But every year more than one hundred million new people are born and not a single one of them is born knowing that they are made out of atoms, or that black holes are awesome. Someone needs to be there to tell them. To show them."

The world is full of neat stuff, and sometimes lj is the best place to point them out :).

Your ~Life Work~

2013-07-10T23:01:09Z

There are no shushing librarians, but I will probably never stop laughing at the first 55 seconds of this librarian vocational film from 1947. The delivery is just...precious. Like a robot trying to understand this human malady called "feelings". "Do they mean something to you? Are they your friends?"

(btw, if you get attached to books, a library is probably not for you)

Some things haven't changed ("I don't remember the author, or the title, but it was a blue book"), but some things really, really have. ("I'm starting a new project on radar. Could you compile a bibliography on the subject for me?" Hahaha no.)

"Terror is coming home to find that everything you own has been replaced with an exact copy"

2013-07-07T23:00:40Z

"Fear gives us life. Being afraid of the right things kept our ancestors alive. It makes sense to be afraid of poisonous insects or hungry tigers, but what about fear when there is no clear and obvious danger? For instance, a teddy bear with a full set of human teeth? Or a smile.jpg? There's something a little off about these images--too much mystery and strangeness. But no obvious threat the way there is with a gun or a falling rock, but yet they still incite fear because they are creepy. But why? What gives us the creeps? What causes something to be creepy?"

An interesting exploration of terror and what gives us the creeps.

Incidental music for the soul

2013-06-24T12:20:25Z

There's something incredibly relaxing about ambient coffee shop sounds, but I don't want to do my work in a coffee shop. This site, therefore, is a godsend.

I do believe that between coffitivity and RainyMood I can control the horizontal and the vertical. What a time to be alive.

;)

Weh

2013-06-06T13:56:21Z

That moment when you've got a bunch of websites open in tabs to respond to later, and you close Firefox...and there's a pop-up window still open. Goodbye, Restore Previous Session; I hardly knew ye.

(and reconstructing from history is haaard)

Story rec: Twitter API returning results that do not respect arrow of time.

2013-06-02T21:00:16Z

Listen: @timebot has come unstuck in time.

Vid rec: The Maker

2013-05-28T23:23:46Z

Here's a creepily beautiful short film called 'The Maker'.

What do you need to make a story? A character, a task, a ticking clock.
(Remember, children, always read the whole recipe before you start.)

Don't ask where the materials come from, or what will happen when they run out...

I kinda want to make a warren of them now. I've got practically all the raw materials to hand.

ETA must resist urge to fix bunny problems. Just...a simple three-step guide pinned to the wall would solve so much. Let me mend your stupid broken world. Give it to me!

Power fantasies rarely tackle the real hard work

2013-05-25T23:24:55Z

Wondermark breaks Batman:

"I want to dress in a bat costume and punch individual muggers" Alfred why are you going along with this?

Step 2: ???; Step 3: Profit!

2013-05-25T00:00:20Z

There's some interesting parallels between Amazon's recent bid to monetise fanfic (see Cleolinda and John Scalzi for a breakdown if you missed it) and the crowdsourced poster design for this year's Sydney Design Festival that the Powerhouse Museum ran and then very quickly pulled when it became apparent that in this case the crowd didn't like to be sourced.

Now, crowdsourcing can be great: from funding projects to crisis mapping in disaster areas, from correcting electronic text translation in digitised newspapers to working out the rules governing RNA folding mechanics, many hands make light work, drops of water turn the mill, et cetera.

But use crowdsourcing to sidestep a preexisting system of contract work and solicit work on spec that should by rights be created after the writer/designer has secured a contract? And pay a pittance for it?

Yeah, no wonder there's been backlash.