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Jul. 14th, 2025 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeI should be on, but if I'm not, it's because we've lost power or had to evacuate due to lots of rain. It should be fine looking at the radar! ETA: looking good, I'll be on!
Hey all, if you'd like to join the crafting hangout, it is tonight from 6-8pm ET!
Hey all, if you'd like to join the crafting hangout, it is tonight from 6-8pm ET!
Video encouraged but not required!
Topic: Crafting Hangout
Time: Mondays 6:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 973 2674 2763
(no subject)
Jul. 14th, 2025 01:16 pmunicorndukeevery week I think I'm not going to work as hard because we're caught up and yet. I'm tired. one of our teenage employees that we're training up to do more complicated and involved work called out because he pulled his back (not working), no idea when he'll be working again.
and then it rained 1.6 inches in an hour and a half overnight. might as well not have even spread the fertilizer. I'm sure it's all gone now. thank goodness for my dad, who was up late and pulled all the pumps and hoses out of the creek. they would have all been gone if he hadn't. thankfully, we've got enough grassy areas, perennial plantings with grass aisles and small fields that erosion isn't a huge problem with heavy rainfall. it only becomes an issue if the creek goes over the bank, which it hasn't yet. another storm is approaching now though :/
this was at 5:30am this morning. normally the water is 15 feet below the bridge. it has gone down since then
left a message for insurance stuff, we'll see. no petting strange dogs right now.
I have ideas for making food but no energy to do it on my day off. current plans: potato and chickpea curry hand pies with rice and pork in curry sauce (I bought a jar even). hazelnut cookies. might take a nap instead. maybe I should try and do some of this a little at a time sitting down. I miss baking so much. I think part of this is that I really enjoy farm work and getting stuff done around the farm. It's extremely satisfying and I'm full of energy. And yet, I am so tired on my days off. I don't really understand it much. I think I also am pretty sore from the tractor, they didn't build things for comfort in the 40s. the backrest broke off yesterday too, so there was only a metal bar to rest against.
nap it is
I wasn't so tired until yesterday, when I spent all afternoon and evening until 8:30pm spreading fertilizer with the cultivating tractor. Wanted to get it all spread before it rained so it would dissolve into the soil. ate lunch at 2pm while on the tractor. It's an international 140, extremely cool gas tractor. We got the fertilizer spreader working and I spread 450 lbs of fertilizer over 6.5 acres banded on the pumpkin rows. It took me six hours due to drive time.
and then it rained 1.6 inches in an hour and a half overnight. might as well not have even spread the fertilizer. I'm sure it's all gone now. thank goodness for my dad, who was up late and pulled all the pumps and hoses out of the creek. they would have all been gone if he hadn't. thankfully, we've got enough grassy areas, perennial plantings with grass aisles and small fields that erosion isn't a huge problem with heavy rainfall. it only becomes an issue if the creek goes over the bank, which it hasn't yet. another storm is approaching now though :/
this was at 5:30am this morning. normally the water is 15 feet below the bridge. it has gone down since then
left a message for insurance stuff, we'll see. no petting strange dogs right now.
I have ideas for making food but no energy to do it on my day off. current plans: potato and chickpea curry hand pies with rice and pork in curry sauce (I bought a jar even). hazelnut cookies. might take a nap instead. maybe I should try and do some of this a little at a time sitting down. I miss baking so much. I think part of this is that I really enjoy farm work and getting stuff done around the farm. It's extremely satisfying and I'm full of energy. And yet, I am so tired on my days off. I don't really understand it much. I think I also am pretty sore from the tractor, they didn't build things for comfort in the 40s. the backrest broke off yesterday too, so there was only a metal bar to rest against.
nap it is
My Readercon Schedule!
Jul. 14th, 2025 11:48 amravenna_c_tanWhew! I’ll be making my Guest of Honor run at Readercon this coming weekend in Burlington, MA! It’s me and P. Djeli Clark in the GoH seats, with legions of super-smart sf/f writers and editors on the program, including Max Gladstone, Rob Cameron, Catherine Lundoff, John Chu, Laura Antoniou, Erin Roberts, Sarah Pinsker, Shariann Lewitt and many many more.
As expected, my schedule will be PACKED. Of note: I added a second autographing slot because of concerns that the first one happens soooo early. I will not have a table selling books: you can get them in the bookshop from Sally at Larry Smith Booksellers and some will also be on the Broad Universe table.
And yes, there will be some copies of the new shiny beautiful Magic University Collectors Edition hardcover. (And if you ordered a copy via Kickstarter, check your email for an update about picking up the book in person if you want to! Or just come to a party!)
FRIDAY
2:00 PM Bisexuals in Science Fiction: Still Hip After All These Years?
3:00 PM Autograph Session #1
4:00 PM Cecilia Tan GOH Reading
7:00 PM Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
9:00 PM Levels of Interiority (in Narrative)
SATURDAY
12:00 Noon The Works of Cecilia Tan (I’m not on this, I’ll just be listening!)
1:00 PM Divination in the Writing Process
4:00 PM Guest of Honor Interview: Cecilia Tan by Charlie Jane Anders
6:00 PM Erotica, Horror, and the Fear of Visceral Fiction
9:00 PM Patrons & Kickstarter Supporters Get-Together
SUNDAY
12:00 PM Noon Beyond the Bio: Weird Jobs & the Worlds They Inspired
1:00 PM Harry Potter and the Undeath of the Author
2:00 PM Autographing Session #2
Mirrored from Cecilia Tan.
Readercon 2025
Jul. 14th, 2025 11:00 amoracneI’ll be at Readercon 34 this weekend after spending most of the last couple of weeks doing massive re-reads.
If you’ll be there, please feel free to stop and say hello! My schedule is below.
If you’ll be there, please feel free to stop and say hello! My schedule is below.
The Works of P. Djèlí Clark
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Andrea Hairston [moderator]; Leon Perniciaro; Rob Cameron; Tom Doyle; Victoria Janssen
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!
The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT
Storm Humbert [moderator]; Anne E.G. Nydam; Charles Allison; Ellen Kushner; Victoria Janssen
Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.
Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Cecilia Tan; Jedediah Berry; Sarah Smith; Steven Popkes
It’s becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.
Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen
Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
The Works of Cecilia Tan
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Charlie Jane Anders; Laura Antoniou; Cecilia Tan (i)
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov’s, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America’s other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia’s many talents and accomplishments.
Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
Victoria Janssen [moderator]; Alexander Jablokov; J.M. Sidorova; Laurence Raphael Brothers; Steven Popkes
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
Kate Nepveu [moderator]; Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Laura Antoniou; Victoria Janssen
In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how “2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides.” Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
Sunshine Revival Challenge #4
Jul. 13th, 2025 10:25 ampauraque![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sunshine_revival's next challenge is:Fun HouseBirds always make me smile, so let's do a bird list! To narrow it down a bit, I'll talk about a few of the birds I only got to know after I left San Francisco and moved to New England. The order is going to be arbitrary because of course all birds are equally fantastic, but I'll play along with the top 10 theme.
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.
Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.
( Top Ten New England Birds [photo heavy] )
arg
Jul. 13th, 2025 07:00 amunicorndukeBack in May, I picked out my health insurance provider. I looked over the plans, I looked up some doctors and such in my area, saw both plans had doctors in my area and picked out the health provider that seemed better with coverage.
I just went to book a dentist appointment and now there's no one in the area taking that health insurance??? I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I missed something? I looked it all up on the website and everything, I don't really understand. unless because it was through the state portal that it did something weird to their search website? I don't know.
now I guess I need to see if I can change health insurance providers. what the heck
eta: I think I don't have health insurance right now, fuck. the provider called me a couple times in june and I was so busy. and I looked at the state portal and it says my application was denied. frick. guess I'll call tomorrow.
I just went to book a dentist appointment and now there's no one in the area taking that health insurance??? I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I missed something? I looked it all up on the website and everything, I don't really understand. unless because it was through the state portal that it did something weird to their search website? I don't know.
now I guess I need to see if I can change health insurance providers. what the heck
eta: I think I don't have health insurance right now, fuck. the provider called me a couple times in june and I was so busy. and I looked at the state portal and it says my application was denied. frick. guess I'll call tomorrow.
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (2006)
Jul. 11th, 2025 09:36 ampauraqueIn this first book of a hard SF trilogy, nanomaterials expert Wang Miao is recruited to help investigate the suicides of several prominent scientists. His inquiries lead him to a strange VR video game called Three Body, in which the player is challenged to solve the mystery of why the game's simulated world keeps falling victim to unpredictable changes in climate that cause its civilizations to inevitably collapse. Interwoven with the book's near-future narrative is a story of the past, in which an astrophysicist who lost everything in Mao's Cultural Revolution is assigned to a secret military base that she comes to realize is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. These two seemingly unrelated threads come together to reveal a multilayered conspiracy of world-ending stakes.
I had this on my TBR list for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it was about, and I think that worked out well for my experience of it. I never knew where it was going to go next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Liu has a flair for creating epic set pieces of jaw-dropping cinematic scope that nonetheless follow naturally from the speculative science. I consumed a lot of popular science media in the 2000s, specifically, so for me the science in this book felt... oddly nostalgic? Not that it's obsolete, necessarily, but the particular preoccupations of that era and what was cutting-edge are strongly represented here. It made me want to go read a Brian Greene book.
The translation by Ken Liu reads nicely and I appreciated the informative but not excessive footnotes helping with some points about Chinese culture and history. I love that they let him write an afterword about the translation process!
The book is definitely more interested in ideas than people, and it's particularly weak on female characters. I was not entirely surprised to hear that the Netflix adaptation makes some of the male characters women, including Wang Miao. (I guess it also changes the nationality of a lot of characters, which makes less sense to me since the Chinese setting seems crucial to the book's themes, but I haven't actually watched the adaptation so it's not for me to say how well it works.)
I do plan to continue with the trilogy, though I have a suspicion that it might turn out to be too pessimistic in its outlook on the future for my taste? But I guess it depends on where the story ends up. My library hold on the second book just came in.
I had this on my TBR list for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it was about, and I think that worked out well for my experience of it. I never knew where it was going to go next, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Liu has a flair for creating epic set pieces of jaw-dropping cinematic scope that nonetheless follow naturally from the speculative science. I consumed a lot of popular science media in the 2000s, specifically, so for me the science in this book felt... oddly nostalgic? Not that it's obsolete, necessarily, but the particular preoccupations of that era and what was cutting-edge are strongly represented here. It made me want to go read a Brian Greene book.
The translation by Ken Liu reads nicely and I appreciated the informative but not excessive footnotes helping with some points about Chinese culture and history. I love that they let him write an afterword about the translation process!
The book is definitely more interested in ideas than people, and it's particularly weak on female characters. I was not entirely surprised to hear that the Netflix adaptation makes some of the male characters women, including Wang Miao. (I guess it also changes the nationality of a lot of characters, which makes less sense to me since the Chinese setting seems crucial to the book's themes, but I haven't actually watched the adaptation so it's not for me to say how well it works.)
I do plan to continue with the trilogy, though I have a suspicion that it might turn out to be too pessimistic in its outlook on the future for my taste? But I guess it depends on where the story ends up. My library hold on the second book just came in.
The Friday Five for 11 July 2025
Jul. 11th, 2025 12:59 amanais_pf posting in thefridayfiveThis week's questions were suggested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silent_r_infork.
1. What was the most sick that you've ever been?
2. What disease are you afraid of getting?
3. Are you a big baby when it comes to taking medicine/shots for your illnesses?
4. Is going to the doctor really THAT bad?
5. Would you have the flu twice a month if you were paid $1,000 for having it?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
silent_r_infork. 1. What was the most sick that you've ever been?
2. What disease are you afraid of getting?
3. Are you a big baby when it comes to taking medicine/shots for your illnesses?
4. Is going to the doctor really THAT bad?
5. Would you have the flu twice a month if you were paid $1,000 for having it?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
delphiFandom 50 #23
Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia
Description:
( Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.
I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.
Untitled Daisuke and Monty by Julia Stark
Fandom: Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho!
Relationship: Daisuke Bucklesby/Monty LaMontgomery
Medium: Art
Length: 1 piece
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, then and now, clothing, nostalgia
Description:
Two full-colour images of Daisuke and Monty, one in the present and one in flashback to their younger days. The first is fully saturated and features the two walking close together with Monty in the lead. Daisuke's hat is tipped forward over his eyes as he looks down with a faint smile and puts away his flask. Monty is watching him over his shoulder, likewise smiling and seemingly mid-conversation with him. Above them, larger and more faded out, is a memory of them sitting together decades ago, Daisuke speaking while Monty watches him with soft-eyed attention.
( Very Minor Spoilers for Episode 6 )
This piece is just so sweet. The whole "getting the band back together" element of Cloudward, Ho! has been right up my alley, and I like that their separation was more about losing something that was holding them together rather than a big falling-out that created any ill will. It's made for a great story so far about some highly competent older characters reuniting warmly with old friends and working well together because of their shared history.
I love how the artist has captured this. The flashback looms large over the two men, creating a sense of those past conversations fuelling their present ease with each other and shared direction. It spot-on conveys Monty's wonderful attentiveness to people and suggests a lot in imagining the usually laconic Daisuke so engaged in talking to him. As someone who loves the aesthetics of this season, I'm also very much here for the details in their outfits and the little ways they've changed over the years.
