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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Sunday, July 12th, 2009 |
secritcrush
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12:17p |
The Ego Google meets Babelfish
So a long time ago I signed up for google alerts and while I mostly ignore them as I never use my gmail account, I needed to pop over there this morning and saw an alert for something in Hungarian. It was a review of the Escape Pod production of Elvis in the Attic, so I ran it through Google translate. ( I'm not really sure what they thought )Oh and on another note - what do you all do when someone has republished one of your stories? (It's attributed and was already on the net, so I mostly can't be assed to do something about it.) Do you care? |
nwhyte
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1:11p |
July Books 16) Downtime, by Marc Platt
Some time ago I watched the Doctor Who spinoff video Downtime, written by Marc Platt and directed by Christopher Barry, which unites the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Victoria Waterfield and the Yeti. Platt's extended novelisation, published as one of the Virgin Missing Adventures, is much better, with lots more background of Victoria's life after leaving the Tardis and of the Brigadier's later experiences; it also includes K9 and a young Captain Bambera. It even has some photos taken from the video, so you can pretend it was better than it was. And of course, being on paper rather than on screen, the effects can be as good as Marc Platt's words make them, and Peter Silverleaf's dismally poor acting is no longer a problem. It's still a somewhat confusing story, but it is well enough told, and apart from the many moments of continuity joy it also has interesting seeds of the later Sarah Jane audio and TV stories. So I think I can generally recommend it to Who fans. I was able to get it for £2.70 on eBay, so it's not as difficult to find as some Who books are.  |
selenak
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11:38a |
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communicator
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10:28a |
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2666 is a massive novel, and it's translated from Spanish. I think it's worth the commitment of time and attention, and I haven't read any reviews from any of my friends. Hopefully, this overview will let you judge if it's the type of thing for you. 2666 is about 900 pages long. Bolaño died as he was finishing it. He left instructions for his heirs to release it as five novels over five years, to maximise income, because he wouldn't be there to provide for them. Instead they have published it according to its original conception - as one huge novel, divided into five semi-autonomous parts. One advantage of this is that you can tackle each sub-novel as a smaller commitment than taking on the whole. Though, alas for this tactic, the first novel is probably the least accessible. The central theme of the novel is the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora, which is based on real-life Ciudad Juarez in Chihuaha. I was already interested in Juarez, because it is the centre of a real-life wave of misogynist murders, in which hundreds of women and little girls have been tortured and killed and dumped in vacant lots and in the desert. Possibly by the most prolific serial killer ever, and possibly as part of an organised operation by porn cartels, or by sex tourists. The book is compassionate and complex. It values all people, and it is written as such with interlocking lives, in a range of different literary forms. It's is also quite surreal and mystical. ( the five internal novels ) |
communicator
|
9:43a |
What I read on my holidays
I had a very good time in Brittany. It was bright and sunny and also windy so that it didn't get too hot. I had a good time with Howard, walking for miles and eating seafood. We went to a lot of places: The Silver River in Huelgoat, Quimper, Yeun Elez, Roche point, the Glenan Islands, and multiple visits to Bar Nautilus, my favourite. I didn't miss the children too much. My daughter is on her way home today - probably just got off the trans-Siberian railway at Moscow, and I'll meet her at the airport this evening. I slept a lot - about twelve hours every day - and that's had a big effect on me. I gave up coffee altogether, and I think that's done me good. But because of sleeping and walking on the dunes and beaches with Howard I have read much less than I usually do on holiday. I've read one book and listened to two on audio, and I haven't finished any of them. I can't believe it. This never happens to me on holiday. What I read: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. This is a brilliant massive novel, which I will do a separate post on. Gifts by Ursula Le Guin (on audio) - A children's fantasy book, about feudal mountain people with supernatural destructive powers. It's very short - six hours unabridged - and I listened to most of it on the drive back from Plymouth last night. As always, well written, humane, engaging. Packs a lot into a small compass. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman (on audio) - This is a history of 14th century Europe which is an attempt to get inside what it felt like to be a person in those days. It's quite a well known book, written in the seventies. I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in that sort of thing. |
nwhyte
|
7:40a |
July Books 15) So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy
This anthology, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, pulls together 20 short stories by writers of colour, all exploring different aspects of the colonisation experience through an sfnal lens. They are all very good. I found I had to read most of them very slowly to let the language settle into my brain; I think for that reason my attention lingered a bit more on the stories by Vandana Singh, Maya Khankoje and Tobias Buckell which made slightly fewer demands on me. This is a great anthology. It was published in 2004. The Hugo Short Story shortlist for 2005, for which most of these would have been eligible, was of particularly poor quality (as I said at the time), and even the least impressive from the Hopkinson/Mehan anthology (I'll identify it as devorah major's "Trade Winds") is a far better story than the Hugo winner (Resnick's "Travels With My Cats"). None of the stories from So Long Been Dreaming got the 11 votes necessary to be recorded on the long list, let alone the 18 needed for the short list. It surely cannot be true that only ten (or fewer) Worldcon members had read So Long Been Dreaming before the nominations deadline? Something is wrong, or at least was wrong in 2005; this year things seem to have improved. |
| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
bexxa
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7:51p |
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iainjclark
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10:50p |
Le Film
My film watching in the year to date can be found on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 52filmchallenge here. Only 13 to date and I don't think we'll be doing a lot of film watching in the near future by all accounts! I'm quite keen to see Moon, but we're under no illusions about how much spare time we're likely to have... |
nwhyte
|
10:30p |
July Books 14) Queen Elizabeth I, by J.E. Neale
Alas, I was thoroughly spoiled for this by reading David Starkey and Alison Weir on the same subject last year. Though irritated by the writing style I kept hoping that at least I would learn something new; but when I had finished the first quarter of the book without finding anything that had not been covered better by either Starkey or Weir, I decided not to bother with any more. |
bexxa
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4:25p |
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ninebelow
|
7:31p |
This Year's Reading
#33 Saga by Conor Kostick Fantasies of agency are common but they are particularly common in SF and in YA SF even more so. This is not necessarily a good thing. I really enjoyed Epic, Kostick's previous novel, but this fails to repeat the trick. Chiefly this is because although both novels deal with groups of teens overthrowing a malign political authority in this case they only succeed because two of them happen to handily have superhero powers. It is also ineptly structured and less original in its setting: it shows a heavy debt to Scott Westerfield's Pretties series and anticipates Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. #34 Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry Another, more conventional fantasy of agency: Joe Ledger is the world's greatest cop, soldier and martial artist. When Big Pharma and Al Queda unite to unleash a zombie plague on the world, who ya gonna call? Utter tosh, obviously. Cheers to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) grahamsleight for keeping me up to date on trashy holiday reads though. |
james_nicoll
|
2:23p |
Aaaaahhhhh
Why did I "just glance" at Darths & Droids? |
saxonb
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7:23p |
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nwhyte
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7:19p |
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kate_nepveu
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1:16p |
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coffeeandink
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9:41a |
Readercon: Friday
Or not Readercon Friday, mostly. I got in too late for most of the programming, so ![[info]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) veejane took me out for Vietnamese food. I had these yummy glutinous steamed rolls with little crispy vegetable bits inside and grilled pork and scallions on top and then on the way to the car I stopped off at a Chinese bakery so I could get red bean cakes because I love them. Registration was closed when we got to the hotel, so we sat in the lobby and talked with kate_nepveu and ckd and ktempest and grahamsleight and a woman whose name I forget, and then later on oracne. (It is possible that our fond reminscences of 80s cartoons and ktempest's detailed recollection of 80s boyband lyrics have scarred Graham for life.) We stayed for Meet the Prose, where I braved the crowds to look for rushthatspeaks. Chatted for a while and then was overwhelmed by PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE and left. Veejane and I were going to get alcohol, because it's a con, even if we had resorted to a con of two, and also I was excited by the prospect of cider options broader than Woodchuck or Magner's or often, sadly, just Woodchuck (oh, Massachusetts!), but we could not find an open liquor store (oh, Massachusetts). The Readercon hotel charges for wireless access. I am not impressed. This entry was originally posted at http://coffeeandink.dreamwidth.org/1020564.html. Please comment there using OpenID. |
kate_nepveu
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9:58a |
SteelyKid at 11 months
SteelyKid was 11 months on Tuesday. I know I just did a development post for her but I figure I should start erring on the side of more posts.
( short update ) |
selenak
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9:33a |
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nwhyte
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8:57a |
The Torchwood debate
I cannot recall any tv show that I have watched generating as much polarisation as this week's Torchwood. (Of course, I am slow at these things, and watched the later Buffy and mid-period West Wing only a couple of years after first broadcast.) To generalise brutally, my impression is that a majority of the fanfic side of fandom was appalled, while the more literary sf side was generally fascinated, with plenty of exceptions on both sides. To summarise reaction from my f-list (a number of these posts are locked, so you'll have to take my word for it): ( links )( What I thought )( Is that the end? )Edited to add: For more reactions see here. |
james_nicoll
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12:09a |
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| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
james_nicoll
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11:58p |
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james_nicoll
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11:43p |
Sad
When did Die Hard start looking like Sledge Hammer? |
bexxa
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10:39p |
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james_nicoll
|
5:45p |
CBC asks for help
Who was the little girl in this interview?"Would you like to go to the moon?" CBC reporter Walt Lacosta asks a young girl in this charming 1969 interview.
"Yes," she responds without hesitation.
When questioned if she thinks she'll ever make it there, the young girl smiles and responds with a simple "no."
"Why not?" Lacosta asks.
"Because I'm not a boy," she says says shyly but definitively.Nicked from dewline |
nwhyte
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10:03p |
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