I posted some thoughts about playing Pandemic in a Facebook comment thread a year ago; when I came across that just now, I figured it was worth pulling those thoughts out into a post of their own. It’s possible for Pandemic to become essentially a solo game, with one experienced and/or pushy player telling everyone […]
Here’s the next Strange Horizons Flashback story: “How to Hide Your Heart,” by Deborah Coates A man who hunts monsters meets a woman who’s really good at driving. (Somewhat NSFW.) (Content warning for hints of bad things in character backstory.) (Published in 2008.) (5,300 words.) He’s a hunter. And the things he hunts live in […]
For the past couple years, I’ve been engaged in a project to get through my shelves of unread books. Some of them I’m reading, some I’m skimming, some I’m glancing at and immediately putting on the giveaway list. At this point, I’m down to fewer than 150 unread mass-market paperbacks. My progress has slowed considerably […]
I’ve been reading William Tenn stories, from NESFA Press’s 2001 volume Immodest Proposals: The Compete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1. I used to like Tenn’s work a lot, but these days I’m not a good audience for satire, even when I agree with it politically. I’m skimming the stories and mostly rolling my […]
Yesterday morning, I attended the Families Belong Together rally at San José City Hall. It was pretty good, although it took me a while to find a place to stand where I could hear the speakers. Came home afterward. (Traveled to and from via light rail; took a lot longer than driving, but (a) could […]
Some thoughts and notes about Harlan Ellison, in no particular order, on the occasion of his death. Content warning: I’m going to say some positive things about him as well as some critical things; if either of those will distress you, then you may not want to read this post right now. He was capable […]
One of the first things I thought of on learning that Harlan Ellison died this morning was the introduction he wrote to his 1988 short-story collection Angry Candy. It’s a powerful piece about the deaths of forty-plus people who he cared about and admired, over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1980s. […]
Lately I’ve been spending way too much time playing the iOS game Hole.io. I’ve reached the point where I can consistently score 200+ points, and frequently 400+, and often get first place in a round; a couple of times, I’ve reached max size. My highest score so far is 1,601 points. So I thought it […]
Here are some recurring themes and tropes that seem to me to be a lot more prominent than usual in this year’s Hugo-nominated fiction. (For some of these items, by “a lot more prominent” I just mean featured in two of the nominated works; but in those cases, I feel like even two is more […]
I had a hard time finding this info, so thought I would post it here. Say you have a .mobi file that you’ve legitimately obtained through some approach other than the Kindle Store. (Like the .mobi files in the Hugo Packet.) Say you want to read that file on your Kindle or in the Kindle […]
From Le Guin’s “Introduction to Planet of Exile” (intro written in 1977 or 1978; can now be found in The Language of the Night). Worth reading the whole piece, but here’s a bit of it: […] Planet of Exile was written in 1963–1964[…]. The book exhibits my early, “natural” (i.e., happily acculturated), unawakened, un-consciousness-raised way […]
I think I’ve now read nearly all of Joanna Russ’s published fiction. A couple of people who haven’t read her work have recently asked me for recommendations for starting points, so here’s an attempt to provide some. As with my Delany-starting-points post from last year, I’m dividing this into categories, depending on what you’re interested […]