Do four things make a post?
The entire Liaden series is now available on audiobook via Audible -- all fifteen books worth so far.
Yesterday the Hugo Awards were presented at World Con. As usual I settled down to watch it through the livetweets. They'd also set up a Ustream video feed, so you could actually see the ceremony and hear all the speeches, rather than just an impersonal list of winners. I liked seeing the winners, especially all the women. Besty Wollheim had been an editor for 37 years and had never been nominated or won a Hugo. Unfortunately they'd included clips for the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form with two shows you may have heard of -- Community and Doctor Who. Just as Neil Gaiman was giving his victory speech, a notice that the feed had cut "for violation of terms of service" went up. All of us stared at the screen in disbelief. Some of us tweeted and vented. (I'm still boggling that my version got retweeted by none other than Neil himself -- oops?) Chicon claims they cleared everything, but maybe it didn't include Internet airings? Ustream tried to restore things to no avail and then claimed it was a trigger happy bot that did the damage. So we didn't get to see the big awards at the end either. Imagine watching the Oscars and having the feed yanked before the Best Actor/Actress/Picture awards? I would have loved to hear Jo Walton's "I'm so sorry George" comment when she beat out George RR Martin for Best Novel, but maybe I amuse easily.
Accessibility issues at WorldCon: Stories like that make me realize the differences between the smaller cons vs some of massive ones. MediaWest could never have gotten away with the "fake" track thing without someone raising hell and there were plenty of scooters/wheelchairs when I last attended. But the comments remind me also access means different things for different people.
All this probably didn't help my mood reading Michael Swanwick's two stories set in a "Ruritanian fantasy" in a fractured Europe that never was with magic and wizards and intrigue. That all sounded like quite my thing, until I finished both stories and realized not only did neither pass the Bechdel test remotely, but it had the disturbing pattern of killing off the female characters. (Of the four introduced, only one survived to the end and she was a minor character.) As much as I like the universe, I realized I was much more interested in how the Queen came to commission dresses from an obscure Russian dressmaker than any intrigue or manpain involving the two main male characters.
Yesterday the Hugo Awards were presented at World Con. As usual I settled down to watch it through the livetweets. They'd also set up a Ustream video feed, so you could actually see the ceremony and hear all the speeches, rather than just an impersonal list of winners. I liked seeing the winners, especially all the women. Besty Wollheim had been an editor for 37 years and had never been nominated or won a Hugo. Unfortunately they'd included clips for the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form with two shows you may have heard of -- Community and Doctor Who. Just as Neil Gaiman was giving his victory speech, a notice that the feed had cut "for violation of terms of service" went up. All of us stared at the screen in disbelief. Some of us tweeted and vented. (I'm still boggling that my version got retweeted by none other than Neil himself -- oops?) Chicon claims they cleared everything, but maybe it didn't include Internet airings? Ustream tried to restore things to no avail and then claimed it was a trigger happy bot that did the damage. So we didn't get to see the big awards at the end either. Imagine watching the Oscars and having the feed yanked before the Best Actor/Actress/Picture awards? I would have loved to hear Jo Walton's "I'm so sorry George" comment when she beat out George RR Martin for Best Novel, but maybe I amuse easily.
Accessibility issues at WorldCon: Stories like that make me realize the differences between the smaller cons vs some of massive ones. MediaWest could never have gotten away with the "fake" track thing without someone raising hell and there were plenty of scooters/wheelchairs when I last attended. But the comments remind me also access means different things for different people.
All this probably didn't help my mood reading Michael Swanwick's two stories set in a "Ruritanian fantasy" in a fractured Europe that never was with magic and wizards and intrigue. That all sounded like quite my thing, until I finished both stories and realized not only did neither pass the Bechdel test remotely, but it had the disturbing pattern of killing off the female characters. (Of the four introduced, only one survived to the end and she was a minor character.) As much as I like the universe, I realized I was much more interested in how the Queen came to commission dresses from an obscure Russian dressmaker than any intrigue or manpain involving the two main male characters.