Category: Geekitude

Help Spread The Word?

By:  TempestGeekitude

Pursuant to my last post–in addition to bidding again and again and again, if you could also help spread the word by posting about the Interfictions auction I would greatly appreciate it.  If everyone who reads me posts something, and then the people who read then post, and so on, we could take over the world :)

If you’d like some sort of picture thing to use on your sidebar or in your post or whatever, I’ve been making them here.  I’ll add more as more auctions go up and I come up with ideas, so scroll all the way to the bottom to see them all.

Shiny Shiny Shiny

By:  TempestNews

Because I was so involved in setting it up yesterday, I neglected to post here about the auction of jewelry based on Interfictions stories. From the press release:

Interstitial artists and admirers of Interfictions have come forward with some truly stunning pieces based on Interfictions stories by Matthew Cheney, Catherynne M. Valente, Jon Singer, Veronica Schanoes, and Colin Greenland. Participants include artists Elise Matthesen, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Mia Nutick, Kris McDermott, and many more.

And, most remarkably, some of the authors themselves have created unique pieces based on their own work! Keep an eye on IAFAuctions.com to see wearable interpretations of their own work by Interfictions authors Leslie What, Rachel Pollack, and K. Tempest Bradford.

I like that term: wearable interpretations Ellen Kushner came up with that!

So far a piece by JoSelle based on the Valente story and a piece by Sarah based on Cheney’s story are up. And today I posted a preview of stuff to come.

And yes, it’s true that I have something going up, too. I have been trying to come up with something for months. Months! But then I saw this gorgeous piece based on “Black Feather” (which is, can I just say, so amazing to see something beautiful that was inspired by something I did. So cool!) and was inspired myself. I don’t know if my idea will pan out, but here’s a sneak peek of the earrings I am making called “Inwood Hill”:

Work In Progress

I want to add one more chain, but I’m afraid of making it too heavy. But then I use pretty light materials on there — very light/hollow glass beads, coral, tiny Jasper beads that weigh very little. There will also be a black feather hidden in there somehow. What do you guys think?

SFWA: Overrun By 12-Year-Olds?

By:  TempestGeekitude

Good news this weekend, the SFWA election results are in and Andrew Burt is NOT the next president. That honor goes to Russell Davis, who had an overwhelming majority. Go Russell! I was also pleased to see my bud Mrs Robinette in there as Secretary. Maybe now she can sneak me in!

But while perusing the election results I saw something I did not expect. The write-ins get increasingly more silly and childish as you go down. For vice-president, someone wrote in Spiro Agnew. Now this is amongst several sensible write-ins like John Scalzi and Charles Stross, but then you get to this one for Treasurer: Orlando Bloom.

‘scuse?

Eastern Regional Director: Angelina Jolie and Nick Mamatas

What?

I’m willing to bet this is the doing of one person, but still. Nick Mamatas? What’s next, Donald Duck? Superman? It’s like a bit from a sitcom when someone is trying to get a petition signed. Dude.

But I suppose I should not be surprised. After all, some folks voted for Andrew Burt. I guess Orlando in the write-in space pales compared to that.

(Hmm… I think I may have just torpedoed my chance of being snuck into SFWA… ah well)

P.S. And now someone pointed me to this. *SMH*

Boring Website Stuff Made Exciting With Exclamation Points

By:  TempestGeekitude

Finally switched over to my new host. Finally got all of my data over to said new host. New host restored WordPress databases! Love new host to death so far. DNS propagation went smoothly, yay! Upgrade to WordPress 2.5 went smoothly, yay! The WP future post function now finally woks for the first time evar, yay, yay, yay! Put in a bunch of new plugins so I can pretend to be as awesome as Mary Robinette, yay! Completely forgot that the crossposter doesn’t work with WP 2.5, boo. So no one on LJ saw this post from yesterday, boo. This will be my first test of the upgrade, yay! My comments now have avatars, yay! I decided to upload my own avatars for that, so went with people of color from SF TV shows and movies. I think I got everyone from the TV shows I watch, and I have Will Smith + some Matrix people. But I need more! Suggestions? In the comments, yay! Which can now be threaded, yay! WordPress is awesome, yay!

4 Things Make A Post

By:  TempestGeekitude
  1. Thank you, everyone, for the birthday wishes. They made me smile on a day when I didn’t have much to smile about.
  2. Don’t forget to enter our contest to win a copy of Fangland!  I mean, damn, most of you are writers, you just know you could come up with some fun fanfiction based on some H G Wells or something.
  3. Over on SFBookswap, Jasmine is now going to include the total # of stories and the # of female-written stories for each market (and a list at he bottom of markets who didn’t have any women-written fiction in a certain period).  I asked her to do this so we could keep rolling data on this stuff and make tallies and such at the end of the year.  When I do the print fiction roundup for May I’ll start the same.
  4. One of the things I noticed when I was collecting online data from last year is that Baen’s and IGMS seemed to have the lowest ratios.  It’s weird because I get the impression that the older and/or more established SF writers who don’t really know much about what’s going on with online markets seem to be okay with Baen’s (and possibly IGMS).  I was talking to Nancy Kress at World Fantasy and she told me she had a story coming up in Baen’s.  I waved my hand dismissively and said I didn’t red that market because if something’s online, I’m not paying to look at web content.  And she said to me, in a sort of bewildered tone like I was a small child, “But Tempest, how else will they get money to pay their authors?”  (I should pause here and say that Nancy wasn’t being condescending.  Rather, she is like the ultimate mother-ish person.  And ever since Clarion West, when I first met her, I’ve always felt rather like a small child whenever she talks to me, but in a good way.  Like somehow an apple pie is going to show up and I can suck my thumb and watch some cartoons and be snuggly safe.) Anyway, my point was that I wonder if there is a correlation?  Like, old guard SF is into Baen’s, so Baen’s publishes like an old guard magazine, complete with the lack of women in significant numbers.

What Is Going On With Me

By:  TempestGeekitude

I am going to various social functions this week and missing some others and there is a lot going on with me. And as I know that I am not myself at the moment, I should probably explain somewhat.

Yesterday my grandmother died. She’s been sick for a long time and a few months ago the doctors informed us that her heart was failing and that she did not have very long to live. Cue the bit where I say this was expected, yes, but still hits me hard, yes. The funeral is this Saturday, which means that I’m going to miss ComicCon, which isn’t so big a deal, but also means that I’m attending a funeral on my birthday, which I am intellectually aware I should be somewhat upset about but can’t bring myself to feel much of anything at the moment.

I still don’t know how/if this will affect my Thursday birthday plans.  I do know that I won’t be having the party on Sunday, so I’ll email folks to reschedule.  I’ve made plans to have someone else do my duties at ComicCon, so that is mostly covered.  I will be at KGB this week.

Whenever something like this happens, most people’s first reaction is to ask “How are you?” or say, “Are you doing okay?” and the answer I will inevitably give is I am fine and Yes. But may I ask, if folks don’t mind, that you please not ask me those questions?  Or, really, ask me anything about it at all?  In general, I am not doing well and I don’t really want to talk about it.  And as with the days and months and years after my mother died, my reaction to anyone saying “I’m so sorry” and “How are you?” is to barrel right through their kind words and on to some other topic.  Or, even worse, to wave my hand dismissively and say it’s okay or I’m fine or It’s nothing when it most certainly IS something.  But I do not deal with grief well, and certainly not in public, so if it’s all the same, I would rather just not have to tell everyone I am fine.

I realize I’m being very high-handed and dictating how people should deal with me at this point, but considering that I’m unable to function normally and people will probably be like WTF is wrong with you? because of it, I feel the need to explain.  It also heads off most of the WTF comments.

Exercise and Work

By:  TempestGeekitude

I blame Scalzi for this.

At the end of that post about how unhealthy life is for bloggers (we’re all gonna DIE) he mentioned giving them all stationary exercise bikes with laptop desks so they could do cardio while trolling the Internet. That sent me off looking to see if such things existed, because considering how many people spend all day at a computer, it seems like it should. It does. But the company doesn’t seem to get a lot of business. I suspect it has something to do with that website. You cannot convince geeks to buy your stuff if your website isn’t sleek.

Also, the workstation is out of stock. But, I thought, I have a laptop desk — one like this — why not just buy a recumbent bike? Then I can roll the desk over to me and be in business. I started researching and found several that might work. I’m partial to this one because it has less to get in the way of my desk. But this one is cheaper.

Then there is this thing, which is meant to go under a desk and is much more portable/storable. Another version of it, with less hardware. I haven’t the slightest clue if it’s any good or what makes a good exercise bike. Anyone want to enlighten me?

I can’t afford most of them, honestly. And I wish I could try them out to see if they worked. Still, it would be peachy keen to exercise while I do computer stuff. Might even get me geared up to actually venture out into the sun.

Anyway, as my birthday is coming up, I will ask folks, if they are so inclined, to contribute toward getting such a beast. If you would like to, there’s a little button on the sidebar of my site which will exist there until the end of April.

Same Plot, But Who Did It Best?

By:  TempestGeekitude

I was highly amused by this list of The 10 Most Insane, Child-Warping Moments of ’80s Cartoons, which I found through the Jem mailing list I’m on (shut up). It’s weird because some of the stuff at the “bottom” is far more traumatizing than the stuff at the top. I think they have the numbering backwards.

I’d forgotten about that episode of GI-JOE with Shipwreck’s fake family and the androids that melted and ahhhh that was so messed up! Though I have to say not as creepy as the part in the GI-JOE movie where Cobra Commander was turned into asnake-human beast and kept repeating “I used to be a man…. I used to be a man…” The black GI-JOE nearly punched him out.

Anyway, the Shipwreck episode got me thinking about reused plots because I just watched a Star Trek: TNG episode with a similar story. The one where Riker wakes up 10 years in the future, he’s the captain of the Enterprise, has a son, and is all WTF I don’t remember any of this! And at first he thinks it’s a Romulan plot but then it’s not. I’m pretty sure the GI-JOE ep came first, but I can’t be sure.

Not that this is some major thing, TV shows often recycle plots, and often there are plots that you always see in certain genres of shows. Sitcoms have their own, dramas have their own, and SF shows have their own.

Just off the top of my head, there’s the your life was actually a crazy hallucination plot. Like that episode of TNG where Riker (why is it always Riker?) thinks he’s going crazy and an alien psychiatrist tries to convince him that his whole life on the Enterprise was made up in his head. Someone once informed me that this happened on Buffy, too, while we were watching a Stargate: Atlantis episode where Wier was the one who thought she was crazy.

There’s the time loop plot, where characters keep experiencing the same slice of time over and over, sometimes without realizing it for a while. This happened on TNG, but my favorite one was the Stargate: SG1 episode where Teal’c and Jack were the only ones who saw that the day kept repeating itself, to hilarious results.

The evil counterpart plot, the most famous probably being the classic Star Trek episode where Kirk goes to the evil universe with a bearded Spock. This was later revisited on Deep Space Nine, though less successfully, IMO. There was a good TNG book about it, though. One of the only good episodes of Stargate: SG1‘s ninth season was of this stripe.

The out of phase plot, where characters are invisible and can’t be heard, but they aren’t dead, just shifted slightly off to the side. TNG again (Geordi & Ro), SG-1 again (Daniel), and at least two episodes of Strange Days at Blake Holsey High.

The who the hell is this person we’ve never seen before but was supposedly here the whole time? plot. From what I understand, Buffy’s sister’s entire storyline is this. Same goes for Cam on SG-1. That show also had an episode in the 4th or 5th season where an alien had a pheromone or something that implanted false memories in people to make them think they’d known him all along. Recently, Torchwood had something similar in the ep. “Adam”, though the alien in this case was much more sinister. More sinisterness in an episode of TNG where the whole crew lost their memories and suddenly there was some dude we’d never seen before pretending to be part of the bridge crew.

The bringing people back from the dead in messed up ways plot is usually about fan service. Like the time TNG brought back Tasha Yar as the Enterprise slipped into an alternate dimension, Callisto’s many appearances on Xena after she died, Kira’s boyfriend coming in from the evil dimension on DS9, and Janet & Martouf similarly coming over from another universe on SG-1. Torchwood‘s “They Keep Killing Suzie” isn’t really fan service, though.

Oh, and Character X meets her/his double! I like it best when the double is some random person not related to the character in question but who just happens to look exactly like them. There were several hilarious Xena episodes wherein we discovered two or maybe even three women who were mirror images of Xena (her dad got around a bit, methinks). Jem & the Holograms once met a princess who looked like Kimber (I think a lot of these plots have The Prince & the Pauper as their base). And that awful TNG episode where Riker (again, why always him??) meets himself, a dude who is actually his exact genetic double because of some transporter splicing (they blamed the transporter for every damn thing). I still hate that episode.

ETA:  Veejane and Deedop both pointed out variants of the Body Switching plot, the secret/surprise switch and the known switch. Classic Trek has the Kirk swaps with Janice Lester episode, SG-1 had an absolutely hilarious one where, eventually, Teal’c and Jack switched, and Chris Judge showed the real range of his amazing acting. Stargate: Atlantis also had an episode, as well as a very funny episode of Farscape.

Charlie brought up “the living-someone-else’s-life-in-your-head plot – TNG did it with Picard to commemorate a civilisation and Voyager did it for a similar reason with most of the crew who thought they’d been involved in a war that was over centuries before they arrived. I suspect SG-1 have also done that one, experiencing false memories of some kind.”

There are more I can’t think of right now, help me out! Which plots that are mainly the province of SF shows do you see recycled all the time? And, of the different episodes that you’ve seen, which are the best exemplars?