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Wow, I totally forgot it was Thursday there for a while.

You know, there's no way I'm going to accomplish this anywhere but a proper desk. *gets up and moves*

( Let this be our little secret )

This would be one of those overdue state of the journal posts. To wit, I've decided to let my paid account lapse, which it will do in early January. Farewell, comment editing! Farewell, poll posting! Farewell, 112 icon capacity! But 'twill be better thus.

So I'm going to do a takedown of my icons sometime early in the new year rather than let LJ select which 6 icons I get to keep. To that end, I have an icon poll for your delectation going. I know which icons I like (viz, almost all of them), but I'm curious to hear other people's opinions.

Also, LJ is running a holiday promotion whereby paid members can give up to 10 non-paid accounts $10 coupons on one year's paid account time. Since for the time being I'm still a paid member, comment here if you'd like a coupon, friends or non-friends, first come, first served. (I will have to friend your account to gift you the coupon.) Screened comments, &c.

Finally, if you have a DW mirror and/or account that I don't know about, I am trying to lighten my LJ footprint, so please let me know about it if you like. Again, screened comments.

ETA: I have disabled the My Guests feature, and will not re-enable it.

Translations of DTB and xxxHOLiC are in progress. I'm terribly busy atm, but I should have at least one of them out today.

Poll #1499998 Who would you rather have as your Nii-san?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

Who would you rather have as your Nii-san?

Well, they'd both go to drastic lengths to protect you...one just does it more FABULOUSLY than the other...

For the record, this is not how I wanted to spend my five year LJ-versary (actually last week, but who's counting?). Hang on tightly, let go lightly.

Poll #1499584 I got 99 icons, but a specified gender ain't one
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

Which five of my 99 icons do you like best?

I haven't given up on these things!

Just this past month was sooooo busy. T_T
( Riza likes working under Mr. Mustang... )

What an epic tale of near-disaster, close shaves, and epic logistical failure on the grad school application front I could unfold for you, dear readers. But the story's not finished yet, so it will have to wait until tomorrow.


In the meantime, via inkstone on Twitter, holzman discusses the white privilege inherent in some permutations of the reaction to the Peter Watts imbroglio. I have not been following the matter at all other than noting that it happened, so let me be unequivocal, although a day late and a dollar short: What happened to Peter Watts happens to people routinely, but should not happen to anyone, no matter their race or citizenship. Nor should borders be places in which people attempting to cross them involuntarily and automatically surrender their rights, both civil, legal, and human (which they, or at least the U.S. borders, essentially are now).

On a tangentially related note, I received this holiday card from Delta Airlines today. I note that while other cities are represented by architectural landmarks, Johannesburg is accompanied by an image of a giraffe and Tokyo has an image, from the rear, of a Japanese woman in kimono amongst bamboo trees. Mm, stereotype much? Last year's card from Northwest was much better, but that was pre-merger.

ETA: Via synecdochic, LiveJournal's next code push will a) make the gender field in the profile mandatory; and b) make the gender choice binary (i.e. either male or female). The post at Denise's journal has the relevant links to changelog and to the LJ feedback form.

Oh, LiveJournal. More and more I think that I'm just not comfortable giving them my business, let alone posting my content there (you'll notice I have never posted any fanworks to my LJ account; only links to them at other sites). I think 2010 will probably be my last year as a paid account holder.

ETA 2: I encourage people to consider DreamWidth as an alternative. There are invite codes available for the taking at dw_codesharing; no need to give anyone your email address.

A very Happy Birthday to tammypierce!

I can't think of a single author whose works have had more influence on me as a reader, as a writer, and probably as a person too--here's hoping you have a birthday as awesome as your heroines.

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In other news, rachelmanija has an interesting essay on Ponyo at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. I think she's particularly good on discussing the parental figures in the movie, which apparently some people found problematic (I will admit immediately that I didn't notice any problems, but this is because I am not a parent), as well as on the movie versus the Anderson story.

And now to work.

Epigraph: Best Science Fiction Books of the Aughts according to io9.com. It's not my list (more on that anon, maybe), but it's certainly a list.

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Lovecraft Unbound. Ed. Ellen Datlow. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2009.

I've never actually read any Lovecraft, and while I imagine that I consequently may have gotten less out of this book than your average Chthulu-head, I enjoyed it quite a lot nonetheless. (Question: Were I to read any actual Lovecraft, which Lovecraft should I read first?) Several of the authors in this collection mention in their notes that they like the Lovecraftian ethos without its racism and sexism, and while I'd say the stories generally succeed in their revisions of Lovecraftiana on that score, I do have to wonder how inextricably the Lovecraftian worldview itself is tied in to such execrable -isms. More on this below.
( To H.P. with love and disrespect )

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# Canadian sff author Dr. Peter Barnes was beaten and detained at the U.S. border this week, and now he's being sued for assaulting a border patrol officer. As the Cobell lawsuit proved earlier this week, fighting Uncle Sam takes time and money; think about donating, if you can.

# Cat Valente smacks it to literary fiction in this post at her LJ (yuki_onna). I think she says some very perceptive things about literary fiction, which is a genre all its own (just like vanilla is a kink!), and its genre rules, and how these rules contrast with sff's.

# A post on tag wrangling 101 by my fellow wrangler akamine_chan. I've been putting in my Yuletide sweat equity wrangling Yuletide fandoms lately--as I said in our chatroom, if tag wrangling is a degree in fandom, Yuletide is a Ph.D. (I might be getting us an icon that says that, actually). We need more wranglers to join our steampunk crew, please think about joining! It helps to be detail-oriented and slightly obsessive, I've found.

# Via my sister, American history, but with cats. (Read "U.S." for "American".)

# Speaking of Cat Valente and of steampunk, her steampunk story "The Anachronist's Cookbook" is now available on her website! Unlike many steampunk writers, CMV does not ignore many of the genre's problematic tendencies.

Epigraph: Small Beer Press is having a book sale! Everything they've ever published, as well as their forthcoming titles, are discounted, and portions of all sales this month will benefit Franciscan Children's Hospital in Boston. I don't know about you, but $5.95 for Kalpa Imperial is way too good to pass up.

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Westerfeld, Scott. Illus. Keith Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Simon Pulse, 2009.

This is not the steampunk book I'm looking for, but it comes close.

Let's back up. It's the end of June, 1914, and Prince Aleksander of Herzhegovina is forced to flee for his life after his parents' assassination in Sarajevo (yes: his parents are that Archduke and Archduchess) along with only a few trusted retainers in...an imperial scout walker. (Yes, all the scenes in the walker reminded me of The Empire Strikes Back.) Meanwhile, British commoner Deryn Sharp takes on the name Dylan and passes herself off as a boy to become a midshipman in His Majesty's Air Service, winding up aboard H.M.S. Leviathan, the pride of the bioformed fleet. Alek and his retainers (including Count Volger, who is made of awesome) are making desperately for Switzerland, where they can wait for Alek's grandfather, Emperor Franz-Josef, to die so that Alek can make his bid to set aside the fact that his parents' marriage was morganatic and claim the throne. Deryn and her ship, in the company of the diplomat, zookeeper, Darwinist (she engineered the Leviathan) and diplomat Nora Barlow, are also making for Switzerland en route to their mission in Constantinople.

Leviathan is a cracking good read, and the illustrations by Keith Thomas are fantastic. More books should be illustrated, period. Westerfeld knows how to write suspense, and both Deryn and Alek are appealing protagonists (though Deryn is slightly more awesome than Alek, I have to say. It's not his fault, though; princes are sheltered). Equally appealing are Count Volger, who is one of those rare people who embody all the virtues of the aristocracy and few of its vices, and Dr. Barlow, who has a thalacine (aka a Tasmanian tiger) and who calls Lord Churchill "Winston" when she insults him. And as a Darwinist--aka a genetic engineer--she is known by her bowler hat, which practitioners wear in honor of the man himself, who in Westerfeld's world discovered not only evolution but DNA, and how to manipulate it.

So, there are some very cool things in this book, if you haven't guessed that already. I think one of the best things about steampunk is the space it opens up for potential critical engagement with history as it actually turned out, and Westerfeld does some of that in here, though he leaves some of the most critical insights, such as the environmental benefits of an empire run not on coal but on bioengineered animal power, by the wayside. That said, I'm uncomfortable with the fact that Alek's status as a protagonist renders the reader complicit in the narrative's imperial sympathies. Deryn and Alek are both unequivocal in their condemnation for the war, as is the narrative, which is sort of the easy way out--hands up if you think the loss of millions of lives was a good idea. Yeah, I didn't think so--but neither they nor the narrative are critical of the idea of empire per se. This is related to my other major problem, which is the book's lack of a clear antagonist. Also, tired incipient romance subplot is tired. Still, these caveats aside, the clear division between the Darwinist and Clanker powers, and the incipient hybridization of both Deryn and Alek, not to mention the sheer awesome that is Dr. Barlow and Count Volger, are more than enough to keep me interested for the next book, Behemoth. It's almost certainly going to have dragons, too.

So, when I heard about the new CG anime, I LOLED, because I totally expected a Lelouch Lives sort of thing, because Sunrise is known for doing that. And because the wank would be hilarious.


And then I saw the scans.




...There have been many times when I went "Geass,WTF?" but this is truly the first time I am totally speechless.

kaigou, whose brain (and in particular the analyses it produces) is a thing of wonder. Recent posts on fanfiction versus original fiction, as well as the attractions of m/m fiction, have been particularly awesome. Not to mention Dreamwidth styles galore, occasional anime fan thoughts, and assorted miscellaneous awesomeness. I've learned a lot, and been given whole feasts of food for thought, reading.

Same name on LJ, too.