I am lately addicted to Kingdom Rush and Streetfood Tycoon. KR is a tower defense game with cute little soldiers and comic-book style KBOOMs, and ST is a Lemonade-Stand type game, in which I cannot get over how happy the customers sound when they say, "Thank you!"

I got them from Google Play; it looks like they're both available on the App Store for iOS; ST is on the Amazon app store but KR isn't. (What's there is some kind of predatory knockoff.)

You know what else, before I forget: I recommend "A Great Clerk of Necromancy", by Catherynne Valente.*

I'm not actually sure which Hugo category you'd vote for a poem in. Short story? Related work? Probably related work. I'll have to read the definitions. Or maybe prior winner lists, see if there's precedent.



* I mean, basically, I recommend everything by Valente; she has become one of the authors whose stuff I'm just going to buy right away and not even bother test-driving through the library anymore. Nonetheless! I especially liked this!

So today, my RSS fed me Scalzi and McGuire discussing some proposed constitutional amendments that will be voted on at Worldcon this year, during the Business Meeting.

I found the proposals themselves on the LoneStarCon website, at the bottom of the Business Meeting page, for reference. The ones in question at those two sites are "No cheap voting" and "Deleting Best Fanzine, Best Fan Writer, and Best Fan Artist from the WSFS Constitution", particularly the latter.

So there's plenty to say about that bullshit, but I've got two toddlers who are currently only distracted from cannonballing into my stomach and smashing berries in my face* by the fact that Wreck-It Ralph is currently attempting to get a medal so that Big Gene will finally let him on top of the cake with the rest of the Nicelanders, so I'm going to leave that part at what Scalzi and McGuire said and move straight on to the part that concerns me, which is:

The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) consists of every member of the current Worldcon. The WSFS rules, published in the Souvenir Book, consist of a Constitution containing the rules for the Hugo Awards and for the selection of future Worldcons, as well as The Standing Rules for the conduct of the Business Meeting. Every attending member of LoneStarCon 3 can attend the meeting, propose changes, debate those changes, and vote on them.

I nominated and voted on the Hugos last year, I nominated and voted on the Hugos this year, and I'm planning to nominate and vote on the Hugos next year. I am a supporting member of the current WorldCon; thus I am a member of the World Science Fiction Society. But I am not an attending member, on account of how cons are generally a long way and an expensive plane ticket from where I live.

So I'm not eligible to vote this bullshit out of town.

Even if I'd paid the attending member fee, I couldn't vote, because I didn't spring for the plane ticket, the hotel, the long weekend away from family and work. The absence of my physical presence is what prevents me from participating in this vote.

That is also bullshit. We live on the internet; why aren't we able to vote there?


* This is only a minor exaggeration. They have never done these two things at the same time. Yet.

Priest's Boneshaker walks into town with a trench coat and a shotgun, and she says she's looking for her son. Milford's Boneshaker* sits on the steps to the general store, playing that old tin guitar, and she looks Priest's Boneshaker straight in the eye: she knows a zombie romp when she sees one.

Milford's Boneshaker hops on the bike her daddy made for her, the fastest bike in the world, and she rides out to catch the Devil at the crossroads. But when she gets there, she finds that Priest's Boneshaker already shot the Devil in the head and left his bones to rot.



* I just read Milford's Boneshaker, and highly recommend it.

We started watching Downton Abbey; we approve. We're just starting the second season now. (On disc, from Netflix: it fell off the streaming just after we watched the pilot. Apparently Amazon has exclusive streaming rights now, or will soon, or something. This further strengthens my belief that Amazon is a dick, and I wish I could invest more energy in not buying shit from them, but it's freaking convenient and that's hard to get past.)

What genre would you call Downton Abbey? My opponent in this discussion thinks it's like a soap opera, albeit a high-quality one. I strongly disagree; although it has a few cases of melodrama, it isn't nearly the complex, intricately intertwined wtf'ery you get out of soap opera plots.

I kind of want to call it just "drama", but I don't actually watch much of the "drama" genre and I bet that's a pretty wide field, containing multiple subgenres. "Period drama", maybe?

1. Today's Hyperbole and a Half. It's spot on as a description of depression. Especially the ... no, well, especially the Everything; I recognized all of it and giggled at a lot of it. It's refreshing to read somebody who gets the jokes. I don't know what's wrong with most of you people, nobody else seems to think all the practical problems involved with contemplating your own death are just fucking funny. Everybody I try to tell these jokes to, they just stare at me and whimper.


2. Catherynne Valente's Six-Gun Snow White, which is my favorite of her books to date; it's Snow White in the Wild West, a half-Indian girl given a cruel nickname by her stepmother. It was chock full of This Resonates, for me. I checked it out from the library but then I bought my own copy afterwards. It looks like a choice, but it's not.


3. Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer King. Also fucking fantastic: a well-past-the-apocalypse-and-now-rebuilt matriarchal Brazilian city where the King is elected and then ritually sacrificed a year later, and chooses the Queen who actually rules at that time. The main character is a girl who aspires to be the best artist in the City, who gets mixed up with the current Summer King in pursuit of that goal. There are many, many levels on which the book pushes back against the standard quest of the white male farmboy/king that is, like... everything I ever grew up with in the genre, and am incredibly tired of and annoyed with now... but my favorite is the progression of several of the characters from hatred to love - not romantically. Just moving towards loving the world, loving everything, and that being a power of its own. I really loved this book.


4. Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds: science fiction! Matchmaking! An apocalypse destroys most of the female population of a particular planet, and they have to emigrate and find wives, and they do it respectfully. It was very satisfying.

1. I got a promotion at work! Now I work in our e-resources department. It is at times bewildering, but it is awesome. The sheer scale of this shit is amazing. There are thousands upon thousands of e-books I could access! For free! (If only I liked the interface. The iPhone is too small for a web-based e-book interface and I don't enjoy sitting at a computer to read. But we're getting a tablet this Christmas, and I am super excited to try that out.)


2. I am writing a lot more these days (Not "a lot" - just "a lot more"), and stressing out much less about it. Oddly, this is a direct result of deep-sixing the "goal" of ever being a full-time-writer. I feel like this about that plan: (...or am I a scientist?)



Writing-like-a-job was just never working out, yo, and "just try harder" was not an effective strategy. And I love my job enough these days that I would keep working even if I won the lottery. And, insurance. And I've been reading author-blogs a lot the past couple of years and have discovered that most of them have day jobs anyway, so what have I been beating my head against a wall over all these years? Lies, it was all lies.

So now I've got some notebooks, and I'm not working on any one particular project, or really, "working" at all. My rule is that if I have an idea I like, I write it down so I don't forget it. And if it leads to more ideas, then that is a win, and if it doesn't I don't care. I've given up on the computer as a writing tool for now, too; I'm happier with tangible evidence of progress. I have the kind of notebooks where you can neatly tear out a page and then tuck it into a 3-ring-binder/folder, and each idea gets its own page(s), so if I ever amass enough material on one idea I can collate it later. Much later, when I decide I care.

So that is working out pretty well for me right now. I do wish I had more time to sit down with it, but you can't have everything.


3. Tablet for Christmas, tablet for Christmas! I think it'll be the Google Nexus 10, but I want to play with it in the store before I buy it. But it isn't in stock at Staples yet, so I have to wait.


4. The minions are super cute. Lots of work, but super cute. Elder Minion is into video games right now - I just introduced him to Zelda. This is good times. And Younger Minion has begun to walk!

There was a series of sexual assaults on campus a couple of weeks ago, so the campus is talking about it. It's nice that they're making noise about this being unacceptable, but I find myself depressed over some of the messaging that's coming out of it: the row of a dozen signs down the sidewalk, each with its own little tidbit of advice. Find someone to walk you home. Don't wear headphones when you're walking in the dark. The #1 date rape drug is alcohol. [I am, bitterly, a little surprised that one doesn't come with an admonition against the little red dress, too.] Love your body; defend yourself.

What every one of those damn signs boils down to is: Don't be a victim. Don't make yourself a target. Don't be the weakest gazelle in the herd.

Not a single one blames - or even mentions - the lion.

Maybe you can avoid his attention now, but that just means he'll hunt someone else. There's always a weakest gazelle, and it's not her fault the lion is a predator.