Looking for some fun reading?

The 2019 Hugo awards finalists have been announced. Tragically, neither Vox Day nor Brad Torgerson nor Castalia House are anywhere on the list. Did I say “tragically”? I meant “hilariously”. I guess the gate-crashing Puppies made their last sad yelp in what, 2016? Instead, we’ve got a lot of books and stories that were chosen because people enjoyed them, rather than being forced on everyone by a lot of wanna-be Nazis. Instead, we get this:

The list is dominated by women, with 5/6 women finalists in Novel, Novella, Novelette, AND Short Story, and 4/6 in Best Series. That’s amazing and proves what all we Rioters already know—women rock at writing SFF. We always have, and we always will. And in these five categories, nine nominations go to authors of color, a decent amount, though SFF awards in general still need more diversity.

They’re good stories! I was skimming through the list, and had to stop and read “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”, just because of the title. Raptors are great, but there is, however, a shortage of cephalopods and spiders. Perhaps next year diversity will be extended to other phyla.

Something I noticed about the category of best long-form dramatic presentation…

  • Annihilation, directed and written for the screen by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer (Paramount Pictures/Skydance)
  • Avengers: Infinity War, screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Studios)
  • Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler (Marvel Studios)
  • A Quiet Place, screenplay by Scott Beck, John Krasinski and Bryan Woods, directed by John Krasinski (Platinum Dunes / Sunday Night)
  • Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley (Annapurna Pictures)
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman (Sony)

“Infinity War” is the weakest of the nominated works, and it still made buttloads of money (I favor Into the Spider-Verse or Sorry to Bother You myself). The amazing thing is how many high quality, and critically acclaimed, SF movies are being made nowadays. Fifteen-year old me is finally getting his day in the sun.

Now if only I had time to read all that…and you know, excellent authors keep pumping out new stuff for this coming year, too.

Today, my knee is all swole up like a balloon

Except that it’s kind of firm and fluid filled. And it hurts. And it wobbles when I walk on it.

[Doctor shouts from stage left: “Then don’t walk on it!”]

OK, imaginary doctor, if you say so.

[Futurist shouts from stage right: “Would you like robot limbs, and a jetpack?”]

Yes, imaginary futurist, sign me up! Can you get me those before this sloppy aching mess heals up?

[Futurist whispers: “no.“]

Shut the fuck up, stupid futurist.

Movies with Mikey + Baby Driver?

Perfection. I like both Movies with Mikey and Baby Driver — I thought it was one of the best movies of the last few years. And then to discover something new that I hadn’t noticed, even though it was pervasive in the movie, was a real eye-opener.

It’s about coping with being disabled? Yeah, now that you mention it, it’s goddamned obvious.

Also relevant, this past year I’ve developed a growing problem with tinnitus — getting old sucks — and I’ve been dealing with it by living with headphones on all the time I’m working in my office. And then we learn that my wife has been living with a degenerative hearing disorder all of her life that has only recently gotten bad enough that she’s needed hearing aids. It’s an odd one, too, where she’s slowly losing the low end of her auditory range, so in a few years we may have to learn ASL…or I’m going to have to start speaking in a falsetto all the time. (Don’t worry, neither of us are suffering horribly with this stuff, it’s all mild and we’re handling it as well as every other hurdle aging throws at us.)

Now I’m going to have to watch Baby Driver again, which is no hardship, at least.

Oh, god, Peterson is such a fool

I’ll say something more substantial about this later, but Jordan Peterson opened his mouth and said something stupid, and I got slapped in the face with it this morning, and I’m still trying to recover.

Morgane Oger is a transgender woman, and a court ruled that she’d been discriminated against and libeled by Christian flyer that was sent around that misgendered her and made various religious claims condemning homosexuality. This has obviously stirred up the conservative Christians and Jordan Peterson (but I repeat myself). What Peterson wrote is such flaming nonsense I’m going to have compose something to explain cell non-autonomous sex determination — and maybe some disambiguation about chromosomes vs. DNA vs. cells that I would have thought an “evolutionary biologist” like Peterson should already understand.

But then I made a mistake. A terrible awful mistake. I thought I honestly should look a little deeper into what Peterson actually says at length, because I know the first thing that will happen if I criticize that demented drongo is a swarm of his cultists would fall on me howling about how I have to listen to hours and hours of his lectures to understand him. So I tried.

I opened up one of his podcasts.

OH MY GOD.

That thing is 2.5 hours long. Hours of garbage about…this.

Lecture II in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories from May 23 at Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto. In this lecture, I present Genesis 1, which presents the idea that a pre-existent cognitive structure (God the Father) uses the Logos, the Christian Word, the second Person of the Trinity, to generate habitable order out of pre-cosmogonic chaos at the beginning of time. It is in that Image that Man and Woman are created — indicating, perhaps, that it is (1) through speech that we participate in the creation of the cosmos of experience and (2) that what true speech creates is good.

It is a predicate of Western culture that each individual partakes in some manner in the divine. This is the true significance of consciousness, which has a world-creating aspect.

I listened to a half hour of it. It’s word salad delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion by a babbling loon who talks really fast. I gave up at around the 37 minute mark when he mentions that he’ll get around to talking about Genesis 1 shortly.

Now I have to get out of the house and go for a walk and spend some time in the gym to clear my head. I pity those people who willingly listen to this gomer at length.

Later. After I’ve recovered.

Holy shit. After reading that drivel by Peterson, read this letter defending him by…Richard Dawkins.

Once upon a time, I would have thought Richard Dawkins would have regarded giving a pretentious, empty-headed twit like Peterson a visiting professorship at Cambridge to be an “ignominious disgrace.” And jeez, whining about selfies is just so old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds.

OK, now I’ve got to go out the door and away. Maybe I’ll also need to spend some time cooing over spiders to cool off.

Enjoy the new AD-FREE Freethoughtblogs

We’ve snapped the evil capitalist cord. We just deleted all the ad slots on Freethoughtblogs — we hope everything is faster, smoother, and more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, we still have to pay for our server costs, and it would be nice if our bloggers got coffee-money now and then. We’re going to try and figure out as a group how to do all that, so may soon be going the crowd-funding route, or having donation drives, or something. Watch this space, we’ll announce our new strategy soon.

I do have to say that going into the guts of the WordPress machine and savagely murdering all the ad-bot code was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done today. Easy, too.

Now that is a play

North Bergen High School put on Alien as their school play. I am kind of blown away — amazing sets, all from recycled materials, cool costumes, scary story. The kids must have lusted to get a part. Click on the tweet to see more, people were posting video clips.

I am reminded that our Morris Area High School had a fantastic theater department when my two youngest were attending. They put on two plays a year, not of SF spectacles, but one was always a musical, and these kids would just stun you with their talent and enthusiasm. Connlann and Skatje were both deeply involved in the shows — Connlann was a performer, Skatje was into theater tech — and they were so inspired by the work.

Then the school district, incomprehensibly, killed the program and let the teacher who was so good at these things go. That was so stupid and short-sighted. There is such an ignorant focus on just teaching what will help the kids get a job (and STEM benefits from that, unfortunately — so many young people thinking they should do science, engineering, or medicine for all the wrong reasons) that they kill the dreams…and it’s the dream that carries people forward.