I’m not a fannish type, but I wrote a fan-letter once – to George MacDonald Fraser, Author, the isle of Man, UK. And I got back a charmingly gracious reply, too. I have read nearly everything Mark Twain wrote, and a measurable percentage of Voltaire but Fraser is the only one of my favorite authors I can claim to have completely read.
Go read this, if you haven’t already.
Shiv asks some questions that I, in my cis-privileged way, have pondered while drunk, weary, or otherwise bleary. I frame it differently but, to me, it boils down to “what is ‘hot’?” and it seems to me that a lot of people don’t put very much thought into that. I have, and all I want to say right now is that it’s instructive to think about it.
I’m naturally suspicious of governments, and the suspicion seems to be mutual. Since I’m not trying to do any harm, that annoys me more than a bit: they want to treat me like a criminal, even though I mostly want to be left alone to live out my life without being interfered with by their wars, walls, economic collapses, and oligarchs. Is that too much to ask?
Most Americans don’t know how Korea came to be partitioned, which is an embarrassment given the political oppression and violence that both Koreas have experienced as a result.
You said I was unpatriotic, and that it was people that fought the cold war, who made the world safe for people like me, who sit comfortably and complain about their actions.
I have to make a sudden trip out to Los Angeles, and I have no idea if my writing and commenting schedule will be impacted. This is one of those “it’s either going to be very boring” or “it’s going to be very busy and exciting” trips and I don’t know which, yet.
Content Warning: Rape and humans behaving horribly badly
This is nearly unbelievably bad at every level. So, I am trying to contextualize it in a way that I can even get the idea into and across my brain without something exploding.
Stanislaw Lem wrote some very witty and unusual science fiction. If you haven’t read Tales Of Pirx The Pilot [amazon] or Memoirs Found In A Bathtub [amazon] you might enjoy them if you like quirky and thoughtful fiction.
Tales of Pirx The Pilot has one of the most memorable scenes in science fiction: Pirx, an astronaut in a space mishap, has to spend a prolonged period in his space suit – and discovers that there is a fly in his helmet.
This is another example of credulous/bad reporting about my field. Whenever I see the press utterly fail to “get” something to do with computer security, I assume they’re equally lazy and wrong about every other field that requires more understanding than “who made Kim Kardashian’s shoes?” (because they are labelled)
I was annoyed at myself, earlier, for taking the easy way out and doing a half-hearted job with some iPhone video and bad lighting.