My 2019 review, in the traditional meme form.
Today's January meme prompt was from Fox: "current favourite piece of music, what it feels like and what it does to/for your brain?" (There are still some empty days for prompts!)
Today's prompt from the January meme is from David MacIver. In October, I gave a keynote talk at PyCode Conference with the title How do Vampires Use the Internet? It was about how fan communities use, repurpose and create technology, and I used my own home fandom of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles as the source for a lot of my examples. The slides are here. I'd really love to share a video of the talk, but it hasn't yet been published online.
Today's topic from the January meme comes from anotherbluestocking. There are still some empty days!
I decided to interpret 'world' as universe rather than planet, and look at fiction where I feel the worldbuilding has something special about it. This is an unordered list!
This is the second prompt from the January meme, from cloudsinvenice. It's a great question but a bittersweet one right now, as the first answer that popped into my head was a formerly very close friend who recently cut off our friendship. We had grown apart and I had done a lot less to hold up my side of the relationship than she had.
Happy 2020! To encourage me to blog more often, I'm taking part in a meme from DreamWidth where every day in January has a topic to post about. Here's my list of topics—I'm still taking suggestions for the empty days! Today's post was suggested by cloudsinvenice.
This is a science-fantasy short story I wrote in 2008 for the Pod Writers' Guild. Several months later, I started working in a chemical-sensor lab, and was amazed by how well I'd predicted the work in this piece.
Every time I read one of my friend Alex's daily DreamWidth entries, I wish I were also writing them, and so, though I think it's extremely unlikely I'll keep up this habit for long or as regularly as they do, I might as well start. Today is a reasonably good day for it, as David and I were in Bangkok last week and I would also like to write up a blog post about that.
I had the idea a while ago to write some posts about words I particularly like. Here's the first one, with the disclaimer that I'm not a linguist or even particularly good at languages; I just enjoy thinking about them.
The traditional year-end meme!
November is National Novel Writing Month, a holiday obviously named by Americans. It's the month when people all over the world try to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days, competing only against themselves, the clock, their daily responsibilities and their pernicious 'inner editors'. This year, for the first time in ten years, I won!
Corpse Position, Dark Alley Books, 2012
Down Dog, Dark Alley Books, 2013
Salute to the Sun, Dark Alley Books, 2018
Now that the final volume in Aurora Smythe's Molly Sheldon series has been published, I thought it would be a good time to review the whole thing. I ordered new copies of all three books (so as to get the brand-new matching cover art) and have been working through them all week. Or, as my partner put it last night, "Are you still reading those Vampire Yoga Instructor books?"
I glided into the new year on the warm reflection of how much I achieved in 2017, only to crash into the realisation, ten days in, that I still have to keep getting things done this year as well. And that it was January, a cold dark month with nothing at the end of it but February.
Here's my summary of 2017, in the traditional questionnaire form.
The strangeness of this year was that, while a lot of horrible things happened in the world and to people I care for, many good things happened in my personal life. My employment was steady. I got an actually helpful diagnosis for (parts of) my weird brain, and help to deal with it. Exciting things happened in David's career. We travelled a lot. Meanwhile, my stepfather is dying, another member of my extended family had a frightening, still ongoing, health crisis, and the British and American governments have been waging war on their own citizens. It's been hard to reconcile all of this; I wonder constantly what more I should be doing to help. Anyway, here's most of what I did get up to.
After leaving it untouched for three years, David and I have made some updates to our blogging engine, Bumble, and we have plans for more.
This is a short entry about Powercoders, but it's also a test post to see if crossposting to my DreamWidth journal works. I apologise greatly if you see it multiple times, or in oddly distorted forms.
Ramblings on 'it' pronouns, written by a person who doesn't use them—which means this might come off as uninformed or tactless, though hopefully it won't.
March 2017? I hear you ask. Oh, that Rae, skipping over February entirely and thinking we wouldn't notice. Well, I have news for you! I have in fact written a post about February, but a chunk of it is currently held hostage on a different computer from the one I'm writing on right now. Also, it was such a hard post to write that the emotional cramp from it kind of put me off finishing it, or writing anything else, for an embarrassingly long time. February sucked, dear imaginary reader. March was better, though! Let's bang this one out and come back to February later.
My first blog was active from 2003-2013 and, while most of it was memes about which style of coffee I was or apologies for not posting often enough, some of what I wrote there was actually, I still think, pretty good. Some of it was ridiculous tosh, but that's what I like; in that spirit, here's a repost from January 2011.
One of my favourite, most expressive German words is Muskelkater.
Cross-posted from my tumblr, because it seemed substantive enough to live here as well.
I just reblogged cassolotl‘s beautiful post about gendered behaviour, feminism, and gender as emotion, because it encapsulated many things I’ve felt for ages and I would like it to be as widely read as possible. Now I will muse about some other gender-related things that I didn’t necessarily want to attach to that post, which is so whole in itself.
This entry is part of a loose series of posts about (mostly) software tools I use to make my life better. Quantified Self is a slightly odd fit in that regard: a lot of the data I collect on myself is not currently analysed in any useful way, and I'm not certain that some of it even can be. Content note: exercise, weight, eating habits.