January 11, 2008 – 2:44 pm
An MP3 of the Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree winning author reading a chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea.
January 5, 2008 – 10:15 pm
Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, opened nominations for the 2008 Hugo Awards.
The dearth of women nominated for last year’s Hugos lead to a proactive response for the 2008 cycle, including:
The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2008, so if you’re looking for books to read, check the sites listed above for suggestions, and blog your reviews.
December 26, 2007 – 8:07 pm
Without them we become hollow-eyed, half-alive, wraith-like shadows of ourseves.
[via Janice Gelb]
December 24, 2007 – 6:13 pm
I don’t know if I surprised my family or not by sending a spiritually themed card this year. Normally, I send a holiday themed card, and they send religious ones. But I was gently awed by the Daibutsu during my trip to Japan, thought the lessons of the Buddha were appropriate to the season, and I wanted to try Moo’s new postcard product.
I suspect they thought I was being a smartass.
Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying a peaceful holiday, full of joys large and small. My best wishes for 2008. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
December 21, 2007 – 8:01 pm
CNet’s Webware listed the revamped .Mac Gallery as one of their top ten site redesigns of 2007. However, after working on it, I do not want to go to Mammoth Lake, ever. [Thanks, Josh.]
December 21, 2007 – 12:12 am
Kate Schaefer on Anita Rowland: I was never clear about whether she believed in anything related to church except for the music and feeding the hungry; those seemed like enough.
December 19, 2007 – 1:38 am
I read a wonderful post by danah boyd discussing how inexpensive actions in social networks add little or no value (think of all the Zombie invites you got on Facebook until you deactivated your account in dismay [*].) And that reminded me of a rule adopted by the members of a mailing list I started some years ago.
If you want to add someone to the list, you post to the list with your intention to do so. Then you wait a week for objections. After the week passes, you can nominate them.
Why the wait? Back in the late 1990’s, email was still new to many of the members of the community for which the list was created. They didn’t check email hourly, or even daily. So if requests to add someone to the list were processed immediately, we ran the risk that we could add someone who another member of the list may have had an issue with, and they would not know until well after the person was added.
In practice, I think there has been only one objection to adding someone to the list since the rule was implemented. But it’s kept because we decided that we want to respect each other and not spring disruptive surprises on one another.
The list thrives, the members discuss and debate, but we haven’t suffered mass defections and flame wars.
[*] Boy, I’m glad I gave up Facebook before all the beacon craziness.
December 17, 2007 – 4:56 pm
Now I know who wrote God Rest Ye, Unitarians, it was the Rev. Christopher Gist Raible of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester. Since my copy of the lyric is (as of this writing) the top result in Google for “god rest ye unitarians,” I’m glad I now have the correct attribution.
December 10, 2007 – 6:52 pm
Anita Roland at NorthernVoice in Vancouver, BC.
Originally uploaded by roland.
Back in 1999 and 2000, Anita Rowland helped bridge the online journaling and weblog communities, with her weblog and her journal, Anita’s Book of Days, she also helped run the Seattle Blogger Meetups. I met Anita through Science Fiction Fandom, especially Potlatch where she ran the hospitality suite whenever it was held in Seattle.
For the past few years, she fought off cancer, but today, she died.
Cynthia and I are grateful that she was well enough to travel this summer and go to Japan for the World Science Fiction convention where we last saw her.
My condolences to her husband, Jack William Bell, and to all of my friends in Seattle Fandom’s Vanguard crew who helped them with looking after grandchildren, rides to the doctor, cooking and cleaning.
Dammit, Anita, you are well-loved and will be missed.
ETA: Jack has opened a memorial post on LJ for our memories of Anita.
Shelley Powers points back at Frank Paynter’s interview with Anita from a few years ago.
December 8, 2007 – 1:07 pm
Cynthia and I saw The Golden Compass last night. And I was disappointed. And no, it wasn’t about the religion. With all that brocade and those Roman collars, it was obvious that the heavies were clerics. The Catholic League will feast for weeks on that. There were bigger holes and problems.
Read More »
December 5, 2007 – 12:37 am
No, I will not be turning off spam filtering of comments on the 15th. It creates unnecessary work, and besides, Akismet doesn’t have a 100% success rate. I still have to delete some spam comments by hand.
Spam’s done by bots and poorly paid contractors, neither of whom will be moved to reconsider their ways by you turning off the spam filter.
November 27, 2007 – 2:36 pm
Liz Henry: If I were a computer manufacturer or a media conglomerate I’d be doing stuff like putting Buffy DVD collections onto fancy Buffy themed bracelets.
November 24, 2007 – 6:56 pm
I’ve noticed an increase in traffic from searches for Pullman and the upcoming The Golden Compass movie adaptation, so as a service, here’s an index to my posts on the topic:
There’s also a recent Atlantic Monthly article (subscription required, on how Hollywood eviscerated the book for the movie adaptation. A money quote:
At the [Cannes Film] festival, the studio had delivered a sheet of talking points to the hotel room of at least one cast member, Sam Eilliot, who plays a Texas aeronaut in the film. According to Elliot, the talking points instructed that if the question of Pullman’s religious views came up, the actors should “just avoid it and play stupid.”
I’m planning on seeing the movie, but disappointed that Hollywood caved to the culture war bullies.
November 23, 2007 – 7:24 pm
John Resig: there’s FOAF Support in Safari RSS! Add a link to your FOAF file in the head of your weblog.
November 21, 2007 – 11:29 am
A hybrid of HERE docs and literate programming, Doctest is a standard library feature of Python that uses the interactive shell to run tests. Ian Bicking has a JavaScript version that runs in FireFox.
