It’s a sign that I’m on the right track, how far behind I am on the Kushibora scandal. Now, you know you’ve got a community of sorts when there’s an actual “scandal” because someone’s been (supposedly) misrepresenting himself. Now, many of the people who read me these days aren’t connected to the Korean blogosphere, so I’ll give you the background you need in case you’re like me and prefer to get the beans from the first site instead of linking like mad: There is a vibrant commenting culture on the set of websites included in the “K-blogosphere”, meaning blogs that …
Month: August 2006
‘Nother Sterling-Holic Lurking on Campus?
So I was digging through the open stacks at the library today, trying to find some stuff on/by Ursula Le Guin and H.G. Wells, and you’ll never guess what I found. Yeah, the majority of Bruce Sterling’s books. The only things missing were Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid, Mirrorshades, and The Difference Engine. Oh, plus Zeitgeist and the new collection of short stories and his nonfiction books (which, for all I know, maybe be shelved in some other section). But everything else is there: Globalhead, A Good Old Fashioned Future, and all the novels from Schismatrix to Zeitgeist. Okay, so …
Meet the Tardigrade!
While doing a little research on cryptobiosis, for a far-future flash story I’m writing about a society where longevity-treatments are the ultimate key to power in a society, I ran across a description of the weirdest animal I’ve ever heard of: the tardigrade, also known as the “water bear”. Check out these characteristics (courtesy of the Wikipedia entry linked above): Body with four segments and head Ventral nervous system with one ganglion per segment Multilobed brain Triradiate muscular sucking pharynx Stylets A single gonad Instead of a coelom they have a haemocoel, the only place where we still can find …
Shoopahs
So, I’m not gonna post so much, I say. But I will mention that I’m working on my first semi-post-Clarion story. I wrote some 5500 words of the story at the workshop, but that looks like perhaps even less than half of the thing, I’m realizing as I swoop in towards 8000 words. So anyway, it’s a story about East-Asian superheroes, riffing off the notion of Superman as a representation of America economic/military power. Superman’s an individualist, representing a kind of capitalist-like competition of free agents — he doesn’t make money off his feats, but he does gain a kind …
Fictional expletives, Foreign expletives
Such a list exists, at Wikipedia, of course. I’m sure other writers will enjouy. And for cusses in other languages, see here, though I cannot vouch for accuracy on the latter.