It comes as no surprise to me to hear (as I have heard tonight) that one of the most queer-friendly sites in the Korean internet is a site hosted by a major Korean SF-author. Not because I think there’s a link between SF and alternative sexualities (though this author has addressed that set of issues in fictional form in the past) but because — howsoever certain authors may seem to contradict this notion (here’s a response) — in my experience, and for those people who are likely to be thinking individuals, SF simply accustoms them to thinking about the world …
Month: March 2009
Get Yourself Some Free Diet Soap and Shimmer (and Apex For Cheap)
One thing that sucks about living so far from North America is how hard it is to pick up magazines and just check them out. While I recently discovered that Realms of Fantasy was being carried (on the shelf) by Whatthebook in Itaewon, I found this a shock: genre fiction mags are pretty much the last thing one can sample in Korea, so you generally have to subscribe to find out what they’re like, or stick to what you know, or read online fiction magazines. But there’s a new trend of giving magazines away in PDF form, to allow people …
Lester Young Podcast Live @ Starship Sofa!!!
Yes, here it is! Tony at Starship Sofa has posted this week’s podcast, which includes a wonderful dramatic reading by J.J. Campanella of my Asimov’s novelette “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” The cover art for this issue is an excellent scene from the story by artist Skeet Scienski (who also has an audio segment on genre art!) — I’m blown away by that art, man! — and the story is introduced by Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s SF! (I also do a little outro on the background for the story.) There’s also poetry by Bruce Boston, and …
Since Feb 27th
In the 27 days since Feb 27th, when I last saw my cardiologist, I have: … reduced my weight by 6.6 kilograms (though I’ve probably lost a little more fat, as it’s apparent, when I’m in short sleeves, that I’ve put on muscle mass). One of the professors I work with was teasing me that I will be the next campus hunk. (She didn’t say what I would be a hunk of, so I’m taking it as a good thing.) My current total is 103.4, as of yesterday morning. Even if I’m on diuretics (which speed up weight loss, but …
Ada Lovelace Day
Argh! I missed it–unsurprising, since I’ve been deluged with work and email, and since I also spent more than an hour after a long string of classes today, helping some students figure out how to find an angle for their article for the magazine we’re working on. (So if I haven’t replied to an email, it’s coming soon, dear reader/correspondent.) Well, Nalo and Jetse both blogged for the occasion, among, I’m sure, many others. But I did not let Lady Lovelace go unnoticed on her special day: when one of my students claimed (today, in Media English) that the “first …
Media, Power, and Technology: The Themes of My Media English Course
So, I was thinking about what to do with the real intro lecture to my Media class, last week. (Yes, it was week three of the semester, but as one student put it to me the other day, “We don’t think of the first week of school as the first week of classes. You know how we change classes and shop around.” The first week of real classes is Week 2, and in Week 2 I led a discussion about personal opinions and experiences of Media, of course. So I was casting about for what to do with my Week …
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Nominated!?!?!
Actually, I found out a few days ago, and believe you me, it was hard to keep it secret. But the Hugo and Campbell nominations have been announced now, so I can finally stop keeping it secret how honoured I am by my nomination for the Campbell Award 2009. I’m blown away. Thanks to all the people who saw fit to nominate me! It’s nice to see the competition there includes some familiar names, including fellow Canadian Tony Pi and the very impressive Aliette de Bodard. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and squee! until I’m red …
Worth Reading, March ’09
I don’t link online fiction enough, but I found a few links at The World SF News Blog, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Here’s a great story at Strange Horizons by Shweta Narayan. Here’s a very interesting essay about SF (or its relative lack thereof) in the Arabic world, by Achmed A. W. Khammas. It’s particularly interesting in relation to relatively (though not exactly) comparable status in Korea, and its pinpointing of cultural and historical causes for the scarcity.
My Research Plan Application (Argh!) and a New Korean SF Organization (Yay!)
There are a couple of posts I could write about this, so I’m going to try and combine them, groggy-headed as I currently am, into one. Groggy-headed? Ah, well, you see, I was up late last night. Apparently Wednesday was the deadline for funding applications for publications for the coming year. Essentially, professors submit their research plans for the year, specifying one paper that they intend to research and publish, where they plan to do so, and so on. The problem is that nobody told me, and nobody told the one secretary who usually communicates this stuff to me. The …
Weigh-in
UPDATE (20 March 2008): Yeah, figure I’d move the painful details behind a cut. Also, I pretty much fit into my size 38 jeans now… the ones I haven’t worn since 2004. (I knew keeping them was a good idea.) That’s down from a somewhat loose size 42 before, and I think another month of exercise and I’ll be able to buy jeans in Korea again, like I was able to do after a six or eight months of swimming every day. Holy crap, this exercise stuff really works! (Heh.) ORIGINAL POST: I don’t know how much I actually weigh …