The back half of F&SF jan/feb 2017

I just tried eating the 'vegetable lasagne' from the sainsburys free from range.
Gliten free pasta don't half take a lot of chewing.
It was a distinctive textural experience, to the point that I didn't really notice the taste, except to note that inly a few mouthfuls even had any.

won't be trying that again.



The magazine...

Dunnage for the Soul by Robert Reed...
I think I would bet a substantial bit of money that the author is not disabled.
Because it is ablist as all hell, while possibly attempting to satirise ablism?
It does that thing where someone society deems disabled turns around and makes people just like him, to leave them to see how they like it.
( Read more... )

Alexandria by Monica Byrne is all made of feelings, and is quite a lot about impermanence and how sad it is. But it's not very much F or SF. It just put future dates on people finding the ruins. Made me feel things, but.

Wetherfell's Reed Runics by Marc Laidlaw
I looked him up and he appears to be an old white guy, so I'm not impressed with him inventing a not-Hawaii island and making the local characters there like cleaners and criminals. And bookstore guy, the point of view guy.
The plot is sort of... not? Like, it just shows us around the place, in the point of view of a guy who thinks he's a bad writer who can't describe it right, while kind of mocking tourists yet giving the reader a touristy experience.
I kind of didn't see the point. Like, stuff happens, but only a bit and around the edges.

There Used to Be Olive Trees by Rich Larson
interesting post apocalypse with lots of interesting nasties running around
and a bit of a gay love story
though I'm really tired of homophobic violence even in a futuristic hellscape.
really, we don't need that, there is plenty of drama, do something else.
Other than that, interesting characters, vivid setup, coherent plot.

(no subject)

I am frustrated by current social media options.
Tumblr is easier to signal boost but impossible to find people on, let alone have a conversation.
DW has the great comment threading capability but takes many taps to make a link to somewhere interesting.

I need to go through that friending post and make more friends who are still here.


also I forgot to join Imzy back when I was asking about it. Is that still a thing? Did everyone go there? If they did they wouldn't be here to tell me so.




I still miss mailing lists and message boards. I mean I'm still on mailing lists and message boards, but everyone else left, usually in the 90s.

also I mostly lurk most places because talking is hard and the idea of friending or even just adding to reading list new people kind of makes me ill of anxious, but that's not a technical problem.



Tumblr is busy and noisy but in a signal loss way. It's easy to keep the queue full and read the dash all day but hard to make meaning beyond oooh pretty.



I'm really glad of Ao3 because I hate to think how fragmented fic could get without it.

Killjoys season one 1 to 5

I sat down and watched the whole of disc one of season one of Killjoys, five episodes in a row.
And while I did that I did the monday cleaning, because that's just fill laundry empty laundry change program repeat, or dishwasher same. But that made it a very accomplished day, so I win.

... I win with a headache. That feels like too much staring. Maybe my glasses are not quite right? I barely wear them for reading anymore cause they feel odd, but I need them for the TV.

ANYway. Killjoys.

I like it. I don't love it and I only vaguely like the characters so far. Gender is only balanced if you count Lucy the ship. And it does that thing where a woman needs an excuse to be kickarse.

But it's having fun with worldbuilding, there's a bunch of female characters being politicians and so forth, and there's lots of running around shooting things or having horrible things happen to them yet enduring.

It's a bit dark really, it keeps making me ponder what I'd rather be watching instead, with less internal organs showing.

And yet I watched the whole disc in a row, and have only stopped because feeling a bit blergh.



Oh, also? Picture quality as it should be, so it's just Agent Carter discs being wrong.

And the subtitles are excellent, they're the very rare sort that care about where on the screen they are and tell you who is speaking by where they're put. They're a joy to watch. Ten out of ten, would employ whoever did these to resub everything else.

... I get frustrated when this is a thing that can be done, yet subs get thrown on as an afterthought, if we're lucky.

But for true, these are the good stuff.




Maybe I want to watch something where political marriages and trade deals save the day. I don't know, seems like I'd have to go out of genre for that.



But this was good to watch.

Just very biological quite often.