Freckles & Doubt

Here is another entry in the Department Of The Approximately One Million Things That Make Me Cry. "Space Oddity" is a fairly emotional piece of music anyway, considered quite apart from its position in my pervy-David-Bowie-fancying lexicon: it's a particularly vivid and evocative rendition of isolation and loss layered on top of stirring human endeavour. Space is simply emotional, and humans in space hit a deeply-embedded science fictional nerve in my psyche. (Which suggests why it's taking me so long to get around to watching Moon, and also why I really ought to). I've also been following Chris Hadfield on Twitter and Tumblr, as he patiently and systematically humanises the space station project - not so much putting a human face on it, as skilfully using the immediacy and speed of social media to insert us into the experience. It's been wonderful, both exciting and moving - he's an amazing man. He also posts the odd photo of Cape Town from orbit, which makes me ridiculously happy.

He's coming back down to Earth now, and as a farewell has released a version of "Space Oddity" sung, rather well, by himself, in the space station. This is a perfect thing. It's been bouncing around my Tumblr and Twitter feeds all morning, accompanied by righteous squee. It also hits so many of my buttons simultaneously that I've just sat at my desk for ten minutes and cried like a baby.



I've had a rather madly social weekend - book club on Friday, Neil's birthday on Saturday, and a Sunday night dinner I cooked last night with Jo&Stv and Sven&Tanya featuring wine, hilarity and roast chicken with all the trimmings, not to mention a new recipe for chocolate mousse which ... seems to work. All three of these gatherings were not particularly notable in that they featured me, at some stage, babbling enthusiastically about fan fiction, as a result of which Jo was moved to suggest that I actually post some links to these stories for the general enlightenment or bewilderment of my readers. Which is a damned good idea.

As an opening shot, and in keeping with the Space Feels, have a series of really rather interesting AU fics re-imagining the Avengers in a space opera setting. I'm impressed at the creativity of this writer: the way they've managed to take the characters and relationships of the Marvel films and explore them via a rather different idiom but with a sensitive eye to emotional and political resonance. Also, bonus AI politics and Tony Stark as technomancer with nanotech, communicating with JARVIS via a neural implant. JARVIS is simply cool. icarus_chained, Space Electric.

Added bonus: I've managed to shamelessly use both "evocative" and "resonant" in the same post. I blame the Space Feels.

Teh Internets have recently been all agog about yet another in the long line of tragically misogynistic assaults on female fans by men from within the fantasy/sf/comics world. There's this utterly weird thing that goes on at cons, with certain male geeky types getting their Superman boxers in a twist because attractive female geeks in costume cannot possibly be "real" geeks and are, as far as I can make out in their somewhat incoherent argument, simply doing it for the attention. Or being deliberately and callously unattainable. Or something. Not a lot of logic here, and rather a lot of evidence that a very specific subset of the male geeky type is hopelessly defensive and bristly about "their" fandom, and moreover has absolutely no idea how to deal with the mere fact of attractive women within their "safe" space. Or the idea of anyone seeing "their" fandom in different terms - you see further outbreaks of this kind of thing in the assaults on female fanfic writers who have the temerity to slash comic-book characters, which are now "ruined" for the "real" fans. Or something. I can't even. (See here for specific examples and commentary, as well as a surgically accurate attack on the objectification of women in comic-book art).

At any rate, while there's a beautiful deconstruction of the Tony Harris misogyny here, my favourite response is, as often seems to be the case, Scalzi's: the gut-boy analogy is exquisitely withering and certain turns of phrase made me choke, as is traditional, on my Earl Grey. It's just fortunate that for every certain kind of male geeky type there is an equal and opposite male geeky type, probably because physics. Thank FSM.

I also can't help wondering if the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that con fandoms tend to be around fantastic texts, which trend heavily to the symbolic and thus the idealised and reductionist, so that in the faint scrabblings of the demented fan-brain the concept of "fan" has the same inviolably perfect status as "Batman". Or, in other words, as I spent a happy half-hour explaining to my nice therapist the other day, because superheroes are actually about the idealisation of both identity and agency, and to a greater or lesser degree of dysfunction, being a hopeless fan is about as close as any of us are ever going to get.

It was a slightly madly busy weekend, which I'm only getting around to describing now because I've been spaced and elsewhere all week. Possibly because of actual alien abductions. There certainly seem to be moments when I look up and great tracts of hours at a time have passed without me noticing or actually doing anything in them other than desultorily reading fanfic. (Hilarious fact of the day: the Hawkeye/Coulson slash ship is known as "Bowtie". Hee.)

At any rate, we Salty Crackered on Friday, with mixed results. Then on Saturday we did another installment of the Great Me/Jo LARP-writing pact, which is causing that Wild West LARP to actually be written at a rate currently not one microsecond faster than two hours per week, but that's just under two hours a week more than it's been doing for about the last decade, so score.

Then on Saturday night we movie clubbed. Movie club was Jo's choice, and we watched Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs Evil, which is a strangely inevitable pairing requiring much bolstering of my nerves with booze and a monkey pillow behind which to cower fetchingly because I really don't do gore. Really. And there was a lot of gore. A lot. (Collapses on fainting couch in girly fashion at the mere horrible memory of all the sprays of blood). Cabin in the Woods is, of course, Joss Whedon (fangirlfangirlfangirl*) doing his usual genre-savvy, hyper-aware, meta sort of stuff, with enough panache and general out-thereness that I spent the first half hour of the movie going "WTF is he doing?" in tones of fascinated dread. It's a brilliant (if bloody) script and has a bloody brilliant cast, I'm really enjoying Chris Hemsworth's slightly tongue-in-cheek jock thing, and Fran Kranz is a weird and lateral acting deity all on his own.

And the film, apart from being self-conscious pervy genre-fondling of the most extreme type (and therefore making me very, very happy) is also a beautifully dark and incisive exposition of the night's theme, which was, of course, The True Nature Of Evil. (Jo thinks it was about Horror Cabins In Woods Revisited Ironically, but she's wrong, or at very least less right. If these films do anything, it's to insist that evil isn't what you think it is and, in particular, it may actually be what you're doing when you think you're fighting evil, something the American Republican party would do well to consider. And horror has, after all, absolutely the best box of tropes about confronting evil.) Whedon's take on this is intelligent and pointed enough that it made the efforts along similar (and more slapstick) lines of Tucker and Dale look like the semi-comic hackery I darkly suspect they actually were, Alan Tudyk and some reasonably funny lines notwithstanding. Possibly I am prejudiced against it because of the gratuitous stereotypes. And the woodchipper. Aargh. Woodchipper.

In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that the night's theme was The True Nature Of Evil As Explicated By Oblivious Teens In Gory Horror Cabins In Woods, Revisited Ironically By Joss Whedon And/Or Alumni. But it's a bit of a mouthful.

Sunday morning I did tea in Kirstenbosch with my sister and Da Niece, who just turned seven, good grief, and scored thereby Ursula Vernon art and various subversive works of kiddielit including Dragonbreath, just because. Then Sunday afternoon/evening we trotted out to Fish Hoek for a braai with rumint in his ceremonial biennial visit to these shores, and it was lovely to catch up. But I am dead this week. Dead. I am not designed by nature to be a happy socialiser in any sort of extended format. And there's book club tonight. Oh, lord. *girds loins*. I love book club and its lovely ladies, but my socio-metre needle is quivering on "full".

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* obligatory

I've spent the last week reading Avengers slash more or less continually, and really, it's not what you think. I can happily give you, if you like, the current state of theory about slash, its operation as a female-produced and female-centred emotional pornography, its response to the body fetish of contemporary media society, its address to gender balances in our cultural texts. All of that is true. But it's not why I read it. I am not immune to the charm of beautiful men articulating their feelings with greater or lesser degrees of angst and humour and smut, but it's really a different kind of intimacy which keeps me immersed in this world, warmed by it: the true pull is the intimacy between the writer and their text.

Fan fiction of any sort has a sort of luminosity to it. However badly it's written (and despite my fastidious focus on the articulate end of its spectrum, I still encounter the odd appalling assault on grammar and coherence), any fan fiction breathes from its surfaces the loving intensity with which its writer regards the story and characters they're appropriating. Fan fiction is about investment, the wholehearted identification with a text which raises the writer to new, in some cases superhuman levels of sensitivity and insight and insane creativity. People spend weeks and months of their lives producing novel-length responses to their canon because that act is the only one with sufficient magnitude to reflect their love of it.

And this has surprising knock-on effects. It has its squabbles and its bigotries, but the fan-fiction world on the whole presents itself as a supportive community, shaped and directed by the overflow of warm and intimate relations with texts into warm and intimate relations with fellow fans. The tenor of fan interchanges tends to be playful and funny and self-revealing, intrinsically about recognition and trust. As a corollary, I increasingly find fics posted with trigger warnings: do not read if you have problems with non-con, BDSM, abuse situations, whatever. It's protective and rather sweet.

Fan fiction finds its own level: a reader looks for writers whose preoccupations and 'ships and responses to a character or world are the closest to their own, and will thus also reflect their investment. Communities grow with a lot in common, but they are also made up of people with a tendency to invest heavily in their cultural artefacts. This spills into the fictional world, so that any fanfic you enjoy is likely to be rife with references to books and films and music and poetry other than the canon text of the 'fic, but which equally resonates with you, not just because you are likely to share tastes with the author, but because even a passing reference is delineated with passion and precision and a sense of loving identification which makes a reference a shining thing in itself. I discover a lot of books and music and poetry via fanfic references, thereby enriching my life greatly.

I don't write fanfic for a variety of reasons, but mostly, I don't write fanfic because I have no need to - because my own investments are content with the nature of the reflection they find in the fiction that already exists.

I have just spent two days at home with a weird virus thingy which caused me to feel hot/cold, faint, faintly nauseous, slightly hovercraftian¹, and as though my arms are around three miles long. It's an odd feeling, watching your hands do things completely independently of yourself. I am now back at work, but am prone to look vaguely at a point just beyond a student's left ear and mutter things about squid². My hands are still typing this post more or less off their own bat, to which I say hooray. If I can work out how to outsource actual student advice to my hands, perhaps my head will stop aching.

During the course of the last two days I have read multiple volumes of frivolous YA fantasy (still very enamoured of Kristen Cashore and entertained by Tamora Pierce), played short snatches of computer games which have been prevented from being long snatches by the spinning of my head, and imbibed a great deal of fanfic. The list of links at Making Light is a particularly fine selection which has introduced me to Doctor Who/classic lit crossover fic (Austen and Gone with the Wind) and to Avengers fanfic, which tends to the cute. Still not sure about Tony/Captain slash, though. However, delightful to be reminded that Steven Brust wrote a Firefly fanfic novel. Also, memo to self, must watch Leverage, if only because Christian Kane.

My current state of weird finds curious comfort in H P Lovecraft as agony aunt. With, of course, emphasis on the agony.

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¹ Floaty, teetering, and likely to spin off in odd directions. Also, full of eels.
² I have no idea.

There's a piece of Harry Potter fanfic I read lo, these many moons ago, about which I can remember nothing except that it featured Draco Malfoy on the run through Muggle England by train. (It may, on mature reflection, have been an A. J. Hall). At some point his train stops in the middle of nowhere, and a soothing voice on the public address system advises passengers that there will be a slight delay because "there is a sheep lodged in the high-tension cables." I always thought this was pure hyperbole. Hah.

Today my otherwise calm and well-planned trek from Golders Green to Kingston was stopped for a total of about half an hour at two stations on the Northern Line, because (a) "they're still having that bit of trouble at Belsize Park" (precisely what kind of trouble history does not relate), (b) "the Fire Brigade are examining Chalk Farm station", and (c) "there's something stuck under the rails in the tunnel." It's a little disconcerting to be told all change, this train has been discontinued, please cross the platform to the other train, oops, sorry, that's also been discontinued, please cross the platform back to the first train, which has now morphed from the desired Charing Cross iteration to one that goes via Bank and is thus perfectly useless for purposes of Waterloo. (And what's with a station called "Bank", anyway? I don't know if it's meant to be taken in the financial or geographical sense, but either way, it's a sad failure of imagination).

It is, I suppose, faintly inevitable that passing through Mornington Crescent repeatedly for several days should cause hallucinatory fragments of the game to circle vaguely and continuously through my skull.

I managed in the end to change at Camden Town without undue trauma, and there was a lovely taxi at Kingston Station who took me and my suitcase (which is, I have to say, doing that inexplicable suitcase thing of becoming heavier and more overfull despite the fact that I'm actually taking stuff out of it rather than adding) to the B&B. It's a slightly downmarket B&B, rooms not en suite, but chintzy and comfy and right on the mighty river Thames, which this evening looked like this, with added swans, sculls and vapour trails:



Achievement Unlocked: Visit All London-Resident Ex-Boyfriends Whose Names Begin with A. (My romantic history has some strangely specific trends, at least in the geo-alphabetical sense). I had lovely lunches with lovely people on Monday and Tuesday, and egadfly and Iza were princely hosts (the latter allowing me to feel useful by assisting her to cut up and laminate untold oodles of stuff for her class full of teeny titchy kiddies, which is absolutely the closest I care to get to kiddies, teeny-titchy, for the use of, en masse, and was rather fun).

Oh, yes. *speaks urgently into Secret Service wrist-mike, à la Chuck*: wolverine_nun, I am happy to report that the bok has bumpied. Repeat: the bok has bumpied. *skulks off*.

The tottering piles of unread tomes which festoon my study are reaching critical mass. On my to-do list for this six weeks of leave: read them into submission, by processes of stern self-discipline and rejection of distracting fluff. The problem is that in my current chronically fatigued state I'm really drifting inexorably into the fluffy, on the grounds that it's all my tired brain is really fit for. Any inroads into the Bookshelf of Unread Reproach are thus hard-won, spasmodic and somewhat few and far between. In addition, while most of the BoUR is composed of fairly worthwhile literature, some of it is downright intimidating (I still, for example, haven't dared crack open Anathem on account of the fear), so if I do finish something, it's because it bloody well gripped me enough to make me do the work.

This is thus already a point in favour of the two novels I've just finished, which are in the Iskryne series, a collaboration between Elizabeth Bear (whose lj, as matociquala, I very greatly enjoy) and Sarah Monette. I don't know Monette's writing at all; I know Bear's novels from the cyberpunky Jenny Casey series, Hammered et al, which are fun, and from her rather entertaining take on urban fantasy and mage/fay wars in Blood and Iron. (On my to-acquire list: the slashy Shakespeare/Marlowe ones). She's a deceptively solid writer - the prose feels plain and sturdy, until you look at it more closely and realise how carefully crafted it is and how hard every word is working. She's also deceptive on the level of plot, as these apparently straightforward character-driven adventure narratives tend to be packing serious political teeth.

The books I've just finished are A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men. I thoroughly enjoyed them, but they've stayed with me in a not entirely comfortable sense: in the final analysis, I'm still not sure if they completely worked. The Iskryne world is a sort of alternate-fantasy Viking-based civilisation, in which the early-medieval Nordic homesteads are regularly threatened by trolls and wyverns. The task of fighting off these supernatural depredations is taken by the wolfcarls, warriors telepathically bonded to wolves, who form their own sub-society revolving around the pack. The harshness of the setting - ice and snow and advancing glaciers, and marginal existence scratched out in the face of it - contributes to the overall feel of the books, which is gritty, bloody and occasionally brutal.

Telepathic bonds with animals are so much of a fantasy cliché, you're probably groaning as you read this. Fortunately the authors of this series are absolutely and intrinsically aware of the cliché, and are deliberately setting out to turn it on its head. What above all I adored about these books is the absolute poke in the eye they are to the fluffy teen romanticism of things like McCaffrey's Pern series. The books set out to logically work through the implications of two basic premises, viz:

1. Telepathic bonding with animals renders the human bondmate open to the unconstrained sexual impulses of the animal in heat, with whatever that realistically implies in terms of loss of agency; and,
   
2. Bonding with wolves is about being better equipped to fight maurauding trolls. While a wolfcarl may bond with a male or female wolf, in a civilisation based on Norse mythology and Viking civilisation, the people doing the fighting are going to be exclusively male.

You can see where this is going. Inescapably, this premise followed with any degree of consistency is going to lead to really an awful lot of gay sex. Which it proceeds to do, not always comfortably, but always with complete conviction.

I was impressed with the world-building here. The cultural consequences of a separate, wolf-pack-based, homosexual society for a subset of the culture's warriors seem to me to be well and convincingly delineated. The writers are not shy when it comes to depicting both the consolation of such a setting for its participants, the strength and support of its relationships, and the less comfortable tensions - not just in interaction with a heterosexual meta-culture, but the implications for a heterosexual man who is nonetheless drawn to the wolf-bond enough to accept the sexual imperatives that come with it. The whole set-up has a beautiful logic, and its working out is consistent and satisfying even when it touches on brutality and limitation of choice.

But I'm still not sure it completely works, and I rather suspect that some of the point of my disquiet is in the genesis of this whole thing in two female writers writing about male experiences of homoerotic encounter. When I flippantly refer to "slashy" takes on Shakespeare and Marlowe, above, I am quite deliberately invoking the whole subculture and creed of slash fan fiction, in terms of its production of male homoerotic encounters by, largely, female writers and for the benefit, largely, of female readers. I'm doing it deliberately because at times this is what Companion and Reckoning feel like. There is an awful lot of homosexual sex, inevitably given the set-up, but more importantly, there's a huge amount of focus on male feelings - love, angst, conflict. At base, quite apart from the smut elements, this is what slash is about, the exploration of male emotion expressed outside normal cultural contexts and expectations, and this series does that in spades. The problem - and this may simply be the result of my over-exposure to slash, and thus somewhat dubious - is that it somehow feels as if its address is the same as that of slash, towards a female readership.

So, however much I enjoyed and respected Iskryne's world and achievements - and I did - there's still an ambivalence in my response. Part of me is responding with an awareness that this is serious world-building and cultural exploration, and is doing mental pompom routines on the sidelines in recognition of the simple elegance of the setting's inversions. Hell, if you want a truly poignant window onto the probable experience of gay men forced to hide inside heterosexual marriage, try looking at it through the eyes of a heterosexual man forced into homoerotic relationships solely because of his love for his wolf.

But there's another aspect to my response which is quite simply to feel as though some of the things the series is doing are about objectification, pure and simple - men put through their sexual and emotional paces by and for the benefit of women. And pure titillation aside, some of those paces are nasty - if you let the animal lust thing run its course with men standing in for the wolf bitch in season surrounded by males, what you have is a gang-bang. However rational the steps which have led to that outcome, and however much the focus is on cultural necessities and the emotional consequences of the choices they force, the upshot is deeply unpleasant, and the slashy conditioning makes it feel slightly as though the characters are being put through trauma because it gives rise to interesting angst.

Which is, of course, deeply illogical: to return full circle, what I really like about the series is its ability to insist that animal life is not clean or pleasant or romantic, that Pern's dragonriders largely got away with soft-focus hawt dragon sex rather than having to face the reality of sexual coercion via involuntary participation in an animal's responses. The angst is entirely necessary and justified. Likewise, if slash interests me, it's mostly because of the extent to which it seems to function as a genuinely female pornography, written by and for women and about men. If I don't have a problem with Harry/Draco, why should I have a problem with conflicted homosexual wolf-carls? Because it's "serious literature" rather than "fluffy parodic self-indulgence"? Way to be consistent, there.

Nonetheless, there is disquiet, and I'm not entirely sure it's the disquiet the authors intended to create with their deliberately provocative premise. It's not enough to prevent my enjoyment of the writing, and it won't stop me from acquiring the third in the Iskryne series when it turns up - this is a compelling world and I really like these characters. (Quite apart from all of the angst and trauma and bloody fighting, these books still manage to be occasionally funny). But I have, let us say, small political reservations. I shall watch the direction taken by the third book, and my own responses to it, with baffled fascination.

Sid the Sinus Headache is flexing his gosh-darned muscles and growling again, so I shall attempt to distract him by being Literary. True Blood and Doctor Who 4 notwithstanding, I've actually managed to do some reading lately, which is just as well because my Bookshelf of Unread Doom is stretching L-spacily again...

So, Sarah Rees Brennan. Better known as Maya, authoress of, among other things, bunches of Harry/Draco slash and also "Draco Malfoy the Amazing Dancing Rat", which is one of my favourite pieces of Potterfic, not least because it rather entertainingly ships Draco/Hermione and features geeky homework-related flirting over lots of coffee. She's also just published her first YA fantasy, called The Demon's Lexicon, which I have just read.

This was fun. Fairly straightforward urban fantasy stuff - contemporary England, demons, teen brothers, and the snappy and often funny dialogue which is her trademark. She also evinces the particular qualities I've come to associate with fan fiction, even at the more accomplished end of the spectrum her work inhabits, which boil down to (a) bucketloads of angst, and (b) pretty boys being emotionally intense. (Another case in point: Cassandra Clare's City of Bones). Really, this is what slash is all about: not the sex, per se, but male characters embroiled in difficult, demanding, complicated feelings, whether they like it or not. In Demon's Lexicon it's a brotherly rather than a romantic relationship, but the vibe feels very familiar.

This also accounts, perhaps, for the overall impression I have of the book: while it's intensely readable and boasts a rather spectacular and well-done plot twist, it also feels young, not just because it's aimed at young adults, but because it's a young writer. The first half or so of the book drags slightly, marking time while the payoff is set up: Ms. Brennan is definitely in command of her characters, but she's not quite in command of her narrative. My sense, however, is that she very definitely will be in the not too distant future, and I shall watch her career with interest. (She says, pushing her pince-nez back on the end of her nose and channelling a Victorian lawyer).

The other fantasy novel I've read recently is John C. Wright's The Last Guardian of Everness, which my Evil Landlord left carelessly lying around an obscure corner of his bookshelf where I happened to be rootling. I loved Wright's Orphans of Chaos series, which I described as a "sort of weird semi-inexplicable Victorian/modern heroic school story". Everness does a splashy and inelegant belly-flop into Lovecraft's Dreamlands, immersing itself thoroughly while spreading detritus around wholesale: the detached, drifty approach to a world beautiful, strange, inexplicable, threatening and corrupt is absolutely nail-on-the-head in terms of tone and feel. Also, bonus mad faerie women, cheerfully crude and sociopathic Selkie and giant set-piece battles between death knights, animated stone statues and small, confused military detachments with machine-guns. This book is trippy, beautiful and gut-wrenching by turns: it's like being repeatedly hit over the head by an exquisite statue constructed in five dimensions from bloody human bones. On the whole I think I like it. Certainly enough to dig up the sequel.

In other news, Woolworths eaten by vampires. Just because I'm relieved that someone else experiences the same degree of lateral to their conversations.

I love the bit where I tell a room full of anxious first-years that it's actually significantly difficult to get thrown out of the faculty, they're fine if they pass three courses in their first year. The sharp intake of breath. The helpless, relieved grins. The relaxation of the shoulders as hope dawns. Until this point most of them are petrified that they'll be flung out into the snow if they fail one. Sometimes I really enjoy my job.

Back to lecturing today, which also possibly explains my unusually buoyant mood, to the extent of wandering down the corridor singing "Tell me why! I don't like Mondays..." happily to myself. (Bob Geldorf notwithstanding. Lord, that's an irritating little man). Holding forth for forty-five minutes on the essential unreality of sex in representation seems to calm my inner kvetch quite nicely, thank you, which is fortunate as the Monday shock after a three-day weekend is usually quite nasty. Also, bonus, made a point of using both "resonate" and "evoke" at least once during the lecture. Just for you, stvil. Plus mandatory references to Buffy, Anne Rice diss, and revelation of the existence of Weasleycest to stunned and disbelieving Humanities third-years.

I miss teaching. Memo to self, trade in career, it is skraaatched.

I couldn't work out why Todal, feline of the 10-second attention span, should choose Wednesday evening to blitz me with an extended, 20-minute affection session, complete with staring, purring, climbing all over me, putting her whiskers in my ear, and that cute bit where she pats my nose with her paw. That sort of love is usually reserved for the Evil Landlord. It transpires, however, that this was post-traumatic shock of a sort: on Tuesday evening, following the mad piratical DVD-watching, she did her usual odd-kitty thing, which is to jump up into the narrow space between the TV and the cabinet and disappear behind the TV, presumably in search of all the interesting little moving people. On Tuesday I apparently closed the cabinet doors and went to bed without realising she was in there. She spent the night there, mewing and thumping, which caused the Evil Landlord to turn over in bed a couple of times and assume that a Multicoloured Gerbil of Paradise was once more buying it on the living-room carpet. He let her out when he woke up in the morning.

I feel a bit bad, but also mostly amused. Also, someone has dismembered a pigeon all over the Evil Landlord's study this morning, suggesting that some kind of generalised feline revenge has been exacted. Sigh.

Random linkery for jo, because she liked the bit that MTN rip off in their ad: the OK Go treadmill music video. Bizarrely lateral and appealing. I hope this eats less of your time than the Spikefic. *evil grin*

Random linkery because I can: various Hugo-nominated novelettes and short stories available on the web. I really enjoyed Ian Macdonald's "The Djinn's Wife", which uses Indian mythology to talk about AI. Michael F. Flynn's "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" is one of those mild, understated, slow-build stories packed with significance. Robert Reed's "Eight Episodes" is simultaneously fun and thoughtful. Haven't found time to read the novellas yet, watch this space.