Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
📚 forty-nine of 2020: Clash of the Titans by Alan Dean Foster ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Foster does his usual solidly enjoyable adaptation work. And I’m pretty sure that this movie was responsible for the majority of my knowledge of Greek mythology for much of my youth (and beyond…).
Something I noticed over these past few days that I find both heartening and a little amusing:
When I first saw the headlines popping up on Twitter and elsewhere that Elliot Page had announced his name and pronouns, I had no idea who this person was. I haven’t watched Umbrella Academy, and most of the headlines were something along the lines of “Umbrella Academy star Elliot Page…”, so it didn’t clue me in, and I just shrugged it off as someone who wasn’t in my awareness. It wasn’t until other headlines also mentioned “Juno” and some Juno-era pictures were shown that I figured it out.
And I think that’s pretty cool, because in all the news I was seeing in my feeds, not a single post or news headline was deadnaming or misgendering Elliot.
Sure, it’s likely that some amount of that is due to my particular circles of friends and acquaintances, who tend to be more aware of these sorts of things. But still, they were linking out to articles, some in fairly mainstream publications, so even if the person posting was being respectful, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if the news articles weren’t.
But it took me nearly a full day to clue in to why this person’s announcement was making so many headlines — and I think that’s pretty cool. I’ll happily spend a little time being mildly confused if it means that cultural progress is being made.
This year’s series of Microblogvember posts is done! Once again, lots of SF/F microfiction. Find all of them — plus, if you scroll back far enough, all of last year’s — on the microblogvember tag page, and (hopefully) enjoy!
She closed her eyes, reciting line after line of every poem, song, and book she could remember, desperately trying to reinforce her mental defenses against the earworm’s attack. Unfortunately, humanity had yet to find a working defense against “It’s A Small World, After All.”
📚 forty-eight of 2020: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome by Joan D. Vinge ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Better than I expected for a novelization of an ‘80s action flick. Makes me want to re-watch the film again to see if it’s better than I remember, or if Vinge just did a particularly good job.
When he was younger, the future was a bright, shiny goal that he couldn’t wait to get to. Now that he was here, though it all seemed so sadly pedestrian and banal. Even personal transporters and alien coworkers lost their fascination after a few years of everyday encounters.
The ball had progressed beautifully. As each reveler grew tired and departed, whether alone or with one or more partners for more private entertainments, they drew a mask from the bin by the door, placed it over their face, and returned to the safety of everyday life once more.
📚 forty-seven of 2020: Exiles by Howard Weinstein ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #startrek #tng 🖖
The best of the early TNG novels so far. The characters felt right, and there was a good mix of serious plot and humor throughout. An obvious final solution, but that’s forgivable.
Once the initial breakthrough was made, time-travel was actually fairly simple…as long as you were going backwards. After all, that had all already happened. But going forwards was a much larger dilemma due to the difficulty in targeting any one of the infinite possible futures.
While spell development was superficially similar to most any other sort of creative process, the fine-tuning was killer. There were just so many variables to know what to adjust — ingredients, gestures, words, tone of voice — that those final touches could be quite dangerous.