WisCon!

The domestic and laboratory goddess, in her answer to our question about science fiction and science bloggers, talked a little about the female role models available to a young budding scientist. This prompted me to realize that I have readers, too new to have heard me waxing enthusiastic about WisCon, who would love this convention.

WisCon is the first and foremost feminist science fiction convention in the world. WisCon encourages discussion, debate and extrapolation of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class. WisCon honors writers, editors and artists whose work explores these themes and whose voices have opened new dimensions and territory in these issues. And, oh yes, we also like to have fun while we're at it.

WisCon is my "home" convention, the one I attend every year, even though it's a four- to five-hour drive to Madison to get there. It's a convention of grown-ups but isn't too grown-up. It has the highest ratio of published authors to fans of any convention I know, but the media programming is great too. It has an academic track, child care, a civilized con suite and commitments to access for people with disabilities and dignity for people with unconventional gender and sexual identities. Oh, and a hot tub.

The James Tiptree, Jr. Award (named after Alice B. Sheldon and supported by a bake sale and auction), is given "for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender" at the convention. This year's guests of honor are Ellen Klages, who made a room full of people go from laughter to tears in less than five minutes two years ago, and Geoff Ryman, a former Tiptree winner and reportedly most graceful wearer of the tiara in Tiptree history.

As you can probably tell, there's no good way to explain this convention. It's utterly unlike the stereotype of a science fiction convention, except in the ways it isn't. The only way to find out whether it's for you is to check it out. It doesn't happen until May, but don't wait. Registration is capped at 1,000 people, and right about now is the time it fills up.

Go see, and maybe I'll see you there.

Murder in the Round

Every once in a while, I come across a place in the center of a city that makes me wonder whether the city planners had been drinking a wee bit too much mountain dew. And no, I don’t mean the soda. Or even the moonshine.

I walk through Elliot Park in Minneapolis on my way home from work most days. It’s an irregular piece of greenery on the edge of downtown, carved up by basketball and tennis courts, a skate park, a rec building, a ball field, a playground and a wading pool.

There are concrete paths here and there, but people mostly follow the ruts in the grass. The main path in the park forms a large circle around the playground and pool. To be perfect, it should circle a small hill, but people know well enough not to follow it anyway. Well, the children may not, as the designer was no doubt aware, but their attention spans are short enough that they never make it around three times. At least, I haven't heard of any disappearing in the park.

Just inside the path is a circle of elms, and this is where the park gets interesting to more than just a faerie-fevered imagination. The trees are nearing the end of their lifespans, and there are a few gaps, but this also means they're the tallest trees on this edge of downtown.

In the fall, tall trees and nearby food turn the park into Crow Central. Every evening, toward sunset, crows on their short migrations have to find somewhere to spend the night. Most nights, it's the park, specifically the ring of elms. I hear the park, of course, before I see it, as the normally more solitary birds negotiate settling in these massive groups. The chatter is so obviously meaningful that it's hard to fight the impression that if I stand and listen long enough, I'll begin to understand.

It's fascinating to look up and see trees, so recently opaque with leaves, now studded with large black bodies. They never quite become opaque again, though. While the elms are definitely the preferred perches, they can only accommodate so many birds comfortably. I don't know how the question is decided, but when one too many birds lands, the entire tree erupts again.

Some of the crows will swirl about to land again in the same tree. Others will depart for less-crowded, less-desirable trees nearby as new birds fly into the park. The entire sky, a post-sunset deep blue, churns like a movie shot of the bat cave--only the silhouettes above are ever so much bigger, and they carry their own music with them as they move.

This video is the closest I could find to what I see walking home. My view is obviously steadier.



Without a circle of trees to concentrate the birds, it's not quite the same. What I see and hear feels nigh unto magical. I keep meaning to the write the story that goes with it, but my descriptions can't begin to capture it. Of course, nothing can. If it could, it wouldn't be magic.

And like any good faerie magic, all that's left of the birds in the morning is shit all over the sidewalk.

Shakespeare in Translation

More Animaniacs.

Hamlet on Yorick


Puck

Lessons With the Warners

Yakko, Wakko and Dot, that is. Someone's been posting Animaniacs videos, and they've put up most of the good patter teaching songs. Now, I wouldn't want to try to pass any tests based on these, but they're still fun, years later.

Presidents


State Capitols


The Nations of the World


Yakko's Universe Song


"We're just tiny little specks, about the size of Mickey Rooney." [sigh] I miss those guys.

Tradition's End

Mme. Piggy has a post up mourning the--hopefully temporary--loss of a Thanksgiving tradition. It resonated with me in a way it might not have any other year. This year marks the end of a tradition for us as well.

For me, Thanksgiving has always meant my grandparents, my mother's parents. They were the in-town grandparents when I was young, and Thanksgiving was always at their house. (We lived in another state for a few years, but I don't remember those Thanksgivings.)

Things changed, of course: more leaves in the table as more kids came, a kids table when we became too many, a shift to early Thanksgiving when my grandparents became snowbirds, adult grandchildren bringing dates. But my grandparents were the constant.

There was a brief break in tradition when my grandparents shifted to a longer snowbird schedule. We had to choose between early Thanksgiving and celebrating the fall birthdays. The birthdays won, and Ben and I started hosting Thanksgiving in our new house.

Hosting was much more convenient for us. It allowed us to combine family obligations from both sides in one place, and our kitchen is much more able to cope with preparation for a feast. Still, it felt wrong without my grandparents, like a fake holiday, like we were playing house while the grownups were away.

Then they sold their place in Arizona and started coming to our house for Thanksgiving and all was well again. Sure, my grandpa keeps thanking me for all the good food as though my husband doesn't grill the turkeys and make gravy and as though no one else brings anything to share (instead of him being the only one), but there are some things that aren't worth trying to change. We had a tradition going. “Over the river and through the hood to Steph and Ben's house....”

Then there's this year.

During the fall birthday celebration, my grandmother started hinting about how they don't get around so well anymore and how it's so nice that everyone else comes to them and maybe Thanksgiving? I changed the subject.

She called a couple weeks later to make the suggestion explicitly. I put her off until after the election.

I knew then we'd go, and we will. Tomorrow, we'll pack up a ridiculous amount of food and cooking gear and carefully coordinate the use of a tiny kitchen. It'll be tricky, but we'll manage.

Much harder will be facing what the end of the tradition means. My grandparents are both in their nineties now, and neither is as hale as they once were. It won't be that long before the feast moves back to our place.

But will it be Thanksgiving without my grandparents?

Grandma's Cranberry Relish

Or, how to make all the kids eat their cranberries. Seriously.

3 12-oz. bags fresh cranberries
2/3 c. granulated sugar
1 large can crushed pineapple
1 pint heavy whipping cream
1 lb. mini-marshmallows

Wash and drain the cranberries. Grind using a medium die.

Mix in sugar and let sit overnight in the refrigerator.

Drain the crushed pineapple thoroughly. Mix the juice with some rum. This is for you, not the kids.

Whip the cream to very stiff peaks, just shy of butter.

In a bigger bowl than you think you'll need, mix the pineapple and marshmallows into the cranberries. Fold in the whipped cream just until you have no large red streaks.

The end result is fluffy, unthreateningly pink and has distinct sweet and tart elements. Serves dozens and freezes remarkably well.

Arbitrary Things

Eek. Tagged again.

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random arbitrary things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Thing One
I was, quite literally, a poster child. Back in the days when in-home daycare was a radical choice, my mother was involved in promoting it. Pictures of me as a very smiley, very blond two-year-old were used to show how happy children in daycare really were.

Thing Two
I have discovered, through a certain amount of experimentation, that overly sweet candies can be much improved by roasting them over a fire. Circus peanuts and peeps are particularly good examples.

Thing Three
I've never had a driver's license. I can drive a manual transmission and downshift around a corner, but I've never taken the test. There is no good reason for this.

Thing Four
My laugh is preserved for posterity. Neil Gaiman recorded material for his spoken-word album, Warning: Contains Language in front of several live audiences. Most of what made it onto the album was recorded in a studio, but "Chivalry" is the live version. That very loud, very distinctive laugh that's just a little early? That's me.

Thing Five
My music collection contains fairly complete discographies of a number of eighties "one-hit" wonders: Soft Cell, Men Without Hats, Thomas Dolby, Falco, Kate Bush, Yaz/Alison Moyet, Dead or Alive, Simple Minds, Madness.

Thing Six
I was in a play about seventeen years ago that the playwright came to see. It took me until this summer to ask the director, "So, did he actually like it, or was he just being polite?" Yeah. I still get stage fright too.

You may have noticed that I'm not very good at following rules. No this is not one of the arbitrary things (it's fundamental), but an explanation of why I'm only doing two-thirds of the list. If you want to consider yourself tagged, I'd love to hear more about you, but I'm not passing this one on otherwise.

Internet Annoyances

I've spent much of the last two days with patchy and unreliable internet access. This has recently been fixed by (a) restarting the router again, although that hadn't done anything earlier, (b) my husband closing and restarting Firefox on his computer (uh, huh) or (c) something further up the line that we had no control over but that happened in conjunction with the other two.

In any case, the whole experience reminded me of other internet annoyances. Here are a few tips on how to not make truly annoying websites.

Know the basics of don't: splash screens, Flash-based navigation, media that loads without warning, flashing text, mystery meat navigation and text/background color combinations that will trigger a migraine.

Do not accept any ads you can't wall off from the rest of your layout. Last month, one of the very large internet ad companies was experiencing slow servers, and I don't know how many pages I couldn't see until the ad servers responded. Browsers just didn't know how to draw the pages without the ad information.

Don't design something that looks like navigation but isn't. If that link is on what looks like a button, particularly if that button changes color when moused over, I had better be able to click on the whole button, not just the text. Yes, really, companies do this.

If you can, try not to cram a bunch of links up against the right side of the page; i.e., the scroll bar. Even a few pixels of clear space makes a difference.

Yes, I get that your website is complicated. However, if you're providing information that is available from every publicly traded company, there is no excuse for burying it six to eight clicks deep. It should take me one (easily found) click to get to your corporate site, one to tell you what category of information I'm looking for. At that point, give me a page with a lot of links under different headings instead of making me guess which link I have to click to get to the next step.

Check your traffic logs every now and then. I know of one Fortune 500 company whose website--the main page--has generated errors every time I've tried to load it in the last six months. That doesn't help either of us.

There, just a few tips to make my life more pleasant. If everybody follows them, I can stop being annoyed and get back to writing something interesting.

Bad Ad

Seen on a billboard for a local auto repair chain:

We'll leave the hoist up for you.

Proof positive that advertising account executives not only have no idea how to care for their own cars but also have no interest in knowing anything about it. The hoist, of course, is only accessible in the down position.

Ironically, many shops do put the hoist up before shutting off the power and going home, but this is to make it inaccessible. Silly ad people.

Now someone just has to explain to me how they got the company to buy the slogan.

Not of the Tribe

So, last night I was working on a roundup of some of the cool blogs that have been recommended in the responses to our questions on science and science fiction, when I made the mistake of taking a break to check in on some of the blogs already on my blogroll. I was completely derailed.

DrugMonkey had a post up about the tribe(s) of science and action for the common good of the tribe. It was, if I'm reading him right (no guarantee), an introduction to some thoughts on applying humanity's tribalist tendencies to achieve a greater good. It's an interesting idea, and I agree with the goals...but he said, "tribal."

I reacted. Nothing out of line, just a pure emotional response. So, of course, I have to break it down.

I don't belong to any tribes. The whole idea makes me itch.

I belong to a couple of small, manufactured families, but at least in this day and age, that's not the same thing. Knowing with whom I chose to spend my time doesn't tell you much about me. Not the same way that being part of a tribe would. I like my families, but I don't identify with them. I am not them. They are not me.

This isn't true in tribes. The premise of a tribe is that the tribe's welfare is your welfare. In order to make this real, the tribe's identity also has to be your identity. You can have your own place, yes, but only as long as it fits within the tribe.

To take a nice, contentious example, I'm female (physically, genetically). I don't communicate "like a woman." I don't solve problems "like a woman." I don't accept the roles of enforcing social norms or making peace or having or raising children. The majority of my allegiances are to men but are neither sexual nor power-imbalanced. I don't fit comfortably within the feminine tribe.

I could do what others do and try to stretch the tribe itself to fit me better. There are no guarantees, though, that this will happen. Look at the resistance others get when they try. And even if I were to fail, the tribe would have demanded my cooperation during the trial.

I've lost the benefits of being part of a tribe along with the obligations, of course. After all, your welfare is also the tribe's welfare. It could be a lonely type of freedom if I weren't an introvert. Still, I think I prefer this to a lonely belonging.

There is a piece of writing advice that says to claim for yourself the identity of "writer." It's meant to carry the writer through the times when it doesn't feel as though progress is being made--the middle of the novel, incoming rejections, having to practice and practice a particular skill to get it down. So far, so good.

There is also a bit of advice that says simply, "Writers write." It's very practical advice that says you'll never have a finished product worth publishing if you don't sit your butt in a chair and crank it out. Also good advice.

However, these two pieces of advice together have caused some serious heartache for people whose writing has been interrupted for long periods by, well, life. Being one of the few tangible rewards for most people who write, tribal identification is highly prized, but it slips away with every day not spent writing. I've seen an award-winning author ask, "Am I a writer?" because she writes slowly and in spurts.

So, no. I write, but I am not a writer. I geek out, but I am not a geek. I have U.S. citizenship and take an active role in politics, but I am not an American. I am not my school, my hometown, my local sports team, my hobbies, my career, my gender, my body shape, my political beliefs, my socioeconomic status, my health issues, my pet ownership, my musical preferences, my clothing choices, my operating system. These things are part of me. I am not part of them.

I belong to no tribe.

Beware, Writer

I manipulate you, you know.

I lay out a path of words to take you where I want you to go. And you go, fitting your steps to the rhythm of my words.

I wave a hand over here to keep you from looking over there. If you see what I want you to ignore, you turn away.

I tell you I am humble. You build me up, disregarding the arrogance required to assume my thoughts and words would be of interest.

I make you cry, each word hitting you in the same painful place. You call it beautiful and send others to weep.

I decide the effect I want, then plot and scheme against you to achieve it. You applaud and ask me to do it again.

I carefully calculate just how much return I must give you, then give a sliver more. You thank me for my generosity.

As a reader, I am one of you, kin. When I write, you are mine.

And I am at your mercy.

Response the First

A big thanks to Simon Haynes for being the first person to jump up and throw in his opinions on the relationship between science and science fiction. Simon is the author of the Hal Spacejock series, which is currently available only as imports in the U.S. (grrr). However, you can download his first book to get a taste before diving in.

As you can probably guess from the name, Hal Spacejock is a hoot, but how about the science?

Humanoid robots and self-aware computers please!

I'm writing novels based in the far-future, where humans are the same cantakerous self-centered beasts they've always been, but robots and computers are intelligent, wise and caring. I've seen reviews declaring that my human characters are bastards one and all, while my robots represent the ideal I'd like humans to aim for. Not far wrong, that.

Simon's a long-time computer programmer, so he presumably has a better grip on how to manage to integrate self-awareness and selflessness than I do. Read the rest of Simon's answers and find out more about him at Spacejock News.

I'll get more links and highlights up soon, but thanks again, Simon, for being first.

About the Name

In case you've ever wondered where the blog name comes from, here's a video from one of my favorite artists. I bet you'll never guess what the song is called.



Don't read too much into the lyrics, though. There's a lot more to this not being a place of diamonds, including the fact that I just don't like diamonds. Who wants to be that hard, that pure, that transparent, that flawless? Give me a beautiful colored stone any day, and if it's just a little more fragile, then so be it.

In fact, I prefer it that way. Where do you go from perfection?

Out and About

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Me? I'm off hanging out where I can wear shirts like these and not feel like a complete slob or, you know, twelve.





Of course, it helps that they now make these things in women's cuts. Nobody's going to mistake me for twelve in one of these.

A slob, on the other hand? Maybe. But that's what weekends away are for.

Science and Fiction--An Open Call

ScienceOnline09 is an annual science communication conference that brings together scientists, bloggers, educators, and students to discuss promoting public understanding of science. Peggy Kolm and I will be moderating a session on science fiction as a tool for science communication. We're looking for input on the topic and to start an online conversation between science fiction writers and science bloggers.

Participation is easy:

Questions about science and its relationship to science fiction are posted below and at Biology in Science Fiction. Send us a link to your answers on your own blog or post the link the comments at either site. If you're a writer without a blog, you can post your answers directly at either site.

We will then collect links to the posts on the ScienceOnline09 conference wiki, as well as our own blogs, and facilitate a discussion on the different ways science and science fiction are used.

Questions for Science Fiction Writers

• Why are you writing science fiction in particular? What does the science add?
• What is your relationship to science? Have you studied or worked in it, or do you just find it cool? Do you have a favorite field?
• How important is it to you that the science be right? What kind of resources do you use for accuracy?
• Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?

Questions for Science Bloggers

• What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?
• What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?
• Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?
• Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?

Thanks for taking part, and we look forward to your answers!