| really random but i started so i'll finish |
[07 Jan 2010|11:25pm] |
I just found this badly-written post I had started at the beginning of November last year. It's probably not of interest if you don't follow figure skating but may also appeal if you like dudes in bad outfits or indeed if you like bad writing.
I am geek and already excited about Vancouver 2010.
One of my favourite sports, not just in the Olympics, is figure skating. I absolutely love a bit of speed skating (but not you Apollo Anton Ohno, never you, you are not forgiven) but my preference is figure skating. All of it: from the costumes to the musical interpretation to the big scary mama Russian coaches wearing an entire moose's hide.
( here be men in bad close-fitting outfits )
In conclusion, I am a colossal geek and I watch a lot of sport. But it makes me happy.
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| lawks a-mercy it's Bob Flowerdew |
[07 Jan 2010|10:24pm] |
The vaguely terrifying Bob Flowerdew (BBC pre-watershed level nudity alert) is coming to Oxford Botanic Gardens for their Winter Lectures series:
A Year in Bob Flowerdew’s Norfolk Garden by Bob Flowerdew, Thursday 28th January
An illustrated feast of the finest flowers, fruits, vegetables and the ingenious methods employed to produce them throughout the seasons.
Alas, the combination of having a big fat ZERO female gardeners speaking and being in the Saïd Business School has put me off mightily. Although, given that they're selling tickets at £45/series (glass of wine included, hopefully for each lecture) suggests that it's not me they're selling to, dearie me no.
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| State of the Goat 2009 |
[07 Jan 2010|01:10pm] |
It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
- Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
- We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
- Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
- Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
- After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
- Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
- We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
- In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
- At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
- In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
- This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
- When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
- How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted.
We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
- The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
- This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
- We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
- We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
- We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
- Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
- A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
- That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!
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| day two of the snow |
[07 Jan 2010|07:16pm] |
Day two of the snow is when you leave the house, start to move around, test your cold weather gear and find out what transport is still working. I tried a few different boots (settling on the sturdy vintage walking shoes I "borrowed" off my mother's husband about ten years ago), piled on the christmas knitwear and set off for the tow-path.
By the bridge there were foraging flocks of long tailed tits and redwings in the alders and willows, picking through next year's catkins as yet tightly curled. The river was seething with wildfowl and a few hardy rowers. I saw three mallards and a coot squabbling over an apple bobbing in the shallows; a gull joined them, shrieking that if there was food to be had, he should have it.
The real catch though, was lurking in the weirdly galled silver birch (the effect of Witch's Broom Fungus) where a clatter and a flash of green resolved into a green woodpecker! Which took one look at me and bolted across the paddock (where a solitary horse was sulking, under its blanket).
At lunch, I went out again, and nipped up the canal (juvenile Grebe, Pied Wagtails foraging on the broken ice of the canal, a Moorhen taking a snow-bath) to see if there was anyone ice skating on Port Meadow but there was no floodwater, so no ice, and no ice-skating, only people building snowmen as far as the eye could see.
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| consider the snowmen |
[06 Jan 2010|11:30am] |
... and I shall now break the internet with cuteness. Sorry about that. Kitten didn't like snow at all, had to be rescued. Also, it was almost up to her nose. Poor little thing.
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| the matthew horne glove dream |
[06 Jan 2010|08:56am] |
Good kitten. She held off on waking us up until 7.10am today, perhaps understanding the precious nature of a snow day. I was having a dream; we had been brought in to see if we could help a catatonic woman. I was a shadowy woman with dirty blonde hair and a forgettable face. My partner was Matthew Horne, who was acting like someone in the throes of violent PMS and wearing a badly buttoned labcoat. We discussed the accident; she had fallen over on rocks at the beach and not successfully regained consciousness. "Where was this?" demanded Horne, shoving his hand into a complicated gauntlet. The woman's partner, who was distraught, named a seaside town on the Welsh coast and it flickered into view on the floor, in faint 3d tracery, initially slightly abstracted and iconised in LED red/green, but as he guided Horne to exact spot of the accident becoming better rendered and more accurate until we could see the texture of the rocks, grains of sand, and the man's partner sat on a high rock, gazing blankly out to sea. Horne (visible in the abstraction in his travelling body as an angry labcoat with a big green glowing glove, held out like superman ahead of himself) could not see her, and said (again and again) as he examined the area, "she's not here!". For her part, she neither moved nor spoke but sat there, eyes on the horizon, as if waiting for a ship. "She's there," I said, "She's right there, on the rocks beside you." Horne, impatient, waggled his glove. "OK, OK," he said, "I'm downloading some updates which might fix my range." There was this strange moment of waiting, the woman staring out to sea, icon Horne fiddling with his glove, and the three of us stood in her bedroom, silent, the only sound the steady even breathing of the stricken woman. Then, "I've got her," he said, and started to run off into an explaination of how he'd downloaded a small-time seasonal search module that he was fairly sure she wouldn't be hidden from, though whether he thought she'd been hidden or had deliberately hidden herself I wasn't sure, anyway, she was coming back now, for what that was worth.
A kitten jumped on my head right then, but I woke up thinking about this very common fictional trope. Mine was dressed in up in Web 2.0 sci-fi pop culture drag, but there's a very similar scene in Lord of the Rings, among many, many others. As I got up and checked the snow (about 10 inches) it was in my mind as pipe dream nonsense, wish fulfilment for those left holding a breathing corpse.
But then I remembered S, a childhood friend who really did wake up three weeks (or was it a month and a half?) after a car accident. Obviously this is only true some of the time, and there's a raft of problems, and the better your medical intervention is the more likely it is you'll be able to save the person, and they may not come back the same, but there's a basic lesson in the story; before you give up on someone, find a person who knows what they're doing, ask them if anything can be done, and wait.
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| My snowman's got snow nose |
[05 Jan 2010|11:19pm] |
I started waiting for the bus home at 9:50, was permanently 6 minutes away according to the display before being removed from the display entirely, then turning up unexpectedly and skidding to a halt as the ABS had failed. and the door hydraulics.
I eventually got on board to wait for the next bus to arrive, which was only about twenty minutes. By then there was only me and one other patron to transfer over. After all that waiting she got off at the Fir Tree!
The journey back wasn't too eventful and I was in at eleven: had to get off at Ferry Hinksey Road as the driver didn't think he could make it up the little bridge if he stopped at the designated stop, and other customer on the 4B were advised to pick the bottom of Cumnor Hill or the top of Cumnor Hill and nothing in between.
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| snow day |
[05 Jan 2010|06:56pm] |
I tried the frost underfoot today and decided it was worth trying the towpath on the way into work. By way of reward I didn't fall into the river, but I did see:
Magpies and magpies and magpies.
A mixed flock of Blue Tits and Great Tits.
Two winter flocks of Long Tailed Tits.
A cheeky Redwing.
A pair of sparrows foraging in a leaf-choked gutter.
That thrush again, ducking into the ivy.
An explosion of woodpigeons as I passed six foraging too close to the path.
Assorted gulls, mallard, geese, blackbirds, coot and a swan.
After that I wasn't expecting the walk home to stand out, but I was wrong. It was both brought forward a little and made enormously more exciting by the presence of snow!
Falling snow fills the negative space of the urban environment, making what is usually air a mass of exciting whirling particles, suddenly visible in all its glorious three-dimensionality. This usually invisible and ignored space is suddenly given turbulent life and I see now that it is full of current and eddies, gusts and breezes, particles around which ice can form and fall. The disturbances to the flow caused by vehicles, trees, buildings is suddenly revealed, and as if someone had dropped dye into a wind-tunnel, the air becomes suddenly visible, tangible and real.
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| Rose & Bay Awards Nominations |
[05 Jan 2010|12:19pm] |
Hey, folks... nominations for the Rose & Bay Awards are open until the end of the month. This award is for crowdfunded art: any project that is mostly or entirely available online and was funded directly by reader donations. It includes Art, Fiction, Poetry and other projects (music, web comics, etc).
If you know any worthy stuff, anyone can nominate, so please do! More information can be found here.
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| Mendoza in Hollywood, by Kage Baker |
[04 Jan 2010|09:23pm] |
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Title: Mendoza in Hollywood
Author: Kage Baker
Series: The Company #3
Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company
Format: Hardcover
Year: 2000
Pages: 334
Genre: Soft SF/Superhuman/Time Travel
Jacket Description
At a stagecoach inn on the road to Los Angeles (Cahuenga Pass, 1862), botanist Mendoza meets her fellow cyborgs. Porfirio, the security tech, has broken the rules by maintaining contact with his mortal family. Einar, the zoologist of the team, is an early cinema buff ("A lot of it will be shot in these very canyons!"). Oscar, an anthropologist, gathers information in the guise of a traveling salesman ("I'm in notions"). Imarte, an anthropologist too, interacts with the mortals a bit more intimately ("I'm compiling fascinating material on mid-nineteenth-century mores and sexuality"). And teenaged Juan Bautista, collecting bird specimens, has made a pet of a baby condor christened Erich von Stroheim.
In the sad-funny vein of Grand Hotel, we get to know the lives of these operatives from the twenty-fourth century. We watch their reactions as they screen, for relaxation, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance; we root for Oscar as he tries repeatedly to sell the Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe; we duck as bullets fly overhead; and we learn that Mendoza is being haunted in her dreams by the man she loved and lost three centuries ago. Then his ghost is unexpectedly reincarnated with the arrival of a very large, very smooth, and very handsome British spy: Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
My Review
This third novel in the Company series reverts to Mendoza's first-person narration, and the transition did not go entirely smoothly. Mendoza is still far more self-centered than Joseph, and that comes through her narration. We saw in Sky Coyote that Joseph wants her that way because he fears for her safety, but after being in the head of a character who is constantly paying attention to those around him and to events at large it's frustrating to come crashing back to Mendoza bitterness, self-pity, and deliberately narrow focus.
That shift in perspective made the first third of the book relatively rough going for me. Baker's writing style is still a trifly obvious, and there were no perfect moments as there were in Sky Coyote to make up for the downsides. So I spent my time instead wondering at the gender roles that are shaping up in the series and being a little put off. Of the two first-person narrators, obviously Joseph is the more well-rounded, adult character; but if you're going to have a male narrator and a female narrator in a parent-child relationship, obviously one of them has to be more adult and it might not mean anything that Baker chose the male to be the parent. But unfortunately (for me at least), those same character traits are given to another pair of male and female characters in this novel: Porifirio is the sort of operative who deals with being an immortal by watching out for the other immortals in his care and is justifiably wary of the Company while Imarte has retreated from the trauma of living an immortal life among mortals into a ferociously narrow focus on her work.
However, just as I was beginning to be really annoyed by Baker's female characters, the action picked up a bit and I was reminded of what was so enthralling about Mendoza's narrative in In the Garden of Iden. The few things that Mendoza lets herself care about she cares about passionately, and that gives her narrative more tension than Joseph's ever had in Sky Coyote, because whether it's the wild beauty of unsettled California or her beloved soulmate, both we the readers and Mendoza herself know that she is destined for heartbreak. It took much longer than I expected for Mendoza's Englishman to appear on the scene, but once he did I raced to the conclusion breathlessly, and once the book was finished I wanted to immediately pick up the next one.
There is just one other thing that bothers me about this installment of the novels of the Company: I'm now three books in and the damned story hasn't started yet! This is why I tend to avoid long series' like the plague. . . delightful though these three books have been, there is still the sense that they are merely the opening act of some great epic, and I am getting rather impatient to get to that epic. Luckily for me, I do believe the action commences in the next book; even luckier I think it returns to Joseph's narration. Needless to say, I will be picking it up as soon as possible.
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| my plants are dying because winter is here |
[03 Jan 2010|11:29pm] |
I did my usual chore-bundle today, but it left me feeling kind of meh. Possibly it's an art hangover from Seizure and Pop Art at the Tate, or maybe it's some sort of capitalism exhaustion; one sale sign too many. But I think on balance it is becuase my plants are dying and there's little point in getting more; it's dark all day and barely above freezing. Nothing will grow. I drew a plan for the front garden, and chopped back the fir and the laurel but the beds look desperate and it's impossible to tell what is making it through the winter, and what is rotting, cells blasted open in the chilly freeze-thaw dampness.
Anyway, I made stew and it tasted good enough to be worth recording the recipe. ( Venison with fruit and flowers )
And then, to bed.
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| 2009 in Films |
[03 Jan 2010|03:33pm] |
I've been keeping a list of films I've watched all year, and had this mad idea of actually using it as the basis of an LJ post. 64 at the cinema, 45 at home, just 11 films I had seen before. There is a lot to be said for living a minutes walk from a cinema that hows a pretty good selection of stuff for a multiplex and having an unlimited card. 20 minutes walk gets us to The Electric, for some of the things that don't make it to Cineworld. In June we started a Lovefilm subscription (cheers ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bibliolicious ), and are using this to watch all sorts of things we wouldn't catch otherwise.So, ( Films of 2009 )( Read more... )
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| my own private resolution list |
[02 Jan 2010|12:07am] |
I made an absolute mass of resolutions last year and kept quite a lot of them, including serveral from the previous year. There were fails, however; eating out more and eating more (should have been less), sending more letters to friends and family (I sent a lot of wedding invites, but feel they don't count), wearing ear-plugs to gigs, and so on. I also signed off by saying, "I've really outsourced resolution to 43 things, anyway. I'm sure New Year's resolutions will be in as a feature for next year -- doubtless with slightly annoying functionality!"
Well, I was right about that...
( copied here for personal convenience )
But, as ever, these are the resolutions that really matter:
In 2009,  cleanskies resolves to... Learn to play the ink.
Go cycling three times a week.
Go to the cartoons every month.
Become a better wine.
Apply for a new paper.
Spend less time on advice.
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| HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010! |
[01 Jan 2010|06:28pm] |
A most splendid party this morning in the variously warm embraces of Veuve Clicquot, cheese-in-blankets and an exotically-wide Swedish sofa. I can't resist showing another angle on that amazing photo of a blue-haired Jeremy with James, Tim's leg and the dinosaur pile on the Dromminge...
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| Flying North |
[01 Jan 2010|03:59pm] |
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mood |
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 busy |
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The version of Flying North that Thomas Dolby recreated for his Sole Inhabitant tour has become my favourite version of one of my favourite songs. I was thinking about it a few moments ago, chatting to hunkymouse on Twitter about my Great Circle tomorrow, up north into the dark and then south again into the sun and desert...
Luckily the man has put it online for us, as part of his podcast series.
Enjoy!
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| happy new year |
[01 Jan 2010|11:32am] |
...as you can see, mine started very well, on a vast Ikea sofa, with champagne and plastic dinosaurs and silver shoes (although I'm not wearing them in this shot). Well, if you ignore the little issue with the computer, that is. It froze and failed to start on me on NYE and I left it running back-ups as I headed out into party city, and I'm still running diagnostics and back-ups as we speak (came back to find it had frozen again) -- and using Internet Explorer, as Firefox has been on for all the freezes I'm aware of. Bah, humbug, etc. Does anyone use Chrome? Is it any good?
Anyone in Oxford who likes chocolate and hasn't visited Hotel Chocolat's post-xmas sale yet, you should go. There's something called a champagne sparkle in the xmas mix which is very special.
Happy New Year!
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| 2009 diversions |
[31 Dec 2009|11:08pm] |
I've missed the last couple of months, but here's the year in things I did, read, watched and otherwise spent my time on:
Films: I haven't quite gotten around to updating 52filmchallenge yet, but I actually made it to 52 this year \o/ ( And for the record, here they are: )
Of those, my faves of the year include Iron Man, Rocknrolla, Watchmen, Star Trek, Gone Baby Gone, and Kung Fu Panda.
Books: Far fewer books than usual this year, for a number of reasons:
( books! )
Of those, I really liked Neverwhere, I was ambivalent about much of the Allingham, I very much liked The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and although I felt it had flaws, I was much taken by Anathem (and many thanks to abrinsky and lamentables, without whom I would never had read it).
TV: A fair bit of TV this year, and thanks to some interesting scheduling we've been able to see more than one season of some of the American stuff.
( square-eyes: )
Stand-outs among that list have to include House, which has reached new heights of excellence, CSI for handling to loss of two major characters and the gain of a third, and The Wire (although still not seen S5 yet) for simply being one of the best television series ever made.
Music: We actually managed to see quite a bit of live music this year, including two city-based festivals.
( listen up )
Travel: This year we've been away to Chester for a long weekend (and it was lovely), Brighton for The Great Escape (and it was pretty nice), London also for a long weekend (it was a good as ever), Portugal for a week (sunny and chilled and just what was needed), and Dublin for Hard Working Class Heroes (every time I visit Dublin I fall in love with it all over again).
Miscellanea: Just two plays this year (note to self: more theatre next year), All's Well That Ends Well, and Waiting For Godot. I was unimpressed by the former, enthralled by the latter. We saw Eddie Izzard at the NIA in Birmingham, and he was as good as ever (and is hott in boy mode).
And that was 2009...
(ETA: found a list of acts I saw at HWCH in Dublin :-)
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| shopping trolley reef |
[31 Dec 2009|02:47pm] |
On the way across the bridge today, I spotted a shopping trolley in the river. The water was goose-turd green, angry and high. We're on flood warning, and the Thames is fast and brutally cold at the moment. A human would be foolhardy to venture into that mess to fish it out. So there it stays, for a while, becoming part of the river.
Which brought the thought that it would rapidly be colonised by fish and weeds and riverine invertebrates. By the time it was removed, it would be sheltering species, well on its way to becoming its own tiny ecosystem.
I'm not the first person to think such things; meet the Bath Marine Preservation Society's Trolly Reef, and follow on down the comments for the eerily beautiful Original Abandoned Shopping Trolley Project.
All of which leads me to wonder how much of conservation is about returning an area to an idea of appropriate wildness. The plants and animals don't especially care, they will happily grow through concrete, tarmac, old bikes and shopping trolleys. You could argue about rust, broken glass, sharp edges but moss and murk will happily cover all of that, given time. And the wildlife would probably appreciate being left in peace.
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| Take your best shot |
[31 Dec 2009|12:25pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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busy |
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| [ |
music |
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Thomas Dolby - Gothic - Part One |
] |
I've been trying to think which of my photographs taken in 2009 is my favourite.
Was it the lava flowing into the sea in Hawaii, the honu on a black sand beach, the cliffs over Zion, the road down into Monument Valley, the feathers of a low flying turkey buzzard?
There's one I keep coming back to, one that ended up as the cover of the Blurb book I made and gave my family this Christmas. It's a simple image, a rose on a cold January day at a Paso Robles winery. I thin I like it because of the colours and the sharpness of the foreground, the red against a blurred green background.
I wonder what images 2010 will bring.
Paso Robles, California
January 2009
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| I outlined it (with light) |
[31 Dec 2009|12:05pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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busy |
] |
| [ |
music |
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William Orbit - Pieces in a Modern Style - Piece in Old Style III |
] |
I like sunsets, and I like photographing sunsets.
2009 has been a good year for them, too.
I remember it starting with a sunset flowing darkness down the Colorado river, as it lit the walls of the Grand Canyon with yellow light. I remember Ruby Beach, in the teeth of a gale, as a bald eagle drifted down the yellow light. I remember the flare of bright light as the sun fell over the Pacific on a Hawaiian evening, silhouetting the heiau.
I remember the lilac London summer evenings as volcanic ash reflected colours from the stratosphere. I remember crouching on the roof, trying to focus in on spiderwebs, hoping to catch a strand of gold in the evening sky. I remember standing on Beachy Head, watching the sun gild the autumn clouds, rolling down into a steely Channel. I remember the chill of New York December, seeing the Empire State Building turn yellow in the evening light.
There's one place, though, that I'll never forget, the place where the sunsets have been with me since I was born.
It's seems fitting to end a year of sunsets with images of the sunset from Christmas Day on my home island of Jersey.
St Clements, Jersey CI
December 2009
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| Ha'penny, by Jo Walton |
[30 Dec 2009|04:55pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 thoughtful |
] |
Title: Ha'penny
Author: Jo Walton
Series: Small Change #2
Publisher: Tor
Format: Hardcover
Year: 2007
Pages: 319
Genre: Alternative History/Thriller
Jacket Description
In 1949, eight years after the "Peace with Honor" was negotiated between Great Britain and Nazi Germany by the Farthing Set, England has completed its slide into fascist dictatorship. When the vile Mark Normanby takes advantage of a political murder in order to arrange his election as prime minister, and promptly enacts draconian security measures, the last hope of democracy seems extinguished.
Then a bomb explodes in a London suburb. The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch king-and-country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Normanby and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.
Against a background of increasing domestic espionage and the suppression of Jews and homosexuals, a band of idealists and conservatives blackmail the person they need to complete their plot, an actress who holds the key to the Fuhrer's death. From the ha'penny seats in the theater to the ha'pennies that cover dead men's eyes, the conspiracy and the investigation swirl around one another.
In this brilliant sequel to Farthing, Welsh-born World Fantasy Award winner Jo Walton continues her alternate history of an England that could have been, with a novel that uses the form of the classic thrillers of the thirties and forties to open our eyes to the world in which we live today.
My Review
I loved Farthing, the first book in this series, despite avoiding alternate history and especially anything involving Nazis and WWII like the plague. In Farthing, Jo Walton took a classic British country house mystery and used it to divert the reader from all the subtly horrifying alternate history world-building going on at the edges, then brought all the alternate history aspects to the fore in the final third like a punch to the gut. It was one of the best books I've read all year.
In this sequel, which takes place almost directly after the events in Farthing, Jo Walton uses the classic thriller novel as her starting point in continuing to explore her fascist England, and if it isn't quite as successful as Farthing was, it is still compulsively readable and raises questions that will linger long after the book is finished. It can be read as a stand-alone, but I have no idea why anyone would want to, as reading it first would spoilthe events of Farthing, and that would be a terrible shame. (Needless to say, this review will also spoil the events of Farthing, so read no further if you haven't read the first book yet!)
This book has the same structure as its predecessor, alternating chapters between a tight third-person focused on Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard and a new female first-person narrator, also a woman born to the upper classes who has rejected (and been rejected by) her traditional aristocratic family. In this novel, the female narrator is Viola Larkin, who has been estranged from her family since she chose to take up acting as a profession. Carmichael is still reeling from his decision to compromise his ideals of justice to save his comfortable life with his man, Jack, and Viola has just agreed to take on the role of Hamlet in a production that will be attended by Mark Normanby (the new Prime Minister) and Adolf Hitler, who is coming to visit England to cement ties. Within the first couple chapters, Carmichael is investigating the accidental bombing death of an actress who was also going to be in the production of Hamlet, and Viola has been forced to become a part of the new assassination plot by one of her sisters, a card-carrying Communist.
This structure works less well in Ha'penny, however, because the two protagonists are far less sympathetic here than the two protagonists were in Farthing, creating emotional distance and lessening the impact of events later in the book. Carmichael, though very much consistent with the character Walton set out in Farthing, has now fallen from grace; he does not deserve the same sympathy he received when he appeared to be the righteous detective on the trail of monsters. And while Lucy Kahn was a little person caught in a trap who had the wit to find a way to escape for herself and the man she loved, Viola has much more power in determining her own destiny and chooses to give that power away by swooning over her terrorist captor. A review I read advanced the notion that she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, but to the best of my knowledge a person does not develop Stockholm Syndrome after a momentary fright -- and besides, Viola was strongly attracted to Connelly before he ever became her captor. No, to me Viola is just another one of those fantasy girls that gets hot and bothered when a man mistreets her, and while I have no problem with sado-masochism in principle and found it wonderfully treated in Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series, in this instance it simply rang false. (Underlining the falsity, later in the novel Viola is disgusted by Normanby's subtly sadistic treatment of his wife.)
The novel also failed a little for me because I simply have no sympathy for terrorists. I reject utterly the notion that the ends can justify the means, so I had no problem rooting for Carmichael to discover the conspiracy and put a stop to it. That sucked some of the tension out of the middle of the novel, where in Farthing the middle section ratcheted up the tension by pitting Lucy against Carmichael when both were clearly on the same side.
Still, despite those weaknesses, Walton pulled off an ending that had the power to devastate, and the fact that it raises so many questions about power (questions concerning both what the ethical assertion of power looks like and what power any individual has to change any larger system) makes this a novel that people should read and discuss. I would strongly recommend it to nearly anyone, and I will most certainly be reading the next book in the series.
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| harry harrison could have told you that |
[31 Dec 2009|12:24am] |
I've just been googling "Primeval Drinking Game" and "Jonathan Meades drinkng game". No luck, just some people being sarcastic about Hannah Spearritt's pants and opinionated bloggers skipping lightly between Meades and binge drinking -- Off Kilter at work, I suspect. Ah well, I'll just have to watch the christmas box sets and make them up myself then. I'm feeling the need for another eating-and-drinking party, perhaps Primeval will provide.
Oh, and I went to see Avatar -- quite an eye opener, especially in 3D. I hear some people have been finding it hard to empathise with the big blue sexy cat people, perhaps comparing them to the vastly cheaper but somehow more intensely engaging prawns from District 9. Well yes, but all you've really got to empathise with is the planet, as it's clearly a Deathworld. Sorry, it's not a planet. It's a low gravity moon orbiting a gas giant. And that huge chasm full of floating rocks? My guess is that's the remnants of the previous invaders, their antigrav drive still sputtering away after thousands of years. I see the faint marks of someone thinking it through, under the layers of glitter, render, flying debris and mood lighting.
Shame it's not going to be a trilogy. No, scratch that. Shame it won't be the trilogy I'd like to see which would be (working titles, obviously) Revenge of the Earth Men and Green Hell Planet Unleashed. It might well become a trilogy, but it'd probably just be a rehash of the noble savage/Gaia theory nonsense the humans kept using to describe the ticks/gardeners/interface species. Not sure why they did, really. If it's real, you can just say what's happening.
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| Pixelations |
[29 Dec 2009|08:23pm] |
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Always look up when you're in a city, as you never know just what you'll see.
That rule goes doubly so for New York, where much of its architecture looms over the street canyons and where new and old meet in a delightful visual cacophony. One such view is at Grand Central Station, where station's sculptures and the surrounding tours are reflected in a wall of curved windows. The images pincushion in the mirror glass, golden in the late afternoon sunlight.
New York, New York
December 2009
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| Sky Coyote, by Kage Baker |
[28 Dec 2009|11:00pm] |
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Title: Sky Coyote
Author: Kage Baker
Series: The Company #2
Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company
Format: Hardcover
Year: 1999
Pages: 310
Genre: Soft SF/Superhuman/Time Travel
Jacket Description
The year is 1699, the place the Lost City in the heart of the Mayan jungle -- but in fact it's New World One, a rest-and-rec center for Dr. Zeus's hard-working immortal operatives. (The margaritas at the Palenque Poodle are excellent.)
Enter Facilitator Joseph. He's been given a new assignment, and it's a tough one. Joseph sailed with the Phoenicians, was a priest in Egypt, a politician in Athens, secretary to a Roman senator. . . but now he must go to Alta California. His mission: to save the Chumash of Humashup from certain destruction at the hands of the coming white men, by convincing an entire village to step into the future.
The Chumash, he quickly learns, are no pushovers; they were the inventors of shell money, after all. Some, like Nutku, spokesman for the Canoemakers' Union and First Functionary of the Humashup Lodge of the Brotherhood of the Kantap, may match Joseph himself in cunning.
In this second book of Kage Baker's Company series, we get more of a glimpse into the Company, and some of what we glimpse is dark. (When certain troublesome cyborgs disappear, for example, what happens to them?) We also learn how Botanist Grade Six Mendoza is managing after that unfortunate experience she had in Renaissance England.
My Review
This second novel of the Company makes all of In the Garden of Iden feel like a prequel, and for those SF readers who don't like much romance I might recommend starting here. It jumps ahead a couple hundred years and switches to Joseph's first-person narrative (I think the series is actually shaping up to switch back and forth between Mendoza and Joseph with every book, but I could be wrong), and it gets much more into the world-building that was so ruthlessly relegated to the background in the first novel. There's still nothing ground-breaking about Baker's set-up, but the glimpses of the world of the future begin to have a more coherent (if deliberately baffling) look.
Joseph is a delightful narrator, much wiser than Mendoza and less self-centered. He also has already done his growing up (way back in prehistory, as he was recruited somewhere around 18000 BC) and thus doesn't subject the reader to all the "oh my god the world is not what I was led to believe!" bit that goes along with any sort of coming-of-age story. Instead, he is the sort of character that is settled in his comfortable rut and keeps his head down when the fur starts to fly. He knows he's playing ostrich, but over the millennia he's gotten glimpses of some nasty things, and he very much doesn't want to be the one turning over all those rocks.
That, of course, makes him very human, no matter what Mendoza thinks of him. And that, of course is the major theme Baker is exploring in this series -- our common humanity, no matter what outer trappings we set up to differentiate ourselves from each other. That theme is very much made manifest in Baker's portrayal of the Chumash, which I also found delightful. The jacket description doesn't do them justice. . . they are not "noble savages," nor do they speak in metaphorical and broken English the way they do in far too many Western novels. . . instead, they are aggressively modern-thinking, and they use an economics vocabulary that I doubt was invented yet (at least not in the New World), but then realism isn't exactly the point.
But though the Chumash serve as the focus of the plot, Sky Coyote is there for many of the same reason In the Garden of Iden was: to introduce a key character and get him into position for the larger events in store. To that end, in this novel we also meet our first humans from the future where Dr. Zeus invented time travel and immortality treatments, that bright future that all the immortals living through history the long way are waiting to see, and their portrayal answers some of my questions and raises quite a few others. I was wondering, the entire time I was reading In the Garden of Iden, why on earth the Company didn't employ any adolescent psychologists who could tell them what the natural course of events would be given the way they raise their little immortal cyborgs (I mean, anyone with a lick of common sense could tell what was going to happen, but I acknowledge that the Company would likely need to hear it from someone with a degree or two before acting on it); now that I've seen some of the people who run the Company I understand why they didn't employ any adolescent psychologists. But now I'm left to wonder how on earth those people even formed Dr. Zeus Inc. -- a question Joseph is left wondering as well, so I assume Baker is going to answer it somewhere down the line.
I will admit, this novel wears its narrative on its sleeve -- I can just hear Baker thinking things like "and I'll insert a flashback here because the plot's getting a bit slow and I need to put this in somewhere" -- but the narrative voice is strong enough that I don't mind. And there is a moment, a single perfect moment, near the end of the novel (p. 285-286 for those who've read it and want to see what I'm talking about; I wouldn't dare try to paraphrase here because I couldn't do it justice) where Joseph is forced to look in the mirror and examine his choices over the last 20,000 years. It involves the Chumash, the Loony Tunes, and Philip Marlowe, and I wouldn't change a word of it. That moment is the same sort of moment I saw in the short story I read by Baker that made me start talking her up as a favorite author; that moment would have made a much weaker book worth the price. And the ending Baker gives Kenemekme is just as good, a wonderful bit of metaphysics and humanism that isn't overplayed like it could have been.
I will definitely be continuing this series, though I'm a little worried I'm going to hate switching back to Mendoza's voice. . . but then, I was a little worried about switching to Joseph's voice, so it'll probably be fine. :)
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| Wasserman, Robin: Skinned |
[28 Dec 2009|10:44pm] |
 Skinned (2008)
Written by: Robin Wasserman
Genre: YA/Science Fiction
Pages: 361 (Trade Paperback)
The premise: snatched for BN.com, which is also the backcover blurb: Lia Kahn was perfect: rich, beautiful, popular — until the accident that nearly killed her. Now she has been downloaded into a new body that only looks human. Lia will never feel pain again, she will never age, and she can't ever truly die. But she is also rejected by her friends, betrayed by her boyfriend, and alienated from her old life.
Forced to the fringes of society, Lia joins others like her. But they are looked at as freaks. They are hated...and feared. They are everything but human, and according to most people, this is the ultimate crime — for which they must pay the ultimate price.
My Rating
Must Have: but with one warning: this is not a plot-driven or action-driven book. If you like character-centric books, particularly those with more of an existential theme, and you love the themes behind the updated Battlestar Galactica (focusing on the cylons), then you're going to have fun with this. It's a good book, and even when I didn't agree with our heroine, never once did I not at least sympathize and understand where she was coming from. Wasserman really gets into the heart of the matter and makes you really THINK about how you'd feel if you were in Lia's shoes. The science fictional elements and social reaction to those elements are also very strong, which surprised me, though I don't know why: for whatever, unfair reason, I expect the science in YA SF to be light and fluffy and non-existent, not explained in detail (which isn't to say the science used in Skinned is accurate or not, but it makes you wonder about how such an process could take place in the future). At any rate, it's a pretty strong start of a series, and I'll definitely be picking up the next installment, Crashed, once it's released in trade paperback. :)
Review style: spoilers, because this isn't the kind of heavily plot-driven book the premise makes it out to be. It's actually very, very character-driven, and it's hard NOT to spoil such books. So if you want to avoid said spoilers, there's no need to click the link below to my LJ. Otherwise, click away! Comments and discussion are most welcome. :)
REVIEW: Robin Wasserman's SKINNED
Happy Reading!
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| A diversion |
[28 Dec 2009|11:45pm] |
Hello! Merry THING! Happy THING! Fuck off, TWO THOUSAND AND NINE, you shitfuck of a year.
So yeah... since I last posted, I got a job. It's depressing and menial and too many people I work with care who wins the X Factor, but I had a good time at the Ecksmas party until I woke up and then threw up a bit. But I made it to the toilet, so that story has a happy ending.
Dad stayed in Spain for the holidays so I ended up at James and Helen's. Sadly, New Super Mario Bros Wii didn't arrive but Helen had bought him Lego Indy 2 so we spent a lot of time doing that. A lot more time than intended because James wiped the save file. Scotland was rather pretty all over, being somewhat COVERED in snow. James rode around the place on a mini-tractor so that kept him happy.
I bought a 360. If you have one, Hoggatron's my gamertag btw. ( More game talk )
So are you calling it two thousand and ten or twenty ten?
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| 2009: The travel meme |
[28 Dec 2009|05:40pm] |
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The usual visited places list:
Williams AZ, Tuba City AZ, Kayenta AZ, Blanding UT, Bicknell UT, Las Vegas NV*, Barstow CA, Cambria CA, Pacific Grove CA, San Francisco CA*, Paso Robles CA*, San Jose CA*, Sunnyvale CA*, Palm Desert CA*, Kirkland WA*, Aberdeen WA, Pacific City OR, Brookings OR, Barcelona, Cincinnati OH*, Orlando FL*, Los Angeles CA*, Palm Springs CA*, San Diego CA, Coronado CA, La Jolla CA, Escondido CA, Santa Monica CA, Campbell CA, Willlows CA, Eugene OR, Kailua HI, Hilo HI, Boston MA*, New York NY*, Santa Barbara CA, Scottsdale AZ, Flagstaff AZ, Gallup NM, Trinidad CO, Grand Junction CO, Elko NV, Cameron Park CA, Mountain View CA*, Jersey CI
As always * denotes a place with more than a one night stay.
Countries: USA, Spain, Jersey CI.
Airports: SFO, MCO, LAS, LAX, EWR, CVG, BOS, JFK, HNL, ITO, ONT, SJC, JER, BCN
Airlines: Virgin Atlantic, FlyBe, JetBlue, Alaska, Southwest, Delta, Iberia, Hawaiian Airlines
Aircraft flown: Boeing 747-400, various 737 variants, Boeing 717, McDonald Douglas MD-80, Airbus A320, Airbus A321, Embraer EMB-195, Airbus A340-600
Trains taken: Acela (Boston-NYC), London Underground, LA Metro, NJ Transit, NY MTA, BART
(Phew.)
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| happy christmas and the review of the year |
[27 Dec 2009|11:55am] |
Happy christmas, I hope it was good, mine was. Having watched Charlie Brooker's screenwipe review of the year last night, astonished as ever by his bottomless well of irk, it now seems the right moment to have a poke around my year.
I also watched Pirates of the Carribean at World's End last night. I'd forgotten how astonishingly incoherent it is. The BBC, perhaps as commentary on said incoherence, are showing Pirates 2 on new years day... anyway it's just an excuse to drink pirate's punch, really...
( the year of things and stuff )
--- and here's a kitten, for those not bored enough to go under the cut:
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