- the cosplay of loncon3: saturday & sunday – We are book punks.We are book punks. –
- the cosplay of loncon3: friday – We are book punks.We are book punks. –
- the t-shirts of loncon3 – We are book punks.We are book punks. – Featuring yours truly
- Video impression of LonCon3 – Saturday –
- Video impression of LonCon3 – Friday –
- LONCON3 | The Anjelican Universe –
- My Day Out at LonCon3 | Me and My Books –
- kate_nepveu | Entries tagged with cons: worldcon: 2014 (loncon 3) –
- Mental Illness Primer for Speculative Fiction Creators: Contents page | Long Time After Midnight – This is for creators of speculative fiction. The idea is to improve depiction of the mentally ill in narratives like film, books, music videos etc. It is just a primer, therefore it will not go into too much detail.
- Summer Cons and All the Awesome! | Suzanne van Rooyen – This summer I had the privilege of attending two amazing science fiction and fantasy conventions, not only as a fan, but as a panelist. The first was FinnCon held in June in my university town of Jyväskylä. The second was WorldCon held in London just last week. Both cons were great in different ways and here’s why…
- #Loncon3 – THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PANEL ABOUT INDIE PUBLISHING, WITHOUT AN INDIE PUBLISHER ON THE PANEL | deborahjay –
- – I Went To Loncon 3 On My Own, And Left It With Myself – For conventions are, for one thing, places of understanding. I suppose I feared that I would not understand this world, or it would not understand me, or something equally high-minded. But there’s something wonderful about people brought together by common passion. We sat through the opening ceremony, stuffed full of in-jokes and genre references. I didn’t get half of them, but even that was fun. A sense of being welcomed into a 72-year-old family with its own customs. A dinner table with one extra place waiting.
- kaberett | Entries tagged with loncon3 –
- The Wanderground | Just Higher-Ed- jobs.ac.uk career blog – Why am I telling you about what was effectively my summer holiday? Because this Convention-Conference taught me a lot, about how academic conferences are run, what academic conferences could be, and how more intellectual credibility should be given to people outside academia than it often is.
- Conventions, hierarchies and forced diversity | The 13th Colony – And this was something that appears to be continually driven through over the weekend, or at the very least the panels that I’ve sat and spoken in: the ageism, sexism, racism, anti-academic-ism, hierarchism and various other -isms. I have no doubt Worldcon means a lot to the people who have been going to the convention throughout the decades it has been running and has forged a community there. I even understand the protectionism that they feel when hordes of media fans invade, because yes, sometimes we haven’t read the book or appreciate the fight to be legitimised back in the day but does that make our experience less valid, and therefore devalued?
- On LonCon3, Diversity and Hierarchies | bethanvjones – And that wasn’t the only dismissive attitude I saw in relation to LGBTQIA people. Another panellist used the offhand ‘gender-whatever’ in discussing diversity. I tweeted about these instances, as did others, and from what I’ve heard they weren’t the only ones. But on the flip side I also saw how quickly the con organisers were to deal with racism and how supported one of my fellow panellists felt by them.
- 6 Impossible Things: LonCon 3 – After being in my new job for a week and a half I took some leave (starting on the busiest day of the year) for 6 days in order to attend LonCon 3, the 72nd WorldCon. Of course I 'd booked to go to WorldCon a year before I knew about the job, so it was really just lucky timing.
Articles with the Tag writing
Your Happening World (July 28th through August 2nd)
- Why I’m spending today swapping out the dialect in my novel | Mary Robinette Kowal – My project today is replacing all the dialogue spoken by Antiguan characters in Of Noble Family with dialogue rewritten by Antiguan and Barbudan author Joanne Hillhouse. Let me explain why I’m doing this.
- Google Groups – An code name is quickly picked for the exploration of Earth 1/4 Billion: Green Door. Like 'tanks', 'Manhattan District' or many other project names, it is designed to give away as little as possible about the project. As usual, the Soviet hear about GD in a few weeks.
- EPONA – Third stone from taranis – Imagine that you have just landed on a planet twenty-one light years from Earth. You are about to enter a lush world where things are more than just a little different! Evolution has taken exotic paths and a whole new kingdom of life reigns over land, sea and air! You are the leader of a first contact mission on the planet named Epona. The mission you have organized has journeyed here in an interstellar craft that orbits Epona. Your hand-picked crew must provide all the information you will need about Epona from the 21st Century technology available to you. Your objective is to unlock the secret of Epona's remarkable life-forms and discover if there is intelligent life you can communicate with.
- Markov Chains – Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space': a list of all possible states. In addition, on top of the state space, a Markov chain tells you the probabilitiy of hopping, or "transitioning," from one state to any other state—e.g., the chance that a baby currently playing will fall asleep in the next five minutes without crying first.
- The Mouth of the WWE « – In a match between a 15-time World Champion and the most dominating real-life wrestler in the world, Paul Heyman is somehow the best pro wrestler in the story line. So forget Cena and Bryan and Orton and Roman Reigns — Paul Heyman is the face of the WWE. How in the world did that happen?
Your Happening World (June 19th through June 22nd)
Blog fodder for June 19th through June 22nd:
- Arcfinity – We’re reading BARRICADE by Jon Wallace – In case you are thinking otherwise, I was not scouring the text for these solecisms, setting out to set you up, but like all people who are preparing a review I was keeping notes throughout the reading. The protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter. I kept noting all the bad stuff (much more than reported here), but I was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you. I found none. It gradually dawned on me that I was wasting my time. Barricade was unyielding in its awfulness. It was a book I did not wish to write about.
- Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Archipelago of Arrogance | TomDispatch – Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
- Lesbian Historic Motif Project at The Rose Garden – My goal here — beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research — is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing.
- All Quacked Up: Steve Gerber, Marvel Comics, and Howard the Duck « The Hooded Utilitarian – This article is a history of the editorial and business relationship between Marvel Comics, their representatives, and the late writer Steve Gerber (1947-2008). Its focus is their dealings over Howard the Duck, Gerber’s signature character.
- Ptak Science Books: Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Department: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the “Awkwardness” of Holocaust, 1962 – How rich we'd all be after the bombs dropped!
On horror
In a recent discussion on genre in rec.arts.sf.written, someone quoted a post of mine I had written a year or so earlier. Looking at it, I thought it would be interesting enough to share here too.
Horror is a mood, fantasy is a genre.
To explain a bit: horror can be evoked through the mundane (Silence of the Lambs), the science fictional (Who Goes There?) or the fantastic (Dracula).
Horror revolves around evoking a mood of dread, of being scared shitless, a growing sense of unease or discomfort, the sense that something is wrong with the world.
Fantasy revolves around magic in some sense or other, like science fiction revolves around science in some sense or other and mainstream or memitic fiction revolves around “the real world”.
Horror can be evoked in all three of them.