Beyond Selidor

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 13: Makes me laugh

It seemed appropriate that today's answer by Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I can still remember the first time I read it — I started reading it in a cafe, and eventually had to leave the cafe because I couldn't prevent myself from laughing out loud. I'm awaiting the upcoming adaptation with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation.

( The other days )

1. If she goes for a long time without running, and combines this with a long time forgetting to take her iron tablets and consuming Vitamin C-heavy foods, she turns into a hysterical, freaking-out-to-the-point-of-curling-up-in-the-foetal-position wreck.

2. However, ASNaCs are the kindest people in the world and will always be there when she needs a shoulder to cry on, a hug, or a cookie.

3. Also, her supervisor, when she's on the warpath, is the best kind of avenging angel to have on your side.

( Links and stuff )

The internet! What a marvel it is! So full of wondrous and interesting things! Things that make me go !!!, apparently!

There is papersky's review of Dune! And Ursula Le Guin's thoughts on a female Prospero! (I love Le Guin, and The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, so this induced a swoon of geektastic proportions!)

We've got a couple of insightful posts about the Arizona shooting on Tiger Beatdown, while John Scalzi's written some good stuff about Sarah Palin's 'blood libel' comments. He's also got an open thread about Obama's Tucson speech.

Now, in case anyone needs a unicorn chaser of sorts, Neil Gaiman and Amber Benson are in the same place. Be still my geeky, geeky heart.

Have I got links for you!

I was introduced to the site TED a while ago, but in recent days I've been linked to two really fantastic talks. The first, Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity, was sent to me by my friend D (who has been visiting Cambridge) and really resonated with me. The other is author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talking about 'the dangers of a single story'. It reminded me a lot of deepad's post 'I didn't dream of dragons'. I grew up a voracious reader, and, as an Australian, read a wide variety of English-language children's books, but I think the majority of them were written by Australians, Americans and British authors. Their characters looked like me, for the most part (although many of the young-adult books I read, especially those set in contemporary Australia, were about CoC, but mainly from the perspective of immigration to Australia). This was unremarkable to me at the time, but I now believe that reading such monochromatic books, and hearing, as Adichie says, a single story about those from other backgrounds is bad for everyone involved.

The Adichie link I encountered through a post on Tiger Beatdown about female characters in literature. I cannot sing the praises of Tiger Beatdown enough. If you add one site to your blogroll, add that one. It is consistently one of the most engaging and interesting places on the internet. The next post is a link to Tiger Beatdown blogger Sady Doyle's column for The Awl, which is about feminist utopias (specifically Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon books) in SF. I link to the Tiger Beatdown link, rather than the (excellent) Awl article itself, because it expresses, most eloquently, the complexity of people such as Bradley, who wrote about utopias while being deeply flawed individuals on so many levels.

Another person who is greatly inspiring to me, but is not without his flaws, is Neil Gaiman. I'm thrilled at his latest idea, which is to introduce a Halloween tradition that involves giving people books as gifts. What a wonderful idea! Being Neil Gaiman, he's able to command a lot of respect, and if you read the next posts in his blog you'll see that he has managed to coopt a lot of big names to participate in this scheme.

Another author I greatly admire is Kristin Cashore. She's a truly wonderful human being and says some very interesting stuff on her blog. I'm not recommending any one particular post, since she is consistently fantastic.

And now on to something completely different! Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope done in Facebook status updates. And a cool op-ed piece by Lucy Mangan about how having sisters supposedly benefits your mental health. As a woman with three sisters, I concur. I love my sisters very much.

I can't stop playing 'Bang Bang Bang' by Mark Ronson and The Business INTL (Feat. Q-Tip and MNDR). It's so catchy! My housemate and I were puzzling over the lyrics, and it took me way too long to realise that they're actually quoting 'Alouette'. That made me feel kind of silly.

Well, I'm nearly finished my registration work, but it's killing me (oh, Lebor Gabála, ours is an abusive relationship), so I've been taking lots of time off and reading interesting stuff online. You know the drill, it's a linkpost.

The wonderful stefeny has started up a blog about her experiences rereading Enid Blyton books. It's very funny. I was one of those people who grew up with Blyton, missed all the racism and sexism and classism and plain bad writing, and then reread the books years later in horror. (I was reading them aloud to a girl I was babysitting, and found myself changing the writing whenever Blyton said something appallingly awful.) Anyway, I highly recommend this blog.

I really appreciated this post by highandrandom about moral ambiguity, for I, too, am a fan of morally ambiguous characters.

I love this post on True/Slant about the whole kerfuffle with the Downfall parody videos being taken off Youtube.

thelxiepia pointed me in the direction of this wonderful recap of Supernatural episode 5.19 by tahirire and blacklid. A must-read for all SPN fans.

If everyone on Twitter were to read the same book over summer, it would be...American Gods. *flails*

sarahtales wrote a very interesting post about romance tropes. westerfeld_blog proves yet again why I love him so.

Here's a great article from The Sydney Morning Herald about tampon ads. I found myself nodding along with pretty much everything the writer said.

I've got a life post, a post about my birthday books (where I mostly whine at Robert Harris for the audacity of not being Steven Saylor) and an announcement post on Longvision.

Here's Neil Gaiman being awesome (when is he not, really?). Here is Justine Larbalestier's list of new blogs she discovered in 2009. I'll probably end up following lots of them.

My mum emailed me the link to this great New York Times article about Katherine Paterson, the new 'ambassador of children's literature' in the US. Her advice? Spend time reading to your children. I love Paterson. Her novel Of Nightingales That Weep was a staple of my childhood. I could probably quote it from cover to cover if I thought about it.

Finally, Jo Walton (papersky) wrote a beautiful post about The Dark Is Rising on Tor.com. Until I got back to the UK, where it is currently blanketed with snow, I didn't appreciate one of the major plot points of the eponymous second book in this series: snow, when you're in England, is sinister and scary. There's something very offputting about the way it swallows sound, the way it makes the landscape harsh and hostile. Walton makes the important point that this excellent series is heavily rooted in the land - Cornwall, Wales and the south of England (near Windsor), and until I lived in England, I didn't really understand quite how accurate Cooper's depictions of these places were.

Some of these links are quite old, but I thought you should read them if you haven't already.

I haven't had time to write anything today because I've been too busy moving house and agonising over what the hell to do with my life. Since I don't want to bore you with those details, have some links instead.

Here's a great post about the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film. I haven't seen the film, but conventional thinking about it among Whedonistas is that it was a flawed movie that failed to capture Whedon's vision.

John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman act like excited fanboys after meeting one another for the first time at Worldcon. I wish I was there. The comments on Scalzi's blog are, as always, hilarious.

Justine Larbalestier managed to get her cover changed on her book Liar. You may recall that I wrote about this a little while ago, and I am delighted that Bloomsbury changed their tune and are committing to ending the whitewashing of book covers.

John Scalzi's response to the idiot who emailed him, demanding to know why Scalzi hadn't informed the world that Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are dating.

Umm, entitlement issues, much?

EDIT: Also, a really excellent post by Justine Larbalestier about why we shouldn't be panicking so much about boys and reading. She rightly points out that boys are reading. They're just not necessarily reading novels.

I was going to write a proper post today, but I'm exhausted and jittery after doing my seminar talk, and so instead I'll treat you to a few links.

First up, an interesting comparison between Dollhouse and Fringe. I love it when people say Joss Whedon is too clever for his own good. It makes me feel all superior for liking his shows.

As you all know, I love Neil Gaiman more than is healthy. This post only serves to make him more awesome in my eyes. In it, he takes an extremely entitled George R. R. Martin fan to task for getting all grouchy that GRRM is not finishing his books as quickly as fans would like:

Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

*swoons*

Usually I'm very homesick. This, however, makes me pleased to be far, far away from Australia. God I hate rugby league players. I'd quite like to point the dude in my icon in their direction.


This secret from fandomsecrets cracks me up. I've always tracked the trends in secrets ('Oh, this is a big week for Supernatural secrets'; 'Remind me to stay far, far away from Hetalia' and so on) but shipping secret trends? That's a new level of insanity, and a kind of insanity I can get behind.

That's it for tonight. One of these days I may manage to find a part of my brain that's not filled with immrama and penitential exile, and use it to write a meaningful blog. Unfortunately, I can't find that part of my brain tonight.

I'm the lunatic in ur cafes, laughing crazily in the corner

Today I was sitting in My Favourite Cambridge Cafe Whose Name I Will Not Divulge Because Then It Would Always Be Too Crowded And I Would Never Get A Table. I had brought Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman with me to read. I got as far as the list of Dramatis Personae before I had to leave, as I was laughing so much I thought everyone in the cafe would think I was a nutcase. Here were some of the gems:
Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)
Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer (A Witchfinder)
Anathema Device (Practical Occultist and Professional Descendant)
Madame Tracy (Painted Jezebel [mornings only, Thursdays by arrangement] and Medium)
Full Chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans and other rare and strange Creatures of the Last Days.

I adore Pterry and Neil Gaiman.

Links
When I looked at yesterday's Irregular Webcomic it looked very familiar. Surely not, I thought. That looks exactly like the main quad at Sydney Uni. Then I scrolled down and read the commentary. Oddly enough, it was modelled on Sydney Uni, jacaranda tree and all! And Sydney Uni's modelled on Cambridge, which is even cooler.

Have some swing dancers dancing in front of Parliament House, thanks to the Riot Act. You've gotta love those Canberrans.

Raphael is going to be blogging about his trip to the UK here. (I suspect that everyone who knows him and reads my blog knows this already, but oh well.)

Life
Well, I suppose I should do something productive today. I'm meant to be writing an article for the newspaper, but I've been putting it off. Now my editor's written to me suggesting it be 'broader'. Any broader, and this article's going to wind up longer than my dissertation. *sigh*

Edited to add:
TV
I don't have anything much to say, except that Dollhouse keeps getting better and better. The new series of Robin Hood, on the other hand, is just getting worse and worse. The replacement Djaq new Girl Outlaw Kate (dubbed 'Blondie' by the good folks at Obernet) is exceptionally annoying. Gisbourne's mopey, Robin's angsty and the addition of Friar Tuck to the gang does little to cover the fact that this was one season too many.