My brain. I woke up this morning and was laying in bed thinking about how during the night I’d heard some noises I associated with the coming Deluge. I couldn’t remember what they had been though. A thing? Goes ro-ro-ro? Doesn’t seem very windy out there. What is that ro-ro-ro thing associated with rain? Oh well, sure it’ll come to me.

It wasn’t until later when out happened again that I thought: oh yeah. Thunder.

I think Killian crept in during the night and swapped brains with me. He says dogs say w-w-w.

Later: I was eating some olives. Killian came over, interested. He licked the one I offered him, did the whole body shudder everybody does the first time they eat green olives (don’t lie), gave it back. I ate it. He asked to try another. He made a face, gave it back, and watched carefully as I ate it. He took a little bite of the third one, and split the fourth one with me evenly. This kid. This social kid.

other things

All week, the streams have been full of various upsets, mostly coming out of the conventions over the big weekend. The Hugos were awarded and John Scalzi finally won best novel, for Redshirts, a comedic piece he supposedly wrote in (I haven’t doublechecked this) five weeks. Good for him. I have a lot of thoughts about the Hugos as an award, but they’re not much different from my thoughts regarding any award granted via popular vote. Since I haven’t read the book it definitely isn’t something I’m too fussed about. That’s not true for other people, though.

The location of Worldcon 2015 was also settled, and it will be Spokane! That’s a four hour drive from Seattle (or an eight hour train ride). I’m planning on attending. I also registered for Norwescon 2014 while everybody else was off at PAX/DragonCon/Worldcon. I wimped out last year and I didn’t want to give myself time to do that again.

Mind, that’s another thing people have been discussing. Worldcon is full of old white people and not a lot else. Which is a problem, definitely. It’s making some people decide to stop going. But it’ll be in Spokane and I’ve never been and maybe when I go I can at least be relentlessly me at them.

PAX resurrected the old dickwolves tempest. This is making a number of people talk about if there’s any way to change PAX or if it needs to be given up to the most unpleasant elements of geek culture. Here’s one. I used to be a loyal reader of Penny Arcade, but kind of stopped when Killian was born, because you do cut down with new and needy babies. I was an Enforcer at the very first PAX, even, although I’ve not attended since the first few years.  I won a Dickerdoodle contest, too.

But I’ve found I haven’t really missed Penny Arcade the strip as much as I expected. It doesn’t help that their artist isn’t very good with words, but he just keeps using them in loud and aggressive ways, and he keeps punching down while thinking he’s punching up. Anyhow, here is a good post you may not have seen on the topic: Penny Arcade, Geek Culture, and Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” It includes historical links if you’re curious about more details about the Dickwolves Debacle.

Finally, in not-actually-news, somebody has been complaining about the not-actually-scifi on the SF shelves. The extremely insightful Foz Meadows does an excellent analysis of the post in question, which I’ll encourage you to read. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart. I read Among Others (Hugo/Nebula winner for 2011) over the weekend and it made me think a lot about science fiction then (in the 60s and 70s) and SFF now. And I also do a lot of thinking about romance novels, romance in other fiction, casual games, women’s entertainment and the denigration and profitability of such, and some of the qualitative differences between styles of SFF. But… that’s a whole different post for another night. Which I hope I’ll get around to making! But now it’s time for kid bed!