ExtraPenguin

Okay so I'm falling asleep on my keyboard (and will go goodnight soon), but:
- I have Worldcon flights! I'm arriving on the Monday afternoon (after 30+ hours of travel) so I'll have Mon afternoon/evening to wander around Wellington being supremely jetlagged, then Tuesday to wander around Wellington/maybe walk a path, slightly less jetlagged, before Worldcon on Wednesday-Sunday. I leave the following Saturday (with another 30+ hours of travel), so I have four and a half days (I'm reserving Friday evening for packing) to spend in and around Wellington. I've spent some time on the tourism webpages, but people in and around Wellington, is there anything you think I Must Do? (My current plans are mostly along the "walk around trails in the nature" lines. I'm physically fit and your winter is roughly our autumn, temperature-wise.)

- Work is ... not exploding, but busy. I'll have to go in early tomorrow to get some actual work done before some bullshit meetings. The good news is that I finally found out when I'm going on a longish work trip, and it's not in conflict with any space_swap deadlines.

- space_swap noms are ongoing! I have processed a lot. I will process more tomorrow, when I'm not asleep on my keyboard.

- I've continued with the femslash ficlets, even if I've wanted to write some Yang Jian/Xiaoxiao het for Fairyland Lovers (??????), return to a name magic MDZS concept I had in 2018, and do approximately eleventy billion other fics. Today's and yesterdays were CQL Wen Qing/Jiang Yanli darkfic.

- I came across some interesting meta on the translations of the MDZS sex scenes. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, addendum from a translator (all on tumblr). It's interesting, and I'm side-eyeing ExR a bit now. (Tldr is that compared to two other translations, ExR picked the more "severe"/dubconny/yaoi-tropey ways to translate phrases and expressions, while the other two translations being compared are much closer to each other.) The meta author doesn't compare to the raws, but did (for parts 2 and 3) consult with someone who's looked at them.

- MDZS fic rec! But suppose Icarus did not fly so high, Jin Guangyao redemption/canon divergence where Nie Mingjue never dies. I enjoyed it!

- 音阙诗听 - 惊蛰 (Jingzhe | insects wake). It's not yet the 6th of March, and the insects are thankfully still asleep here, but I enjoy the song.

Saturday: 3 panels and a reading, plus autographs!

( notes )

I visited 3 panels, the art show, and tried to buy books except they closed the damn shops on me the moment I found something to buy.

So, first I and my minion registered, then like good Finns who eat at 11 (and we were still reeling at the time zone lag, so 9-10 local would've been an acceptable lunchtime), we tried to find lunch, except that the nation of Ireland doesn't have lunch available before 12. Hungry, we went to the first panel of the con, at the Odeon Point Square. They were in movie theaters, which was very comfortable, but the panelists couldn't really see the audience (so questions were hard) and it created a very ... distant feel between panelists and audience, in some way.

( panel listing and my mostly-unedited list-form notes )

Upcoming posts will deal with Worldcon days Fri-Sun, plus a post on the loot/what I read, and a post on my WDLF2 fics which will sort of hang on the aforementioned; for my assignment #2 I was very much influenced by A Memory Called Empire, and I sort of want to expose my "read this book, then wrote that" orders for this journey and the flashfic, which might be interesting to the one other person who has read what I have (but hasn't watched Guardian) and the one Guardian fan who's interested in metacreation (but hasn't read the books I read). Or maybe the Venn diagram circles will overlap, who knows?

Now that my sibling has finally stopped dragging their heels and bought a Worldcon membership, I can reserve a hotel room for us! I went for the nearest-by option in the price range. This is A Success in my adulting life. Now, the plane tickets...

fandom_stocking now has a list of needy stockings available! Full disclosure: I am on it.

For those of you who are exchange mods, morbane was in correspondince with AO3 over the Reveals Bug – and discovered that there moderation queue functionality is apparently a bug. Post with explanation. I'm drafting together an e-mail to AO3 over this, asking them to please not "fix" this "bug".

In the realm of actual post-posts to make, I have an idea for a post that is half condemnation of Hogwarts House sorting and half rage at the "archetype and 1-2 quirks" school of characterization, a half-post idea that's basically just me quoting stuff someone else wrote on Tumblr + adding a few other translations of the relevant passage, and of course the "OCs must serve either as foils or worldbuilding" post, but: tired. I have to pack and do a ton of bureaucracy and ugh.

space_swap fandom pimping post will go up over the weekend.

Saturday, I went to the con on less than enough sleep (since I was getting rather rank on Friday and had to shower => half an hour + away from my sleeping time). Here are my notes.

( Read more... )

The early bird gets the worm, so I identified all the panels I Really Wanted to go to, then went to queue at least 40 minutes before they started. I mostly went to the science things, since I was at least partially there to get some writing mojo and inspiration, and also if I've already encountered an idea, re-encountering it later makes learning it then easier. Here are my notes on last Thursday beneath the cut. (Updated 18.8.)

Oh, and Worldcon has put up videos of some of the panels, plus the opening ceremonies.

( Read more... )

6. A song that makes you want to dance
Walk the Moon - Shut Up and Dance With Me (link to a video with a movie dance compilation)
lyrics
This is also a song that cheers me up immensely. It has even managed to acquire YouTube comments (typically the dreg pits of lost faith in humanity) such as "This is one of the most beautifully crafted music videos I've seen on this site. Every scene matched the beat, rhythm, tone, and mood of the song. This is what makes a great music video."
In slightly related news, I have connected with a local queer in a maybe perhaps romantic way. I'm certainly grinning like an idiot. Let's see what happens.

I also survived Worldcon! I'll be putting up my panel etc notes for each day a week late – ie, I'll start with Wednesday's on next Wednesday, and so on and so forth. I managed to read two and a half books queueing up for stuff: Jussi Katajala's Nollameridiaani ja muita tarinoita (a compilation of shorts, from refreshingly Finnish to refreshingly un-American to utterly intriguing, to my knowledge untranslated but should be worth a check), Emmi Itäranta's Teemestarin kirja (aka Memory of Water; pretty much at the litfic end of what I like reading, but very immersive in worldbuilding and I loved all of the water metaphors), and half of Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice (so far, typically Reynoldsianly dark and gloomy like gothic metal, but with an intriguing premise).
Other purchases include O.E. Lönnberg's Langanpäitä (a drabble collection, signed by the author who was also the sales clerk), Shimo Suntila's Tähtiviima (a collection of shorts, set in space probably), Alastair Reynolds' Revenger and Century Rain, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee: An Omnibus (seemingly an omnibus of his Xeelee series), three T-shirts (both the Worldcon 75 ones and the Dublin 2019 one), two necklaces for my LARP-a-woman needs, and a space-related oil painting triptych (expensive but very much worth). Freebies include the souvenir book and Giants at the End of the World: A Showcase of Finnish Weird, ed. Johanna Sinisalo & Toni Jerrman.

Artists whose work I liked include: Hannele Parviala (twitter, example art), Lisa Konrad (official site), John Granacki (official site), Sergey Shikin (interview & example arts), Vitaly Yekleris (I think this is his pinterest and here are some book covers by him, but I can't really be sure), Minna Louhelainen (official site), and Eeva Turkka (twitter, an art).