Marie Brennan's Blog, page 196

disaster relief book sale fundraiser

I'm going to take care of two problems here today:

1) I would like to raise funds for the American Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Sandy,

2) I have way too many author copies around the house, that I'd like to get rid of.

So we're having a book sale here at Swan Tower. Comment on this post, or e-mail me at marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail{dot}com, and I will sell you the following books at the following prices, including autographs and (if you request it) personalization to you or another person of your choice.

Note that the prices are a bit higher than they might otherwise be, to ensure that packaging and shipping doesn't take too big a bite out of the Red Cross donation total. (I will send books overseas, too, but since this is for charity, I will probably ask you to kick in a few bucks extra to cover the increased cost of shipping.)

$10
A Star Shall Fall , mass market paperback (18 copies, was 19)
Warrior , mass market paperback (1 copy, was 2)
Witch , mass market paperback (1 copy)

$15
A Natural History of Dragons , unrevised Advance Bound Manuscript (1 copy)
A Star Shall Fall , Advance Uncorrected Proof (1 copy)
With Fate Conspire , Advance Uncorrected Proof (3 copies, was 4)
Hexenkrieger (German translation of Witch ) (1 copy)

$20
In Ashes Lie , UK trade paperback (2 copies)
A Star Shall Fall , trade paperback (1 copy)

$25
A Star Shall Fall , Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (1 copy)
With Fate Conspire , Science Fiction Book Club hardcover (3 copies)
With Fate Conspire , regular hardcover (11 copies, was 12)
Doppelgänger und Hexenkrieger (German omnibus of Warrior and Witch ) (4 copies)


Please spread the word wherever you think people would be interested. I'll try to keep this list updated in a timely manner, so that you'll know how many books are left of each type. ETA: Total raised thus far = $130

The sale will run for one week (so, through next Thursday morning, the 8th of November).

All hail Chronos!

One of the things HRSFA did when I was in college -- and still does now -- was celebrate the Coming of the Hour (in the fall) and the Going of the Hour (in the spring), when the god Chronos, in his benevolence and cruelty, bestows or takes an hour away from us poor mortals. The ceremony lasted for one hour, from 2 a.m. until 2 a.m. (fall) or from 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. (spring), and most definitely did not end with us burning a cardboard clock in Harvard Yard. Because there is no open flame in the Yard. <nods>

Anyway, I must have been a good girl this year, because Chronos is bestowing the gift of the hour upon me twice. Poland switched their clocks last weekend, and the U.S. is doing it this upcoming weekend.

All hail Chronos, whose generosity I rather desperately need these days. (Now if you'll pardon me, I'm going to go contemplate passing out, in the hopes that I can kill this cold with sleep.)

five things make a jet-lagged post

1) I am so very, very glad that I flew from Krakow to Frankfurt to SFO yesterday, rather than connecting anywhere in the U.S. (Not even just the East Coast: the problems there have screwed up routing and plane supply all over the place.) We did have to divert half an hour further north to avoid the winds, but that's minor compared to what could have happened with a different route.

2) My ideal would be to not leave the house today. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have enough food on hand to make that work.

3) This rendition of the X-Men, as characters in Edo-period Japan, is pretty awesome. And if I didn't link to it before, so is the artist's previous take on the Avengers in the Sengoku period.

4) rachelmanija has posted notes/transcript from her panel on gender roles in The Hunger Games, so if you want to see what I sound like after a full weekend of conning and my brain is leaking out my ears, go read. On the whole, I think it was a really great panel, despite exhaustion on my part. (Warning: spoilers for the whole series, including Mockingjay.)

5) Due to a rollout of AO3 code, Yuletide signups have been extended to 9 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. Get in while the getting's good!

leaving Poland

There will (I hope) be more extensive trip-blogging after it's over and done with, but in brief: I leave Krakow at an obscenely early hour tomorrow, after seven and a half days. We got a dusting of snow this morning, that half melted off in the afternoon, but lasted long enough to make the Basilica of St. Mary and the Cloth Hall and St. Florian's Tower and so on look charmingly picturesque in a way I hadn't already photographed. So kniedzw and I ran around repeating a bunch of shots, then hid from the cold in some museums, and then -- when we couldn't usefully sightsee anymore -- went and watched Skyfall, subtitled in Polish. So ha-ha, I saw it before most of you. :-) (Short form: quite good. And surprisingly focused on the personal side, with the Big Threat being more the vehicle that delivered the personal story, rather than the major point of the film.)

I have spent the last two days with a cold I really could have done without, but even with that sapping my energy, it's been an excellent trip. There will be many photos, and assuming I can muster the will, some chatty posts as well.

First, though, I have to endure a transatlantic flight with a cold. Oh joy.

brief report from Krakow

1) Learn from my error, chilluns. If you're going to a foreign country, turn off 2-step verification on your Google accounts for the duration, unless you can actually get text messages on your phone while overseas. Otherwise, if your laptop refuses to talk to the hotel wireless, you'll have to go to great lengths to get internet access long enough to turn verification off so you can check your Gmail on other computers as needed.

2) Things Krakow does very well: street musicians, fall color, street performers of the non-musical kind, hot chocolate, music not on the streets, sausage (so saith the kniedzw ), and RIDICULOUSLY monumental altars/shrines in its churches. Also, veneration of Pope John Paul II (shocker, I know).

3) Things I do not do well: sleep on planes, these days. I don't know where my ability to do so went, but it is gone.

4) I wish I could have come here two years ago, when I could pretend to the IRS that this was research for A Natural History of Dragons. Thanks to folklore (which I will report on in more detail later), there are dragons ALL OVER the place. Including one whose picture I will try to post later, because he's awesome.

5) Off to Auschwitz tomorrow. Not exactly happy fun vacation time, but it's one of those things you kind of have to do.

P.S. My folkloric and musical heart is kind of in love with the Heynał mariacki.

Poland!

(Yes, I know my icon is not of Poland. Hush.)

It occurs to me that if I've made any mention here of my upcoming trip, I did so in passing, where nobody was likely to see it (and I don't remember it). So: I'm going to Poland! On Saturday!

I will be there for about a week, in Krakow and Gdansk. I am, quite pleasingly, the first member of my family to go to Poland; given how much my family travels, this is actually an achievement worth noting. (I beat them to Costa Rica, Ireland, Israel, India, and I think Turkey. Can't remember if I beat them to Greece or not. They -- meaning my parents and my brother -- have beaten me to China, Russia, South Africa, Finland, Taiwan, Norway, Malaysia, Sweden, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Japan, Zambia, South Korea, France, Austria, the Czech Republic . . . yeah.)

I intend to take a great many pictures, some of which may get posted here, depending on internet access and my energy level. Try not to break anything while I'm gone. :-)

Yuletide signups

Forgot to mention: Yuletide signups are now open. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, there's a FAQ here that explains a lot. (And also this, but it's kind of more "entertainingly helpy" than "actually helpful.")

Signups will be open until the 28th. Further updates will be posted on yuletide_admin (official) and yuletide (community); also, this post is worth keeping an eye on.

Yuletide is a lot of fun, and includes many things you might not class as "fanfic" in the normal way of things. I encourage people to check it out!

Troll-Hunting

I can't help but steal Ta-Nehisi Coates' title for this post, since his blog is where I first caught wind of this story, and his title was a good one.

Over at Gawker, Adrien Chen has posted about the notorious Reddit troll (and also moderator, which is a key point) called "Violentacrez." It unmasks VA's real identity as Michael Brutsch, but for my money, that's not the interesting part. Instead it's the dissection of Reddit's "free speech" culture, and the way that its paid employees decided it was easier and therefore preferable to make a deal with the devil, rather than attempt to enforce any sort of decency above the bare legal minimum.

What do I mean by that? You should go read the article, but here's a sampler: VA was very good at hunting down and eliminating actual child pornography posted to Reddit, so they were totes okay with the fact that he was running a giant subreddit called "Jailbait" whose members trawled the web for pictures of adolescent girls in bikinis or short skirts and posted them for the prurient entertainment of their fellow Redditors. (Because, y'know, if they didn't want creeps on the Internet drooling over their bodies, they shouldn't have dressed like that, or posted their pictures online!) Oh, and he was really energetic about policing Jailbait not only for child pornography, but also for any girl who appeared to be older than 16 or 17. Good to know he was on the ball!

Of course, there's been great outrage at Reddit. About Violentacrez? No, of course not. About Chen's great crime in "doxxing" him -- exposing his real identity. On this topic, let me just quote Chen:

Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.

I am OK with that.

And so am I.

As Scalzi points out, a lot of this is based in a skewed sense of what "free speech" means, plus an unhealthy dose of privileged entitlement. The notion that I am abridging somebody's constitutional rights by getting in the way of their ability to be a goddamned asshole, is, to put it succinctly, bullshit. Am I glad that Brutsch has lost his job (with a payday lender, apparently, which Fred Clark at Slacktivist has commented on)? No, of course not. He has a family to feed. But I don't blame Chen for that, either. Brutsch thrived because the culture of Reddit allowed him to get away with reprehensible behavior, and the cost of that to other people is real. His pigeons are now coming home to roost. I'm sure Redditors will take up a collection on his behalf, and they'll inundate him with sympathy for the terrible and unjustified witch-hunt against a guy who only wanted to entertain himself with other people's suffering.

But in the meantime, Chen has struck one little blow against Internet sociopathy. If I could donate to him, I would.

Portal fantasies, on blogs other than this one

I almost forgot to write a post for this month at SF Novelists. Then rachelmanija started a discussion of portal fantasies on her LJ, and that inspired me to distill my thoughts into my own post: This Wardrobe Closed Until Further Notice.

Comment over there (by which I mean both "Rachel's LJ" and "SF Novelists"); no account required.

Sirens!

Got back last night from the ever-lovely Sirens Conference, which this year moved to a location outside of Portland, Oregon rather than up in Vail. Fortunately the move seems not to have hurt the event; on the contrary, attendance was reportedly up 25%. Still a small con, but so far it's doing well.

I had a lovely time as usual -- albeit an exhausting one, due to my unwise tendency to say "yes" when friends ask me to do things like panels. (Though I could hardly have refused the last of those requests. One of the Guests of Honor, the folklorist Kate Bernheimer, unfortunately came down with the flu and had to stay home; the staff had to throw together a last-minute panel to replace her keynote address.) The site is in the Columbia River Gorge, and thanks to driving there and back with starlady38 , I got to see a nice cross-section of the Pacific Northwest. Next year I'm hoping to take two days and go up the coast instead, which is (I'm told) even prettier than what I saw on the I-5 route.

Next year will be the fifth Sirens, and in honor of that anniversary, the theme is "Reunion." There will be four Guests of Honor, rather than the usual three, so as to have one for each of the previous four themes: Robin LaFevers, author of Grave Mercy , for "warriors;" the ever-awesome ellen_kushner , author of (among other things) Thomas the Rhymer , for "fairies;" Alaya Dawn Johnson, author of Racing the Dark and Moonshine for "monsters;" and Guadalupe Garcia McCall, author of Summer of the Mariposas , for "retellings." So, y'know, it's a fabulous year to try out the con. Registration will open soon, with a lower rate than it will cost later; I'll post here when that happens!