Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 118

The Problems of Group Work

Okay, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking I’m about to go on a lunatic rant about that one time the 7th gradebiology teacher had us do group work, and I did all of it and only got a portion of the grade.

And you’d be… not completely wrong.

Back then I considered a love for group work the province of mediocre teachers. It was slightly above “Call me first name” or “you’ll teach me more than I teach you” but on a par with “the class will vote on your grade.” (What? You th...

The Bad Plotting Society is at it AGAIN

UPDATE:

Okay, first of all, and to get this out of the way: We’re still working on the thank you post, partly because not only are people still donating, but we’re finding out people SOMEHOW missed that for donations $10 and over a “shoutout” on the blog was included. So I’m still getting panicked emails from people who didn’t put a note in the donation.

So, statement of where we are below:

YOUR DANGER IS MINIMAL. My intention is to thank people by first name, last initial, unless ...

The Weirdometer

I’ve been a science fiction fan since I found out it existed. This means I’ve always been unimaginably weird. No, I’m not calling you names. Trust me on this. I was more unimaginably weird than thou.

Why? Well, because when I fell into science fiction (and before it I’d been trawling even weirder experimental fiction stuff, looking for what satisfied the itch) I was a very young Portuguese girl. (ten or eleven.)

Reading as a pasttime was already fairly strange. At least in our place a...

Oyez Oyez!

Ladies and gentlemen, dragons and platypuses: We now have the raw data for those who donated. (Something around 1k came in via mail, and thank you Dawn for the slippers. They will be much enjoyed this Winter. They’re amazing.)

Around 1k people donated, with over 500 being over $10 and therefore eligible for a public thank you.

If you don’t want to be mentioned at all and haven’t let me know send me an email today to book pimping at outlook dot com.

HOWEVER because I know in 500 na...

Once The Mask Drops

I’m having a slight problem with all the shock/scare/ horror when people discover how bad leftists are: like G-d to the old Jewish guy praying, I want to answer back “I know, I know…”

Because none of this is any kind news to me, partly because of the place of my birth, my education, and my chosen profession.

From the moment I’ve been aware of politics, I’ve been aware that everything — literally everything — around me — every structure of power, every field I might be interested in, de...

What We’re Made Of

I have a character in my head who’s been trained in interplanetary diplomacy. (Oh, shush. Keep it down to a dull roar, will ya? It is getting written, but I think that series starting with No Man’s Land (eh) and ending six books later with Earthman’s Son will be written behind the scenes and not published till they’re all ready. For various reasons. So you shall most certainly abide in extreme patience, okay?)

Um… So, my characters are (probably) not separate thing from me, but rather I...

On Being A Flea

Good Late Morning/Early Afternoon, depending on your location, ladies, gentlemen and platipi, and welcome to the portion of according to Hoyt in which we commit heresy.

Oh, not heresy against religion or moral. Those poor nags have gotten hit so much over the last century at this point you are not even hitting a dead horse, more the memory of the expectation of a dead horse. Those of us who still believe and hold out our little light

are largely people of no account and even less p...

The “ist” Trap

So I actually meant to do this post, when we had the big “but why aren’t women exactly like men, only better” kerfuffle here (well, the latest one.)

There is a trap to feminism. Or really any ism. But Feminism was the one that set this off.

You see, I considered myself a feminist way back when, when women didn’t have the same rights under the law in Portugal. This made a certain amount of sense, since having the same rights under the law is kind of important. In another way, it was al...

Color Me Tired

The other day I was ambushed by an otherwise HIGHLY entertaining musical of Pride and Prejudice that had, as one of the four sisters of Elizabeth Bennet a young black lady. I was upset at it because it made the whole production bizarre. “Was Mrs. Bennett unfaithful? Is Mr. Bennett blind?”

A friend who does small production amateur theater told me “Look, it’s probably a small production, they go with what they have.”

Turned out she was right. It was a tiny theater company with a limite...

Going Backwards

There is at this moment a road, once as familiar to me as my own hand, which I shall never walk again. There are faces I’ll never see again, voices I’ll never hear again in person. There are people alive and theoretically accessible to me in the world right now, that I will never see in person again, no matter how much I want to. And one of those might very well be the first person I remember being aware of loving.

Some of that is normal and natural, a consequence not only of our being ...