Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 339

All In All It’s Just Another Brick In The Wall

When I was 14 and in ninth grade, my form and I had a teacher we loved. In my memory she was communist, but maybe I’m wrong about that and just inferred it. Certainly unlike all the other communist party members, she never tried to make us sign up for Our. Very. Own. Communist. Party. Card! (Be the first kid on your block NOT to own one.) Maybe she was just some shade of pink short of full red, which meant she was average for that time and place, particularly for teachers.

Where she stood out...

Misty Water Colored Memories

Lately I’ve been fretting about my memory.

First I should explain my rather confused relationship with my own ability to remember things. One of the first coherent memories I have is of my parents being very proud I remembered a trip we’d taken. I know I took that trip at three, and I still remember that trip clearly. We were visiting my aunt at a hot-baths-place (you know, medicinal, from the time of the Romans) and took a train up to the mountain. It was the first MODERN train I’d seen (tho...

Nobody Expects the Fannish Inquisition! By Christopher M. Chupik

*As a veteran Volunteer in exchange student organizations, libraries and the like, and an habitue of Austen fan groups, I DID. But Chris is young.*

Nobody Expects the Fannish Inquisition!

By Christopher M. Chupik

While I had been watching SF and Fantasy stuff since I was a wee Canadian lad, I made my jump into the larger world of fandom the late ‘80s when I went to my first Star Trek convention. It was just a small, local affair with no guests, a few people in costumes and The Voyage Home pl...

Minor Slide Backs

It’s very hard for people born and raised in a country to actually see it as it is. It is even harder for people in a country and in a culture to have a dispassionate view of their own culture and the state of it.

This is particularly hard for the US because we’re such a great big country, (as a friend said about my older son, once “larger than life in all directions.”) Our pop culture even projects outward, appealing to people who frankly don’t get most of it save for the fact that it’s “new...

Everything is Coming Up Promo- Freerange Oyster

Everything is Coming Up Promo- Freerange Oyster J.M. Ney-Grimm Skies of Navarys

When the king’s geomancer announces that a tidal wave threatens Navarys – the Atlantis of the North-lands – every citizen on the island springs to action. Amidst the uproar, the aeromancer Palujon steals unique and magical lodestones.

Mago, son of the lodestones’ creator, vows to retrieve his father’s precious artifacts. But Mago’s friend Liliyah questions Palujon’s motives.

Why would a man of his stature break t...

This You Cannot Think

Recently, in a fit of my own form of quixotic insanity, I posted the following in my facebook page:

What did I want? I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur – I w...

A Modest Proposal – Kate Paulk

A Modest Proposal – Kate Paulk

A Modest Proposal (With apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Given the appalling decision-making powers of the political elites, and the equally appalling spectacle displayed by the recent primary contests in this nation, it becomes essential to propose a simple solution to the destruction of our essential liberties by means of a simple proposal designed to respect the disabilities of those responsible for such poor choices while enabling those of us retaining the capac...

Winners and Losers

Because I’ve been busy with house (groan) matters and trying to write short stories in the cracks between (they’re due) I have been reading one of those interminable collections of traditional fairytales. See, I need to read something while cooking or walking on the treadmill, or such, but it can’t be anything long or engaging, because otherwise I won’t get my work done.

One of the things that struck me about the fairytales is that people are born to be what they are. Sure, sure, there are te...

On Washing Behind the Ears

I’m going to be a spoil sport. Fortunately that’s easy. You see, I raised two children, and boys at that. Once you get the mom knack, you never go back.

This is the third post I wrote. In the other two I got impolite and unseemly. I had decided to take time away from all social media, but while having coffee — the stuff to make me sleep yesterday made my head ache this morning, though it had the advantage of amusing younger son who’d never seen me tipsy — it came to me that getting impolite a...

BUILDING UNDER – A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM 2013

This seems appropriate just now:

BUILDING UNDER – A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM 2013

So, we’ve established that revolutions don’t do much except make things worse, unless revolutions are the blessing of an order already in place and already functioning, in which case, the overpower vanishes and there it is.

This works best, of course, in Colonial situations, though for the record, most of the anti-colonial revolutions ended disastrously. Even when the colonial power was as unorganized, hapless a...