L.S. Johnson's Blog, page 6

evangelion

Cautiously pleased that I’ll be able to rewatch Evangelion on Netflix. I’ve been meaning to for a while, I’m curious to see how its influence on me has played out (I first saw it sometime in the late 90s, I think? When it aired on PBS in San Francisco) … But please, please can we not redo it, or extend it, or revise it, or live-action it, or anything else? The series was so good, both as a story and an artwork, a kind of commentary on its own creation, which is also one way of looking at the...

Grateful

Lake Chabot Park this morning

Grateful today for air I can breathe, rain-damp parks to walk in, a novella over the halfway mark, the small hopes of this past election. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

November

(This was sunset in my neighborhood two nights ago. Particle count was 187 per AirNow.)

Life, my therapist is always telling me, is one thing after another. The last three weeks, for me, have been clear evidence of such, culminating in a death in the family and my partner getting sent up to Butte County to help with the Camp Fire. Through it all I’ve kept indexing, riding out this busy season as best I can, so there are now certain memories that are inextricably linked to Putin’s second go a...

Vote. Please vote.

I don’t talk as much about politics as I should. It’s disheartening, and frightening, to see that the causes I marched for thirty years ago are still the causes I’m marching for. This country has always been a dark place; anything built on a legacy of violence, of unaddressed violence, would be a dark place. But it’s also my home. It’s the macrocosm version of a toxic relative: you love them yet you can’t stand them; you dread confronting them yet you want to shake them and yell at them until...

Not once but thrice! Events in October

I am back from Florida, where the regular afternoon storms felt appropriate for this nightmare of a timeline. But in between the rage and the phoning, the phoning, because November is coming (it is coming, it has to be coming), I’ve somehow got three events this month:

October 13: I will be at the Livermore Public Library’s Indie Author Day Showcase. There will be a talk by Andy Weir from 1-2 PM, followed by a book sale from 2-4 PM. I’ll have copies of all three books, along with a little sw...

AoT season 3

It’s day two of no freelance deadlines, hurrah! And I’m getting to grips on things again. I’ve been making entries on the Magic Spreadsheet, nudging the daily wordcount up past 1000, reconfiguring the desk into something a little more ergonomic … and also treating myself to Season 3 of Attack on Titan.

(Yes, I know, not S3, but I love this image.)

So far I’m enjoying it, though with reservations. Sometimes, for me, long-running series go down narrative paths that I find frustrating, though u...

after Worldcon

So I went to my first Worldcon! The programming was far better than I expected considering the pre-con issues. The Mexicanx initiative made for some excellent panels (see E.M. Markoff’s blog post for a deeper look at the initiative), I picked up some tips in the more craft-oriented sessions, and I’ll be scouring the Internet for videos of a few that I missed out on. As I tweeted earlier, I’m also looking forward to revisiting the Mexican Gothic panel, which will be podcast on the Outer Dark l...

Worldcon 76 (updated)

(The image has nothing to do with Worldcon. It’s here because I’m having a thing right now about this Gerhard Richter series – this is 14. Marz 2000 [Firenze]. I’ve been thinking a lot about inside and outside, and translating inner landscapes, and, well. Big mood as the kids say.)

So I will be at Worldcon 76, though I keep wanting to say the Worldcon, like how people in LA talk about their freeways. I will be reading with Broad Universe on Saturday at 5 pm somewhere in the Convention Center...

Worldcon 76

(The image has nothing to do with Worldcon. It’s here because I’m having a thing right now about this Gerhard Richter series – this is 14. Marz 2000 [Firenze]. I’ve been thinking a lot about inside and outside, and translating inner landscapes, and, well. Big mood as the kids say.)

So I will be at Worldcon 76, though I keep wanting to say the Worldcon, like how people in LA talk about their freeways. I will be reading with Broad Universe on Saturday at 5 pm somewhere in the Convention Center...

Catching up

I’ve been there and back again – to Florida and back, that is, where I celebrated my father’s birthday. While I was gone Leviathan finished its introductory sale and Vacui Magia was featured by Bookbub, all of which made for a week that went by far too fast. The only downside was the last night, when I had my first encounter with the terribly-named noseeum (seriously, can you imagine using such a name in a story) and apparently I’ll have the joy of their lingering nibbles for another week or...