layla | (no subject)

For some reason I can’t seem to focus on any project for more than 5 minutes today. Guess I’ll write a slightly disjointed blog post, then.

Tomorrow I’ll be at the Biz Bee as the table-decoration judge. This is an annual fundraiser for the Literacy Council of Alaska: local business sponsor 3-person teams, who compete in a spelling bee. I participated on the News-Miner team for several of the years I worked there, and had fun, even if we often washed out in the early rounds (which, since we’re the local newspaper, is just embarrassing). Anyway, I haven’t been to the Biz Bee in a few years, so it’ll be fun, or at least different. There’s a small cover charge (proceeds going to the Literacy Council) if you want to just show up and watch.

Random link stuff (under the cut):

I was just reading this Wikipedia article on a Serbian mythic trickster-villain who is based on the Roman Emperor Diocletian. This is something that absolutely fascinates me, and always has — the mythicization of historical people and events. The idea that many seemingly fantastic myths and folktales are actually dim memories of real events, no matter how much they’ve been altered over time, is one of the most fabulous things about history to me. (Raven’s Children would have gotten into this in a major way, if I’d continued the series, and I will probably use some of those ideas in other things. I need to start updating the Annotated Raven’s Children again …)

Torn World’s South Meets North storyline updates on Mondays. If the comment total reaches 20, there will be a bonus update on Friday — and this counts any comments across the Torn World website, so, hey, comments. This week there is a new article on plants and trees of the North, which is basically Fairbanks (North in Torn World = subarctic Alaska, more or less) plus a few fantasy plants.

On a much more serious topic, a fundraiser on IndieGoGo to raise funds for Healthy Start on the Pine Ridge Reservation to help save lives of Lakota babies (whose infant mortality rate is the highest in the US, 300% above the national average).

Doing that Reading on Wednesday meme this week is kind of pointless because I haven’t been reading anything specific; it’s mostly been short fiction from a variety of websites, including Torn World and Lightspeed and Clarkesworld and a few others. I did stumble across a strikingly gorgeous novella at Clarkesworld, “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherryne M. Valente – Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3. It was nominated for a number of awards, including the Nebula and Hugo, and I can certainly see why. This particular style of lush, detail-rich, non-linear writing is not my usual cup of tea, but this is so amazingly written that it sucked me in regardless, although I had to read in stops and starts because it’s just so MUCH. Two paragraphs of this story contain enough ideas to support a novella all on its own; it’s a nonstop flow of ideas and imagery. As far as general plot, it’s about the development of an AI in a virtual-reality environment and its interactions with its creators, all of which is couched in rich and gorgeous fairy-tale metaphor, because the AI learns how to talk to humans through visual and story-based metaphors.

Crossposted to Wordpress, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you like.