…in different categories). To single out just two of them, though: it will come as no surprise that Ken Liu’s short fiction is nominated both for Best Short Story and Best Novella (and I will be very miffed if he doesn’t take at least one of those trophies); and many congrats also go to Nancy Fulda, whose short story “Movement” is a Villa Diodati success story (not often that stuff we critique ends up on the ballot for the Hugos and the Nebulas!)….

…y large and small details, of a mosaic of beliefs and cultural mores which comes from the environment we’ve been raised in, the society we’ve moving in, the subcultures we’re members of, the people we frequent… Yeah, we’re all the same deep down, but, broadly speaking, life in Hồ Chí Minh City follows very different rhythms from life in Paris; and the social structure and attitudes can also be very different [2]. Similarly, of course French politi…

…fensive, but I had the privilege of being able to stick to my rather large comfort circle(s). I remain confident those are issues we’re working on as a genre, and that things can only get better (I’m quite sure cons used to be much less gender-equal than they are now, for instance–this is an area where we’ve definitely made progress). And the whole discussion has given me ideas for future panels at Bradford! -Charles A. Tan on the fallacy of World…

…So… bags packed. Chocolate taken with me. Eastercon app downloaded. Leftover food (xá xíu) handed over to the H for his bánh mì tomorrow. My plane leaves at 8:00, which gets me up at 5:15am. Arg. I’ll be off for some sleep then… A reminder that my schedule can be found here; and the author herself can be found in the bar or in the dealers’ room. I will be rooming with the awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and hope to see many of you there!…

…a very simple basic criterion: they don’t make sense. They present a presidential program that does a combination of: incoherent measures, promising something we already have in place (like separating investment activities from credit activities. We already have that), and/or promising something intenable (you can’t actually hand out gift measures to everyone, and promise we’ll balance our budget by 2017). And I stare at them, and think, oh my Go…

…actually export stuff. That wouldn’t be so bad–except that Outlook doesn’t come prepackaged with CSV export, and you have to install from the CD (which, of course, I’ve lost). I then attempted to go through Thunderbird sync–which turns out to be a buggy feature that makes the Ovi Suite crash, yay. (also, apparently Nokia stopped supporting Ovi Suite, oooh, about 4 months ago, making any kind of feature update hard. Not that it was ever anything mo…

…wonder that the psyche and the culture of the Filipino is so scarred and wounded to the point where we see the white and the west as being superior to us in all things. Reading the history of conquest and colonization is a traumatic experience for the colonized. The Philippines went through not one, but two colonizers. I wonder how many colonizers other countries had to endure. From reading these histories, it becomes clear to me that the erasure…

…men survived easier than ships–because they had armours, because the ships had been tasked to take care of them. Dong Huong remembered arguing with Lady Meng’s Brewer–begging the ship to spare itself instead of her–and running against a wall of obstinacy, a fundamental incomprehension that ships could be more important than humans. Among the Northerners, however, everything was different. (I have no idea what I’m going to do with this, and it look…

…ors and the bodhisattva Quan Am to find strength; but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart. I know, of course, where it started. I took you to the ship–because I had no choice, because Khi Phach was away on some merchant trip to the Twenty-Third Planet–because you were a quiet and well-behaved son, and the birth-master would have attend…

…on you guys; all complains should be addressed to ML in Paris *g*. 1. male underwear upper parts Ha, someone must have been very disappointed. I wonder if I should convince the H to pose for nude pictures? 2. a glittering ballerina scarred forever Er, I admit have no idea what was going on here. (this actually got multiple searches. Colour me puzzled). 3. the science of pineapple brownies Ha. Fair point. So, pineapple brownies: chemical reactions…