< sarcasm > I don’t usually post anything about politics on this blog, but I did want to point this out: if you’re one of the French presidential candidates, aka the ones who have been repeatedly bashing on immigration and foreigners and generally centering the debate on pretty hateful xenophobic stuff, you shouldn’t be surprised that some madman with a gun decides to start shooting minorities they don’t approve of. < /sarcasm > (on a not-sarcast…

So, a long, long while ago, I wrote a story called “A Bitter Taste”, a pseudo-Hindu fantasy about war and destined victories (hint: it doesn’t quite turn out the way you’d think 🙂 ). I subsequently sold it to an anthology called Scheherazade’s Facade, which was about characters who didn’t follow gender conventions (my story had a hermaphrodite). The TOC included awesome people such as Tanith Lee, Sarah Rees Brennan and Paolo Chikiamco. That was t…

…ndamentally incapable of commitment (and I’m not necessarily saying sexual commitment here, the Doctor being as incapable of long-lasting friendships as he is of sex). At least the series has female characters (unlike, say, Sherlock), but I have a rising suspicion that it doesn’t really know what to do with them other than turn them into idiots pining after the Doctor. This is deeply annoying. (especially since so much of the series is good stuff,…

…usly lack imagination for that sort of thing (I mean, the only things that come to mind is something with a decent main female character who’s not a Strong Female Who Still Needs to Be Rescued by Men cliché; and a female POC Doctor Who…). But judging by all the interest when I bitch about Sherlock, I’m pretty reasonably sure that some of you have got strong ideas on this 🙂 Therefore, I’m throwing the question(s) out for collective brainstorming: W…

…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…

…nder equality on panels and how it was swiftly dealt with are a particular example of how stuff was efficiently and strongly dealt with). And again, I personally haven’t experienced anything I’d classify as offensive, 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 gende…

…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!…

…ny things that I find outright creepy in them–the insistence on overtaxing companies (er, can I point out that companies you overtax will just move to another country where taxes are lower?), on curbing immigration and promoting French values at the expense of Europe (yeah, sure, let’s step back a few decades). But that’s not the pathetic thing. The thing is–all of those leaflets, save one [1], fail on a very simple basic criterion: they don’t mak…

…phone that I wanted to use primarily as a communications device). And now comes the fun part where I import my contacts from Nokia into Android. Guess what. It’s a horrendous experience. I can sync the contacts from my phone to the Nokia Ovi Suite. Unfortunately, the %%% programmers at Nokia didn’t make any kind of CSV export, so you have to try and sync contacts with an external email program, such as Outlook, in order to actually export stuff….

…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 and subjugation of existing indigenous narratives were prioritized as these were viewed as being rival to the colonizing power. Well worth reading, discussing and sharing….