Hippoi Athanatoi

A few quick hits, of free or very, very cheap stuff that I recommend taking a look at:

• Amazon Shorts is a new initiative by Amazon, providing original short stories and essays by a number of fine authors for the low price of $0.49 each. Notable among them are Robin Hobb’s "The Inheritance" a short story set in Bingtown, an essay by Gardner Dozois explaining how he puts together his award-winning Year’s Best SF anthologies, and an essay by Robert Silverberg discussing how he went about creating his Roma Eterna series of alternate history stories. There’s much more besides that, and I’m looking forward to seeing what other authors and material they introduce.
• Kelly Link—who recently won a Hugo for her story "The Faery Handbag"—has made her first story collection, Stranger Things Happen,  available for download. Her stories are sometimes quirky, often amusing, and always interesting. Give it a try.
• Finally, Neil Gaiman has put up a long excerpt from the audio book of his forthcoming novel, Anansi Boy, read by comedian and actor Lenny Henry. Henry’s reading—and the story he’s reading—are both very funny, and worth giving a try. I think this one’s on my to-buy list. More information, and the link to the mp3, can be found at Neil’s journal.

As part of her update for September, Jacqueline Carey has put up a synopsis of the forthcoming novel about Imriel, Kushiel’s Scion. She also notes that the publication date, at least for the time being, is set to June 2006. Much too far away, if you ask me, especially after reading that little teaser.

Not too much to say about today’s lesson, since it turned out to be the once-per-semester obligatory trail ride. Not what I had hoped for.

For those looking out to try a different browser, the friendly Norwegians behind Opera are now giving away registration codes for the software as part of a celebration of their 10th anniversary. I used to use Opera back in the day, and as far as I know it has remained a fairly small, fast, and feature-filled browser particularly well-suited to those with older, slower computers.

In the course of debating how much a horse can carry over at the A Song of Ice and Fire board, Elio came across the webpage of the Equine Studies Institute, and pointed me to a fascinating article called Best Built to Ride.

Last night Linda and I went out to the casino with her parents. Nothing dramatic happened—we broke even, which isn’t bad after three hours in there. Her mother, of course, ended up 600 crowns richer, and that’s after taking out money she insisted on giving to the unlucky (i.e., everyone else). The interesting thing about it was that the experience was noticeably different thanks to a recently passed law.

From PNH’s LiveJournal, a link to the SF/F Opening Lines Test, containing 40 questions in total.

I scored 87%, with text exactly like PNH’s—but I was surprised that I actually managed 5% better than one of the best editors in the business! I’ll wager it’s the fantasy bits that got him.

This would be my inaugural, non-Worldcon post on the Musings blog. I’m going to try and get into the habit of posting something from time to time, because (as Linda well knows) I often have something to say about something, somewhere—sometimes political (all too often, according to her), sometimes geeky, sometimes weird.

Following is a discussion of a fanfic sighting, followed by a lengthy digression regarding fan-fiction, and then a return to some hazing-spotting with some further digressions regarding social and peer group expectations in Sweden and the United States.

Today was the first lesson of the autumn semester, and as always we started the sign-up with the dreaded weigh-in. Fortunately, my trip to WorldCon two weeks ago and all the walking Elio and I did there, and my relatively restrained diet since then, had done the trick. I was low enough to be allowed to ride Murphy, even though I think he had been dropped down a weight group. In fact, I believe the instructor said I was the only one there who was allowed to ride him, which would be very good news indeed. I have nothing at all against being ‘stuck’ on him for the next few months. ;)

One pretty good way to get a group of MU*ers to argue is to start a discussion on ‘the art of descing’. Another, of course, is to start one on role-playing in general (in particular, length and style of poses), but that’s a topic for another day. What I plan to deal with in this little write up is only descing. But before I dive into presenting my thoughts on the matter, here’s a few things to bear in mind ...

On Monday we met Cerys and Zollo at the station and shared the same train as we went to Prestwick, chatted with them as we made our way to the plane, and said our final farewells (with suggestions that we should try to meet some time again in the near future) in Gothenburg.

All in all, a wonderful time, and we thank everybody who made it that way, from the people we knew (George, Parris, Joanna, Christophe, Jamie, and of course the most excellent BwB—especially daj, GoN, mormont, lady mormont, Caress of Cersei, and everyone else involved in organizing and running the parties as well as making sure that people had places to stay) as well as those we don’t (the many, many people who organized the convention, who took part in panels, and especially those who donated their time and volunteered to make sure that everything happened). It’s a time we’ll never forget, deflowered former con-virgins that we are, and we really hope to get a chance to see all of you at future conventions, and perhaps get to know you better.

We especially want to extend our thanks to everyone who made sure we actually could make it out to the convention by creating to the Brotherhood without Banner’s newely-formed fan fund which, I gather, will be associated with the Raven Award when it’s given. It’s extremely appreciated, and we hope we’ll be able to give something back when the call is put out for the next BwB Fan Fundraiser.

Cheers.

Woke up around 9 AM, having decided that most everyone in Cairncross would be sleeping in later just because of the very late partying the previous evening. Didn’t stress too much, other than determining that we wanted to be at Boisdale at least twenty minutes early so as to make sure we could get a place during GRRM’s reading. We marvelled at the obviously too-small room he was given, but what can you do? We popped into Ops briefly, to see if my jacket had been returned, then went over to the cafe where a number of the BwB were. When we mentioned that we shouldn’t stay long, given that his reading was bound to be popular, new information was laid on us: it had been moved to Hall 5, which had plenty of seating. Wonderful! No stressing at all, then.

Saturday morning, we got up fairly early to avoid the fire alarm forcing us to leave the room or get a stern talking to. We got dressed, and sat around—no fire alarm. I guess people learned their lesson. The idea for the day was to go shopping. We did a lot of it, though most was just window-shopping with the occasional bit of tourism. Google maps fooled us into thinking the shopping centers were very widely separated, but in fact most of them were within spitting distance (most notably the trio of the Argyle Arcade, Prince’s Square, and St. Enoch’s (where we left a couple of Scots bemused as we asked them for where we might buy some marmelade). We looked at some antiques, bought this and that (the aforementioned marmelade, from a place called the Whisky Shop, which had giant bottles of whisky on sale for 90-odd, a skin product from Lush that was much cheaper here than in Sweden, and so on), and then decided to go eat.

We repaired to the Goat because of Gary Gibson’s note in Emerald City that it had free WiFi as well as decent food. Both things turned out to be true (in fact, the food was quite good—we had caesar salads with roast chicken breast) and the staff was friendly. We finally did some picture posting and departed about 8 because the second floor had been hired out for a private function. We returned to Cairncross where we rested and freshened up a bit. Linda was, as always, quite fetching while my best efforts made me just a hair better than what the cat dragged in. C’est la vie.

While Elio attended the Realistic Swordfighting 101 panel, I went to see Translation: Controlling the text, as I hope to be able to get a foot into the translation business sooner rather than later. The panelists were Frank Borsch, Didi Chanoch (who I believe translated A Storm of Swords into Hebrew), John-Henri Holmberg, Alain Nevant and Terry Pratchett. A Gail Dana should have been part of it as well, but was nowhere to be seen.