Christmas Week 2015

So...starting another week of job-hunting, chores, research, and so on.

Christmas week? Just another week full of all of the above. Also, remembering Dad anew, because 2002.

More on other stuff later...

Noting the Weather

Other people are getting far worse than this across the planet. Which annoys me on a continuing basis, but there's stuff closer to home that bugs me in a more immediate way and not for the first time either.

Ice pellets.

It's a petty annoyance, for which I apologize for venting about here. But it's there. I'll be going out to de-ice the driveway in a few minutes after I finish with the map infographics tutorial video series I'm watching on YouTube at the moment...

Fictional Geography: San Angeles - A Contested Name

So rob_sawyer_blog pointed out a debut novel by one Gerald Brandt, The Courier, about to hit the bookstores soon. The Courier is subtitled on the cover as "a San Angeles novel".

So, you know me by now. Alternative geographies, fictional geographies, they get my attention right off. Naturally, I went looking to see if the name had come up in SF&F before.

Some of you will already know what I'm about to say: that the name has a history, inside and outside of the genre. "Prior art" is, I think, the phrase for it. And Wikipedia has some detail on the cultural history of the name. Real-worlds politics, dystopian SF, super-heroic fantasy...it's been making some serious rounds.

Using the name and concept in yet another novel isn't necessarily a bad thing, and everyone who's used it has their own spin on the idea, but to these cultural-historian eyes of mine, I don't belive there's any way to make an exclusive claim on it at this point.

PHOTOS: Blair Station - 19 December 2015

Some discoveries in the cold.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dwight_ew/albums/72157661954288159

Testing, testing...

...the USB keyboard attached to my laptop computer at the moment, specifically. There was some weirdness making itself felt with a particular website and a particular browser a few minutes ago. The issue does not seem to be making itself felt in the same browser here on LJ.

Guessing that it's website-specific.