Okay, I Found A Quote From An Interview With Ian McKellen. “The Actor Who’s Starred As Magneto In

That awesome bi moment

when BI PRIDE DAY!

Does it bother anyone else that there are parts of your life you don’t remember? You have done and said things that you don’t even know about anymore. That means you don’t even have the right perception of yourself because you don’t even fully know who you are. However, something that you’ve forgotten about could be a prominent memory in somebody else’s mind. It trips me out.

The funny thing about the expression “carpe diem” is that people use it to mean “Go out and achieve your dreams” but actually it was a pick up line.

Reblog if you have mourned the death of a fictional character.

If you do not reblog this, you are in fact lying.

Alien Invasion?

Here’s a different take on the alien invasion trope: 

The world is going to shit: overpopulation, deforestation, pollution, global warming, everything. The only question is if we’ll kill ourselves off before we kill the planet out from under us. Then one day ships appear in the skies all over the world- not just America and countries with trendy landmarks, but EVERYWHERE. Efforts are made to stop the “attackers” but humanity is still rounded up and carted off to some strange alien facility. 

Food (of a sort) and shelter are provided, but no answers are forthcoming because humanity’s captors don’t bother talking to us. Maybe select individuals are taken off for testing, but they all come back in more or less the same condition they were found, except maybe with immuno-boosters or a few troubling terminal diseases cleared up. There’s massive speculation about what’s going on and probably religions are formed based on various beliefs about what the aliens are doing with us, but no one knows for sure. 

This goes on for years (or longer) and then one day everyone is rounded up again and taken back to Earth. Everything is exactly how we left it (except maybe dustier and overgrown) except now there’s no pollution, the ice caps have been repaired, global temps stabilized, ozone holes patched, everything. There are more forests, more crops, and maybe a few critical species (like bees) have been given a population boost. There probably isn’t a lot of thought to where people get dumped so a lot of folks end up in the wrong countries and whatnot, but eventually we sort ourselves back out and either make our way back home or settle down where we are. In a world that’s a little better than the one we left.

And that’s how humanity finds out they’re just an alien terrarium and the owners have stopped by to clean the tank.

If someone is an adjunct professor, it’s even worse (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/adjunct-faculty_n_4255139.html). According to that article, the average salary for an adjunct is between $20,000 and $25,000. I think the untenured column on this graph is higher than that because it’s including tenure-track positions.

“

This is for real. Image by Piled Higher and Deeper.

baby ginny sitting herself down in professor lupin’s office hours with her eyebrows furrowed and lupin’s like “shit” bc ginny is an excellent student and very observant and contrary and less likely to take shit than even hermione granger and is rather reminiscent of other red-haired gryffindor women he has known

“i know you’re a werewolf,” she blurts

“oh?” he says though he is thinking shit shit shit shit shit

“yes, and I don’t care,” she says forcefully

“oh?” he says again, though he is carefully not feeling anything

“yeah, I know what it’s like to be possessed by something evil. it doesn’t make you evil,” she says

As a history student, the most ridiculous thing that tumblr social justice warriors ever made up is “cultural appropriation”. If you only had mild historical knowledge of any cultural exchange that took place before colonialism (the ultimate times of evil oppression besides the third Reich) you’d realize that what you consider your culture is probably just a mashup out of thousands ancient cultural aspects from many different cultures. “Culture” itself is an umbrella term for basically anything that might be associated with a certain group of people - and it is both fluid and highly subjective. Your political system has been culturally appropriated from somewhere once, and so has your educational system, your economical system, your religion and your language. If you want to get mad about cultural appropriation, how about you start with those monumental cultural appropriations before complaining about white girls wearing dreads?

​Naomi Kritzer’s excellent story Cat Pictures Please is up for Best Short Story. It’s also the only non-Rabid Puppy story in that category, if that’s something you care about. You can read it at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/ and even if you aren’t planning on voting in the Hugos, you should still take a look -- it’s very good.

A few things about the Hugos

I’m almost through this year’s Voting Packet and would like to say a few things:

1. Hugo voting is for members and supporters of WorldCon. So, to vote, all you need to do is make a $50 donation to WorldCon. (Yes, I know that’s out of reach for many of you, but for others it might be worth it, and the packet often contains multiple full length ebooks).

2. We need more variety in Best Dramatic Presentation, both long and short forms. No, this isn’t a complaint about Doctor Who being nominated every year (the reason Doctor Who gets nominated every year is because Whovians are better at coming to a consensus about which episode to nominate than other fandoms, as far as I can tell).

No, what I mean is: Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form does not equal movie, and Short Form does not equal television episode.

From the Hugo website “The award can be given to a dramatized presentation in any medium.”

This means stage plays (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child if it’s any good) are eligible.

Video games are considered a dramatic presentation per the Hugo rules. I wouldn’t be able to vote for one, but some of the excellent games out there (the 90 minute cutoff would presumably be play time) could use to be recognized.

Audio dramas are eligible. Why has nobody nominated anything from Big Finish?

3. Best Related Work is a disgusting mess. Because so few people nominate, it was taken over by not the Sad Puppies (which has turned into a good thing) but by Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies.

One of the works nominated was outright hateful. Another contained such explicit descriptions of child molestation that MidAmeriCon’s lawyers advised them not to distribute it because of the risk of somebody being arrested for kiddie porn. Or so they say, I didn’t want to risk reading it…

A third was a book about how to fight SJWs by Day himself which - and I feel I can say this - was strewn with personal attacks against multiple people and promoted unethical activity.

The other two were good and I was surprised to find the treatise on Gene Wolfe’s fiction by John C. Wright (another extreme right winger and somebody who’s fiction I find all but unreadable) to be quite well written, interesting and award-worthy.

But outright hate for any group (including Vox Day and his friends) doesn’t belong in the Hugo packet. Neither does, uh…yeah…that.

So, in addition to pointing out to people that they can nominate things other than movies and TV shows, I’d like to toss out a challenge to people - including people who can’t afford the voting fee - to find good Related Works that can be nominated. (Please don’t post exactly five, that’s a slate, and we know those are bad).

Related Works are, essentially, non fiction related to science fiction and fantasy (or “works valuable primarily for things other than fiction”). So, if you find a cool biography of a writer, or even of an actor or director primarily known for genre work, talk about it. Scholarly or fan written works about a book, video game, movie, TV show, etc, also fit into this category. I am also pretty sure that books about writing science fiction and fantasy would be eligible. Collections of art are specifically eligible per the Hugo page. Books about the culture of fandom are eligible - just please don’t promote something that attacks any group or person. If a writer you know has published their memoirs, consider that. Finally, although it’s not clear from the site, it might be possible to nominate “Making of” documentaries associated with a movie, TV show, etc. We really need to get a lot more stuff nominated in this category so it isn’t all coming from one source, and to try and keep out stuff (best fan writer also has some problems in this area - please do nominate your favorite blogger) that promotes a political or social agenda rather than truly being about science fiction, fantasy, and fandom.