Posts by Lilith __
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Pictures are…much harder, and therefore violent content stands out more. So I’ll read things that I wouldn’t watch if you paid me.
I guess this is the origin of "graphic violence" - if you get a picture of it, it generally has a stronger impact.
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When I was young I once saw my Mum give some Religious Visitors a taste of their own medicine.
You know how they often try to break the ice by commenting on the weather or something? Well my cat was sitting there and one of them said, “what a pretty cat,” and my Mum said, “You like animals?”, and they said, “Yes, I love animals!” and my Mum followed up with, “And are you vegetarian?” and they said, “No….but I love animals….” and while they were on the back foot she gave them a stern lecture on animal welfare and sent them away clutching some anti-vivisection pamphlets she happened to have. They never quite got around to saying whatever it was they had come to say. :-)
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
I think you might be writing on it ;-)
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Wow, the PAS hivemind comes up trumps yet again! Thanks for all the great suggestions everybody, I will be taking a long list to the library next time I visit!
Oh and Harry: Mary Doria Russell, how could I have forgotten her. The Sparrow is a total sf classic!
you’ve been living under a rock if you don’t know these names
Tui, I must totally be living under that rock! :-) Great to have your recommendations, though. And your observation that good YA books are like adult novels that don’t muck around, that’s very true I think.
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I think a lot of adult readers are missing out on stuff they would really enjoy, although more and more of them are crossing over into the YA section, where they are very welcome.
It’s sad that certain writers get classified as “genre” authors and never get mainstream recognition. I’ve recently discovered Josephine Tey, who is now long dead, but she wrote ‘detective novels’ that are so much more. Makes me wonder how many other brilliant writers are hidden on the “genre” shelves…
I remember a discussion about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, where someone commented that because of the age of the main characters it was marketed as YA fiction, whereas if it had been called ‘fantasy’, it would have got stuck in the sci-fi/fantasy shelves and it would have passed most people by. [The assumption being that more people read YA books than fantasy. I wonder if that’s true?]
On the subject of science fiction, there’s a ‘100 science fiction classics’ list that’s been doing the rounds on Facebook, and as far as I can see it contains only 6 women authors: Mary Shelley, Ursula le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Atwood*, Connie Willis, and Julian May. To that list I can add Joan Slonczewski, author of the incredible A Door Into Ocean , and a friend mentioned Octavia Butler…but surely there must be heaps more women writers of brilliant science fiction. Who are they? If anyone can add to this paltry and inadequate list, please do!
*Margaret Atwood famously maintains that she writes “speculative fiction”, because “science fiction” is about "talking squids in outer space"!
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Ooo, I particularly love your posts about writers and writing, Jolisa, and I am delighted to be introduced to an awesome author I'd never heard of, whose work I will be checking out ASAP! And especially when she has such great hair. :-)
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Hard News: Going Social, in reply to Sacha,
Isn’t the issue more that Facebook has constantly moved the goalposts over time so that privacy has been reduced?
Not really. There have been multiple sets of changes over the last couple of years, and each new set-up comes with default privacy settings, which you can manually configure to how you want them. IMHO nobody with any sense would trust the default settings. The most recent privacy changes allow you to set general privacy rules for your content as well as having granular control of the privacy of each individual post, if you want it.
Recent changes also saw the introduction of groups: if you set up a “secret” group you can make it and its content visible only to invited members, which can be quite handy for keeping certain chatter within a subset of your friends.
Common sense still applies, though, as nzlemming has said: don’t put compromising stuff out there, and it can’t come back to bite you.
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it’s difficult to argue with some of the points Gladwell raises about social media
Well this is why there are FB privacy settings, lists and groups! You can design your own custom privacy settings for every single thing you post, if you can be bothered, and you can manage that setting either from including certain people or excluding others. Of course FB has limitations, and pitfalls, and we’re still working out some of the finer points of ettiquette. But I’ve really got not time for people who complain about lack of privacy when they don’t use the privacy tools that are right there in front of them.
(sorry if that sounds ranty, I know a lot of people don't know this stuff. When you post something on FB, click the padlock underneath, click "custom" in the menu that pops up, then follow your nose.)
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One of my favourite terms of recent months has been “ground failure”. Our liquefaction-prone soils in Christchurch have failed to achieve the “greater competence” of the Banks Peninsula soils, which are based on nice reliable rock. In the early days post-eathquake the Council was using the term “pavement failure” to describe the gaping rifts in some of our roads and footpaths, but now all the trouble seems to be the fault of the ground. As it were.
But don't worry, we can have "ground repair and remediation", which may or may not involve "vibro-rolling"! [Hey, if Pegasus Town can have it, why can't we?]
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Here’s a little bit of fun for all the cyclists:
http://www.youtube.com/v/Rx9SIyFMfcY
who knew riding exercycles could be so tricky? :-)
[Hmm, link’s not embedding, I wonder why?]