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josephina_x for the gingerbread man!
Finally recovering a bunch of my music from a lost computer, and I realize that I really want a Dean Winchester vid to “Going Through the Motions” from the Buffy musical. It wouldn’t work except in my head, but the heart wants what it wants.
How to suppress women’s remix, round zillion, from Ars Technica.
Kat Zhang, What’s Left of Me: The Hybrid Chronicles, Book One: In a world where everyone’s born with two souls, those in the Americas are cut off from the rest of the world, where hybrids persist into adulthood. Inside the Americas, though, people “settle” as young children, one soul disappearing and the other surviving. Those who don’t are considered threats and taken away for treatment. That’s why Addie hides the persistence of Eva, who still exists even though she can no longer control the body. But a secret like that is hard to keep, especially when strangers show up with their own ideas about hybrids. As you might expect from this brand of YA, most of the bad guys are cartoony, though the refusal to offer any explanation to the protagonist makes much more sense when the protagonist is a kid than it does for an adult. The difficulties of two people sharing one body are presented with enough intensity that you can at least understand why a culture might have convinced itself that singletons are better, even if that’s morally and perhaps biologically wrong (and even if those difficulties are themselves culturally constructed).
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312: Humanity has colonized much of the solar system, but billions back on Earth are still hungry and restive; the colonists have balkanized, and struggle for resources on a wider scale. Robinson brings his usual extensive descriptions of landscape to bear on various engineered environments, from a sliding city on Venus to the mass of Titan, as his protagonists—heavily altered humans who vary much more in size and gender/sex expression than we do—investigate what appears to be a conspiracy by the artificial intelligences they’ve created. It was baroque and stylistically varied, but I may have been Robinsoned out; the descriptions of the places and people just didn’t move me for all the planet-hopping.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl: A philandering husband’s wealthy wife disappears one day; he’s the obvious suspect, and his first-person narration does him no favors. But it’s interspersed with his wife’s diary entries, and there are just enough discrepancies and weirdnesses that you start to wonder what’s really going on. The answer is even more baroque than you might have thought. It’s a combination of gothic family drama complexity, including a portrait of a man raised to misogyny who knows and fights it but doesn't always win, and modern serial killer/reality show consciousness. The story is engrossing, though not exactly pleasant.
josephina_x for the gingerbread man!Finally recovering a bunch of my music from a lost computer, and I realize that I really want a Dean Winchester vid to “Going Through the Motions” from the Buffy musical. It wouldn’t work except in my head, but the heart wants what it wants.
How to suppress women’s remix, round zillion, from Ars Technica.
Kat Zhang, What’s Left of Me: The Hybrid Chronicles, Book One: In a world where everyone’s born with two souls, those in the Americas are cut off from the rest of the world, where hybrids persist into adulthood. Inside the Americas, though, people “settle” as young children, one soul disappearing and the other surviving. Those who don’t are considered threats and taken away for treatment. That’s why Addie hides the persistence of Eva, who still exists even though she can no longer control the body. But a secret like that is hard to keep, especially when strangers show up with their own ideas about hybrids. As you might expect from this brand of YA, most of the bad guys are cartoony, though the refusal to offer any explanation to the protagonist makes much more sense when the protagonist is a kid than it does for an adult. The difficulties of two people sharing one body are presented with enough intensity that you can at least understand why a culture might have convinced itself that singletons are better, even if that’s morally and perhaps biologically wrong (and even if those difficulties are themselves culturally constructed).
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312: Humanity has colonized much of the solar system, but billions back on Earth are still hungry and restive; the colonists have balkanized, and struggle for resources on a wider scale. Robinson brings his usual extensive descriptions of landscape to bear on various engineered environments, from a sliding city on Venus to the mass of Titan, as his protagonists—heavily altered humans who vary much more in size and gender/sex expression than we do—investigate what appears to be a conspiracy by the artificial intelligences they’ve created. It was baroque and stylistically varied, but I may have been Robinsoned out; the descriptions of the places and people just didn’t move me for all the planet-hopping.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl: A philandering husband’s wealthy wife disappears one day; he’s the obvious suspect, and his first-person narration does him no favors. But it’s interspersed with his wife’s diary entries, and there are just enough discrepancies and weirdnesses that you start to wonder what’s really going on. The answer is even more baroque than you might have thought. It’s a combination of gothic family drama complexity, including a portrait of a man raised to misogyny who knows and fights it but doesn't always win, and modern serial killer/reality show consciousness. The story is engrossing, though not exactly pleasant.
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