Covering canals with something to slow water evaporation is a no-brainer, right? (Or should be.) How about making those covers be solar panels for a two-fer—as apparently is already happening in India—now, that’s outright ingenious.
(Incidently, I can recommend Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife from 2015, in which water rights and covered canals feature strongly. In case you’re interested in that sort of fiction.)
Jane Foster wielding Mjölnir will be something to see! I have no idea of the comic book storylines, so I can’t say how the tidbits we see compare to those—I have literally no idea—but the main antagonist, Gorr, seems musty and uninspired. We’ll see if that’s just that trailers always lie.
I do find the realm with a fancy, floating (although quite open) city interesting, and all of the other sets, props, costumes, and effects are handsome, as usual. Since this is another Thor movie co-written and directed by Taika Waititi, I’m inclined to see it in the theater.
Thor: Love and Thunder is set to debut on July 08, 2022, in the U.S.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
“There is a particular kind of character in SFF. You know her. She’s smart and tough, determined, decisive, and she can kick the collective arses of any takers. She comes in a few varieties—in better stories she’s an Alanna of Trebond or a Brienne of Tarth, with depth and history and more than one dimension; in weaker ones she’s an empty Strong Female Character™ who has no real contribution to the plot other than Being Awesome While Female—but either way it’s her prowess at fighting, particularly against men, that sets her apart. […]
“Instead, I wrote a woman, Kalina, with a chronic illness who couldn’t fight to save her life. Literally. I wrote a book in which the main characters’ problems couldn’t be solved by the strategic and entertaining use of violence even if they had the skills to deploy, and I did it purposefully. I did it in part in response to my own sewing test.
“Let me explain.
“The sewing test is failed when a book deploys a lazy code to tell me how much better, more interesting, more deserving, the female character is than those silly other women by making a point of having her hate sewing or embroidery or [insert other feminine-coded activity or trait of your choice—but you wouldn’t believe how often it’s sewing]. These days, if a book does this, I’m out. It’s not just lazy, it’s not just a cliché, it’s a statement by the author that I’m expected to cheer on one woman by disparaging the rest of them. […]
“Basically, there’s a nasty underbelly to over-reliance on this very limited model of ‘strength’, and it’s rooted in the same insidious patriarchal BS that gave us the old style women-as-objects-to-be-rescued stories: here are traits which are traditionally coded as masculine, which you have been taught are more valuable than traits which are coded as feminine. See how you should cheer on this woman because she’s different and better than those other women, who are weak and shallow and worthless. Reward her for those traits, and punish those who lack them.”
author Sam Hawke at Fantasy Book Cafe blog, 2019
Hawke is perfectly right, if you ask me. As awesome as ass-kicking women are, other ways of being awesome exist and should be recognized more widely. Because the variety of life skills to be excelled in is much, much wider than merely physical prowess, fighting skill, or attitude.
Moreover, as we all know, there are situations where the application of know-how or just the right tool will create such a better outcome than anything else that at best it’s not even fair to compare them. Why should genre literature forget these skills when women stand in the protagonists’ shoes?
I’m going to be adopting the phrase “being awesome while female” for all kinds of amazing things that women do. It’s just that awesome. 🙂
P.S. I just read City of Lies, Hawke’s book with the female protagonist who has a chronic illness. I thoroughly enjoyed her strategic and entertaining use of her brain—and ditto for the male protagonists, Kalina’s brother and his best friend.
Image by Eppu Jensen
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Apart from the Empire’s hunt for Obi-Wan, most of the plot seems to revolve around interpersonal conflict. (Those of you who have started watching already may be able to fill us in on this!) There seems also to be an introduction of the first true female antagonist of the franchise. (I don’t count Captain Phasma, as she didn’t get nearly enough screentime.)
Obi-Wan Kenobi was released on May 27, 2022.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Ukraine has been at war for 105 days now. That’s 15 long, grueling weeks. (Also the length of Finland’s Winter War with the USSR, which is why the number is significant to me.)
Russia’s craven attack (despite the incompetence it seems to have been implemented with) did change the world, albeit a bit differently than intended. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia have submitted their applications to join the EU.* There’s an unprecedented feeling and showing of solidarity towards Ukraine in Europe. Russia—and especially their petty, piddling thing of a presidential figure—is becoming something of a pariah at least in the Euro-American world. Furthermore, Finland and Sweden are joining NATO, ditching their long-cherished military independence.**
That’s in the first three months. Much like the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s felt three times as long. Unfortunately, I’m afraid this conflict will be a matter of years. Sigh.
World, any time you want to return to duller times is okay by me.
*) Getting even a membership candidate status isn’t simple, though, so this isn’t happening soon.
**) And thanks to Turkey’s pretentions of power-playing, this isn’t going to be as much of an open-and-shut case as we thought, either. Ohwell. I do believe Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership will happen eventually.
Good grief! Either I haven’t been paying attention, or there really is a whole slew of SFFnal trailers out in the past month for me to blog about and comment on. Here we go…
The end cap for the dinosaur park franchise(s), Jurassic World Dominion, puts together characters from the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy. And dinos, of course:
I was surprised to learn the movie takes place four years after the preceding one; it will be interesting to see how the writing team will have figured humans and dinosaurs might coexist. It will also be very nice to see some of the older characters, and I hope there will be less time spent on my least favorite faces and more on the nicer ones.
There is, however, one thing I will NEVER want to see again: high heels that stay glued to the female protagonist’s feet while she’s running through the jungle. Oh, hello?! Yuckkk!
At this writing, Jurassic World Dominion will be released on June 10, 2022 in the U.S.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
One of the astounding things about living right now is the sheer amount of scientific knowledge and technical skills humanity has gained in the past 100 years or so alone.
These days it’s trivial, for example, to get high-quality photos from a neighboring planet brought to your personal device.
(Ok, it’s not truly trivial in the strictest sense since so many steps and technologies are involved, but at the same time: Photos. From another planet. Automatically delivered. Via the Internet. Which many (if not most) of us in the West have casual access to. Pretty much daily! So yes. Trivial.)
Specifically, I’m talking about the Persevererance Imgage Bot on Twitter. It’s a project by computer engineer Niraj Sanghvi. He has automated image tweeting mostly from NASA/JPL-Caltech sources for an impressive, ever-growing collection.
The photos are purely functional, of course, helping the rover to operate, but some are also quite interesting as photographs. Below are some recent favorite shots.
(Click on the image source links below to find more about each photo.)
As before, the head and shirt slots are hidden and the bracers aren’t visible. I also retained the two fist weapons mogs (Silithid Claw).
The update is built around the Bronzebeard Heritage Armor set. Since I tend to find the pre-made sets often a bit lifeless, however, I only used the shoulders, chest, hands, and feet, and filled out my new transmog with Dignitary’s Traveling Cloak, Stygian Belt, and Harvester’s Court Leggings. I was suprised how well the diamond-patterned quilting in the Revendreth pants fit with the diamonds in the Bronzebeard shoulders, and the red in the belt exactly matches the pants.
Finally, I added some red tattoos (Gryphon pattern) to match the pants color and the detailing on the shoulders.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s speculative work The Last Man starts very much like a run-of-the-mill regency-era novel with its three-book structure. You even start to wonder whether much of interest is ever going to happen.
And then a plague hits. Book three, especially, where people drop off like flies, felt rather grim even before living through a pandemic myself. (I read it a few years ago.)
Since the plague aspect is a little too on the nose, I’m going to skip all of that for now. Instead, below is what the protagonist thought about reading:
“I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude.”
– Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Sounds astonishingly like Mr. Darcy’s line about a truly accomplished woman who must improve “her mind by extensive reading” in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, doesn’t it? It must’ve been very much in the air in the early 19th century.
Caoileann O’Mahony crocheted some wheelchair spoke covers and blogged the instructions for the Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon bid. This isn’t your sleepy granny square crochet, though, oh no; O’Mahoney also made little planet appliques and turned the spoke guards into a model of our solar system.
And round and round it goes. I like the color selection (although I wish the photo were a little clearer). Saturn and Uranus even have their rings. How cool is that?!
Co-Geeking 