retstak.org

Welcome to social deviance! The place where you end up when you realize that you don’t quite fit in. Social deviants serve several important functions, but mostly we serve as a horrible warning, “See what happens if you aren’t a good girl lil susie? You end up like that woman down the street who paints obscene things and lets weeds grow all over the yard!”

You sound like you’re in a tricky, unhappy place, where things are changing a bit too fast, for that I’m sorry. No advice or anything, just pull a chair up to the freak table, grab a pint and realize you aren’t alone.

‘ish, in response to this post on Enter the Jabberwock

I stumbled across this as I was trawling through my Google Reader looking for something to read, since my brain has decided that writing isn’t going to happen tonight. (That, and I’m without my computer.) And I read the post, which is about why God would bother condemning somebody to hell, and it wasn’t bad, but the gem was here in the comment section.

So I pass it along with no further commentary.

So the neighbors made us cupcakes for Easter. This, of course, ends with me goofing around with cupcakes, microwaves, and the digital camera on my Blackberry…


Our story starts with an innocent Peep on an innocent cupcake, a normal residence of Cupcakelandia, on the fair continent of PlasticaPlate. Obviously, all is right with the world. But little does our peep know that the world is going to get very … interesting. Yeah, that’s the word we want, interesting. It is a tale most foul…

Of course, in Cupcakelandia, sitting on a cupcake without the permission of the monarchs is a crime. So our innocent little peep gets thrown to the wolves and is oppressed by the two Peeps who sit in judgment on the Cupcake Thrones! Oh noes! Our innocent little peep is being oppressed! What is there to be done? Well, it seems the rulers of Cupcakelandia are looking for a peep to be experimented on! And they pick our poor innocent peep! What will become of him or her, as we completely failed to give our peep gender when we started this story!

At the Kenmore Nuclear Test Chamber, our peep is strapped to a gurney and placed inside to be radiated by powerful forces for thirty whole seconds! Will our peep survive such awful treatment? In the wreckage of the test range, we found a journal with the following entry:

Subject Y. Peep was accidentally placed in the test chamber for approximately thirty seconds. Subject emerged as a irradiated SuperPeep and stormed off in the direction of the capital muttering something about those bastards on the Cupcake Thrones. I fear the worst.

The scientist who recorded this missive was obviously lying on at least one point, as the irradiation was done quite deliberately and with malice aforethought. Also, I suspect SuperPeep trashed the Kenmore Nuclear Test Chamber before going on his mission to destroy the Peeps on the Cupcake Thrones! This would make sense given his awful treatment at the hands of the scientists at the place. Perhaps our mystery scientist was trying to cover up his role in this plot. We may never know.

News photography in Cupcakelandia brought us this last image before we lost all transmissions. It shows an obviously larger SuperPeep behind the thrones, just before SuperPeep ascended the thrones and destroyed them and their rulers. It was a marshmallow bath, folks, and that sort of thing is just not okay for the kiddies to see. I mean, marshmallow all over the place? Are you some kind of pervert or something? It didn’t really matter, though, as our cameras lost power, possibly from SuperPeep’s irradiated hide, shortly thereafter.

(Read: katster got bored with taking pictures and decided to eat peeps instead. Note, microwaved peeps are not as good as normal peeps, as the chewy goodness becomes sugary tasting rubber.)

Yeah, my plaque for Best New Fanzine Fan showed up in the mail today, and that’s me proudly holding it. And yes, that’s a shirt from the Denver Worldcon I’m wearing. For those who want a closer view, here’s a picture of the plaque I took.

Anyway, gotta get back to writing. The end of the month fast approaches…

When I was in fifth grade, my teacher suggested to the class that now that we were learning decimal points, we should circle our problem numbers to avoid having them accidentally show up in the math. It’s a habit I gleefully adopted, and used through several classes of higher mathematics. Even to this day, if I’m making an ordered list, I circle my numbers.

So I was doing this at work today as setup for what I’m doing on the computer, and I noticed that every time I drew the circle around the number, I drew it counterclockwise. Writing ‘o’ and ‘0′ are done the same way. This got me pondering — is this what every righty does, and lefties go clockwise? Maybe something with the way the pen is gripped?

So I asked the question on twitter, and got three responses. All four (counting myself) were righties, and we split right down the middle as to how we drew our circles.

My pen grip hypothesis seems to be on shaky ground. So in the interests of science!, I’m looking for more data points. Do you draw your circles clockwise or counterclockwise? What hand are you?

Because I would love to get my hands on this collection.

Alas, I am still not yet a multi-millionare, so I’ll have to keep dreaming.

So, not two weeks ago, I wrote here joking about winning a Hugo in 2014. Would I like that? Oh, sure. Who wouldn’t? But that’s a huge dream and one I suspect might not happen at all.

But that’s not why I found my gast well and truly flabbed yesterday. It had started with my pal Ei dropping me off at my grandmother’s so I could hook up with my folks and my ride back to Sactown. While she was there, I made mention of a possible Baycon ribbon I was thinking about, and then had to explain to my grandmother what ribbons were and why I wanted to make them for something called Baycon, which led to me explaining in general terms about science fiction conventions, specifically Baycon and Worldcon. (Also, there was a digression on how con-commuting is a bit painful and the turn-around times mrfnord and I were pulling in Denver last year.)

The conversation drifted, as conversations are wont to do, and at a lull I pulled out my phone and glanced at my email. There, I found an email from Peter Sullivan (ceemage). Now the two of us are friends and fellow eAPAeans, but generally we don’t exchange email. But it wasn’t the fact I got an email from him that had me staring at my phone in shock. No, it was his subject line: “Congratulations on your FAAn award win!”

Now, a bit of a digression here. The FAAn awards stand for “Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards”, and they are voted on by whomever in fandom chooses to participate, although in practice, it works out to being mostly fanzine fans. There’s several categories: best fanzine, best fanzine writer, best fanzine artist, best letterhack (person who writes letters of comment to fanzines), best online fanac site, and best new fan. They’re given out at Corflu every year, and this last weekend was Corflu Zed up Seattle way, simulcast on ustream so that us fans who couldn’t make the trip could hang out and watch the proceedings. Unfortunately, it was also the weekend of my grandmother’s seventieth birthday party, so I couldn’t spend as much time as I would have liked hanging out in the chat and watching the feed.

Which leads me back around to the email informing me I’d tied for first on best new fan with Jean Martin of SF/SF. Now see, I’d fully expected that if I was going to win it at all, it would have been next year, since I was planning to become more visible in the fanzine fandom this year instead of mainly writing my APAzines. So to find out I’d won this year — yeah, it completely came out of the blue.

Hopping on Twitter, I’d found that Peter had announced it there too, and then there was a followup from Chris Garcia, the man who runs the most excellent Baycon fanzine lounge as well as being a whirling dervish of fandom, saying much the same thing. So I guess this had actually happened, and I wasn’t dreaming. And after getting back into Sactown, I hopped back on the virtual con and had a couple people congratulate me there, too, which just went to make it all that more concrete.

So yeah. It may not be a rocket, but it’s a truly wonderful surprise nonetheless. I’m pleased as heck that the folks who voted for me in the awards thought highly enough of me to do so.

Yes. My gast is well and truly flabbed, even now on Monday morning.

So I participate in a couple APAs. One of them is not relevant to this story. The other is.

You see, the next issue of eAPA will be its sixtieth. Since it’s a once a month APA, the sixtieth edition means that it has been going for five years. In celebration of this milestone, we’ve been asked to project what fandom might look like five years down the road. It’s an interesting question at the moment, as people I follow have been nattering about the future of Worldcon, among other things.

So here’s the question. Aside from me accepting my first Hugo at the possibly-European Worldcon of 2014, what do you think fandom will look like in five years?

(Okay, so I’m kidding on the Hugo thing, but ever since I got into science fiction enough to understand just what a Hugo was, I’ve always wanted one of them rocket thingys. Although 2014 might be a bit soon…)

Anyway, I’d really like the comments to be on my blog, so I’m funneling LJ comments over here. Also, feel free to pass this URL onto anybody who might care to comment, as this is the sort of thought I’d like to get from anybody who’s got an opinion on the matter. While this is mainly concerned with science fiction fandom (and all its various components), I’d love to hear from folks who are into anime or comics or media or games, because I suspect those fields tie into the general fandom.

Also, since Chuck, our esteemed editor, would kill me if I failed to mention this, eAPA is always looking for new members. It’s all digital, as we do it in PDF. If you’d like to hang out and wait for the open issue next month, that’s cool, but if you want to get involved in this, Chuck’s address is on the eAPA page at efanzines, which I’ve linked to above.