Happy International Geek Day/International Towel Day/Glorious 25th May

When I was little, we would eat biscuits with milk and watch Star Trek. My brother and I would act out scenes from The Wrath of Khan. He was always Kirk.

When I was older, I watched The Next Generation. I was told I couldn't like science fiction because I was a girl. I was told I couldn't be good at maths because I was a girl. My classmates gave out to me when I turned up for a school tour in a Star Trek: Generations jumper. They made no sense to me. I knew who I was.

When I was older still, I watched Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Roswell, Angel and dozens of others. It was a golden age of science fiction and fantasy on television. I joined my local Star Trek club, of which I am still a proud member. I started to write science fiction, to read it more. I discovered Douglas Adams, and would spend hours in bookshops looking at his books, deciding which ones to buy with birthday and holiday money. Every week I would go in, checking to see if any of my favourite authors had a new book out. I never found out when books were due to be published. I didn't want to know. I just wanted to go look at the books and see for myself. Even if I'd known what Douglas Adams was like with deadlines, I would still have looked. I was given a gift of eighty classic science fiction books, twenty of them by Isaac Asimov. It was an education.

When I was in college, I discovered that I could study science fiction. I spent my twenty-first birthday at a Stargate conference in England. It was one of the best weekends of my life. I wrote a thesis on feminism and science fiction, discovering Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, women who had written what I wanted to write. Women who spoke to me, writing back to them, silently thanking them for being there, for their voices. I entered a competition I'd entered a few times before. I found out I'd won while sitting in front of my laptop, writing another story. I wanted to psyche my mother out with the news, but I was too excited.

When I was in graduate school, I kept writing about science fiction. I found conferences where I could go and talk about and listen to things I wanted to know about my genre. I returned to Douglas Adams for my PhD and discovered that the old love of his work was still there. To this day, over eleven years after his death, I still look for the books with his name, with that same small sliver of hope that today there will be a new book by him. I started to game, and found myself around a table laden with dice and story sheets, laughing at something that no one else could understand, because they had not been there.

There's so much I can say. About how many of my oldest friends are geeks. About long conversations into early morning about anything and everything, wandering around the shows and books and films that have made up our cultural heritage. About how there is a joy in knowing that other people love what you love, and that you can argue about it and never fall out. About how you can get a hold of Ursula Le Guin's Hainish novels or Joss Whedon's television shows and films or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Terry Pratchett's Discworld and find new ways of looking at your world, answers to the questions you couldn't put into words, new questions that had been hovering around, trying to get your attention. About how you can flirt with a guy over the word 'shiny'. About how my friends seem determined to gift me more sonic screwdrivers than I could possibly hope to use, to my joy. About how sometimes when you fly, you fall. About how it is through suffering that we reach out to each other, that we come through it together and are truly one people. About how you can tell a joke and a truth in one sentence. And more, so very much more than that.

So instead I will just say this: I am a geek. I am proud to be a geek. I hold the glorious 25th of May sacred and will be looking for lilac after work. I am a frood who knows where her towel is. It's on the printer next to me.

Live long and prosper, my shiny friends.

Gaming

The year before last (I don't recall the weather), I was informed that I would have to call myself a gamer. I hadn't realised I'd been particularly denying it, largely because I felt I wasn't justified in calling myself one. However, when, at the tender age of late twenties the Christmas present I really really wanted was a Nintendo 3DS, it is definitely time to be allowed to name myself as a gamer (I got it, by the way. Very pink. I love it. 3D Tetris, dude. 3D Tetris.).

So, here I am, gamer girl, by all accounts, but in some ways, I'm a very specific kind of gamer girl. I'm not the biggest fan of first person shooters. I find them a little dull. I prefer point and click, bonus points if there's a puzzle involved somewhere. I've also been known to have an impressive collection of hidden object games, which I know many other gamers would find ridiculously boring, but I always enjoy a quiet evening making fun of some terrible plot as I try to figure out whether they mean a bat as in baseball or a bat as in 'blind as a'. I'm also pretty fond of Heroes of Might and Magic. Right up to the levels I can't beat...

I'm incredibly impatient when it comes to maintenance games. Like Minecraft. I appreciate that it has some very cool elements. I enjoy those videos on Youtube of people making cool things on Minecraft. But I find it so boring. Seriously. I need plot. Even terrible plot will do. At least terrible plots make me laugh. Leave me plotless and you will find me randomly digging all the way down to lava and feeling far too bored to dig back up (this happened when I downloaded a demo for Minecraft).

The worst thing you can do? Play a game where you have to serve customers in a timely manner when you are working in the food industry. I remember playing one of those games years ago, I think it was on Yahoo, and I couldn't understand why I was getting so stressed until I realised it was just like being at work at the bar I was in at the time. I changed to a matching game, and I felt infinitely better. If you're going to game, game away from what you'd do at work. Your blood pressure will thank you for it.

I love platform games. Anyone else out there remember the New Zealand Story on the Atari? Not to mention the first Super Mario Bros on the Gameboy. And since we've mentioned Tetris, I will briefly tell you that if you want to see competition, give myself and my immediate family a Gameboy and Tetris and mention the words 'High Score'. Then step back. We still argue over who had the highest score nearly two decades ago. Good times. Recent holidays have seen us using a very pink Playstation to play quizzes, in which it has been attempted to stop me holding the joypad, since I have the fastest reaction time in the family. Yeah, I don't think so.

I'm also something of a card game fiend, though Immediate Female Ancestor is the true shark in the family. I pick up card games pretty fast and I can get pretty ruthless. I can still see the look of defeat on Swordsman's face when, during a game of Munchkin, I gave him this ultimatum: "I can either help you, or really hurt you". Yeah, I'm that mean. I've also been known, during Fluxx, to play crazy cards just to see what happens.

Child of Chaos suggests that I start blogging our Magic: The Gathering games, after one truly epic battle last year. Child of Chaos plays Forest, I play Plains (I like white better than green). In one game we managed to pick up lands at about the same rate, so we started building up our creatures at about the same rate, and about the same strength; so much so that neither of us wanted to attack the other, until much later in the game, when Child of Chaos, with a few more higher level monsters than I had, decided to attack. So I used a Neck Snap card to kill her best monster. She could still have beaten me, until I used a second Neck Snap. Child of Chaos's face was priceless. I think I would need more details to make this sound as cool as it was...

Funnily enough, the person who told me that I had to call myself a gamer, GameQueen, didn't know most of this. All she knew was that at the time I was gearing up to play a whiskey and chocolate obsessed Technomancer Elf in Shadowrun. Her opinion of me has been reinforced by my currently playing a Malkavian who sleeps in a morgue with her pet morticians in Masquerade (never underestimate the power of playing the crazy girl), and my participation in my first steampunk larp. Spending a few hours as a genius airship designer was far more fun than I'd imagined it would be. Later that day I purchased the Ankh-Morpork board game and discovered that I truly love putting trouble markers into other people's city blocks. I suppose it doesn't take much to make a gamer, but there are so many types of gamers.

Perhaps my favourite gamer moment is the look of pain on Swordsman's face as Child of Chaos and I discussed our Facebook games. It wasn't that we were playing Facebook games that pained him; it was that both of our computers were capable of playing much more complicated games than what we were using them for. It was the wasted capacity that cut him to the bone.

Still, I am of the opinion that when you're tired but not quite ready to go to bed, there can be nothing more relaxing than matching things for a little while until you are ready to go to sleep. The only trick is making sure you stop before it's 3 am...

Funtimes

So I took an hour off this afternoon and got to have one of the most fun recurring experiences in my life. I went to the hairdressers and asked to get most of my hair cut off. They are always alarmed. Apparently, many people don't realise how short is short. I was going for something much longer than the pixie cut I've had before, so I was prepared and delighted to once again be sporting a manageable length of hair that, I've discovered, looks very fetching with a hairband.

I must purchase a wider range of hairbands.

Funtimes continued when I wandered to a bookshop and discovered that they have reprinted Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology. It looks fantastic, but beyond that, it is one of the best anthologies of SF that I have ever read. The stories were published in 1967 and includes Philiop José Farmer's 'Riders of the Purple Wage'. The sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, features Joanna Russ's 'When It Changed', the precursor to the amazing The Female Man. The sequel doesn't appear to have been reprinted since the 1970s, which is a shame, because I think it has some of the better stories between the two anthologies. I read these when I was in my late teens/early twenties and they shaped my writing by introducing me to the 1970s New Wave. Science fiction, Ellison and his compatriots taught, could be really strange. I still haven't figured out some of the stories. SF could also be witty, funny and extremely subversive. It could be unrecognisable (though I think it was probably a good idea that Ellison warned the reader what they might expect). You guys should definitely take a look at those anthologies, because they are brilliant. And hey, if enough copies of Dangerous Visions sell, they might even reprint Again, Dangerous Visions in its own shiny new cover!

Plugging!

Since this appears to be a blog that won't be going away (coz I'm having fun!), here's some linkage plugging me, my work and other people.

My agents are the Makepeace Towle Literary and they got me onto Ether Books, which allows you to download my fiction onto your iPhone or iPad. I was first published in Interzone after winning the James White Award in 2006. I have a flash fiction in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, which is my first anthology publication and is really, really cool.

My academic publications are two chapters in Battlestar Galactica: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? and a chapter co-written in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films with Frank Ludlow.

So if I can figure it out, I'll be posting these links permanently on the home page, but for now, enjoy them here!

Oddities

Trusty Companion and I were chatting and this story randomly popped into my mind.

Back in secondary school, I think in 1st year, but at any rate, somewhere before the Junior Cert, a boy from my year (but not from my class) tapped me on the shoulder during one of our breaks and asked me if I ever smiled. At first the blank look I gave him was a mixture of 'Who are you?' and 'Huh?' As he became visibly more agitated by my apparent inability to move my facial muscles, it started being fun. I was genuinely curious as to how long I could maintain it, and how long he would stand there. It didn't last long, but I won, and grinned as he wandered off. By now I have no idea who that boy was, and I can't even picture his face. But the fact that I was later told by one of my classmates that I was always smiling just goes to show how differently people can view the world.

Trusty Companion commented on my inability to remember anything about the boy. I think the surprise erased it. It was the first time I'd ever considered that anyone I didn't know personally would notice my lack of a smile, let alone be sufficiently bothered by it to comment on it to me. I was a tunnel vision kind of kid; unless I knew you, or were in class with you or otherwise had some manner of contact with you, I probably wouldn't notice you. I'm still very much like that. Child of Chaos has often said 'Oh, did you see that person with [cool thing/clothing] just go by us]?' and my answer has typically been 'Huh? Where?' As a writer, I should probably be more observant. As someone who is trying to get to work/college on time, possibly not.

The encounter taught me another lesson that I inadvertently put to use a couple of years back when someone came out with the most inexplicably misogynistic comment I've ever encountered. If somebody is trying to get a reaction out of you, giving them absolutely nothing will frustrate them no end. It simply ends the conversation more effectively than anything else I've encountered. In the case of the inexplicably misogynistic commenter, he looked rather downcast as he tried to explain that demeaning my entire gender for something that was actually a man's policy was supposed to be a joke. I continued to appear both confused and unaffected by his comments, largely, again because of shock.

(For those of you who think I'm giving him a hard time, his response to me following my work's payment policy was 'Women are always causing trouble'. Ah, no. Ignoring the women bit, doing my job is not causing trouble. Expanding it to all women and not just me only intensified my irritation. An appropriate joke there is 'I bet you're a real stickler for the rules, huh?' I would have laughed at that.)

I sometimes wonder if I should have been annoyed at the boy's frustration that I never smiled, but I can't judge it as if he was expecting me to smile. Apparently he'd never spotted me smiling and was confounded by it. He never told me to smile (though I think he did ask me to react during the blank face period) and he was honestly curious. True, he was being a bit of busybody, but most of the teenagers I knew were nothing if not nosy (I include myself in that).

And, in the way that I do sometimes, I wonder if he remembers that incident, if he ever wonders if I smile now. Or did it disappear into the same black hole that the memory of his face fell into?

The Return of the Shiny!

Hello Universe!

Child of Chaos and I have recently moved out of where we were and into a new place. It has, as yet, not been opened to visitors aside from Immediate Female Ancestor and CofC's boyfriend Swordsman (who has proven exceptional at the transportation and lifting of things, so yay him!), but it is feeling of home already. It is called The Library, given our proclivity for bookshelves and books to fill them with.

One of the fun things about living with a friend is that one can be rewatching a season one episode of Fringe (our digital box finds itself already half full after less than three weeks) and be interrupted by Child of Chaos coming in to tell the story of how the hole where a tooth was removed had sealed up. She was very pleased about this, and I was amused by the promise of many non sequiters in the future (not that we hadn't had our share of non sequiters in the last place). The fun thing about living with other people is the unexpected; you never know what funny or odd thing will happen. That said, I'm sure there will be unexpected things from Child of Chaos that will annoy me immensely, and things I do that annoy her, but the balance will always be towards the positive, if the last two years of house sharing are anything to go by. Needless to say, it will also balance heavily towards the nerdy.

While I'm back, I have another little story to tell. I was on the bus back to The Library the other day when I noticed a small girl had started singing enthusiastically on the bus. There wasn't much in the way of tune, but she was clearly having fun. This reminded me of an incident when I much younger. I was on a bus that had broken down and we were waiting for a new bus to come along. I was sitting on the floor in front of my seat, playing with a toy, I think, and I began to sing away to my heart's content. At the end of the song, the other passengers applauded me and I attempted to hide under the seat, much to Immediate Female Ancestor's amusement. When I heard the little girl, I texted IMF to find out what song I had sung, only to discover that it was not the isolated incident I had thought. Apparently, singing on the bus was a regular hobby for me as a child, for which I heartily apologise to the universe. I have never been able to sing well. However, we did narrow it down to two potential songs: Doe, a Deer and The Greatest Love of All. So here are some links for you to enjoy those songs, properly sung: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dpGmAc3kMk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYzlVDlE72w&ob=av3e.

Also, because it's his birthday and it's generally awesome, here's some Levar Burton talking about science fiction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXLju6cBDwI&feature=player_embedded.

Comments

Just a quick update: Child of Chaos pointed out to me that the comments weren't allowing for anonymous submissions, so I've fixed that. Let the debates begin!