No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

This is the last post before oblivion, and I make it only to repeat and highlight old news, buried in past Comment Streams, that

the “Offensive Squid” forum does in fact exist now, right over here, and is just dying for pithy posts on anything from the neurology of mantis shrimps to the recurring philosophical themes [...]

One last miscellaneous grab-bag before oblivion, folks:

Parsec:
As in, the award. This is old news (it was announced late last month, I think), but “The Things” — or rather, Kate Baker’s wondrous, melancholy performance of “The Things” — has been nominated for the Parsec Award under “Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form)”. Kate squeed [...]

This whole writing retreat thing is stranger than I remember it. This is the approach to my bedroom.  My bedroom door is the pale green thing with the poster taped across it:

For those of you with teensy monitors, here’s a closeup of the sign outside said approach:

Yes, you read that right.  My bedroom is [...]

I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about Polaris. Formerly “Toronto Trek”, one of the huger local cons, it changed its name a few years back and started featuring sf novelists in an attempt to expand into the literary end of the sf pool. Their media roots have always remained front and center, though. [...]

If you’ve noticed the new “Coming Attractions” element on the sidebar (which only renders properly if you insert its code into the middle of the calendar elements, for some reason — some day I really gotta figure out this php stuff from scratch instead of just poking it to see what happens), you may have [...]

I don’t suppose any of you know anything about this?:

I found it in my laptop bag the other day. I have no idea how long it was lurking in there. It might be there yet if my accursed Dell laptop hadn’t finally crapped out beyond any hope of redemption, forcing me to clean [...]

Here are a few bits and pieces that have been piling up in the background while I raged impotently against imaginary friends who let me down.

Dr. Mark McCutcheon, of Athabasca University, is presenting a paper called “The copyfight, science fiction, and social media” at Congress 2010, a Canadian humanities and social science conference. I [...]

Busy, postingless weekend. Ad Astra gobbled up most of it, although even there I didn’t get to as much stuff as I’d have liked (there was in particular a room party in 020 that I wanted to check out). An audience member at the self-promotion panel emphasized that biographical, dear-diary-type blog postings are [...]

Ad Astra starts tomorrow. I suppose I should list my schedule, for any of you who might be in attendance:
Friday

9pm, Crowne Room: Reading (with my buddy Dave Nickle). I’d been thinking of reading a bit of in-progress stuff from State of Grace, but then the Hugo nom happened so I think [...]

And so it came to pass that a certain editor suggested we push “The Island” a little more front-and-center, for the benefit of any who might wish to read it before voting. And since I haven’t updated my Backlist page in longer than I can remember, I figured sure, why not. So you’ll [...]