Guess who has spent most of today staring at code rather than blogging.
– Alex C. Telander interviews AussieCon 4 GoH, Kim Stanley Robinson (podcast).
– The Guardian puts the boot in to bad fantasy character names.
– Mark Kelly starts gathering some interesting statistics about how SF&F books are published.
– A Western Australia newspaper has a very positive article about Aussiecon 4.
– Jeff VanderMeer has compiled a wonderful list of recommendations of good 2009 SF&F from many different countries.
– Charles A.Tan talks to the publishers of an anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.
– On Saturday I tweeted about a group of people in V masks who were demonstrating outside of the Scientology offices in Tottenham Court Road. I now suspect that they may have been the racist and homophobic group talked about here.
– The Scavenger has an excellent interview with trans activist, Julia Serano.
– The Guardian publishes another trans-positive article (which I note because it shows they are making progress).
– Australian resident wins the right to have no gender.
Re: Anonymous:
“Anonymous is a group of individuals in America who preach anti-gay, anti-black and anti-Scientology messages via the internet. ” Thus spake the august tabloid press of Colchester.
Some people acting as “Anonymous” are anti-scientologists. Some people acting as “Anonymous” are malicious, bigoted vandals. Conflating the two is one of those things that tabloid journalists do for a living. Whether the Gazette’s anonymous (!) reporter deliberately aimed to malign the anti-scientologists is open to conjecture.
On a more positive note, re: Norrie May-Welby: ain’t that cool?
The Telegraph also reported, more briefly:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7446850/Briton-is-recognised-as-worlds-first-officially-genderless-person.html
Zie has a blog (props to Catherine Crockett for discovering it):
http://may-welby.blogspot.com/
Update re: Norrie May-Welby (alas):
http://may-welby.blogspot.com/2010/03/norrie-ready-to-battle-with-govt_23.html