More reasons to hate Google Hangouts

Dear Google,

I’m so glad you decided to link all of my settings to my Google account, rather than to device on which I’m using that account. Because of your decision, I don’t get to say that I would like chat notifications on my tablet, but not on my phone. I either get notifications in both places, or in neither. This is perfect! I get to choose between never seeing chat messages unless I’m on my laptop (where I use Pidgin, a wonderful program that does all the things Hangouts won’t), or having my phone pester me with pinging and buzzing every single time somebody sends me a chat message. Which is fabulous when I’m, y’know, in a public place.

This is such a brilliant move on your part. Even better than that time you decided to take away the nice Talk app and replace it with Hangouts, where I don’t get to see whether somebody’s status is Active or Away or Do Not Disturb. I just love having companies strip away utility and force me into some marketer’s pre-determined idea of how I’m going to use the program, rather than the way I was using the program. You’re doing a bang-up job of understanding your audience; if you didn’t have such a firm grasp of what we wanted, you wouldn’t be so successful at giving us the exact opposite.

No love,
Me

Five Things Make a Post That Is Not About Supernatural

1) The funny thing about having a release date early in the month is that it sneaks up on you. After all, we’re still in February. That means The Tropic of Serpents won’t be out for a while yet, right? Wrong — it’s out next Tuesday, i.e. March 4th. (For those of you in the U.S. and Canada, at least. UK folks, your street date is the 20th of June. After that, Tor and Titan should be publishing more or less simultaneously, so you won’t have the added wait.)

Kirkus, by the way, not only gave Tropic a starred review; they listed it as one of their Best Bets for March. They even used the cover art as the top image for the post, which is yet another sign that Todd Lockwood and Irene Gallo are awesome.

2) If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll have a chance to hear me read from The Tropic of Serpents at 7 p.m. on Sunday, March 9th, at Borderlands Books. It’s my intent to also publicly announce the title for the third book there, as an added treat for my hometown peeps. 😉

3) Also for Bay Area types, I’m going to be at FOGcon weekend after next. I unfortunately had to back out of one of my panels because of a karate belt test on Friday night, but I’ll still be doing several things that weekend:

  • Friday, 3-4:15 p.m. Narnia, Hogwarts, and Oz, Oh My!
    What are our favorite secret worlds? What do we love about them? Why is a secret world so useful for storytelling? What can we learn from the ways used to access these places? What about worlds which exclude some people from accessing them, such as adults or non-magical people–are these worlds problematic or necessary? Or somewhere between the two?
    M: Tim Susman. Marie Brennan, Valerie Estelle Frankel, Naamen Gobert Tilahun
  • Saturday, 10:30-11:45 Secret History and Alternate History; their similarities, differences, and how to write them
    Tim Powers, in books like Declare and The Drawing of the Dark, has brought us into the realm of secret history — the events that really took place around known historical facts. Harry Turtledove, Philip K. Dick, and many others have brought us into the realm of alternate history — the what-if-things-had-been-different. (Indeed, one could argue that Mary Gentle’s Ash is secret alternate history!) What about these works fascinates us, and how do we put them together?
    M: Bradford Lyau. Marie Brennan, Tim Powers, Tim Susman
  • Saturday, 4:30-5:45 Reading
    Marie Brennan, Alyc Helms, Michael R. Underwood

4) In non-Tropic-related news, I participated in the Book of Apex blog tour over at Books Without Any Pictures. There’s a review of my story “Waiting for Beauty,” a brief interview, and a guest post wherein I talk about how writing historical fiction helped me become better at worldbuilding in general.

5) And Now For Something Completely Different: I really love both of these art sets, one of Disney princess in historically accurate costumes (the last image is the best!), and one of celebrities cosplaying as Disney characters.

Supernatural Re-Watch: “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award

I promise I’ll post something other than photos and Supernatural analysis eventually. 😛 My brain’s a little wrung out from revision, so right now I’m just kind of coasting along, recovering.

Also — speaking of a wrung-out brain — ignore what I said last post about discussing “Scarecrow” some more. I managed to get my wires crossed, and mashed “Scarecrow” and “Shadow” together in my head. (They’re both one word starting with S, and they both have Meg, okay? And I don’t have much functioning grey matter at the moment.)

Instead, we will talk about “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award.

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A Year in Pictures – Fushimi Inari

Fushimi Inari
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This is pretty much the classic photo to take at Fushimi Inari. The site is famous for its torii, the red-orange wooden arches you see in abundance here; they are all. over. the mountain, in a dozen branching paths, leading to small shrines crammed onto every vaguely flat surface (and some that aren’t so flat). In most places the torii aren’t quite so closely packed, but when they are, they make for a very striking view.

A Year in Pictures – Ceiling Emblem at Vincennes

Ceiling Emblem at Vincennes
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This is from the other Sainte-Chapelle, the one at the Chateau de Vincennes. (There are probably lots of other Sainte-Chapelles, but those are the two I visited.) It’s a wildly different space, with cream-colored walls painted in very few places, apart from this emblem painted on repeatedly on the ceiling high above. I, er, have a possibly obsessive tendency to photograph interesting ceilings, so of course this detail drew my eye.

Supernatural Re-Watch: Pilot

As I said before, I won’t be blogging each episode individually. That would be way too much work, not to mention that I don’t have something interesting to say about every. single. ep. But the pilot, being the thing that launches the whole series, does get its own post.

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A Year in Pictures – Kannon atop Fukusaiji

Kannon atop Fukusaiji
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Remember that turtle head from a while ago? Here’s more context for it. I don’t have any especially good shots of the whole temple, but envision that head sticking out over the front door, the entire roof shaped like the back of a giant silver turtle, and at the top . . . this. A statue of Kannon huge enough to be seen from a mile away, with children arrayed adoringly at her feet.

I told you it was a weird place. 😛

This is one of the few photos where I haven’t just done normal editing to it. The sky was very cloudy that day, which made for very boring light; at my father’s suggestion I dropped the “aged photo” filter over it, giving the whole thing the sepia tinge you see here.

A Year in Pictures – Rose Window of La Sainte-Chapelle

Rose Window of La Sainte-Chapelle
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This is Sainte-Chapelle again, this time looking the other way in the upper sanctuary, toward the rose window. As you can see, a few of its “petals” are missing; they’re doing restorations on the stained glass elsewhere, so I don’t know if those will eventually be replaced, or whether the absence of the original glass means they’ll be left as they are. Doesn’t stop it from being absolutely lovely, though.

Supernatural Re-Watch

So I’m almost done with the revision of the third Memoir, I just turned in my next chapter for L5R, the number of pictures left to edit is down to two digits, and the next ten months are jam-packed full of time-consuming things I intend to do.

Which means it’s a perfect time to start a new giant project!

(Or at least it’s a perfect time for my brain to suggest a new giant project.)

I’ve decided I’m in a mood to re-watch Supernatural. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well blog my way through, because one of my reasons for re-watching it is to take a look at its macro-level narrative structure. Eric Kripke, the showrunner, did a remarkably good job of blending a strongly episodic, Monster of the Week format with a long-term metaplot and thematic development, and I’d like to take a look at how he did it. I won’t be blogging each episode individually, but rather commenting on structural stuff as it comes up during the course of the show.

This will involve spoilers. Lots of them. I’ll put everything behind cuts, but if you already know the show or don’t care about being spoiled, feel free to share your thoughts!

Before I get started on the actual blogging, let me share how I got into this show, and why I find it interesting enough to merit this kind of project.

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You can only go so far

Look, guys. I tried. Really I did.

Not just the usual steps, but extra steps. I culled. I culled again. I tagged early, so that I could compare crosses to crosses, statues to statues, urns to urns, and delete the ones that just weren’t on par with the rest. I deleted more when I started editing. I got rid of as much as I could.

And I still have 229 bloody photos from Highgate and Brompton Cemeteries.

It was October! There was autumn color! Leaves and branches blown down by the storm! Crows posing on crosses! Ivy eating EVERYTHING! It was like being in Japan when the cherry trees were blooming. Those places were just too damn photogenic for their own good — or rather, for mine.

I mean, this is a major improvement over where I started. I think I had more than 450 shots from those two places when I started. But still. 229 photos of crosses, crosses with ivy, statues, statues with ivy, urns, urns with ivy, obelisks, obelisks with ivy, the occasional mausoleum, and did I mention the ivy?

Between this and Zakopane, I’m sorely tempted to post nothing but cemetery shots in October. I have more than enough.

A note on the pictures

Since this came up in comments the other day — you should be able to click through on any of the photos from “A Year in Pictures” and get the largest version I have. Actual size varies wildly, since my older photos are often smaller to start with and some of my selections have been massively cropped; some of them will be OMGWTFBBQENORMOUS and others will be not that much larger than what’s posted on my site. But if you want to pull any of them down for private use, feel free. (If you want to use them for some other purpose, drop me a line and we’ll work something out.)

Proud Member of the Insect Army

“The problem is that the ‘vocal minority’ of insects who make up the new generation of writers don’t scramble for the shadows when outside lights shines on them—they bare their pincers and go for the jugular. Maybe it is a good thing that SFWA keeps them locked up. The newer members who Scalzi et al. brought in are an embarrassment to the genre.” — (name withheld) on SFF.net, during the recent unpleasantness.

I hereby declare myself a proud member of the Insect Army — not a member of SFWA, but certainly part of the “new generation of writers” and unwilling to run for cover when bigotry and stupidity rear their heads in my industry.

And if I’m willing to say that when I am massively phobic of cockroaches and abhor the damn things to the depths of my soul, you know I mean it.

A Year in Pictures – Żuraw at Night

Żuraw at Night
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The Żuraw is the old medieval crane of Gdańsk: an enormously tall building with a giant treadmill-driven pulley system inside for lifting cargo from ships. Kyle and I arrived in Gdańsk late at night and discovered our hotel was just across the Motława River from the Żuraw, and so we spent a little while admiring (and photographing) the view. The stillness of the night meant the reflection was absolutely lovely.