Just "twigged", reading my RFF mailing list, that the SF Experience is backed by some heavy hitter RFFers. Hence I must brag about that here, although my major contribution is being on the RFF mailing list and making the occational fitful gesture in the RFF direction. :-) RFF is "Reading for the Future" by the way, and is a mailing list anyone can join via yahoo groups. It is a group of teachers, authors and other intersted parties who support the use of sci fi as a means to get the next generation reading and thinking about the future.

The SF Experience is a hands-on sci fi museum, a la various science centres, that will have an online presence as well as a physical one in Washington State (Seatle).

posted by Lynda at 22:57   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

David is picking up pictures from Norwescon today, so expect I'll have up a report by the weekend, including a belated picture of the lovely Okal Rel Universe buttons created for me distribute there by Kathy Plett and Jordan Bacon.

Now for something entirely different, as they used to say on Monty Python.

Received an e-mail today from my eccentric friend Si -- I think Si would accept that description, although she usually renders it more colorfully along the lines of "feminist bitch creative activist" -- recommending I check out the e-journal Rhizomes, which I did, and discovered it views itself as a cultural studies expression of a "Deleuzian" nature. Not recognizing the word I did a search and came up with an essay by one Manuel DeLanda called Deleuzian Ontology where I found out there were three major classes of ontologies, or claims for describing reality, and the philosphy of Deleuze is of the sort called realist and--more particularly--asserts the universal-singularity and individual-singularity rather than class vs. instance. As I understand it, after brief acquaintance, this makes all kinds of sense in biology and computing where instances stubbornly refuse to stay within the lines of any classification proposed to encompass them. I always tell my students that classification type critical thinking is a tool not a truth of the absolute sort. That is, there is little to be gained by splitting hairs over whether File Explorer (instance of a program) is a component of the Windows XP (instance of Operating System) or an instance of the class of system software known as Utilities, or an instance of the class of application software File Managers. The exact classification of any annoyingly gray item or hybrid beast like the platypus is less important than the recognition that classes can be used in the abstract to vastly implify the problem of thinking about a huge number of very cluttery details, just as "species" can be a handy method of thinking about a huge clutter of individual animals...but nothing about reality precludes the emergence of a thoroughly confusing beast or program. Maybe more meaningfully, no amount of classification and abstraction that defines the group can adequately cover the uniqueness of the individual for some purposes. Which reminded me of Alison's talk on the future of medicine some time ago in Prince George, when she spoke of the need for treatments to become individually taylored. That is, for a focus to develop that takes into account the differences between individuals or the uniqueness of individual circumstances, more than existing practice is generally able to do. I have heard similiar rumblings in computing, where centrally controlled, vanilla solutions are starting to give way under the far more natural need for personal customization and control. Messy business all around. But it strikes a chord with the Deleuzian Ontology essay, for me, somehow. Not sure whether therein there lies a tune....

posted by Lynda at 16:03   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

I have just come back from delivering a fat padded envelope to the post-office, containing 552 pp of FAR ARENA. That's 145 400 words, down amazingly from the near 190 000 words we had when we compiled all the first-draft chapters. Said total occasioned much moaning and clanking of chains from my (Alison's) part as I wandered (figuratively) around like a distressed spectre, wailing 'we're going to have to cut; we're going to have to cut'. I took it to the vicinity of 165 000 words, and then Lynda got her second wind and took it down the rest of the way (... and it was her turn to chortle and mine to make soft whimpering noises of apprehension: 'no, not that part, please not that part'). Feedback from the readers of THRONE PRICE has been much, much appreciated - aside from simply keeping us going through the revisions, it tells us how much we can rely on our readers' intelligence and imaginations - so we don't need 45 000 extra words.

Lynda is presently down in Seattle at Norwescon. I've no idea what she's doing! - between winding up FAR ARENA, her neuropsychology course, her course marking, my clinical study reports, my rehearsal schedule, my other novel (GRAVEYARDS OF NEREIS, which is also done, printed and sent off) and my contracting one or other of the endemic winter viruses (no not SARS) - I never did catch up with what she was doing, aside from a reading by readers of THRONE PRICE or MEKAN'STAN.
posted by Anonymous at 10:48   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Reported sighting of a supporter in an ORU T-Shirt. Mica Currie, comp. sci. student at UNBC, caught in the entrance of Lynda's office. :-)
posted by Lynda at 09:05   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Relieved, today, to feel some hope the war may be near an end and stories on the news may be more about healing than killing. War is such an intoxicating, toxic drug. May the people engaged in it, soldiers and civlians, stay alive. And the liberal institutions of western democracy survive the purge.
posted by Lynda at 09:02   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Testament to one man's obsession with the sea, this house in Esquimault, just above the dock where the harbour ferry lets off. A pirate on the roof, a crows nest hanging off the side, King Neptune, mermaid and dolphins on the lawn, and, not shown, the garage is the brig, complete with briggee. I figured if there was anywhere for me to put this picture, it should be here ...

posted by Anonymous at 21:45   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
kath and the baby (not complete)
kath_draft.jpg
posted by Yukari at 14:22   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Testing out lab instructions for a photoshop lab and wound up with this. :-) Alison may remember the background. Now, if I can extract her out of her picture as well and so an Alison version ...

posted by Lynda at 18:43   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments