Inside the Little Plastic Castle

20th Century Audio SF

The "Mindwebs" series of 30-minute science fiction and fantasy short works brings back happy memories. Michael Hanson's voice is liquid chocolate velvet and the production values are very high (though the table-of-contents leans heavily pale male). I heard some of these live on WERN/WHA, which has a good claim to be the oldest public radio station in the USA.

It’s hosted at the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410, where I’ve had no luck using their streaming player but the downloads are fine.

Accessible Pedestrian Call Buttons

Double treat: Urban infrastructure and assistive technology! Thanks to LinusBoman, who explores the tactile and auditory interface for pedestrian signals in Sweden. Unfortunately, he provides no image descriptions to the many photos and slides in his presentation:

( stream here )

Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/330teb6dst0

audio only "lyric video" — large captions on screen, but no explicit image descriptions

I just today realized that Boman worked on my favorite, default font, Atkinson Hyperlegible. He’s a type geek, choral singer, and designer of classy-looking books and cocktails under the brandname Calligraphuck. His home page is (of course) at TimesNewBoman.

Marissa Lingen MarissaLingen writes really lovely short stories — more than a hundred so far. She's disabled and her fiction generally includes the mundanity and creativity of disabled living. She lives in the Twin Cities. She's funny. She studied math and physics before turning to full-time writing — as of this writing she’s got 20 stories published in NATURE.

( Bit of history, three recs with excerpts )

Thanks to MetaFilter, here's a clever tune addressing the enduring question in the minds of over-60s: Where is my flying car?

So it's the new millennium. Where's my vacation on the moon?
There's still no cure for cancer and I don’t think we;ll get one soon
We know that power corrupts; our leaders are as nasty as they come
This is no global village—we're living in a global slum

Sadly couldn’t find a live link to the composer and performer, Allison Lonsdale -- have you seen her perform at a con?

content note: deep pessimism, all the terrible things as of 2003.

In the cut: YouTube performance and lyrics.

( morbid humor )

FIYAHCON is a virtual convention centering the perspectives and celebrating the contributions of BIPOC in speculative fiction, hosted by FIYAH Literary Magazine. The inaugural event takes place October 17-18, 2020 and will host a variety of entertaining and educational content surrounding the business, craft, and community of speculative literature.

Where the magazine is focused specifically on the elevation of Black voices in short speculative fiction, FIYAHCON seeks to center the perspectives and experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). The reasoning is that Black voices are not the least represented in the field, and we don’t want to exclude groups who are already systemically excluded from other spaces.

We recognize allyship as an action, not a sentiment. And in that spirit, we also invite anyone who wishes to be viewed as a resource for racially/ethnically marginalized writers or who understand these are people to be celebrated and learned from, to be a part of the event.

Get ready for two days of dynamic, entertaining content with BIPOC at the center of speculative literature discourse! The event takes place October 17-18, 2020 and includes panels, presentations, office hours, write-ins, workshops, kickbacks, virtual tea house, and more.

Two days, $40.

theconvention.fiyahlitmag.com

( what’s Fiyah? glad you asked )

The New Decameron continues publishing a wide range of SF and fantasy shorts, inspired by the 14th-century series of novellas that heralded human invention during the Black Death. Ninety-one entries and counting at Patreon, free to read:

https://www.patreon.com/projectdecameron

Tina Connolly’s contribution made me LOL a lot: ( 152 words )

Even while quarantined, isolated, sick, or anxious about COVID-19, we can still tell and share stories! The New Decameron project plans to post a story every day, to share art and aspiration during this crisis and bring our community together.

https://www.patreon.com/projectdecameron

Although it’s hosted on Patreon, all the content is free to read. Organizers include Jo Walton, poet and author Maya Chhabra, and librarian, singer, and SF/F fan Lauren Schiller.

Since 16 March they’ve published 57 short stories in the science fiction/fantasy genre, including many authors on my insta-buy list: Naomi Kritzer, Marissa Lingen, Rosemary Kirstein, Laurie Marks.

Decameron has also introduced me to some wonderful new writers, for example:

The Hemlock That Was Afraid of Heights by E Lily Yu

https://elilyyu.com/

The full story is a quick sip, less then 1400 words, and I totally believed that it was a tree-point-of-view story.

( 125 words excerpt )

We’ve read your thoughtful and pain-filled emails, tweets, and Facebook posts. We are sorry for the harm that’s been done, especially to some of the most marginalized members of our community.

We recognize that the award is necessary to the community, but can’t go on under its existing name. Now we need to figure out what to do next and how to do it. We’re working on it. And we’ll say more within a month.

Their SF story “Morphic Resonance” has busy public transit, lovely assistive tech, found family, and dreamy meditations on body modification.

( excerpt )

Although I trend SF, I also enjoyed Toby’s fantasy story, “The Way You Say Goodnight,” which I read in Transcendent 2, The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction² or via Kindle.

( excerpt )

Toby also writes non-fiction, and I loved their gentle and deep interrogation of the questions visibly disabled people too often field

( last excerpt )

Marissa Lingen, a Twin Cities author and fan, experienced a shitty sexist interaction at ConFusion. She explains how the ConFusion staff handled it right. Too important to summarize, but if you're involved in any way with cons, read It's not your turn, sir.

( few drops of Marissa's wisdom )

Back in October 2013, I had the good fortune to attend the “Disability Disclosure in/and Higher Education Conference.” It was a disability studies rock-star event: many of my favorite thinkers presented, and I learned tons of stuff. The focus was on disclosing in order to get accommodations: unusually, we examined both faculty and student experiences. An essay collection resulted from the bubbly stew of ideas, new from the University Michigan Press:

Negotiating Disability: Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, James M. Jones, eds.

I sampled it via JSTOR, it’s also available on other electronic databases: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1012609341.

I was particularly delighted by the essay challenging stoicism and disability pride from Josh Lukin joshlukinworks. Josh floats in my ethereal intersection of disability studies and SF, and I first met him at WisCon. He's a wicked punster, a much-lauded teacher, and my kind of all-around intellectual. Josh rightly points out that when us social-model types push “disability pride” we can also create our own version of the “overcoming” trope we love to hate.

Essay nut graph:

begin quote
Once one realizes that one’s disability is not a moral failing, one is supposed, judging by the syllabi, books, and blog posts I have encountered, to embrace the social model of disability, become a proud activist, and write a memoir. I do have an unpublished draft of a memoir (Urgency: Growing Up with Crohn’s Disease), and I have been credited with activism in my teaching and scholarship. But the social model part and the pride part don’t work well for me, and I know from a number of students and from conversations in the disability community that I am not unique in that. So I want to consider why that might be, and how theoretical and science-fictional models offer alternative ways of being disabled–ways that are not really new discoveries on my part but that are already immanent in crip culture.
quote ends