Nothing of consequence

+/-0: I'm a bit more functional today. On the plus side, got five hours of sleep last night--after double-dosing the Melatonex. On the minus side, I only got FIVE hours of sleep, even after double-dosing the Melatonex. It was really annoying, too. Went to bed around a quarter after ten in the hopes that if I dropped off I'd actually get nine or ten hours. And I did drop off... but I woke up around a quarter after three. Nothing seemed to provoke it; there wasn't a whisper out of Polly last night. Instead, without fanfare or preamble, I was suddenly AWAKE. And I remained such until the alarm clock went off at seven, though I lay still the whole time and let my thoughts try to wander in the hopes of dropping back to sleep.

-1: Lost my very promising Rogue in Nethack last night due to a fall onto poisoned spikes in a pit. This was extra special vexing as I'd found a wand of wishing on Level 4 and had gotten said Rogue outfitted very well indeed, and had just wiped out every hostile monster in Fort Ludios. It's quite ignominous to die while wandering around picking up gold. The lesson to be learned here, my children: get poison resistance early.

+2: The weather has reverted to cool, gray, and a little rainy. This is a Good Thing, not only because we desperately need the bolstering of our local water supply, but also because I have a small wondering whether I've been physically out of sorts due to weird weather. I have nothing on which to found this suspicion, but it's there nonetheless.

-3: My weight's back up to 168. Grr. It's been there for the last couple of mornings now.

+/-4: Reading The Devil's Highway by Hannah March. Not done with it yet, but while I am finding the story and its hero engaging, I am also finding the typos liberally sprinkled through the text quite distracting: things such as missing punctuation, improperly capitalized letters, and at least one occurrence of the dreaded "but it passed spellcheck" problem--the word "way" showing up in dialogue where "why" was clearly the needed word. Knowing what I know now about how the publishing industry works, I am not at all certain whether to blame these errors on the author or on a slipshod copyediting job.

-5: Some of my test servers have been repeatedly dying, shutting down due to 'thermal events'. Whatever that means. I presume it has to do with some component or other in the system overheating and crapping out as a result. I'm told that these particular Dells are chronically prone to this kind of problem. Whatever causes it, it's annoying--this particular cluster of machines serves as my primary cluster for running my daily build verification tests. Sigh.

Hee

Gakked from arcaedia, and inspired by cassieclaire, I bring you a writerly take on the Secret Diaries.

I particularly like "Will be outrageous curmudgeon just like Harlan Ellison, but taller."

Even SF writers can be assholes

Spotted this over on Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog today, a post wherein he introduces his readers to an individual who goes by the name Thomas Beale and the alias "Vox Day". This has reminded me that even people who write science fiction can be supreme assholes, as this quote of Mr. Day/Beale's illustrates:

The mental pollution of feminism extends well beyond the question of great thinkers. Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack the physics, so they either write romance novels in space about strong, beautiful, independent and intelligent but lonely women who finally fall in love with rugged men who love them just as they are, or stick to fantasy where they can make things up without getting hammered by critics holding triple Ph.D.s in molecular engineering, astrophysics and Chaucer.

I find this attitude so offensive that I scarcely know where to begin to rant about it. Perhaps with the part where hypocrites such as this man sneeringly claim that women cannot 'hack' physics while avowing that any decent woman wouldn't be trying to step beyond her place by studying hard science in the first place--no doubt because they are scared that a woman with brains will prove them wrong. Or perhaps the part where he's ignoring that hundreds of men write soft SF and fantasy as well--including, I might add, Mr. Day/Beale himself. Or perhaps the part where all the hard science in the world, no matter how accurately depicted, does not mean squat if the author is not presenting a story the reader cares about.

I don't know physics. I'll be the first to admit it. I've never taken a physics class in my life. But the blame for this squarely rests upon my tumultuous teenage years, in which I changed schools four times, making it almost impossible to hold to the regular track of classes through which one might expect to proceed while staying four years in the same high school. One might ask why I didn't take physics in college, but there are only so many electives a college student can cram into her schedule--and other things competed much harder for my attention. Language classes, for example, and various and sundry electives more pertinent to my major of Computer Science and my minor in English. To assert that a woman is an inferior thinker, that she does not possess a rational mind and clearly cannot 'hack' physics, is nothing more than a misogynist excuse to keep her out of the field in the first place.

Maybe I haven't studied physics, and perhaps hard sciences are distinctly absent from my fields of study, but you know what? This has a lot less to do with my being a woman than it does with my deliberate choice to study where my aptitudes are stronger: in music, in computers, in language and literature and words. And it does not mean I don't have appreciation and respect for proper science. It does not mean I do not think.

As for "romance novels in space", I have some names for Mr. Day/Beale: Julie Czerneda. Sharon Shinn. Liz Williams. Kathleen Goonan. Sure, all of these women have included love stories as part of their plots, but you know what? So has practically every single novel I've ever read by men, too: J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, Dennis Danvers, James P. Blaylock, Jim Butcher, and all of the other gentlemen who share space on my shelves with female authors.

I'll stand up and yell it loud and proud: I LIKE LOVE STORIES. I want to see the boy get his girl. Or the girl get her boy. Or the boy get his boy, or the girl her girl. But this does not mean I want that to be the only point of the story, or that it will be the only point of any story I write.

Lastly, let's talk a bit about this half-baked assumption that fantasy novels are somehow less subject to rigorous critique than hard SF novels. Just because you're making up the universe does not mean you have license to suck. In fact, I would argue that you have to be even more rigorously consistent than a hard SF writer, because you do not have the luxury of falling back upon the foundations of known scientific principles to establish your author cred. Nor does it mean you are somehow ignoring basic science when you're trying to create a world from scratch, or that you are just going to handwave and say "it's magic" because you're writing a fantasy novel.

But then, what would I know? As a woman and a feminist, one who is working on both fantasy and soft SF novels, I fully expect that I would be classified by Mr. Day/Beale as one of the "mentally polluted".

I find myself strangely unperturbed by that prospect.

Seasonal journal flip!

One of these days I will either whip up a new stylesheet theme for my journal and my personal web page, or at the very least figure out a way to have my journal flip round to the next seasonal style in the queue when my web page does. Regardless, it's spring on Anna's journal now!

Also, I did exercise again tonight, but took care to try to do a less strenuous treadmill walk than usual since my system's been so wonky lately. But I didn't want to fall out of the habit of exercising entirely. So I did 40 minutes again tonight, but kept it slow and easy, and totalled only 1.44 miles (deliberately timed to get rid of the fractional part of my recent Rivendell tallies). Thus:

Miles on the journey: 27.0
Miles to Rivendell: 431.0