Get those specs on me
I tried for the first time in my life to take a selfie with my phone. It is a flip phone. You can't see yourself when you're taking the picture.
I feel as though I have inadvertently reproduced the effect where a cat barges suddenly into frame.
My second effort came out looking more like a person.
What I could not get a picture of was the second necklace I am wearing, which![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee bought for me tonight. It is made of amethyst glass, freshwater pearls, and silver, wood, and bone beads; it is named something like the Nereid's Lavender and it was strung by handful_ofdust. I feel I should write it a story.
All of my program items today went better than I had feared. The audience at my reading liked the two scenes I read from the work in progress which I am not talking about because I don't want to break it. The memorial panel on Le Guin could have gone for hours. The speculative poetry deathmatch was indeed kind of a trainwreck from my perspective, since writing timed two-minute poems to audience prompts—by hand—plays against all of my strengths, but it was a surprisingly fun trainwreck and at least I did not have to stop halfway through a word or a line. There were three sets of deathmatch prompts, in which each element was suggested by a different member of the audience. The first was "George Washington, geostationary orbit, dragons."
Nidhogg in Zero-G
However the cherry branches toward the sun
behind this glass where up is consensus
the lie at its roots
will always cut it down.
The second was "Drake (the musician), R'lyeh, can opener."
The aeons play at ducks and drakes with continents,
shift the sleepless sea that never dies.
Every book you read in this dreamed city
opens another can of worms.
The third was "scarecrow, used car lot, Lisa Frank stickers." My mechanical pencil broke at the start of this one, but I can't blame it for the fact that I couldn't make the origami image I wanted turn over in my mind fast enough—I had no idea what a Lisa Frank sticker looked like, so the moderator said, "Just think of unicorns," and I thought of Blade Runner (1982).
A man who can spin straw into a PhD
can send me home with a lemon
that unfolds into a unicorn.
And I successfully defended my position on Splash (1984) as regards the trope of "Born Sexy Yesterday," namely that the film doesn't qualify: Madison has to learn to navigate the human world as surely as the waters from Cape Cod to New York, but she is not naively, adorably, sexily childlike as she does it; she has experience, intelligence, and her alienness is a combination of plausible folklore and ways in which the human world is confusing. Sarcasm, raunchy jokes, gender coded by clothing, whether an episode of TV is meant to be upsetting or not. The panel not only agreed, an audience member tracked me down afterward at Meet the Pros(e) to compliment me on my impassioned argument and tell me I'd been the funniest person on the panel, which I was not expecting. I was not expecting to follow up on discussion from last night's Hollywood panel with a tenured professor of film, either. I gave her my Patreon link and am working on not feeling like an idiot. Meals have been haphazard, but the combination of hotel bar and green room has provided opportunity to catch at least a little of Torger Vedeler, Farah Rose Smith, andrushthatspeaks. I spent the end of my evening observing the time-honored tradition of talking for hours with Michael Cisco.
I have an ARC of Forget the Sleepless Shores. It's beautiful. I have been showing it off to people. I have a late-night date with WBAI in August.
I am writing these things down to remember them, because they make me feel much less like I died out of my own life. I must figure out how to sleep.
I feel as though I have inadvertently reproduced the effect where a cat barges suddenly into frame.
My second effort came out looking more like a person.
What I could not get a picture of was the second necklace I am wearing, which
yhlee bought for me tonight. It is made of amethyst glass, freshwater pearls, and silver, wood, and bone beads; it is named something like the Nereid's Lavender and it was strung by handful_ofdust. I feel I should write it a story.All of my program items today went better than I had feared. The audience at my reading liked the two scenes I read from the work in progress which I am not talking about because I don't want to break it. The memorial panel on Le Guin could have gone for hours. The speculative poetry deathmatch was indeed kind of a trainwreck from my perspective, since writing timed two-minute poems to audience prompts—by hand—plays against all of my strengths, but it was a surprisingly fun trainwreck and at least I did not have to stop halfway through a word or a line. There were three sets of deathmatch prompts, in which each element was suggested by a different member of the audience. The first was "George Washington, geostationary orbit, dragons."
Nidhogg in Zero-G
However the cherry branches toward the sun
behind this glass where up is consensus
the lie at its roots
will always cut it down.
The second was "Drake (the musician), R'lyeh, can opener."
The aeons play at ducks and drakes with continents,
shift the sleepless sea that never dies.
Every book you read in this dreamed city
opens another can of worms.
The third was "scarecrow, used car lot, Lisa Frank stickers." My mechanical pencil broke at the start of this one, but I can't blame it for the fact that I couldn't make the origami image I wanted turn over in my mind fast enough—I had no idea what a Lisa Frank sticker looked like, so the moderator said, "Just think of unicorns," and I thought of Blade Runner (1982).
A man who can spin straw into a PhD
can send me home with a lemon
that unfolds into a unicorn.
And I successfully defended my position on Splash (1984) as regards the trope of "Born Sexy Yesterday," namely that the film doesn't qualify: Madison has to learn to navigate the human world as surely as the waters from Cape Cod to New York, but she is not naively, adorably, sexily childlike as she does it; she has experience, intelligence, and her alienness is a combination of plausible folklore and ways in which the human world is confusing. Sarcasm, raunchy jokes, gender coded by clothing, whether an episode of TV is meant to be upsetting or not. The panel not only agreed, an audience member tracked me down afterward at Meet the Pros(e) to compliment me on my impassioned argument and tell me I'd been the funniest person on the panel, which I was not expecting. I was not expecting to follow up on discussion from last night's Hollywood panel with a tenured professor of film, either. I gave her my Patreon link and am working on not feeling like an idiot. Meals have been haphazard, but the combination of hotel bar and green room has provided opportunity to catch at least a little of Torger Vedeler, Farah Rose Smith, and
rushthatspeaks. I spent the end of my evening observing the time-honored tradition of talking for hours with Michael Cisco.I have an ARC of Forget the Sleepless Shores. It's beautiful. I have been showing it off to people. I have a late-night date with WBAI in August.
I am writing these things down to remember them, because they make me feel much less like I died out of my own life. I must figure out how to sleep.
no subject
Thank you. [edit] I just got home and sat down on the bed to talk to
no subject
no subject
"Your
winningscat, sir."no subject