May Australian Spec Fic Carnival

For your viewing pleasure:

 

Meep: Good Things

Some exciting events: 

Wacom Cintiq 12WX (I can’t buy this until my Graphire pays for itself)

Previews on youtube for the movie of one of the best books I’ve read this year, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic autobiography Persepolis (they’re in French, but you’ll get the idea):

Finally! The 18th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy is up (in three parts) at http://troubleinchina.livejournal.com/. I look forward to this carnival - lots of thought provoking discussions. This month is heavier on the gaming side of things, which I am not at all involved in, but I also enjoyed this post on 7 more things heroines can do, because it covers some ground I was exploring in last month’s NaNoWriMo project.

Also, the 5th People of Colour in Science Fiction and Fantasy blog carnival is up at Of Shoes - And Ships - And Sealing Wax, but I only just found out and haven’t read it yet.

 

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Originally uploaded by tanaudel
Biro sketches from Conflux 4 - two from life and two from photos on my phone. These border a page of notes in

my sketchbook.

A wide range of what would otherwise be eccentric behaviour is tolerated and even expected at conventions. Knitting and sketching other attendees is fairly tame.

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Conflux 4: Escape from the ACT

Conflux 4 is over. I have abandoned Aimee to Emma and Gillian and a tour of the culinary oddities of the Canberra Centre, and am back in Brisbane. My throat very decently held off becoming sore until after the closing ceremony.

Five highlights of Conflux 4:

1. Eating Drunken Dalek Cake with our hands out of a tupperware container in the dealer’s room.
2. Dancing at the Masquerade to 99 Luftballons, Neverending Story and a mashup of Green Day’s Graduation Day and the Dr Who song.
3. Discussing full-face casts, moo cards and Victorian women’s literature while sitting on the floor of the hotel conference level.
4. Conversations with random (non-con) hotel guests in the erratic lifts about Pan’s Labyrinth.
5. Subversive cartography.

Five highlights of Canberra:

1. The painting my brother-in-law made for their remodelled lounge room, and my sister showing off my nephews in their sleep.
2. Sharing a Belgian Spoil with my sister at Coco Black.
3. Live Leunig theatre in the tulip fields of Floriade.
4. Reading the first 6 chapters of Ibbotson’s The Secret Countess at Borders.
5. Maximum temperatures several degrees below Brisbane’s minimum.

Five slightly odd things:

1. The lifts at Rydges, which operate (traditionally) on a principle similar to Russian roulette.
2. The bar staff, who may or may not have been burglars who tied up the actual bar staff and were themselves trapped when customers began arriving.
3. Both A & I being complimented and pursued.
4. Not eating dessert. (More particularly, being physically unable to confront dessert after the first two courses of the Regency Banquet).
5. The products the self-confessed mystic (consultant and singer-songwriter) who feels I will meet my husband in New York advised me to obtain there.

Five books I bought:

1. Lucy Sussex - A Tour Guide in Utopia
2. Daikaiju
3. Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners
4. Stephen Dedman - Never Seen by Waking Eyes
5. Mike Resnick - The Dark Lady

Five disappointments:

1. Not being able to meet up with Deb.
2. Not returning to Floriade to buy chai.
3. Unrequited love.
4. Not trying out room service.
5. Being invited to join the Australian SFF writers at a function at the Australian Consulate in New York and then finding out it is on the same night as the night for which we have bought Broadway theatre tickets.

Oh, how annoyed I am about that last.