Why not let the beast...run wild?

marthawells's fantasy novel The Cloud Roads is a free Kindle ebook today.

That is excellent news, particularly as this is her first book in a new series, with book 2, The Serpent Sea, coming out in January.

The Cloud Roads is a spectacular fantasy. It's entirely its own thing: I can't easily point to another book or genre and say "that's what it's like", which is praise in itself. The landscape is unique, the characters come in all colors and shapes -- the main character, Moon, is a winged shapechanger who has never found anyone belonging to his own kind, amid all the people with gills and tusks and scales -- and it has all the Martha Wells trademarks of deep worldbuilding, clever, competent and witty characters, and a ton of plot.

Mostly, what I keep thinking as I read this book is: I want Miyazaki to film this. I want that SO BAD. He would get such a kick out of the flying people and airships and floating sky islands and cities built like giant wheels. *flails*

Note: the free Kindle ebook isn't available in Europe (at least, not to me, snf) but it should work just fine in the US.

Gorgeous, gorgeous fairytale art in the kidpix comm, which I found through astridv: large scans from the book Legends of Ancient Kazachstan.

The post is in Russian, but it's all pictures, and I'm saving them all.

O mysterious magical person who gave me a DW paid account: thank you very much! This was kind of a crappy week so far, and you have improved it hugely, <3!

I clearly need to get back into the habit of posting, because while I do still read and comment on DW and LJ, I just don't talk much, I guess. If anyone has anything they would like me to talk about, now's a good time to comment. :-)

For now I will leave you with this video under the cut, which I've been playing on loop for a while now.

( Sunshine of Your Love )

I love Ella so much, you guys. This song, if you don't know it, is originally by Cream and IMO is your average droning, vaguely creepy stoner rock song, sung by guys who are much better at guitar playing than singing. And Ella takes that song and kicks it out of the park, over the roof and straight down the highway.

So after the Comic Con trailer for Legend of Korra (thanks, elynross!) got me all excited, I saw this:

Comic Con Legend of Korra Panel 2011 Transcript -- SPOILERS GALORE if you go here.

This is the creators discussing character sketches and the premise of the show. There's video links for the panel as well, but I love that there's a transcript, as I personally hate watching people talk when I could read them instead. The transcript also has pics of all the character sketches, which is great, especially seeing them morph from rough ideas into final versions.

It's looking awesome, and I can't wait to see the show. (We'll have to wait a year, just fyi. "Mid-2012" is all I know.)

Quick heads-up: the ever-fabulous dorinda is clearing out a number of fannish items, yours for the mere cost of shipping. The haul includes fanzines, pro novels, records and a MST3K lunchbox. Fandoms include H:LotS, ST:TOS, Pros, QL and SH.

Kirk/Spock fans who appreciate the old as well as the new, go forth and grab that copy of Alien Brothers before some other, possibly less deserving fan gets their mitts onto it!

I love that zine, it's one of the earliest TOS K/S zines around and has beautiful art. If I didn't already have a copy I'd be on it like white on rice. Just look at the gorgeous typography of that cover.

I've been watching Farscape for the first time the last week or so -- I'm still in season 1 and have managed to avoid all spoilers so far, so please DO NOT SPOIL in comments, thank you! But please do join in if you've watched the series.

I never caught this show while it was on the air, and I have been hearing from a lot of people that I missed out. So far, I'm definitely inclined to agree. The show looks amazing, and has a lot of actually alien aliens, which is one of my favorite things in SF. They live on Moya, a ship that is a sentient being, with a pilot who is in a symbiotic relationship with her! J'adooore.

It also doesn't hurt that this isn't a standard Trek-ish story of human explorers with token aliens; the main cast has exactly one human, John Crichton, whom I really like so far. He has Very Nice Arms, and keeps making these completely inappropriate geeky cultural references that nobody else gets, because duh, he's the only human on board. This could be really annoying, but instead it just delights me. In the very first eps he calls a planet Dagobah, and later on he introduces himself and Aeryn to alien bounty hunters as "I'm Butch. This is Sundance. We're the Hole in the Sky Gang."

I also enjoy how everyone else thinks John's kind of a backward species from a primitive planet, and he can't really disagree. "Human. It’s kinda like Sebacean, but we haven’t conquered other worlds yet, so we just kick the crap out of each other." And in the episode I just watched, John tells Aeryn that yes, he does want to go back to Earth even though it's primitive and has wars and disease and no spaceflight -- "but you guys don't have chocolate."

One of the aliens looks human, but she really isn't. That's Aeryn Sun, whom I ADORE. Oh Aeryn. Snarky, gorgeous, stiff-necked and supremely competent. I think she stole my heart first when she got annoyed at John flirting with someone else and expressed her feelings by lifting a massive piece of equipment over her head. She then carried it down the corridor, glaring and yelling something like "Am I the only one around here who gets any work done?". <3

And then there is Zhaan (spelling thanks to flambeau, I sure couldn't tell from the dialogue) -- lovely blue alien priestess who gets orgasms from sunlight and who seems very relaxed and zen at first, right up until she cuts off someone's arm. And D'Argo the Luxan warrior, who has just mournfully said that he and Crichton can never be friends. I bet he is wrong wrong wrongity wrong. At least I hope so, having seen sdwolfpup's adorable Moving Right Along vid. And Rigel, who is a muppet but that is just to fool you -- he is not cute. He is mean, and will sling snot at you if you displease him. Which you will. When you die, he will be first in line to steal your shoes.

I got the complete Farscape dvd set thanks to an Amazon sale that is still ongoing: the Farscape: The Complete Series dvd set for just $50. They last had this sale around Christmas, and I waffled about ordering the set, and then when I finally decided to do it, the price had gone back up again. But it's been $50 now for a while.

Caveat: this dvd set has a lot of commentaries and other extras, but it doesn't have The Peacekeeper Wars, which is a miniseries made after Farscape the series ended. But I figure by the time I've gotten through all the seasons of Farscape, I'll be able to pick it up for cheap; it's less than 10 bucks now.

The British DVD set does have Peacekeeper Wars, but it's also well over 60 pounds, so that doesn't seem like such a great deal in comparison.

Two vidding things that are splendid:

Francesca Coppa did a terrific video interview with vidders Sandy and Rache, which is now online at the OTW journal. Sandy & Rache are two of my favorite vidders -- their website is a roll call of fantastic vids like Stress, Crush Story, A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness and the ever-fabulous Detachable Penis.

The only complaint I have about this is that it's too short; I would basically like a five day long interview where they talk about every vid they ever made and everything that ever happened in vidding fandom. Also, where Sandy laughs a lot, because she has the best laugh. But this is an excerpt from a longer interview, so there's more to come, yay!

The other splendid thing is that killabeez has made a shiny high-quality remaster of her gorgeous Xena vid Salome, which is one of the best vids that ever came out of Xena fandom, if you ask me. It's lush and sensual and melancholy, and it tells the story of Ares' doomed romance with Xena (with, as Killa says, a touch of Xena/Gabrielle). The vid has amazing use of color, red, black, and ice-blue; in a way, this is the dark doppelgänger of charmax's beautiful vid Boom Boom Ba.

These gorgeous cats in Massachusetts, USA are looking for new homes, via therienne:

Shameless pimping of three beautiful cats left homeless by the death of their owner, combined with photos designed specifically to leave you helpless before the Cute, hands grasping in desperate come-hither-kitty movements.

Portal, one of the best computer games ever created, is now available for the Mac, and for the PC, FREE.

Until May 24th. And you have to sign up for Steam to get it, but at least that's free, too.

(Steam is an online service from Valve, the makers of Portal, where you can pay for and download new games, instead of having to go to the store to get a box with a DVD in. I have signed up for it to get some extra downloadable content, but haven't used it much otherwise, because I like going to a store and buying a box with a DVD in and a manual and all that. I'm oldfashioned that way. But I didn't find Steam particularly hinky, and they don't ask for your credit card number upfront or anything like that.)

Anyway, this is an excellent incentive to play Portal for free. And Portal is hard to describe, but I am going to try, because I love it so much, with that fannish love that makes me want to grab people and sit them down in front of a computer and go "Here! Try this! You'll love it!!"

On a puzzle level, Portal has a unique concept: you are a test subject in the Aperture Science laboratories, and make your way through a series of tests by creating portals, or really holes, with the 'portal gun'. You can shoot entrance and exit holes in the walls, in the floors, in any available flat surface. You can jump down one hole on the floor and come out the other, on the ceiling. You can throw things down a hole and watch them fly out the other, because momentum carries over.

That basic principle gets more and more complicated -- just wait until you jump down into a hole and try to shoot another exit hole while you are falling -- but the game leads you through each step, so that it doesn't become overwhelming even though the puzzles get more and more complex. There are timed challenges, moving platforms, laser beams, guardian robots who try to stop you and must be outwitted, and one robot, GLaDOS, whose voice guides you through the maze -- or maybe guiding isn't all she is doing. You may know the song "I'm Still Alive", by Jonathan Coulton; that song was written for the ending of the game, and it is sung by GLaDOS.

On another level, Portal is one of the best-written games I've ever played. It is so beautifully staged and mordantly funny, with a story that unfolds as you make your way through the puzzles. Most of that story has to do with your character's discoveries about the environment she's in, and her developing relationship with GLaDOS, who seems quite pleasant and businesslike at first as she guides you through the initial challenges, where she says encouraging things like

"Unbelievable! You, SUBJECT NAME HERE, must be the pride of SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE!"

Soon GLaDOS has more ominous messages:

"Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record. Followed by death. Good luck!"

and little asides like:

"Did you know you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture Science Self Esteem Fund for Girls? It's true!"

And that bring me to another level of the game -- the feminist one. It's pretty exceptional in that aspect, too. Your point-of-view character, Chell, is female, wears a ponytail and a baggy orange jumpsuit, and looks like a real human being instead of Lara Croft. She is the only human in the game; all other characters are robots. GLaDOS is clearly female (and voiced by a soprano); the other robots' voices are high and metallic, ungendered, and they look like little egg-shaped iPods and say "I don't blame you" or "Nap time" when you knock them over.

Oh yeah, and there's an inanimate character called the Weighted Companion Cube. You carry this cube around on some levels, to solve puzzles; initially it was just plain grey, but the developers found that gamers didn't remember to hang on to it, and so they painted pink hearts on its sides. And then once the game turned out to be a hit, Valve made a plush version of the Weighted Companion Cube, pink fuzzy hearts and all, and it sold out in less than 24 hours. To gamer fanboys. I just find that there's something encouraging about that.

Install and signup page for Portal, plus screenshots and video

So I'm watching American Idol's results show and fastforwarding through pretty much everything that doesn't have Queen Latifah in it --

( very minor spoilers for Idol and V below, mostly concerning things that did not actually happen )

This is pretty neat if you're looking for some new music: Downplayer is a website where you can download 10 songs in mp3 format every weekday, from different well-known and lesser known artists.

Right now they have songs by Beck, Duffy, the Black Keys, the Magnetic Fields and others. As far as I can tell, these are all links to legal downloads that have been posted on music blogs. 

One such blog is Kick Kick Snare, which has Janelle Monae's new song Tightrope + her new video, yay! The new video is fun to watch, with lots of taplike dancing, though not quite as mesmerizing as the science fiction video for Many Moons which I have watched approximately 30 times so far. I'm really curious about the rest of her new album.

So apparently the Times and the Sunday Times are going to charge money for being read online - a quid a day or two quid for a week's access. Best of luck with that, fellows, and let me know when you can't hack it anymore. I give you about eight months.

Meanwhile, I want to point you to the one bit of content I do read on the Sunday Times website: AA Gill. That's his name. He reviews stuff: restaurants, TV programmes, the occasional book or travel destination. But it is almost immaterial what his actual topic is, and quite often you are halfway down the page before you find out.

I read his restaurant reviews even though he reviews places in London, and I don't live there, and when I do go there I wouldn't go to those places. I've rarely seen any of the television programmes he reviews, and when I have I don't agree with him. In fact I barely ever agree with him on anything. None of that matters. The point is: go there now, before they start charging money for the privilege, if you want to read some of the best and quirkiest journalistic talent around, purely for the sake of the writing.

This is AA Gill in the Maledives:

"Half the guests are Russian, paunchy and determined men with defensive eyes, aggressive hair and holiday clothes that have been bought by assistants who don’t like them. Most of them have lady friends whose second names they haven’t yet grasped. These girls undulate in slicing and engorged bikinis, and survey through predator glasses their new partners and everyone else in the way that undertakers look at old people."

This is AA Gill reviewing a restaurant (no, really):

"(...) reading to children is a constant battle against heckling. So I’ve taken to picking up magazines and making up stories. A copy of Playboy is a good place to start. This is a story about a lot of mummies who have lost all their clothes. This is Debbie. She’s looking for her clothes in the bed. And Shawnee is looking for her clothes on the beach. Yes, maybe she’s got her pyjamas in her boobies. Hello! is also good for children’s stories. This is the ugly toad the fairy turned into a prince. Look at his greasy hair. He’s marrying the Queen of the Vampires, and those are her bridesmaids, Lunch, Dinner and Tea, and the guests are the Troll Cannibal and the Witch of Farts, and there’s the Evil Dwarf, and that one’s Simon Cowell."

And here's another restaurant review, which I hold especially dear because it's the first time I've ever seen anyone use Polari in a restaurant review, or in any kind of newspaper prose:

"I was a plongeur and commis chef here, and learnt the full Orwellian squalor of a pre-Conran West End kitchen. I regularly took salad out of the bin when we ran out. I remember that the whole kitchen gobbed into the vichyssoise of a pair of arch pooves who’d been rude to the waitress. I was a teenager with a bona eke and fit lallies, and regularly had beige door johnnies waiting to ply me with a little drinky-winky. I’d have to slip down the fire escape, which isn’t a euphemism. Happy days."

Title: Read My Mind
Artist: The Killers
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Granada TV series)
Summary:  "Come, Watson, come!" he cried. "The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!"

This vid premiered at Escapade 2010. Many thanks to arduinna and dorinda for beta and encouragement!

Feedback very welcome, including criticism.

Download: Big (.avi, 56 Mb, 700x528) | Biggish (.mp4, 48 Mb, 700x528) | Small (.avi, 16 Mb, 350x264)

ETA And here's some Mediafire download links, in case my webhost is down:
Big (.avi, 56 Mb, 700x528) | Biggish (.mp4, 48 Mb, 700x528) | Small (.avi, 16 Mb, 350x264)

Download subtitles (.srt) | Read lyrics

( Streaming )

Part 1: The Blue Carbuncle
Part 2: The Copper Beeches
Part 3: The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
Part 4: The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

I’m just going to cheat and combine The Final Problem with The Adventure of the Empty House, because how can I talk about just the one without at least mentioning the other? I can’t end my list of favourite stories with Holmes being mostly dead! *g*

( Made of smoke and mirrors )

I'd love to hear what your favourite moments are, or what you would want to see in a Post-Reichenbach story, or how much you believe of Holmes's little jaunts into Lhasa and Khartoum -- even if we are agreed that his supposed visit was to the head Lama, and not the head llama, and that Watson was undoubtedly chagrined at the printer's error.

Sorry if you're seeing this ten times in a row, but time is short and Yuletide is awesome, so I'm passing on the word:

If you're up for writing a Yuletide pinch hit this year, please join the new pinch hitters list! The old one is sadly out of commission.

You can join the new list by sending a blank email to yuletidepinchhitters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. To activate your subscription, just reply to the confirmation message you receive from the group.

Or join via the Yahoo groups site if you have a Yahoo account.

I posted this in a comment to cox_and_co and wanted to give the heads-up to my friends as well: Amazon UK is running a very nice sale on DVDs until December 4th, and one of the best bargains is the complete series of Granada TV Sherlock Holmes episodes and movies on DVD for just 29.99 UK pounds. This is the series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and first David Burke, then Edward Hardwicke as Watson, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

I bought a similar set the last time Amazon UK had a promotion: this one, which was 40 UKP then and is now back to 117 UKP, and am very happy with it. It doesn't have any extras, but it has very good picture quality and sound; I had an earlier DVD set of just The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where the sound was noticeably off in places and the picture was very dark.

Also, in the newer DVDs the subtitles are actually accurate as opposed to hilarious. (Where Holmes said something like: "We must catch this gang" in that inimitable Brett drawl, the subtitle was "We must catch this guy". Yeah, very Victorian.)

These dvds are region 2, so people not in the UK will need a region free dvd player -- if yours isn't, do google the exact brand and model number along with "region free", because many dvd players can be made region free just by pressing a code with your remote.

I think this may be my new favorite picture of Nichelle Nichols, in costume as Uhura but not in character:

( Biking around the studio )

But this one is a close runner-up:

( So you thought these clowns were the ones driving the ship? Think again. )

Last week janeturenne posted a wonderfully evocative overview of her personal top 10 favorite and top 10 least favorite canon Sherlock Holmes stories -- part 1, part 2.

She reminds me how much I love seeing people talk about their beloved fandoms in detail, and I've been immersed in the Holmes stories, Granada TV series, and BBC audioplays for years but I haven't actually posted about them much myself. So here's a start! *g*

I'm going to take janeturenne's approach but simplify it a bit, so that I manage to actually post these instead of just think about it: I've picked out five of my favorite Holmes short stories and their adaptations, and will post about each of them in turn over the next few days. Story links go to the University of Adelaide Library, which has all the Holmes stories as well as many other Arthur Conan Doyle works available.

My first favorite is The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

( I love the atmosphere of this story )

Please do comment and tell me what your Holmesian favorites are, or how you feel about this particular story and its radio/TV versions!

So, is this the official death knell of a) the vampire trend and b) the "Jane Austen with Zombies" trend in publishing? I hope so.

"Sarah Gray's WUTHERING BITES, a retelling of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff is a vampire, to John Scognamiglio at Kensington, in a very nice deal, for publication in September 2010, by Evan Marshall at Evan Marshall Agency (World)." (from Publisher's Lunch)

Oh, and 'a very nice deal' means $50,000 to $99,000, in other words about ten times the average. Yeah.

This vid premiered at the Vividcon challenge show. The challenge theme was IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination) and I couldn't resist.

Swing
Music: Club des Belugas
Fandom: Star Trek: TOS
Summary: All you got to do is swing.
Download: Big (.avi, 63 Mb, 640x480) | Medium (.mp4, 40 Mb, 640x480) | Small (.mp4, 18 Mb, 640x480) 
Right-click and save, please!

( Lyrics )

( Notes )

Feedback would be wonderful!