 
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I went with Practicality on [personal profile] jesse_the_k's suggestion; technically the theme is "Calculated Risks" but I changed all the colors and a lot of the decorations so I'm not sure it counts as the same theme any more.

Here's the custom CSS, which is largely ditching a lot of small-caps and extra lines, and making it more boring color-wise. (Edit) Though, if anyone wants to fiddle, there's a thing that's been commented in the code.

CSS )

Thanks for the feedback, all!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I cannot figure out how to navigate the DW style chooser thing at all.

Is there an out-of-the-box DW style that has comment pages with bigger usernames on the comments listing than Tropospherical? Or, are you using an out-of-the-box style, and does it play nice on small screens? If so, which one?

(This is part of my project of trying to be on DW more.)
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I made a couple long comments elsewhere and I should archive them somewhere less ephemeral, for reference.

on defining fanfic )

on deciding whether to become a parent )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I bought the cheapest 8" Amazon tablet on sale this week for $50, because my fairly-new unloved tablet had problems and I had determined to save it only for reading comics and watching video, but it was getting worse and worse, and it was only $50. [*]

So far it's about what I expected--lousy screen, flimsy (the door for the SD card is not going to last the week--but it works. I will report back in more detail later.

The real point of this post is to link to two things:

1) how to install the Google Play store, so you can keep your paid-through-Google apps, which works just fine and does not use require use of adb or anything more complex;

2) how to install a launcher of your choice (I'm using Nova Launcher). I believe I had to power the device off and then back on before the home button detection option came on, but now it works just fine.

[*] It was a NVIDIA Shield K1, which has recently been discontinued; though old, it got good reviews across the board even in current roundups, and so I suspect I got a lemon, because it was a piece of shit from day one. Rebooting itself nearly daily during ordinary use, this exciting nonsense on a system update, etc. etc. Then a hairline crack on the screen edge dramatically expanded, rendering the area containing home and recent buttons unresponsive in the ordinary orientation, so use required constantly flipping, plus once you've got that much of a crack it's just a matter of time. I'll be putting it up on eBay for parts soon.
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
My Tweets for this panel were 50% despair at being unable to catch the names of things, as I said in the prior placeholder version of the post. However! Robert Killheffer put together this very thorough list, with links, of stuff mentioned at the panel, and gave me permission to share it! I have tried to revise my panel notes into something with minimal overlap with the document, so please do consult both.

S.A. Chakraborty, Haris Durrani, Robert Killheffer, Darcie Little Badger, Susan Matthews (leader)
Discussions of "genre classics" tend to focus mainly on modern Western works. This panel will discuss proto-genre narratives from antiquity and the pre-modern and early modern era in the world beyond Western Europe, including not only myths and legends but early authored works such as the Hamzanama (The Adventures of Amir Hamza), the Baital Pachisi (Vikram and the Vampire), and Fengshen Yanyi (The Creation of the Gods).

Read more... )

There, that's better. Thanks again to all the panelist, and especially Robert for compiling the list.
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I have a little bit more notes for this! Still not a ton, though.

Jeffrey A. Carver (leader), Glenn Grant, Kate Nepveu, Sonya Taaffe, Sheila Williams
Robots, golems, and other living machines appear human but can never become human, which makes them perfect vehicles for exploring concepts of sentience, emotion, and human nature. Many robots long to be human; it's much more rare to see one that loves being what it is. Far more fictional robots have gender identities than national or ethnic identities. They are often programmed to feel sexual desire but rarely designed to eat a meal or sniff a flower. How do our depictions of robots reflect our changing understandings of what it means to be alive?

I said in my intro that I'm fairly sure my signup for this was just "Murderbot!" and then a bunch of heart symbols, and rather that recap my rec from the panel, I wrote it up for booklog.

Read more... )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I was really not awake for this panel and so took almost no notes; this is extremely sketchy as a result, but better than nothing.

Phenderson Clark, Greer Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kate Nepveu, Naomi Novik
Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's Temeraire books take a slow and clever approach to a common issue with alt-historical fantasy: if magic has always existed, why have historical events gone essentially the same way that they did in our magicless world? Her focus on the familiar territory of Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars gradually broadens to include other regions that look very different. This panel will examine this and other techniques for integrating magic into history, including using the appearance or reappearance of magic as a timeline divergence point, limiting magic or paranormal entities to a particular region of the world, portraying paranormal communities or magic-users as hidden and secretive, and entirely reinventing history from the Neanderthals on up.

what I can remember )

Annnd that's all I can remember. Feel free to comment, either if you were there or if you want to continue the conversation!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
NOW the last one. Can I get to bed before 1 a.m. before the day with three programming items? Why am I doing this, anyway? (Because if I don't know it won't get done and I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Alas.)

Erik Amundsen, David Bowles, Rosemary Kirstein, Naomi Novik (leader), Nnedi Okorafor
Specialized and secret fields of knowledge create barriers to understanding and can become mechanisms of cultural control. They can also be foundations for resistance. They can support or destroy communities and instill gratitude or resentment. All these things could be said of both magic and science, and the wielders thereof. The tradition of pitting magic and science against each other goes back to Tolkien's anxieties about industrialization, but today's speculative works have moved beyond it to recognize that the two can coexist and are often used similarly as metaphors. We'll examine Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's mix of historical technology and dragons, Guest of Honor Nnedi Okorafor's mix of futuristic technology and sorcery, and other successful amalgamations and integrations.

more collated tweets )

Just under the wire before 1 a.m., go me!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I was going to say, last one for night, and then I remembered I went to three in a row but four total for day. Whee.

Lila Garrott (leader), Bart Leib, Natalie Luhrs, Sonya Taaffe, Vinnie Tesla
Our panelists muse on books that are really bad but in an amazing way! Genevieve Valentine's term "shitmazing" may be appropriate here. What makes something both terrible and great? Are these works worth analyzing and perhaps even emulating, or do they exist simply to be enjoyed (if that's the word) on their own merits (if that's the word)?

more tweets, getting less cleaned up as we go )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I am very very tired but I also need to hydrate and then remain upright for a while, so let me see how far I get in cleaning up my live-tweeting of panels.

First up:

Classic YA Book Club: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
Victoria Janssen (leader), Sandra Kasturi, Miriam Newman, Sonya Taaffe, Tamara Vardomskaya

panel notes )

If anything was insufficiently unpacked, or if you want to talk about it, come into the comments! (You don't need to have a DW account, just comment anonymous and sign your name or nickname or something at the bottom so we can have continuity of conversation.)
kate_nepveu: Ed in profile, pulling away cloak to reveal automail arm (FMA (voila!))
Spoilers for all versions of Fullmetal Alchemist.

So the Toast-commenters-in-exile have a Slack, and some people there proposed a Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood watch, which of course is entirely my jam. We're actually interleaving early episodes of FMA as an experiment, since FMA:B shortens some of the opening and does it in a weird order. Specifically:

episode order )

So tonight while waiting for laundry to go into the dryer, I had no brain for anything but some rewatch and live-blogging. Here, therefore, are notes about FMA 1 & 2 (and then I got sucked into semi-watching FMA:B to compare).

live-blogging of FMA 1 and 2, and also FMA:B 3 )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
1) We are renovating our house. We had no spare bedroom and our kitchen was falling to pieces, so we are a) gut-renovating the kitchen, b) expanding the mudroom off of the kitchen to include a bathroom with a shower and enough space between the sink and toilet that people over the age of five can comfortably sit on it, and c) expanding the little room above the mudroom into an actual bedroom, rather than a small low-ceilinged room good for nothing but random storage. The new bedroom will become SteelyKid's room (she and the Pip will have closets that back on to each other now; regretfully, I declined her request for a secret door between the closets), and SteelyKid's old room will become a guest room. (For instance, Chad's parents live two hours away, regularly come up for the day to visit . . . and then go back home again the same day.)

The end result will be great. The process has been . . . interesting. Getting the loan, for instance, involved regular and literal rage headaches on my part as speaker-to-the-mortgage-people. And while our contractors are awesome, the ridiculously wet weather we've been having delayed the start of construction until mid-May (they'd hoped to start in April), and then more rain while we were on vacation led them to advance some indoor work, so we came home to find our kitchen half-gutted and couldn't figure out where anything was. (It wasn't that much stuff, because we had been moving things out in preparation, but still. I wanted to cry.)

2) Oh yeah, vacation. We went to Mexico for a week with Chad's grandmother, who took her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids (except one grandkid + family, who couldn't make it) on a collective trip to a fancy all-inclusive resort. The kids had a great time with their Midwest cousins, who they'd never met, and spent a good 50% of their waking hours in a pool of some kind, and we enjoyed catching up with everyone. Check out the sillyheads with dolphins!

3) also I concussed myself and messed up my neck, but everything will be fine )

Edit: Chad has more detail about vacation in all its aspects.

4) Readercon! I will be there seven days from now. I have a schedule:

cut for length )

I will also be taking Safety Committee shifts--this will be my last con on the committee, I've handed in my resignation solely on the ground that I've been doing it for a long time now and it's time for me to move on.

So, given the panel times above, and the possibility that I may have to bolt off if the phone rings, a poll:

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 8

Are you going to be at Readercon?

Yes I am. . .
6 (75.0%)

. . . and we should try to get together!
4 (50.0%)

I might be, touch base with me later!
2 (25.0%)



(If you don't tick the second box, I will assume that you are entirely swamped and it would not be plausible, and I will hope to see you in passing.)

5) What with vacation, and the concussion, and making the non-demolished parts of the house fit for human habitation, and work, and Readercon prep, and staring balefully at my notes for the Books of the Raksura post I promised Tor.com pre-concussion . . . I have not read Twitter or DW in more than two weeks. I am sorry! I miss you all! It is just . . . a lot.

And now, we are taking the kids to an amusement park tomorrow, so I really need to go to bed.
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
So the first four episodes of season five of Steven Universe aired tonight as a "one hour special event." They will be re-airing individually throughout the week -- two tomorrow at 7:00, then one Wednesday & one Thursday.

Aside: my DVR didn't know what to do with a block that didn't have proper season/episode information attached and shoved it down at the bottom of the list, which made me think it hadn't recorded at first, that is, panic.

SPOILERS, SO MANY SPOILERS, ALL THE SPOILERS )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
These are available on demand through my cable provider this weekend, so I watched them all in a gulp tonight. (I was going to last night but I was done with Con or Bust stuff too late.) The episodes air Monday-Thursday this week; Season 5 premieres Memorial Day.

I don't know if I'll do individual episode breakdowns, as I'll be very very busy all week and away Thursday night to boot. So come back when you've seen them all!

spoilers for all five episodes )
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
Check either your cable's on-demand system or the CN app--the app is releasing next week's episodes today, and while my cable system (Spectrum, formerly Time Warner) isn't participating in the app, it does have all of new week's episodes available on-demand now, ending Monday, when they start airing on CN.

Eee! New Steven Universe tonight for me!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
Don't back that Kickstarter for a short film about slash fandom, because it's co-written and edited by Franzeska Dickson, who is not a person to be given a platform to talk about race in fandom.

Twitter threads: one, two, or I could just say "wrote that digustingly racist 16k meta (AO3-locked) last year", and a lot of you will know what I mean. Note that the second threads has screencap excerpts of the meta.
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
I have still basically not been here, sorry, but fyi:

Con or Bust is taking auction offers through tomorrow, Sunday April 23 (end of the day Eastern time).

Bidding starts Monday April 24!

There's a bunch of cool stuff up already, a few more things going up today, and, I hope, more coming in that just haven't been submitted yet. So check it out!

kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
My third live Welcome to Night Vale show. I still like the experience of "The Librarian" best, but the audience-participation part of this one was way more to my personal taste than "The Investigators" (and pretty self-evident from the title).

Unfortunately the big climax didn't quite land for me, but that's because I liked it better when (redacted) did it. And I do wish they wouldn't mix the music and sound effects so loud. But on the whole it was a very enjoyable 70 minutes.

Guests, which change from show to show, as I understand it, so not really spoilers, but just to be safe: tonight's guests )

The music was Erin McKeown, previously heard on the weather with "The Queer Gospel".

Finally, Cecil's pants really have to be seen to be believed.

Con or Bust-ery

Thursday, March 30th, 2017 08:03 am
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
News from the Con or Bust end of things:

1) Auction accepting offers now through April 23; bidding April 24 through May 7.

2) Sign up for the newsletter, which includes fandom news as well as Con or Bust stuff!

3) Read the annual report for 2016 and the board meeting minutes, which include my announcement that I am strongly considering not running for re-election to the Board in spring 2019 (ten! years!) and the Board's agreement that regardless, we should identify and encourage new candidates for the Board next year (and/or people who could start volunteering this year!), to bring new perspectives and to keep improving Con or Bust’s stability as an institution, not just my personal project.

I think that's all for now. *whooshes away*

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