Some Random Foo

[newnumber6]

10 Questions, the Answers to Which I Will Genuinely Find Interesting
Stolen from greektoomey
Instructions:

[H]ere's what I'd like to see: answer the questions, here in the comments thread, or in your own journal. You don't have to answer them all. To perpetuate the meme, you could either re-post my questions in your journal and ask your friends-list, or, if you don't like my questions, you could make a post including these instructions and replacing some or all of my 10 questions with questions that you're really interested in seeing people answer.

1. If a magical wish-granting genie offered you a shoe-box and told you that whatever you wanted most that would fit inside that box would be what you'd find upon opening the lid, what would be in your box?

2. Who did you want to be when you were a kid? Who do you want to be now?

3. If you could ask your friends, family, partner(s), co-workers, or even other people on the street to change the way they interacted with you in one respect in order to make your life better, what would you ask them to change?

4. If you were to make the one change in your habits, behaviour, or lifestyle that be most likely to make your life better, what would you change?

5. What stops you from getting what you want out of life?

6. What's the one thing that has happened to you that has done the most towards making you stronger, better, and more capable?

7. What skill or talent do you most wish that you had?

8. Do you have any skills or talents that seemed useless or silly to you at first, but you now are glad that you have? What are they?

9. What one thing in the world are you most in love with right now?

10. If your life were a movie, what genre would it be in? Would you prefer to live a life that would make a different type of film?

My answers:
1. Well, since the magical wish granting genie is magic, I'd probably ask for a magical item. Maybe a key that can open portals into any fantastic or fictional world I can think of, or any other place on Earth, at will. Or a potion that grants me super powers, forever.
2. I wanted to be Sam Beckett, who, theorizing that he could time travel within his own lifetime, stepped into the quantum leap accelerator... and vanished! Or some other fictional hero. Usually the smart ones, though. Now? I want to be the guy with the magical shoebox genie.
3. I suppose I'd like it if my more casual acquaintences did more to try to draw me out and get to know me, because I suck at making such connections myself. Though I know it's my responsibility so it's not fair to ask them.
4. Remove my shyness, I guess.
5. The shyness, social anxieties. And to a certain extent, just plain laziness.
6. I don't consider myself particularly strong, better, or capable. So it's hard to say if anything that's happened to me didn't actually make me less capable. So I guess, uhm, when I started reading a lot.
7. Aside from social skills that I've already gone on about too much, or non-realistic skills, I'd really like to be able to draw really really well, but I can't get beyond stick figures. My vision just isn't too spatially oriented.
8. The ability to research things quickly on the internet.
9. In love with? I can't say I'd put anything in the category. But I love a lot of things, from family to SF, to TV shows
10. I'm not sure there is a genre. Maybe experimental plotless movie. Or tragedy of characters in their own flawishness. When what it should be is a high concept science fiction. If life were as it should be I'd be having sex with alien chicks while exploring the galaxy! Or fighting evil.


Watched Dawn of the Dead last night. Still prefer Shamblers to Runners, but the movie was enjoyable on the whole, save a couple annoying moments of characters being too stupid to live. Have some more thoughts on zombies, but will save for another post I think. Still, the movie gave my good, zombilicious dreams. Well, semi-zombilicious. Mostly the dreams involved evacuating Earth from an unnamed emergency. I think the emergency might have been zombies, but they never actually appeared, just worries about a sickness. Also, we evacuated through wormholes. I managed to get a goatload (yes, a goatload) of my stuff through the gate before the last portal closed.

And, finally, Book Foo.

Finished: Slow River, by Nicola Griffith
Started: Glasshouse, by Charles Stross

Thoughts on Slow River behind the cut. Some mild spoilers. Overall enjoyed it.

The book involves a rich girl, Lore, who, after a botched kidnapping, abandons her identity and takes up with Spanner, a charming criminal who's bad for her, and then afterwards tries to get her life back together.

The novel takes place in three timeframes, which sometimes bothers me, but I quickly learned the secret to telling which timeframe you're in at any time (the 'present' is first person, the recent past is third person, and childhood is third person, present tense), so it wasn't a problem and was well handled. Most of the plots were engaging, but I have to say I was actually most interested in the plot involving Lore's new 'straight' job in a water treatment factory, and the mechanics and corruption that go into the job at the cost of public safety.

One element of the book is that Lore is gay, and so of course is Spanner. It doesn't seem to be played salaciously in any way, or make a big deal that it's something shocking - it's written as just something else about the character you should take for granted. Which is good, although it does start to get a bit eyebrow raising towards the end when it starts to seem that almost every major female character is also a lesbian. I don't call it a flaw per se - there weren't too many, and most of them were introduced in contexts where it's only natural (Spanners ex and her new girlfriend, for example), but a couple of the revelations did sort of draw me out of the story for a second. But then I suppose it's understandable considering so much fiction's already been written with the opposite problem, and it may well be that, in the future of the book, people in general have become much more flexible about their own sexuality.

Anyway, the book was enjoyable throughout... probably wouldn't rank as one of my favorites, but I wasn't at all impatient to get through it and get to the next book either (as I sometimes am even in books I mildly enjoy).


Getting down to the last of the 'easy' Nebula reads. Of the ones left, 1 is a book I might have read anyway (Haldeman's Camoflauge), 1 is a book that I might have read but have never been able to find in used bookstores (Silverberg's A Time of Changes), and the rest are all either fantasy, Part X in a Series I have no real interest in, or both. So it'll be a bit of a slog to the finish line. But I'm getting closer.

Comments

[80sfiend.livejournal.com]

Cool meme. I may be stealing it. :D

I hope you get to do number 10 eventually. :D