Wild Unicorn Herd: Archive

Earth like planet can sustain life

“A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It’s called Gliese 581g, and the ‘g’ may very well stand for Goldilocks. Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that’s the right size and location for life.”

Read full article here.

Pretty sure this is when all the white people and a few POC in the background get into futuristic spaceships and leave.

Why yes I’m on the rag and I’m extra snarky why do you ask?

Sep 30, 2010342 notes

#Spaaace! #colonialism #in space no one can hear you snark

Sep 30, 2010902 notes

#kindaofftopic #magic: the gathering #gaming #fashion #…fashion?

Notes on “Momi Watu”

The world of “Momi Watu”, where there is a vast shortage of freshwater and the “Cold Water Wars” have led to government crackdowns, reminded me of some other sf works that imagine similar futures. Ecotastrophe is very common in science fiction, and I don’t hope to provide even an overview—these are just the works that came to mind as I was reading the story.

Pumzi (2009), a short film from Kenya which screened at last year’s Worldwide Short Film Festival. Set in postapocalyptic East Africa, the film is about a museum curator living in a tightly sealed environment where every drop of water is collected, tracked, and rationed. She breaks out in a desperate attempt to search for signs of life on the outside, which the authorities tell her is a complete desert. Highly recommended.
The Crystal Drop, Monica Hughes (1992). I remembered this one from my childhood (I read a lot of Hughes’ sf as a kid) and just looked it up now. It’s about a teenage girl and her younger brother who set off across a hostile, desertified Alberta in search of a verdant waterfall-filled paradise. I clearly did not remember the year it was set (friggin’ 2011) and it may well be full of fail that I didn’t catch as a kid. But hey, might as well give the “Alberta” tag a bit of use.
The Burning World, J. G. Ballard (1964); later published as The Drought. A book I remember as being trippy as fuck, read during my “let’s catch up on old sci-fi!” phase which was swiftly followed by my “oh my GAAAWD, I am fucking sick of sci-fi by old white men” phase; tiresome and cringey I think in the way that said sci-fi is, but hey, this book predicted marine garbage patches so there you go. That’s sf for you.

If anyone else has a favourite dread-filled, drought-based ecotastrophe, do send it along. Oh yeah, and Dune doesn’t count.

Sep 30, 20100 notes

#nisi shawl #water #Alberta #pumzi #africa #east africa #Kenya #j. g. ballard #monica hughes #sf

Sep 30, 20106 notes

#Janelle Monáe #nichelle nichols #star trek #fuck yeah

Dogs and Wolves

I was ready to trim down and post a review of The Gaslight Dogs, and then today I read Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus and it’s going to have to be a whole essay about postcolonial…stuff and cross-cultural contact…and the concept of “going native”…and transformation.

So, in the meanwhile, have a linkdump on both books!

The Gaslight Dogs

Review: Gaslight Dogs by Karin Lowachee / Tor.com – by jhameia.
Silver Goggles: Themes of Gaslight Dogs – jhameia’s more detailed follow-up essay. ’Ware spoilers.
Interview with Karin Lowachee « Beyond Victoriana – Ay-leen interviews the author.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Now, this book—three interlinked novellas really—came out in 1972, so there’s quite a lot of existing scholarship and some of it is in academic journals which I can’t access directly. But these are the online resources I’m starting with:

Ultan’s Library » Fifth Head of Cerberus – UL is a small but high-quality repository of essays on Wolfe.
Cave Canem – Wolfe scholar Robert Borski’s Fifth Head wiki.
The Urth Archives – the online form of the Gene Wolfe mailing list.

To X., who no doubt hoped this Tumblr, being devoted to POC in SF, would be a Wolfe-free zone: I’m so sorry.

Sep 29, 20100 notes

#gaslight dogs #karin lowachee #fifth head of cerberus #gene wolfe #postcolonialism #sf/f #my blathering #review #interview

Sep 29, 201029 notes

#offtopic #depression

Sep 28, 201010 notes

#Arts & Crafts #katamari damacy #gaming

Aaaaagh

Filter House is not in the public library system, nor in Chapters/Indigo [big national bookstore chain]. About a year after it came out I went and asked for it at Bakka-Phoenix, but they hadn’t even heard of it; it’s possible they’ve got it in since, but at the moment I don’t even know if I will have the money to pay rent, let alone buy frivolous things like books.

(Yes, I know about the Internet; but I don’t have a credit card, or money, so it makes it kind of hard.)

Sep 28, 20102 notes

#nisi shawl #sf

Sep 28, 20104 notes

#cover love #sf/f #steampunk

jhameia:

The book is out December 29, 2010, but you should click through to the Table of Contents anyway <3

LESBIANS? STEAMPUNK? A TON OF WOMEN OF COLOUR AUTHORS? THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS.

SORRY ABOUT THE CAPSLOCK. VERY EXCITED.

Sep 28, 20104 notes

#sf/f #steampunk #wanna read

zuky:

Speaking of Anglos Valiantly Aiding Tragic Awe-inspiring Races, Hollywood mega-director and Good White Liberal James Cameron toured the Alberta oilsands today, before a scheduled meeting with First Nations and Metis leaders:

“I’m still taking in. I’m still in sponge mode, you know, sort of finding out how all this works and getting my arms around it,” Cameron replied when asked for his initial thoughts of the oilsands on the second day in the area.

He was headed off to Fort Chipewyan Tuesday afternoon, where he is to meet with local First Nations and Metis chiefs before a community meeting.

He’s expected to return to Edmonton on Wednesday for a meeting with Premier Ed Stelmach.

“I’ve gotten a lot of information from a lot of different sources and all of those sources have their own specific agenda, so I want to just try to get a balanced view of what’s going on up here,” he said Tuesday.

He was joined by Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner and Greg Stringham, vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, as well as Syncrude and Cenovus representatives.

Flying over the oilsands, Cameron said it’s easy to see how much of the natural landscape is being affected, so it’s important to understand what the short- and long-term impacts of that are in terms of health and environment for the First Nation communities.

You know who’s capable of having “a balanced view”? White people! People of color don’t have the “balanced view” faculty. We’re all magic, mystery, and emotionalism. That’s why you need white lead characters in all those movies about strange exotic lands and cultures. You need a rational person with a balanced view. Only such a person can be a saviour.

Perhaps Cameron will end up screaming “NOOOOO!!!” with one arm outstretched and the other arm cradling an aboriginal mother and child, while the petroleum extraction proceeds as before. He will then storm into the office of Greg Stringham, vice president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, slam his fist on the desk, and seethe, “We had an agreement with those people!! We gave them our word!!” Upon which Stringham will lean back in his executive chair with an icy stare, holding a fountain pen in both hands, and reply, “Oh grow up, Jim.”

Or maybe he’s planning a documentary on the subject. Who knows.

Sep 28, 201016 notes

#avatar #Cancon #alberta #fuck yeah zuky #first nations/native/aboriginal/indigenous

jhameia:

With stars, even!

Whinny if you love scifi!

Yes. No affiliation to this blog, just for the record.

Sep 28, 20103 notes

#meta #fashion #hoofbeats and sparkles in the distance #sf

Sep 28, 201063 notes

#gender expression #gaming #steampunk #fuck yeah #tentacles

tiaramerchgirl:

For decades, geeks were ostracized, picked on, laughed at and punished by the sun’s harmful UV rays. But there is only so long that a people can be kept down before they rise up against their oppressors; and, indeed, the dawn of the 21st century has seen the ascendancy of geeks and geek culture.

We now celebrate that rise to power–and let’s face it, nerds pretty much run everything now–with w00tstock, a special event for geeks of every stripe. Television host/special-effects artist Adam Savage (“MythBusters”), actor/author/blogger Wil Wheaton (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Stand By Me”) and music-comedy duo Paul and Storm (The Internet, Da Vinci’s Notebook) present a night of songs, readings, comedy, demonstrations, short films, special guests, and other clever widgets born from and dedicated to the enthusiasms, obsessions, trials and joys of geek pride.

This is the dawning of the Age of Geekdom–and its voices will ring true at w00tstock.

I love the idea of w00tstock, but damn, what’s with the appropriation of anti-oppressive politics? Besides, it’s hard to out-geek South Asians, and we all have enough melanin to beat UV rays ;P

also where are the women?

<sarcasm>lol, everyone knows that all geeks are white guys and white guys are the last group it’s okay to discriminate against.</sarcasm>

Sep 28, 20103 notes

#music #kyriarchy harshes my squee #hoofbeats and sparkles in the distance

Your #offtopic tag bemuses me. It's tumblr. There's a such thing as on-topic?

Well, the purpose of this tumblr is for POC/non-white/mixie nerd stuff…it’s not my personal blog! So I try to stick to the theme, and most off-topic stuff ends up in my likes. Every now and then, though, you have to let loose. Like on Tuesdays, apparently.

Sep 28, 20101 note

Was it the atheist movement? It sounds like the sort of shit a Certain Type of Atheist would pull. (ref-ing this post of yours, btw: http://wildunicornherd.tumblr.com/post/1205087211 )

GOLD STAR FOR DORIAN.

What can I say in my defence? Only that I have tried not to repeat the mistakes of the past, and that I’ve learned humility is a virtue and intelligence is not.

Sep 28, 2010-1 notes

#off topic tuesday!

“If this was racism, there would be no hope, because people are not going to change their skin color. But this is culturism. People can change their culture.” —

Brooklyn Tea Party President John Press, explaining why he favors “culturism” rather than “racism”.

This quote is worth a moment’s examination. This is a New York white conservative saying that there’s no hope for “racism” because you can’t make everybody white, which would obviously be the ideal. But what you can do is try to get everybody to believe in white supremacism, not through “racism” but through “culturism” which celebrates the culture of white supremacism. It’s kinda that simple. (zuky)

This is the same damn reasoning that was behind the residential schools. It’s a pretext for forced assimilation and cultural genocide.

It reminds me of a conversation I heard between a group of older white men discussing Toronto’s “black problem”. They declared they were not racist because they did not take exception to black people’s race but to their inferior culture.*

* They were members of a group allied with an organization I left around the same time after a stint moderating their messageboard, which mostly involved trying to tamp down the members’ Islamophobic vitriol, till I realized they thought of it as “a feature, not a bug”.

There was also a pervasive pattern of men brushing off women members’ feminist critiques of various principles and rhetoric.

A gold star to anyone who correctly guesses what movement this was a part of!

Sep 28, 2010216 notes

#racism harshes my squee #kindaofftopic #off topic tuesday!

“Now I am going to make a statement. I don’t know whether it fits into the category of other people’s statements or not. But whether it fits into other people’s categories or not, it must fit into some category, so in that respect is no different from other people’s statements. Let me try making my statement.

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between being and nonbeing, I don’t know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have said something, but I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or has said nothing.

We have already become one, so how can I say anything? But I have just said that we are one, so how can I not be saying something? The one and what I said about it make two, and the two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can’t tell where we’ll end up, much less an ordinary person. If by moving from nonbeing to being we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being?” —

庄子 Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE), “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”, Inner Chapters (translated by Burton Watson)

Chuang Tzu is the disciple of Lao Tzu, though unlike his teacher’s dense eloquence, Chuang Tzu loves to mess around with verbosity and ridicule the pomposity of great teachings. His discussions of Tao, or The Way, can be serious and unironic, but his manner of conducting these discussions tends to be flippant and he mocks the uptight rigidity of Confucianism at every turn. (zuky)

FUCK YEAH CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. HERE. HAVE AN OVERVIEW OF ZHUANGZI.

As I dimly recall, one of the big differences between the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions is that, while major Western philosophical works like Republic and Leviathan are pretty much confined to post-secondary education (unless you went to a really good public school), major Chinese philosophical works like the Laozi (Dao De Jing) and the Zhuangzi have been far more accessible and publically influential. Then again, this is partly because of cultural differences with regards to the religion/philosophy divide or lack thereof. Also, it’s been a SUPER LONG TIME since I was in school so take all this with a grain of salt/feel free to tell me how utterly mistaken I am.

Sep 28, 20105 notes

#philosophy #offtopic #off topic tuesday!

A just-launched website with

updates on the situation
news feeds
Twitter feed
city and TCHC contact information for residents
an upcoming “wishlist” feature for residents who need special items
links to people in the community also covering the news.

Sep 28, 20101 note

#toronto #Cancon #wellesley fire #off topic tuesday!

Sep 28, 201029 notes

#face of fandom #H2G2 #sf