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hamilton au
There’s a part of me that wants to go check out all the Hamilton fic that I’m sure exists, all the alternate universes where things went…better. And the rest of me is like NO NO NO because that way lies doom.
But there’s also the part of me that keeps thinking of the Neil Gaiman bit where somebody is talking to a late 20th century Earth person & says something to the effect of, “Who’s President? Ah. Clinton? And Bush before him, and Reagan…? Ah. Yes. You live in one of *those* timelines…”
And I keep thinking, maybe that’s it. Maybe we live in one of *those* timelines. Maybe it’s not Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Nixon, maybe it went wrong a long time before that: “Ah. Hamilton married Eliza? Had the affair? Wrote the Reynolds Papers? Shot by Burr? You poor bastards, you got stuck in one of *those* timelines.”
Because you could, y’know. Draw a thru-line from Hamilton’s disgrace to Trump’s rise. It’d be conjecture, the world has more moving parts than that, but you could. And if you can draw those lines, you can draw a whole different line along where it might have gone differently.
Maybe only writers do this to themselves, but it does make me want to explore that whole AU.
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Recent Reads: The Art of Elfquest
Several months ago I discovered a Kickstarter for three deluxe Wendy Pini books, two on Elfquest and one on her other work.
Reader, I agonized. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, require more Elfquest stuff. The completionist in me shrieks otherwise, but the truth is I got rid of most of my Elfquest originals before we moved, and I never did get several of the later Father Tree Press graphic novels (which I regret, actually, but I really still don’t like the coloring in them), but anyway, ‘completionism’ wasn’t a valid answer, especially at $100 a pop for the books, plus international shipping which added a shocking amount to the overall price tag.
Yeah, so obviously I bought them. The two Elfquest books, anyway, because I could just barely justify those but not LINE OF BEAUTY, the book about her other projects.
I got THE ART OF ELFQUEST last week and it’s *stupendously* beautiful.
There’s not, truth be told, a great deal of new material in it, not for somebody who’s been collecting Elfquest-related material for (good lord) thirty years, but it is so. so. pretty.
There *were* a handful of things I hadn’t encountered before, art or commentary about the art (one drawing that I’d seen before said it was done just after Wendy Pini finished her BEAUTY AND THE BEAST graphic novels, and points out that both Cutter and Skywise look like Ron Perlman in the drawing…and they do! Bahaha! And another that I’d probably seen before mentioned it was a preview/teaser thing for the current storyline, THE FINAL QUEST…but it was done in 1998!), so even for an old-timer (albeit one who’s fallen off the wagon this century) there’s a bit of new material, but mostly, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s about the utterly beautiful presentation.I actually sat around hugging it, in between looking through it. It’s so pretty I regretted not biting the bullet and getting LINE OF BEAUTY, too, and I’m going to have to rectify that failure because SO PRETTY. SO. PRETTY!
If Flesk Publications wants to do a complete deluxe hardcover graphic novel print run of Elfquest after the Final Quest is done, I will be right there standing in line and shouting SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
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don’t tell me truth hurts
…little girl
’cause it hurts like hellI wouldn’t have thought I’d have two posts to make about David Bowie, but then, I wouldn’t have really thought I’d have *one* post to make about him, so what do I know?
I’ve spent most of the last two evenings, when I’m not writing, going through my FB friends’ list and listening to all the Bowie songs they’ve linked to. Or rather, that was my plan. What actually happened was that on Monday evening a friend posted, “So I’ve been working on this list all day. One song from every Bowie album that, for one reason or another, is my choice today. Believe me, it wasn’t easy,” and I’ve actually spent the last two evenings listening to those 25 songs.
I knew *one* of them: Heroes. I’d heard two, possibly three, but although I own The Next Day I haven’t listened to it enough to *know* any of the songs, and I haven’t even finished listening to Blackstar yet. I fell in love with about half a dozen of them (Silly Boy Blue, Aladdin Sane, Be My Wife, Absolute Beginners, Beat On Your Drum, Strangers When We Meet, Slow Burn, nevermind, it must have been twelve or fifteen of them that really struck me), and listening to how each album was entirely its own thing, and the influences of the year/era on each of them, was just so cool.
Anyway, so I’m planning on seeing if I can get FB to cough up those individual songs people have posted (and still are posting), because I don’t think I saw a single repeat out of the dozens posted. Not even from Labyrinth, which, given the kinds of people I’m friends with, is sort of amazing. So I want to listen to as many of the songs as I can, the ones that were what people reached for the day that particular bit of music died.
David Bowie’s Walk-Off Grand Slam is what I was reaching for on Monday when I posted, except I would neither have gone with the sports metaphor or the essay-length introspection (because I didn’t :)). But it’s what I wanted to say.
Here’s Swan River Press’s full David Bowie playlist (YouTube links):
Blackstar (2016) – “I Can’t Give Everything Away”
The Next Day (2013) – “Boss of Me”
Reality (2003) – “Pablo Picasso”
Heathen (2002) – “Slow Burn”
“hours…” (1999) – “Thursday’s Child”
Earthling (1997) – “Dead Man Walking”
Outside (1995) – “Strangers When We Meet”
The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) – “The Mysteries”
Black Tie White Noise (1992) – “Jump They Say”
Never Let Me Down (1987) – “Beat of Your Drum”
Tonight (1984) – “Absolute Beginners”
Let’s Dance (1983) – “Criminal World”
Scary Monsters (1980) – “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”
Lodger (1979) – “Look Back in Anger”
“Heroes” (1977) – “Heroes”
Low (1977) – “Be My Wife”
Station to Station (1976) – “Station to Station”
Young Americans (1975) – “Somebody Up There Likes Me”
Diamond Dogs (1974) – “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)”
Pin Ups (1973) – “Port of Amsterdam”
Aladdin Sane (1973) – “Aladdin Sane”
Ziggy Stardust (1972) – “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”
Hunky Dory (1971) – “Quicksand”
The Man who Sold the World (1970) – “She Shook Me Cold”
Space Oddity 1969 – “Janine”
David Bowie 1967 – “Silly Boy Blue” -
home from Octocon
We are home from a lovely weekend at Octocon, where we saw many friends and had good conversations.
I brought about eight pounds of fudge to the con, and passed it out to the attendees of the Golden Blasters film festival on Friday night. Probably the best two bits of that were saying to people, “If you’re allergic to anything except gluten you can’t eat this, but it’s gluten-free,” and having one woman LIGHT UP when she was told it was gluten-free and safe for her to eat. (Eggs, dairy, corn, nuts: basically all those things go into my fudge unless I’m making Special Batches.) The other best bit was handing a box of vanilla-and-cranberry fudge over to my friend (and guest of honour!) Maura McHugh, who doesn’t like chocolate and who put on an expression of Noble Acceptance of Not Getting Fudge when I came through waving the batch of chocolate fudge. But I was prepared for her, and she shrieked and leapt up and hugged me. :)
The next two days I put the rest of the fudge on the Dublin 2019 sign-up/support table and suggested that if they wanted to put a tip box out for supporting the WorldCon bid so people could throw a coin in, in exchange for a piece of fudge, and they did, and collected, I don’t know, €20, anyway. And I collected rather a lot of swooning admirers, many of whom were especially taken with the non-chocolate fudges. :) I also brought a few small jars of apple jelly, many of which also brought in a few quid for the WorldCon bid, so that’s cool. :)
I was on five panels, plus judged the Golden Blasters, which meant a late night and an early morning for judging purposes, and interviewed by guest of honor Emma Newman for her podcast Tea & Jeopardy, which was SO! MUCH! FUN! We had a packed audience for it, and just really enjoyed ourselves enormously. I’ll link to the episode when it’s available, and hope you all have as much fun watching it as we did doing it. :)
So it was a very very busy weekend, although strangely I mostly feel exhausted because the hotel we stayed at had really extraordinarily bad beds, so every time either one of us moved springs popped loudly and shoved into our various body parts and it was just awful, and we didn’t sleep well.
I’d gone into the weekend vaguely thinking I’d probably mostly survive on the tempura shrimp lunch they had on the menu last year, and was surprised to find the menu had completely changed. I was also mildly confused that the bar layout and whatnot seemed significantly different, but I wasn’t really sure I was remembering last year properly, so I supposed I could somehow be wrong. Somewhere around dinner time tonight, though, I realized that last year there *was* no Octocon; that it had been Shamrokon, the European convention, and that it had in fact been held in an entirely different venue, hence the completely different menu and bar layout. Heh. :)
I’m going to bed now. :)
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dorktastic fangirl squee!
Yesterday for some reason Scalzi was listing his 5 favourite John Cusack teen movies and I volunteered that mine was The Journey of Natty Gann.
Meredith Salenger, the actress who played Natty, responded with an “Awesome!” and I am now totally full of dorktastic fangirl squee. OMG. #dorktastic
Seriously, that movie could be the place my great love of unrequited/impossible love stories comes from. Even now I think Natty and Harry’s story was utterly heartbreaking in the best angstful way possible, and of course in my head I wrote MILLIONS of stories about how they find each other again but no I am absolutely not looking for fanfic of that because if it wasn’t perfectly done I would hate it forever so no. o.o
But I do still love the movie, even a lifetime later, and I’m all dorky and happy now. #beams
