I know who I am, I know how I look

The mirror lies.

Need to cover my face. At least my eyes are pretty, or so I'm told. So vain, so vain.

Never said outright before, for fear of accusations of bias, of accusations of vested interest, for fear of reaction. I don't care, for myself - I'm almost free. If you don't care I'll be freer. Still won't be explicit 'cause that's not who I am, at least now I'm not trying to conceal.

I mean to be published someday (no visionary genius, just having fun, my passion), whatever will they think of this if someday I'm notable enough to be worth looking up? At least it's honest. I try.

Egan Quote of the Day

    Not long after the five thousandth iteration, the orphan's output navigator began to fire - and a tug of war began. The output navigator was wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that showed a response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining itself to the polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both navigators were wired with a drive to bring each other into alignment, to connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak in the same place - a useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphan's chatter of speech and icons flowed straight back to the library, which completely ignored it.
    Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator sent repressor signals into the change-discriminator networks, undermining the attraction of the library's mesmerising show, bullying the input navigator out of its rut. Dancing a weird, chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping from scape to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to talk to.

From Diaspora by Greg Egan

    I do not think this is an example of particularly beautiful writing but it does relate well to how I sometimes feel and so here it is. This, here, is roughly the extent of my social life, at least until I find some manner of paid employment. So please forgive me if I chatter incessantly.

    Egan is one of my favourite science fiction writers (he seems to think the world works the way I think it works so maybe I am biased) and one of the hardest out there, so consider yourself warned. I know I could never write in that mode. It sure is fun to read though. If anyone would like to try a sample of Egan's writing, here is The Moral Virologist (the link was found through the author's own website so don't worry, it's not stealing to read).. The first time I read that one I had to put the book down and get my breath back. It is one of the few he wrote in which the protagonist is not an atheist
    He also scores points with me for not using lesbians as his token homosexual characters (as so many male writers do). Actually, so far as I can tell he does not have token homosexual characters at all - character sexuality only seems to come into play where it is relevant to the story and he still has a fraction approximately matching real life. Treatment of sex (as with everything else) in Egan's stories could probably be best described as utterly unromantic.
    Speculation on the future of sex and gender forms part of his novels Distress, Diaspora and Schild's Ladder and it was from those I learned of the gender-neutral pronoun Ve (ve/ver/vis/vis/verself), which he may or may not have invented (must try to find out). I expect to use it over the alternatives, if only because it was the first I was exposed to.

    Now if you will excuse me, having attempted to recontextualise the above quote to create new meaning I have taken a step on the dark path to becoming my own sworn enemy and must now commit ritual suicide.

    Farewell, cruel world.

X-Men 3

This review has fairly cemented the direction of my anger at the filmmakers and not the characters. Also, I apologise to the first film for thinking it might not be that much better than the third.

Notes from The Seventh

[Figured I may as well repost this since X-Men came up again]

Out and about yesterday and – oh! - what fantastical adventures I had. Haven't been clothes shopping for ages so I collected some much needed new skirts and, as is becoming my habit, a new book. This one was for my younger sister rather than me, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde, though she's offered to let me read it when I get the chance (I think I'm free sometime next May).

I did have some fun wishing people a 'happy.end of the world' in honour of the date. Too bad no one seemed to notice. And to cap it all off I saw X-Men III – The Last Stand (it is kind of like a pointy rock). A very inadvertantly themed day punctuated by reading the short story Coccoon (part of my Egan reading kick) while waiting for the movie to start (that'll show me for buying tickets early and then finishing my business soon after)

The movie might well have been the least of what I got up to but it also seems the easiest to talk about so that is what you are going to get. It seems to help to go into the theatre expecting disappointment; I think this one was not as good as the second and probably not the first either but I still enjoyed it (weep for poor Summer Snow, tragically born without taste). I lost a fair bit of respect for Magneto in this one. Even if he is the villain I had (mistakenly?) thought he was intended to be an intelligent and sympathetic one. He clearly should have expected plastic weapons and he could have organised his forces in a more effective manner (Why would anyone voluntarily take unnecessary losses? For the sake of a clever line, apparently). I blame one of my pet peeves – characters behaving inconsistently to force the story into the desired shape.

My favourite character is still Mystique (watch X2 to see what a minion should be). If I could choose the power of any of the mutants to have for myself it would probably be hers (though Wolverine's healing is pretty neato too). I wonder if those two things are related? Too bad she's barely in this one. Still can't decide if I'm angry with the filmmakers or the characters for some of the things that happen in this one. Depends if I come down on the side of 'in character' or 'out of character' really. I'm no fan of the comics so I may well come down on the wrong side.

Weird narrative deja vu thingy (not mentioned here previously, no need to look) struck again – when I saw the final shot before the end credits there was a strong feeling of having seen it before. Time to go now and try to solve my new problem; now that I have new skirts I have no tops to go with them. The saga continues...