This icon has more referents than usual.

Me: I was telling a story and mentioned her friend Harold and then turned to my mom and said, "Not actually a giraffe," and she broke up laughing. Grandma sort of patiently sat there and waited for us to start making sense again.
timprov: I hope someone's bringing her food.

Five question meme is back for an encore.

aliseadae is doing the five questions meme again. Ask or be asked in comments.

1) What book character would you like to be friends with in real life? Friendship is hard, because it relies on particularities of personality. I have been missing Patrick from the Secret Country books, even though right now he'd be one of my friends of whom I would think, "Oof, not now, Patrick," and put off answering an e-mail unless it had something time-sensitive in it.

2) What is your favorite mathematical concept? The relationship of e, i, pi, 1, and 0 is nice.

3) What is your favorite fairy tale? At the moment I am turning over The Twelve Dancing Princesses in my head for a thing, but I don't know that the underside of it will look the same.

4) Tell me about a good memory from college. Sometimes on Saturday mornings I would get up and go to the library, up on the second floor, and I would get whatever I wanted and look out on campus, and there would be nobody in the library and nobody walking around that early and it would be so quiet. There were lots of good people in my life in college, but on the down side, there were lots of good people in my life in college. And having an entire floor of library and view out over campus and the edge of the Minnesota River Valley to myself was really, really lovely.

5) If you could go anywhere in space or on earth and observe something with no harm to yourself, where would you go? (e.g. the horsehead nebula, the center of a volcano) Right now I am weirdly water-focused. So I am thinking the Marianas Trench, with a good light source and some good recording devices. Alternately under the ice crust of Europa if Europa actually has ice crust and water.

My 4th St. Schedule 2012

Fourth Street is coming! I am the stage of tired where I am doing quasi-useful things because the actually useful things take too much energy. My current quasi-useful thing is posting my Fourth Street panel schedule. Here's what I'm on:

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM: Politics, Complexity, and Fantasy. Marissa Lingen (Moderating), Marie Brennan, Doug Hulick, Sarah Monette, Susan Palwick. Fantasy sometimes seems to have a love/hate relationship with politics: It often wants to deal with grand political issues (revolutions, alliances, continent-spanning conflicts) without addressing the complexities of governance. What challenges do authors face when trying to depict political scenarios? Are there modes of governance or types of conflict that are particularly challenging to work into fiction? Do long-running series, like C.J. Cherryh's Atevi books, allow for more robust depictions of politics and diplomacy?

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM: Science, Technology, and Fantasy. Ellen Klages (Moderating), Marissa Lingen, Chris Modzelewski, Sarah Monette, Catherine Schaffer. There is a tendency for fantasy to depict worlds mired in technological stasis, or to imagine magic and technology as polar opposites. Even when authors combine the two, as in more fantastic end of steampunk, they often choose to reproduce a subset of ideas from our world and prior art. What are some of the sources of this approach toward technology in fantasy? What sorts of narrative opportunities open up when you introduce disruptive technologies, magical or otherwise, into a fantasy story?

Notice a common trend there? That's right, I am 4th St.'s Officially Designated Dreaded Morning Person. Who can we stick on the first panel of the day? Unlucky people...and Mris! (truepenny, I think, is in the former category. Bring her croissants and sympathy. Unless she doesn't like croissants, or unless she is another Designated Dreaded Morning Person.)

Honestly, my worry is not making it to morning panels. My worry is making it through everything else. There's nothing I want to skip at 4th St....and I don't have enough energy right now to make it through normal days without not-entirely-voluntary naps, and I'm terrible at naps. So we'll see how that goes. I will do the best I can. I will attempt not to use up critical Mris reserves. And we will all be good to each other as best we can, and we will have a 4th St.