juliet

L has now reached the age where if I say "Do you want to come with me to...?" he says Yes, enthusiastically, without asking any more about it (I am choosing to take this as an indication that my previous suggestions have largely hit the spot so he now trusts me, rather than as an indication that he has no discernment), so yesterday morning we went off to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition currently on at the Tate. (He was responsible for 'The Weather Project', still my favourite ever Turbine Hall installation.)

( Art! )

Tremendously exciting novel-related news last week: The Deep And Shining Dark was on the Locus 2018 Recommended Reads list (under First Novel). I was very surprised by this but obviously pleasantly so (apart from a brief bout of anxious imposter-syndrome-ness). It got a good write-up in the accompanying critics' round-ups in the magazine as well, from Graham Sleight.

I'm working on the sequel now and hoping to get it to the publishers around May, once I've finished the current vast structural rewrite/rearrangement, done another one to sort out all the things I messed up or introduced during the course of this one, and then tidied everything up properly afterwards. Onwards, onwards.

And in further SF news, I finally got around to collating some of my own recommended reads from last year.

Mirrored from Juliet Kemp.

I received the sad news, a month or so ago, that the Book Smugglers, my lovely publishers for A Glimmer Of Silver, my YA SF novella about second contact and choosing your responsibilities, would be moving away from for-sale publishing. As such, they planned to take all their short stories, novellas, and novels off sale at the end of the year.

But the good news is that they’ve been super helpful in handing me back the rights and helping me with self-publishing, so A Glimmer Of Silver is now available again from all the usual places where e-books are sold. The paperback is also forthcoming in the next couple of days, via Amazon.

So if you haven’t yet read A Glimmer Of Silver, now might be a good time to fix that.

I have reached a milestone: my eyes have stopped getting more short-sighted (in fact this happened a while ago; my prescription's been fairly stable for a few years now) and started getting less short-sighted. Or, in fact, more long-sighted. I am given to understand that at some point this will mean I need reading glasses whilst simultaneously not actually getting me to the point where I don't need glasses for distance vision (my sight is fairly bad so that would take quite a lot), but happily I am not there just yet.

I celebrated this by dropping a larger sum of money than I intended to on *two* pairs of glasses: one with light-reactive lenses, and one without because I'm not sure I wholly trust the light-reactive thing. But prescription sunglasses are a PITA with all the putting on/taking off, so I hope it will be worth it.

ION, I sold a story to The Future Fire! It will be out sometime next year, possibly February. And I got a good review for the novel; and although the people who published my novella decided to stop publishing things, they've handed back the rights and given me all the files so I can self-publish with absolute minimum hassle. So that could be worse.

This weekend I was at Nine Worlds, where I broke AND dislocated my toe (two for the price of one!) by accidentally kicking L in the back of the foot when he ran in front of me. He didn't even notice, but I guess it was a really unlucky angle for me. Happily we were on our way home anyway at that point, so I phoned doop to meet us on the tube, handed L over on the Jubilee Line, and went to Guy's Urgent Care.

Nurse: well we wouldn't usually X-ray for a broken toe, and it *might* just be bad bruising rather than a dislocation.
Me, via thought bubble: honestly I am pretty sure it is dislocated, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered coming in.
Me, out loud: I can't bend it, and really it doesn't *feel* the same way as the last twice I broke it.

I was correct, well done me, 100% for diagnosis, 0% for NOT BREAKING BONES YOU IDIOT.

Anyway. That was Friday, which happily was the only day L was coming with me; I was OK-if-sore-and-tired hobbling round on Sat and Sun on my own, but would have had no hope of keeping up with L. Prior to that, L demonstrated his Uranium costume to people -- he had alpha particles, to decay with, and swap-in acetates of the uranium decay chain for his T shirt -- and spent a lot of time in the kids' space. He also hung out peacefully behind me while I did a panel first thing (well done him!), and came along to the fountain pen meet-up and showed people his nice marker pens.

Saturday I went to a talk on dystopian fashion in film; a Harry Potter and the Cursed Child panel which was just lovely; a bit of Top of the SFF Cops (Vimes won, as was proper); a bit of "This IS your grandmother's knitting" (about historical knitting stuff); a Whedon sing-along which had too much Dr Horrible and not enough Buffy; and the Black Sails panel which had ACTUAL LUKE ARNOLD on it! (I will write up my notes on that one later this week for interested parties.)

The Cabaret in the evening was good fun; I gather the disco was good fun, but as I couldn't dance & was also exhausted, I went home. (WOE. SADNESS.)

Sunday I saw a little bit of a panel about social media and art, which was interesting; a bit of one about mental health in SFF; the whole of one about the portrayals of migration in SFF, which featured Jeannette Ng, Aliette du Bodard, and Jo Lindsay Walton, who were all great; and finished up with "Inhumanity?" about non-human beings in SFF, which fired up a bunch of interesting thoughts in my head.

Then I spent a lovely few hours hanging out in the bar with lovely people, which is the correct sort of end to a con. Hurrah.

(I really could have done without the broken toe though.

Mirrored from Juliet Kemp.

My novel The Deep And Shining Dark (Book One of the Marek Series) was released last Friday! It’s currently available as an ebook from various retailers; the print version will be out in September.

You know something’s wrong when the cityangel turns up at your door….

I watched a lot of people sliding around on snow and ice last week while I was ill, and I found myself getting interested in the different ways of scoring this. NB I am not at all expert in any of this, though I have very basic skating/skiing/snowboarding experience; my perspective is that of the casual viewer.

First up, and simplest, we have things that are one-off races, with multiple people starting at the same time on the same course, like snowboard cross or speed skating, where the winner is the one who crosses the line first. Falling over is a bad idea here, but only because it slows you down. If everyone else falls over too (not wholly out of the question in either sport, though I think the most I saw was 5 out of 6 snowboarders falling over), then you could win or qualify with an objectively 'slow' time. Speed skating complicates things by penalising people a lot, making it more possible that you could fall over, cross the line a minute or so later, and still get bumped up into medal or qualifying position. I don't know if snowboard cross riders are better than speed skaters at not cheating, or if the attitude in snowboard cross is "if you get cut up, that's your tough luck"; my guess based on half an hour of watching would be the latter. (Snowboard cross is bloody great to watch, just saying.)

Biathlon seems to vary a bit in how they manage it; sometimes it's a straight race, sometimes staggered starts, but same deal, fastest wins. They too have penalties, but in this case it's to weight the importance of accuracy in the shooting bit, otherwise you could just fire off your rounds as fast as possible, miss all 5 times, and beat the person who was slightly slower but more accurate. This means we're moving away from "fastest is best" to "we think other factors are important too".

Luge and skeleton are speed races, but unlike the above sports, you get multiple goes. But every go counts; you're rated on the total time taken for all 4 of your runs, not for the fastest one. So it's not just speed that counts, it's reliability. It also allows for the fact that times on the luge/skeleton run are measured to the thousandth of a second, that differences between people are tiny, and that very small mistakes can make a significant difference. So you can allow for everyone having, say, one duff run, and still expect that the winner will both be most reliably the fastest, and have the fewest duff runs.

Moving on, you get the sports that are judged by, well, judges. Halfpipe, slopestyle, big air, that kind of thing. (And ice skating, but we'll get to that.) I only watched the snowboard versions but it works the same for skiing, it just looks less cool[0]. Three runs as standard, but unlike luge/skeleton, you just use your best run. So you can cock up the first two and then pull something spectacular out of the bag on run 3 and win. (Indeed, most people will fall on at least one run.) The advantage to this is that it encourages people to take risks, because if you screw up, you can have another go and this one won't count. But falling is marked really, really harshly; if you do 4 fantastic tricks on a halfpipe run then fall on number 5, you'll get a better mark than the person who fell on trick 2, but you're not going to be bothering the top ranks. Landing badly without falling is marked pretty harshly, too. So the marking system encourages risk-taking, but only to the point that you think you can land it, and land it smoothly, 1/3 or 2/3 times. (Halfpipe marks are also explicitly weighted towards altitude achieved above pipe, effectively to make riders go faster and limit how many tricks they can fit into a single run.)[1]

Which brings us to figure skating, in its various forms, all of which have a massively complicated two-part judging system which weights various things, but all of which also only have a single try per part (there are two parts, but as demonstrated this year by Nathan Chen, if you cock up one part badly enough, you can't save yourself in the second; it's a total score deal). Now, I do not by any stretch of the imagination fully comprehend figure skating marking, because it is pretty damn baffling, but the gist of it is that you get a technical mark, which strictly reflects what element you performed and how well, technically speaking, you performed it, and in theory at least has no subjective factor; and then you get an artistic mark as well. However. The effect of the way that the current system is weighted is that the technical mark is more important than the artistic mark. And you *don't* get marked down all that much for falling over. In particular, if you are a male figure skater and you land a quad (which is a Hard Jump and not everyone at the Olympics can do it), *but* you then fall over or put a hand down, as long as you rotate the requisite number of degrees, you get the technical mark regardless. You'll get some kind of markdown for the fall, but someone who lands a couple of quads and falls over once (eg most of the top skaters this year, although I am pretty sure than neither Hanzu who got gold, or Fernandez who got silver, did fall over) gets more marks than someone who 'just' does triples and doesn't fall at all (eg Adam Rippon, who did a lovely skate with no mistakes but hasn't got a quad, so was way down at #7)[2].

The mark schemes in all of the sports I've talked about exist to reward particular behaviour. In the case of figure skating, I think at the moment they've got it wrong. I guess the thing is that they want to reward risk-taking, but as you only get one go, unlike the snowboarders, they figure they have to reward you for taking the risk even if you can't *quite* do it. But it makes it somewhat aggravating to watch, for the casual viewer. (Please note, as mentioned above, I am absolutely the casual viewer here and that is therefore my bias, but so are most viewers, right?) If you're not a figure skating expert, a quad looks a lot (A LOT) like a triple. The appeal of skating, to most folks, is that they do impressive jumps to music while looking pretty. Falling down does not look pretty, and quads don't look any prettier than triples. By all means reward people who can both land a quad and look pretty (Hanzu's free skate was bloody gorgeous and contained quads and no falling over), but if you fall over in your routine, that should be like it is with the snowboarders: a scoring disaster.


[0] OBJECTIVE FACT.
[1] I'm very tempted to go on about the men's halfpipe final at length, because it was spectacular and worked out to Maximum Tension at the end, and was interesting in terms of risk-taking and the effect of marking systems, but this post is already long enough. Suffice it to say that even the best snowboarders don't land all their runs.
[2] I am also avoiding going on about Nathan Chen, who had a disastrous short programme (fell down many times, enough to actually lose marks), and then what everyone described as, and was marked as, a spectacular free skate, because he landed 6 quads. But when I searched this out on the stream, HE PUT A HAND DOWN TWICE. How is it right that he got a higher mark for that than Hanzu did for his impeccably landed programme just because it had a mere four quads? Oh look I am going on about it, whoops.

This week I finally got to see Hamilton, after about two years of listening to the music, and a year after buying the tickets. It was absolutely fantastic; my main thought on leaving the theatre was "I need to see that again". Obviously I love it and I was expecting it to be great, but it was if anything better than I expected. Herewith a set of somewhat disjointed observations.

( cut in case people don't want staging spoilers )

The other day someone linked me to this report on a trial of Intelligent Speed Assistance on London buses. ISA uses GPS to obtain data on where you are and thus what speed limits apply, and then compares that with the speedometer, and either makes a nuisance of itself warning the driver that they're speeding, or (as in this case) actively limits the speed to the speed limit.

( transport geekery )

More than anything else this strongly suggests to me that what TfL (& the police?) really need to be doing is enforcing 20mph zones, on everyone.