HSU IT Department

This. That is all.

Signups are open over at hoggywartyxmas!!

Trek Class, the Fun and Free Course on the Science and Fiction of Star Trek! I'm so excited :)

"As Captain Picard once said, “We have no fear of what the true facts about us will reveal,” and it is this spirit that inspires our mission to think critically about not only the 23rd and 24th centuries of Star Trek, but also the realities and issues of our own time.

For some students, this course will be an introduction to strange new worlds, alien civilizations and unusual concepts. Others may be acquainted with some or all of the Star Trek universe but discover new ways of interpreting and discussing the many forms of Star Trek media. Whether you're a seasoned fan or just making first contact with the franchise, #TrekClass has been carefully planned to tell the story of Starfleet in a way that is approachable for the first-time viewer and delightful for the lifelong Trekker. In #TrekClass, you will explore the human experience through the lens of the Final Frontier. Along the way, discover Star Trek's incredible impact on popular culture, space exploration, scientific discovery and technology innovation..."

And leave some prompts!




mini_fest 2015 Schedule:
Prompting: August 10
Signups: August 20
Submissions Due: November 20
Posting Starts: December 1

minerva_fest always results in a bouquet of fabulous stories, so run on over and leave some inspiration :)

Minerva_Fest!

(banner by featherxquill; art by Kit466 [used with permission])

Today is the first International Fanworks Day!! Created by the Organization for Transformative Works (the folks who brought us AO3), it's a day to celebrate the creativity that abounds in fandom. Both The Mary Sue and AO3 have great suggestions for how to celebrate it, so pour yourself a glass of wine, pat yourself on the back, and enjoy!

The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fangirl

Striking, illuminating, and poignant. The author, Chinelo Onwualu, is a young Nigerian author, graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop (more proof, if any were needed, that Clarion is the gold standard for speculative fiction writers). You can read one of her stories here on Ideomancer: Tasting Gomoa

Since mini_fest is posting and hoggywartyxmas is coming up soon, this seems appropriate:

"JK Rowling To Write Malfoy Story And Other New Harry Potter Content For
Christmas. The Yule Ball is of course a chance for us all to — er — let our hair
down..." Read more ==>

Do you suppose she'll finally admit that Harry and Draco are meant for each other lol?!

H/D fans, Western Michigan University alum Adam Pasen has written a play that may just be for you. In Badfic Love, fan author Michelle has written a fic about Harry and Draco, parts of which get acted out as part of the play. But she's not a very good writer. Kyle, who belongs to a club whose goal is to protect the public from bad fan fiction (ha, if only there were such a thing!), is so entertained by the story's awfulness that he doesn't want to report her to the other club members. Hijinks ensue.

While the relationship between Michelle and Kyle is flawed, Harry and Draco played by Nick Petrelli and Joey Urreta are very much in love.

Daniel Radcliffe appeared on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast, where he revealed that he apparently has a sizable collection of homemade Harry Potter dolls (now that we've seen talesofsnape's latest Lucuis Big Bang entry, I have my suspicions as to where they might have come from...)

Finally, in another amusing note, the upcoming 200th episode of Supernatural will be a musical -- and the title is "Fan Fiction." I'm giggling already.

I'm badly behind on posting book reviews, but here's one I really want to pass on because it was so good:

You have known all along that something in this story wasn't right...Perhaps, even now, you will feign ignorance, attempt to deny your complicity in the construction of this lie...

Indeed. Well played, Buehlman. Well played. ::cries a little::

When I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, I saw one of the old black-and-white Dracula movies, probably a Hammer Films production. I have no idea which one it was, but the last scene was of Dracula, alone in this Victorian library or parlor, his head slumped over the shaft of the spear through his chest that's pinned him to the wall, the early morning sun streaming in through these huge double-height windows. That scene haunts me to this day, its sense of desolation and melancholy and sadness and, yes, horror (though perhaps not the kind the filmmakers intended).

Something similar washed over me when I closed The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman this morning. This is so much more than a vampire book that it's hard to know how to talk about it.

Here is one thing I can say: Normally I'm one of those rabid page-turners (what's next what's next WHAT'S NEXT WHAT'S NEXT!!) but I found myself consciously drawing out the reading of this book because although I very much wanted to know what happened next, I could sense that something bad was coming. Something I didn't want to see, or know. I was right -- but not at all in the way I expected. Whatever happened next was going to happen by the platform in Union Station, out in the open, under the lights. With an audience...

Which leads me to another thing I can say: This is an excellent piece of storytelling. It's difficult to end a story in a way that is both utterly unexpected and yet still fits all the events that have preceded it, but that's what happens here. Even more challenging is to pull off an ending that makes the reader go back and re-assess everything they just read. That also happens here. Finally, there's a certain level of "meta" as well, since the ideas of narrator, of story, of reader expectations -- not to mention the relationship between narrator and reader -- are played with and questioned in interesting ways.

So...yeah, go read this. Then think about it. Then maybe read it again, knowing what's coming.

(P.S. Stats for the animal lovers in the audience: dogs that die=0, cats that die=1, bird that doesn't die and is well taken care of=1, derogatory mention of insects=many.)