Audience of Strangers

A high point today; I checked the mailbox, and after weeks of no mail or junk mail or occasionally bills, there was my copy of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. :) I think I've mentioned it before; the editor's been mentioning it on LJ.

Chapters has it here, Amazon.com link is http://www.tinyurl.com/steampoweredbook, and the ISBN is 9781610401500 should you need that in order to order it through your friendly local independant bookstore.

I think I've mentioned the Steam-Powered anthology before. As it turns out, there's a contest; a chance to win a copy of the book, copies of all the promo postcards and bookmarks, and jewelry sets based on two of the stories.

To enter? Post about it. That's all it takes.

First, have just come back from seeing Max Payne. Plot-wise it is an okay movie. Visually it is a brilliant movie. It's beautiful. The depth of that gets less pronounced towards the end--the numbers stop counting down, the posters and signs in the background aren't there as often--but it's still lovely. Had a great time.

(I may play the game. I have been assured that seeing the movie will not spoil me for the game, and that there is a cheat which provides unlimited bullet-time. Given my sterling record with twitch-gaming, I feel that this would help immensely.)

Second, I found this. The creator has a whole lot of clockwork and gear and other lovely jewelry here.

I am having an extraordinarily snarly day. It was improved by the introduction of something pretty, which I now pass on to you.

Here.

Dear Internet:

Occasionally, I feel that I don't appreciate you enough. Take you for granted. Especially when I was up very late and so have read all but one of Monday's webcomic updates before going to bed and have nothing to read this morning.

(Tangent: I cannot for the life of me figure out if the protagonist in this simply hasn't thought of chopping off limbs with zombie bites before--he is a vampire, after all, and may have different assumptions--or if he knows it isn't going to work and is just being an utter bastard. Suspect the latter, but am really not sure.)

And then you gently toss up a twenty-one track steampunk compilation on the shores of gears_and_steam, including a Vernian Process track dedicated to Unhallowed Metropolis[1], and I remember just how wonderful you are.

(Ohhh. Three Vernian Process albums available, here and here. Must bring headphones to work today.)

Thank you, Internet.
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[1] Haven't heard anything since early June, but then it was that the files went to the printer and the book was slated for a GenCon release, so I remain quietly attentive. Is it just me, or is there a lot of green in steampunk logos...?

From Phil Foglio's Girl Genius, which is one of those entirely online and free wonders and delights[1] (yes, first issue's B&W):



This is by no means the best or the funniest or even the most well-drawn panel he's done, but right now it completely clicks.

...s'help me god, I'm at the point of buying an LJ account just so I can get more icons.

Wedding in two days. Oddly calm.
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[1] I mean it. This setting is so cool they can actually talk about having a GURPS sourcebook for it and I don't flinch. Given that my first exposure to GURPS had me wanting to print out and burn the quickstart rules, this is a feat. I mean yes, it's steampunk, and I have a soft spot for that, but still...

Unhallowed Metropolis has caught my attention, combining as it does steampunk, London, and zombies. It's set in England, two hundred years after the zombie plague began in 1905. In addition to some of the artwork that'll be in the book, the site's got a university lecture on the physiology of the unquiet dead (from the Introduction to Non-Human Pathology course), and a couple of excerpts from journals. Lines like "Plague Cart caught by surprise this morning. Twelve takes, three mercies. Department of Health gives East End a rating of one per three for the summer." convey quite a lot.

(It does make mention of character classes, and one other game published by the company (Delta Green) is D20. This really does not move me but I am sure that the game would be adaptable to another system. And given that the character class mentioned is a Mourner--described as one hired to sit by the body of the recently deceased after death, and decapitate it at the slightest twitch or moan--I'm staying interested.)

Additional notes, seeming related to my mind:

Burnout velvet is also called broderie chimique; literally, chemical embroidery.

Prosopagnosia--face blindness--is a disorder (group of disorders) in which the ability to recognize faces is impaired to one degree or another. Capgras' syndrome, on the other hand, covers recognizing people and not getting any emotional reaction to that recognition (opening doors to the conviction that something is very not right about this thing that looks like your friend or lover).

Jeremy Bentham was preserved and put on display in the University College London. His head has been replaced with a wax duplicate. (The original is purportedly stored in the UCL vaults, and Bentham is recorded as present at all College Council meetings, always voting in favour of a motion if a tie-breaker is required.)

Phossy jaw is a condition resulting from chronic exposure to phosphorus vapour, and was found in matchworkers and matchsellers during the Victorian era. The jawbone would abcess and eventually rot off the face, glowing greenish-white in the dark.

China Mieville's Looking for Jake, an anthology. I've read two of the stories before, which is hardly a hardship.

Noting a tendancy; the point-of-view character so often seems to be accidentally there. They're witnesses by chance more than protagonists. It doesn't hold true for his novels, but it does for every short story of the six I've read so far. It works, don't get me wrong--given the slow fantastic things he writes about, it helps a lot in suspending disbelief, to have a person who could so easily integrate into the real world witness the events of the story. Provides a point of contact. Migod, even the narrator from the story about Jack Half-a-Prayer[1] seems like someone you'd think it was perfectly natural to meet, if not necessarily easy to relate to.

If I finish this one today, which I think I will, it'll have been three books finished in three days. Feel like I'm picking up old habits again.
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[1] I realize I have a tendancy to get very involved with stories and icons on relatively little information, but in the case of Jack Half-a-Prayer, I think it's understandable. Mieville's passing descriptions of him are as evocative for me as some of Kay's work, and that's not even counting my fondess for steampunk that the Remade and fReemade evoke.