Blog Posts

Blog Posts

“Writing Toward Acceptance” by Sarah Remy

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Non-Binary Genders are gender identities that don’t fit within the accepted binary of male and female. People can feel they are both, neither, or some mixture thereof. It might be easier to view gender as a 1-dimensional spectrum with male on one end, female on the other, and androgyne in the middle, but the reality is that gender is more complex, and 3-dimensional models with axes for male, female, and how strongly you feel attached to that gender identity have been suggested. Recently I’ve begun a little experiment:  I’ve started asking various friends of various ages if they know what ‘non-binary’ means. Granted, I’m not kind enough to give them a hint with a qualifier:  do you know what non-binary means in regards to gender? Hints are not part of the experimental parameters. Hints might be cheating.

Blog Posts

My Superpower: Heather Rose Jones (The Mystic Marriage)

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My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Heather Rose Jones to talk about how the power of root cause analysis relates to The Mystic Marriage. You might not think that the same superpower would come in handy both as a fantasy novelist and as an industrial root cause investigator. But I have a preternatural ability to maintain multiple competing unfinished causal structures in my mind, feeding facts into them bit by bit until a pattern emerges from the swirling chaos, the contradictions fall away, and what remains is—if not the only truth—then at least one possible truth that is consistent with the facts.

Podcast Updates

Quick Update on the RSS Feed and iTunes (Check Your Feeds)

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http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/PodcastUpdateFeedsAndITunes/Podcast%20Update%20–%20Feeds%20and%20iTunes.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSFolks following us on Twitter may have noticed some concern regarding our two RSS feeds:  the full feed to the blog/podcast and the podcast only feed for iTunes (or folks just trying to snatch the podcasts, not the blog).  This is what happened: We use Feedburner to funnel the podcast to iTunes and podcast directories, and we keep a dedicated podcast feed so these directories only get pinged for media files and not for blog posts (which limits how many eps show up at a time).  A few days ago, I went into Feedburner to update both feeds to make sure the information was up-to-date.  For the podcast, that included an updated description, updated cast list, and so on.  In the course of doing this, Feedburner started renaming both feeds to the same address.  I don’t know why, but it happened so many times in a row that I actually got confused which feed was supposed to have which address. Eventually, I got the feeds corrected, but by then, iTunes and iTunes derivative programs were registering a problem with the feed; at least two people reported that they could download episodes, but could not properly subscribe.  Since iTunes can take up to a week to register changes to a feed, I have no idea if this is a permanent error or if the changes to the feed confused iTunes enough that it’s locked onto a feed that doesn’t exist or isn’t the correct feed.  On top of that, Feedburner now registers a massive drop in subs to both feeds, which may or may not be relevant depending on when it did its last subscriber “catch” and depending on how many people checked their feeds on Friday (the last day Feedburner would have grabbed subscriber numbers).  Either way, it’s weird. I don’t currently have a solution for iTunes or iTunes derivative users.  It may be weeks before I can fix whatever is wrong with our iTunes page (a week to find out if the feed corrected itself and possibly another week to correct any errors that might exist).  It may turn out that all of this is worrying for nothing; the feed could correct itself on iTunes and everything could work out just fine. For everyone else, the feeds should work just fine, though you should probably update your RSS reader or podcast catcher so it grabs the appropriate feed.  If you want the full blog, use this feed; if you want the podcast ONLY, use this feed. Sorry for the inconvenience! Download the audio version here.

Announcements and Errata

Quick Update: Totally Pretentious Podcast and Blog Feeds

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If you’re a subscriber of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, which David and I are both a part of, you’ll have heard about the weirdness going on with our Feedburner feeds.  Though Totally Pretentious was not nearly as affected by S&F, there still may have been some changes or weirdness happening with the feeds. So, to clear all that up, there are two feeds: The Full Blog & Podcast Feed The Podcast Only Feed The latter feed funnels podcasts into iTunes, though whether iTunes will register it properly is up in the air (it’s not registering Skiffy at all, so I’m probably going to contact support for both podcasts to make sure they are reading correctly).  The former gives you all of the content on the blog, including the podcasts.  If you use some kind of podcast catcher, you’ll want to use the second feed; just make sure to subscribe to the full feed in Feedly or something so you can get the awesome blog content, too. Hopefully, this won’t be a big deal for Totally Pretentious.  We’re still pretty small, after all. Thanks!

Blog Posts

5 Films to Complement Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet

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The movie list game with Ian Sales continues.  I have been challenged to come up with five movies to complement his Apollo Quartet, as the concluding volume of that series, “All That Outer Space Allows,” hit stores in late April.  The following list of 5 is my attempt to come up with a few good films that fit the bill. First, a few “rules”:

Blog Posts

Book Review: The Copper Promise by Jen Williams

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Sebastian and Wydrin are mercenaries and adventurers, longtime friends and partners, doing jobs for coin in a way and manner familiar to a lot of sword and sorcery fiction. Sebastian is the big guy, a defrocked paladin of a mountain god. Wydrin is an infamous rogue of the port city of Crosshaven known as the Copper Cat, deadly with two blades. The opening of the book starts off straightforwardly enough, with the pair hired by a deposed noble to break into a magical vault. A magical vault that contains a long imprisoned scaly God and followers that the pair inadvertently free. Oops.

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