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Announcements and Errata

Reminder: Site Changes This Weekend; Expect Weirdness

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Hello! You may recall us mentioning that we plan to move our website over to our new host soon. We may even have mentioned that it would happen the weekend of New Year’s. Welp, that’s this weekend. At some point on Saturday (Dec. 30th), we’ll begin the transfer process from WordPress hosting to our new host. This process should be pretty quick, but we’re setting aside the entire weekend just in case there are any issues. Here’s what you should expect around these parts in the next couple weeks: The link to our website may not work for a short period of time (possibly as little as a few hours). When the site finally transfers over, you’ll notice some BIG changes. Our navigation will look quite different, and a lot of things may be a mess for a while. The main feed should continue to work just fine, so you shouldn’t miss anything. Just hang in there. We’ll get it all cleaned up before our new season starts. Once everything is cleaned up and in working order, we’ll issue another announcement on our main feed letting you know of all of the changes and what you can do to make sure you don’t miss anything (or how you can take advantage of all the new things). And that’s it. So expect some weirdness over the weekend and in the weeks to follow. And thanks for listening and reading in 2017!

Blog Posts

Book Review: Girl Reporter by Tansy Rayner Roberts

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Living up to the standards of your mother is no easy thing sometimes. Especially when you are Friday Valentina, daughter of Tina Valentina. Tina Valentina broke barriers as a girl reporter interviewing the Australian superhero Solar and breaking news about Australian superheroes for decades. To this day, Tina Valentina is THE Girl Reporter. That’s a lot to live up to. Living in the 21st century, instead of writing for outfits like Women’s Weekly, Friday has a YouTube channel where she covers superheroes in her own way, like mother, like daughter. Hey, she’s just gotten one million hits on her channel. Friday’s huge! She’s also grown up in a world where superheroes are real and a thing, and she is possibly the daughter of one, or at least all the gossip and tabloids suggest so anyway. Her mother doesn’t talk about that either.  

Blog Posts

Book Review: The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua

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About a third of the way through The Red Men, Matthew de Abaitua’s ravishing new-old (I’ll explain in a moment) cyberpunk nightmare, is very likely the creepiest scene I’ve ever encountered in literature. Not just in genre fiction. In literature. I’m not going to spoil it for you. You’ll know it when you hit it. And your brain will leap out of your skull and try to escape the building, flopping and squelching across the floor until it’s stuck hurling itself ineffectually against a door or gate or other obstacle. Help me. You’ll want to chase after it so you can read the rest of the book. Probably.

Blog Posts

Retro Childhood Review: The Dark is Rising

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There was an endless variety of faces — gay, sombre, old, young, paper-white, jet-black, and every shade and gradation of pink and brown between — vaguely recognizable, or totally strange… [Will] thought: these are my people. This is my family, in the same way as my real family. The Old Ones. Every one is linked, for the greatest purpose in the world. I was going to start my review of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence with the first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, because it holds a certain place of nostalgia based on its similarity to other much loved childhood fiction like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, both being about a group of absurdly normal siblings doing something important. But as I considered what I wanted to read to finish out 2017, a year full of darkness for so many people, the only book that seemed appropriate was The Dark is Rising. Because what’s more relevant than a book about how one person can fight back the darkness by finding strength in the love and support of family, friends, and a world that is fighting with him? Especially when it’s full of winter holiday cheer.

Announcements and Errata

Announcement: The 2017 Listener / Reader Survey

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I know. We’re a bit late putting this message up on the blog. Still, better late than never, amaright? Two years ago, we ran a survey primarily for listeners of the show. The intent was get a better sense of what was working and not working for our listeners, what listeners wanted us to do in the future, etc. Now it’s 2017, the year of trashfires, and we’re trying to end things on a high note with a bunch of fantastically geeky podcasts and a brand new survey for listeners AND blog readers. So, here we are imploring you to take our survey. It has questions about how you listen to the show, what you like the most/least, polls on ideas we have for the future, questions about blog content, requests for suggestions for future content, Patreon and funding-related questions, and more.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

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Benjanun Sriduangkaew creates a fascinating and very loose retelling of The Snow Queen folktale with Winterglass, a high fantasy novella that infuses steampunk technology and an interesting form of magic.  With gorgeous prose and a refreshing perspective on fantasy in general, Sriduangkaew’s unique take on a classic tale creates a captivating narrative with twists, turns, and deadly secrets.  Sriduangkaew’s own-voices retelling features an entirely POC cast and lots of queer rep, set in Southeast Asia.  It’s a relatively quick read, and I spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the world of ice and intrigue. We follow the narrative through two points of view, giving us a deeper look at the complicated and twisted workings of an intriguing world.  Sriduangkaew balances the narrative across the different sides, leaving readers an interesting perspective on a world wrapped in ice.  The narrative itself relies on a concept of a world in the process of being conquered by a deadly force, a queen who desires to be whole.

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