factitious

Glad to see Best Video Game on the ballot. The finalists are an odd set of games, but that's probably for the best. Would have been disappointing if this had just been a bunch of triple-A games.

( Hades )

( Spiritfarer )

( Final Fantasy VII Remake )

( Blaseball )

( The Last of Us: Part II )

( Animal Crossing: New Horizons )

( Votes )

Incidentally, if this category continues next year, I hope Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World: What Would You Do If the Time Stopped Ticking? wins. It has a silly name, but it's genuinely impressive.

I don't feel like I know enough about all these semiprozines to judge them properly. I don't even really know what makes something count as a semiprozine. But I do have a judgment about one of them.

One of the Strange Horizons people was awful about Isabel Fall online. Way worse than anything N.K. Jemisin did. Called her a fake woman, claimed her writing revealed her lack of womanhood, said "When I say, 'This reads like it was written by a straight white dude who doesn't really get gender theory or transition & has no right to invoke transphobic dog whistles for profit', I'll stand by my critique" and later deleted that critique.

I realize Strange Horizons decided to make their listing on the ballot absurdly long as a prank, and that the odds of having a transphobe on a list naturally go up the longer the list is. In the future, I suggest they address this by trying to be more selective. I don't think they've demonstrated a level of standards that merits being called Best Semiprozine.

The voting system would allow me to vote for one candidate and express no opinion about the others relative to each other. It does not allow me to purely vote against one candidate this way. If I vote No Award > Strange Horizons, this implicitly ranks Strange Horizons above all the others, which is the opposite of what I want to convey. I'm considering putting the other five in a randomly generated order, then No Award, then Strange Horizons.

For each of these, I started with the first installment. In some cases I read more, but due to time limitations this didn't track how much I liked them very well - I would have wanted to read more books in some of these series if I'd managed to get around to it.

( The Daevabad Trilogy, by S.A. Chakraborty )

( The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells )

( The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang )

( The Lady Astronaut Universe, by Mary Robinette Kowal )

( The Interdependency, by John Scalzi )

( October Daye, by Seanan McGuire )

( Votes )

None of these felt amazing to me. I'm going to just write short opinions about them, and claim that this is on theme for the category.

( A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad )

( Metal Like Blood in the Dark, by T. Kingfisher )

( The Mermaid Astronaut, by Yoon Ha Lee )

( Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer )

( Open House on Haunted Hill, by John Wiswell )

( Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse, by Rae Carson )

( Votes )

When I talked about Best Novel, I went through the finalists in ballot order and then gave my thoughts on how I'm ranking them. That introduced some redundancy and is part of what made the post way too long. So now I'm combining those and just writing my thoughts on these novellas in the order that I'm ranking them. This means the order of the cut tags is a mild spoiler for the works, in that it can give away how I felt about something you haven't read yet relative to something you have read. If this is a problem for you and you have an idea for how I should address it, please let me know.


( The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo )

( Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark )

( Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi )

( Finna, by Nino Cipri )

( Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire )

( Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey )

( Votes )

Here's a treat not oft given by me: a travel write-up!

Last week I went to the region agave is native to, which was very lovely. The sunsets there imbue high coastal cliffs with a beautiful glow. But I was surprised to see lots of graffiti of Greek letters, mostly taus.

While I was there, I also visited the birthplace of a cartoonist who has drawn some of my favorite comics. That place wasn't promoted very heavily to church enthusiasts, but mosque nerd TV ran a lot of ads for it.

The next day, I went to a science museum to see an exhibit about a type of aquatic cell algae prey on. Apparently it's very energy-rich, and harvesting it can be worth a lot of river cash! There was also an exhibit about how static electricity zaps at flannel, but I had to leave to catch my bus on time. Good thing I left, too, because if I'd stayed there just another hour, a storm was gonna pelt me with hail.

The bus route had some nice views along the river, and I even saw Peppermint Patty canoeing in it. Other than her, the only one I saw on the way was a stray cyclist. The ride was relaxing, giving me time to catch up on podcasts and read some totalitarian porn (don't kinkshame me).

After I reached my destination, I wanted to check out the aviary at the zoo, but all they had was a bad dark condor. So instead I went skating.

Each sentence so far may have made you doubt whether this post is actually going somewhere; naive readers must be confused. Here's a noun hint: get over thinking about where I went, just focus on what I left out.

I'm about to start reading The Raw Shark Texts, based on a recommendation on a podcast.

It opens with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, which makes me think it's going to be a good read. The other authors I can think of who've done that are John Hodgman (More Information Than You Require) and China Miéville (The Tain*), both of whom I really like.

Anyone have any more examples of books that have a prominent Borges quote? I'm especially interested in finding out whether it's possible for a bad book to do this.

*Actually, turns out that quote is at the end, not the beginning. I'm going to count it anyway.

Attention people in or near Palo Alto: I will be there from July first to seventeenth.

And let me know if you're interested in coming over for my family's big Fourth of July party. It's a pretty open thing, but ideally I'd like some idea of who's showing up ahead of time. It'll be on Saturday from 7 to whenever.

The last few days have been pretty eventful. Capucine's gone back to France for the summer, my parents visited me, and I solved a cryptic crossword for the first time.

Tomorrow I'm going to try the Washington Post Hunt with Claire and Brad. Should be fun.

You've been following guest week at Tall Comics, right? Well, in case you haven't, you should be aware that it's finished off with a guest strip by me. There are a few details that you might not get if you don't regularly read Tall Comics, but you should regularly read it anyway, so that isn't an issue.