A Probability of Being

I wrote this during the Bersih 2.0 rally a few years ago, and am bringing it back for Bersih4.

Last fall, when I TA'd for a course on introductory science fiction, I compiled a list of venues which publish science fiction and fantasy stories and poetry, for free online reading . How many such venues are there? The answer is: a lot. 56 in my list (which includes two sites of audio podcasts). The list sat on my Dreamwidth for ages, and I don't know if any of the students ever got around to reading any of them. Even I had only ever read three of them regularly, and never read most of them. This summer, that will change! I have set myself a summer reading goal: I'll work my way down this list, and select three stories to read from each venue. Just three, then move onto the next one. The idea is to get a sampling of all the venues.  My criteria for picking which stories to read should be simple; I'm still doing the Tempest Reading Challenge for most part. However, I've already broken the rule a couple of times, but it doesn't matter that much becaus...

This is an exciting week! Besides being the first week of the new quarter, and the week a good friend visits me after five years of not seeing each other, two of my poems went live!  Strange Horizons published "Magpie Wings," a science fictional re-telling of the folktale "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl" in which the characters are separated due to, essentially, class differences. There are several variations of the story: usually she's a fairy, he's a mortal; sometimes they're both celestial beings but have different roles which keep them separate; she is always of a higher class than he is, though, and serves in the Jade Palace as a handmaiden of the Jade Empress. She goes to live with him for a while and they are happy, but her duty forces her to leave. In Heaven and on Earth, they pine for each other, and the magpies on their yearly migration, take pity on them and offer them their backs so they can meet each other. Their story is commemorate...

Every sliver of injustice in our bones must be picked at, or sucked from the marrow; else slit open the flesh, reach in with your knife, remove the festering source. What good are your tools of righteousness, of goodwill, if they cannot break the fever?

My friend Patricia posted a challenge to a writing group I'm part of: What does your past or future Malaysia look like, 50-60 years from today? Write it as a story or a poem, both works. Bonus Points: If your character(s) speak in Manglish or variations thereof Double Bonus Points: If your setting has magic/future tech Triple Bonus Points: If it's Malaysia in outer space WITHOUT referencing politics 

The other day, K. Tempest Bradford posted a challenge to XOJane: Stop reading straight white cis male authors for a year ! Typically, people are up in arms because how can they stop reading their straight white cis male favs! And how dare anyone tell readers what to read! And isn't excluding people based on their identity discriminatory anyway! But this challenge comes from a very particular place. In much of the English-language reading world, most of the authors who get the most attention tend to be straight white cis men, especially in the science fiction fantasy world. In trying to read widely, and read what the mainstream rates the most highly, it's easy to fall into a trap of reading the same type of writer, over and over again. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia points out, narrowing one's reading to particular themes, lists, and kinds of authors is actually a very normal and useful exercise . In English degrees, you will have classes like "Writers of the 18t...

Recently, I went to see Jupiter Ascending , and right now I can't think of a more wonderful movie to have experienced in theaters! Perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . But Jupiter Ascending isn't an adaptation, except one of the imagination, especially of the young imagination when we were busy creating impossible characters that people told us were unrealistic. It was so fun, my fan buddy Jeanne and I had to recap it! We included as much detail as possible, and added commentary. Jeanne's commentary is in blue , mine is purple ! Read the first half of the recap at her blog ! This recap will be long, and image-heavy, so you've been warned! Without further ado, ACT II:

Sometime around this time last year, I sent out a call for submissions to The Sea Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia. Over the next few months, my co-editor Joyce Chng and I would receive many submissions. Many didn't make the first cut. A few got past, but eventually we could not use them. We were eventually left with twelve stories, with various levels of editing work required, each unique. After that it was a matter of deciding their order, and then getting a cover. I approached Khor Shing Yin, an artist I found through Tumblr, who, it turned out, is Malaysian-Chinese, although she's spent most of her life in the States. We met briefly at San Diego Comic Con 2014, and more recently last August in Los Angeles. For SDCC, I made a frantic last-minute request for her to make up a promotional postcard that I could bring to raise awareness of the anthology. The result was the following:  I was elated! It was based off a photograph of a street in Melaka, with ...

When I was in my first year of undergrad, the prof had us read "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. He asked us, "do you think it's a psychological story of a woman going mad, or a ghost story?" and we picked "woman going mad" so he took the side of "ghost story," and proceeded to point out all the things that could be read as a ghost story. He also taught us that this was based on Gilman's experiences so we weren't totally convinced of its ghostliness at all. Years later I'd read "The Rocking Chair" and "The Great Wisteria" and now I can totally buy the ghost story angle, because she was a ghost story writer too. "When I Was A Witch" is still my favourite Gilman story so far, though.

My brother sent me an email with a PDF scan of a letter I received from Scotiabank, the bank I had been using in Canada, for quite a while. I had no problems with Scotiabank and moving cross-province was a pleasure.  The letter tells me that my account is now inactive, since I haven't used it in 2 years (which, yes. I still do have my Scotiabank card though!), and that accounts inactive for ten years revert all its funds to the Bank of Canada, which I did not know. I should make a small deposit once in a while. Perhaps I will forward my next few checks towards it.  I filled out the appropriate blanks, ticked the appropriate ticky-boxes (how satisfying ticky-boxes are) and wrote my address at the back of the envelope. On the front I wrote the address of my Scotiabank branch, all the way in Hamilton, which must be snowy at this time of year. I can still remember its edifice and the last time I walked into it to explain that I would be gone, a long time (hoping not fore...

The other day, I received news that I had placed third in the Strange Horizons Reader Poll , under the Columns category. I am flanked by Rochita Leonen-Ruiz, in 2nd place, and Cassandra Khaw in 4th place, with the inimitable Genevieve Valentine in the 1st place, and John Clute in 5th. This is passing strange, to me, considering I have contributed only one column there in the past, a reprint of a response . However, it chuffs me to know that I have made an impact, and many dear friends are also listed in the various categories, such as LaShawn Wanak for her short story " 21 Steps to Enlightenment (Minus One) ," and, well, practically everyone in the Poetry category! I've never seen the like of Bogi's poem before, and still cannot wrap my head around it. And M. Sereno's big splash onto the spec-po scene is to be envied and celebrated.  Today I have further news: I have sold a poem! This will be my first, and hopefully not the only, acceptance of the year, whic...

I've been percolating with a lot of thoughts lately that just don't seem to fit on Tumblr or Twitter, and which I don't care to put on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth because those are more personal. So, I will be blogging here more regularly!  Re-reading a lot of these old posts, I cringe at some of the things I've written, how clumsily I wrote them, how wordy I got when less could have been more. But then, I've always been a wordy person--I really like filler words!  Many things have happened since 2011. My life has taken me so far abroad into a strange exotic land where I feel strangely disassociated, like I cannot believe I truly live here. My health has changed. My priorities have changed. I picked up new hobbies, set down some other ones. I probably should not have started writing this at 11pm, but them's the breaks.  Have a flash fic from 2010: "Simply put, you don't want to fuck with Kancil," Sang Buaya said. She thought th...

It's been a while since I posted here, because I've moved mostly over to Tumblr for much of my thinky-thoughts. It's also much more interesting and stimulating in terms of constantly flowing content and conversation, with organic conversation arising from conversations between people. I'm hoping to write another theory on how Tumblr operates to explain why it's been compelling. I haven't written here since around this time of year, last year. It's not because I've given up on blogging entirely: I've been blogging irregularly at Silver Goggles, and in March, helped friends launch a Malaysian feminist blog as well. I've also been hard at work with  writing my MA, and I just haven't had time to sit down and collect my thoughts together in ways that I did back in 2009. In fact, it might be honest to say that I haven't really been able to collect my thoughts very coherently in general, and when I do, I throw them up on Tumblr to see how...

This has been retweeted in #talkaboutit for a bit, it's Louis C.K. doing standup. Transcript and thoughts below the cut.

[Trigger Warning for description of rape] When I was about 11, my family was watching a Chinese serial about Temujin, or Genghis Khan.

So ya'll, I am so sick of talking debating with rape apologists right now on Twitter. If these mofos were even paying attention to capable folks like Kate Harding and Sady Doyle in the first fucking place, we wouldn't even have to engage with why what Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann did was so problematic. So, no, I don't even want to talk about Assange, because frankly, the man sounds like a fucking prick .  I want to talk about Bradley Manning instead. Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a very good article about Bradley Manning and the details of Manning's incarceration . At the moment, Manning "has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions" despite being "a model deta...

Today is the anniversary of the murder of the 14 women at l'Ècole Polytechnique Montreal, 1989 . On this day 21 years ago, Marc Lèpine purposefully went into a classroom of engineering students, separated the men from the women, made the men leave, shot the women, then wandered the school finding more women to shoot at. In 45 minutes, he had killed 14 women, with the rationale, "I hate feminists."

When I was in Morocco, we had a tour guide called Mizouri Abdul. "Like the American state?" my aunt asked. "Yes," he replied. He tried to pronounce her name, but couldn't, and said, "I call you Mississippi!" He was an incredibly funny man, and the first thing he taught us was how to say "UN-BE-LIE-VABLE!" in his very specific, overexcited way. (He also taught us how to say Shukran.) He also had the habit of stopping with a grandiose wave of his arm to indicate some sight with a proclamation, "wherever Mizouri stop, is a beautiful picture to take!" One day on the bus my aunt called "Mizouri!" He barely turned around to response, "Yes, Mississippi!" He regaled us with stories of his wedding night and was very frank about his love life, told us about the hard work his monarch did for the country, was very firm in his opinion that Saddam was a hero, and since he had to take care of us, he had to mutter his pray...

In a lot of discussions in school, there're a lot of questions which basically have the theme of "Why can't the Left unite the way the Right has?" There're plenty of answers, from my outsider's perspective: the Right groups unite because they're willing to put aside certain concerns, while the Left values these concerns. The Right doesn't care about people being thrown under the bus; the Left is comprised of a large base of people who keep getting thrown under the bus. The most infuriating answer I see is the one that places blame on identity politics and the divisiveness that comes about as a result of disagreement of tactics and the like. There's this Kumbaya "why can't we just get along" hand-wringing nonsense. So I've been having some severe disagreements with classmates. But after that we can get along just fine. Here's my metaphor: we live in different houses. Each house has its own rules and household culture. Maybe...

Today I bought myself the classic Kobo eReader, which is the 1st gen device that is going out of the way to make way for the 2nd gen device. The main difference between the two is this: the 2nd gen device has WiFi, so you can download ebooks directly into the eReader, and it's a smidgen faster.  I'd been holding out on getting an eReader, mainly waiting for the tech to boom so I could find a device that suited me best, but as it is? There are a ton of books being released in ebook formats right now that I want , great online magazines that release their stuff in eReader formats, and when I last moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario, I was miserable at the book culling I had to commit (and my dad wasn't pleased with the four banana boxes of books either).  But with the Kobo classic going out, the local Coles was selling it for $128. I visited it a couple of times, asking completely different sales assistants each time if I could have a look, admiring it, wondering what colo...