It’s not just a sub-par Moby lyric, IT’S ACTUALLY TRUE.

(That is an actual thought I had at Launchpad, while we were learning about the most common substances in the universe. It’s easy to dismiss Moby for everything after Play – not only easy, but probably a good idea – but the dude got some factual information about science at some point, that much is clear.)

Meanwhile, the Hubble, which is determined to show us how much we’ll regret letting it just fall apart in space, is taking pretty pictures just to spite us.

Dear Earth,

You know what? I am just taking pictures out here because it’s pretty and I feel like it. Don’t think this is about you, Earth, you hear me? Because I am over you. I don’t want you to worry about me, or feel guilty about just giving up on me forever, or anything like that, because I could not care less. You have fun with your James Webb Space Telescope, okay? Because I don’t even know what I ever saw in you, and I’ve got better things than you coming up.

No love,
HST

P.S. SEE ATTACHED, SUCKERS.

(Not pictured: filename “neenerneener.jpg”)

Also, yes, I have probably turned into one of Those Kids Who Won’t Shut Up About How Fun Camp Was*, and you’ll be regularly hearing about astronomy alongside movies and costuming. (Uh, fair warning for those who hate the night sky, I guess?)

As a kid I loved staring at whatever stars I could see (mmm, suburban light pollution), and I knew the mythology of the various constellations without having a sense of their real scope (or, let’s face it, knowing where many of them were). Launchpad really filled in some of the handwavey places in my brain and rekindled that little-kid love affair with the sky. It’s like I’m a kid again, only now I’m a really tall kid who knows terms like “visual binary” and pays taxes and has realized planes are not actually fun to be on like your parents always said they were!

* To be fair, I have not, nor will I ever, like an actual camp. I was out on Vedauwoo for less than three hours and I managed to wound myself and have an allergic reaction. The best thing about astronomy is that you can do it anywhere where you can look up, like penthouses with skylights. This will involve making new friends who have skylights in their penthouses, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Okay, I have not even begun to settle back in from Launchpad, where I spent a week learning about space with some unspeakably awesome people, but I have a lot of updates and not enough time to write thoughtful intros for them (or for anything, ever). So, we’ll do this list-style and then I promise to bore you sometime later this week with the awesome details about making s’mores with people using only starlight for heat and marshmallows we harvested ourselves.

(This did not happen. Wyoming has no marshmallow trees, as they only thrive in the Pacific Northwest.)

1. First, fiction news! My short story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball” is up at Lightspeed Magazine!

2. I saw Inception opening weekend. I had to wait until I was in New York to do it – I dropped my suitcase at my apartment and went straight from there to the theatre – but I saw it. I will be writing more (a lot more) about this movie later, but for now, my SPOILERY review is up at Tor.com. SPOILERS. It says so in the cut-tag, but I’m direct-linking, so SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. THE TITANIC SINKS. DARTH IS LUKE’S DAD. SO MANY SPOILERS.

3. Launchpad was great. I wrote up an intro post here, with some handy links, and followed it up with Four Fun Things About the Universe, for values of “fun” that include the knowledge that if you get close to a black hole you’ll be torn to shreds by gravity. Whee!

Tomorrow I should be caught up and ready to blog again. I hope. (I might just go home and sleep 12 hours. It’s reverse altitude sickness!)

On Friday, I went to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s launch party for her 1920s vampire novel Moonshine. It was a flapper party. I was not missing that.

It was a great party – live music, performances, people complaining about their suits at length. But the best part about it was that the gallery was so far on the West Side that hipsters piling onto the street from out of nowhere just looked as though they had crawled out of the slime of the River, adjusted their ironic 80s fashions, and then set out their shamble across the city. I am not exaggerating when I say that literally hundreds of hipsters passed us, on this non-major cross-street at the far edge of the city, over the course of the evening. I still don’t understand where they all came from. Eventually partygoers gave me possible transportation options like “magical bridge” and “dirigible,” and I believed them all, because THEY JUST KEPT COMING.

Bonus: that party also ruined my impression of New York as a place where hipsters are obsessed with being seen in superhip exclusive nightclubs with five bouncers, which I carried over from my time working for an event planner. Turns out this is wrong! People in New York will, in fact, enter any venue where lights are on and sound is coming out, much like moths, or nightgown-wearing young ladies vacationing in remote locales. A good two dozen people walked into this party off the street, saw that 95% of attendees were dressed like a silent movie, AND WENT WITH IT. Twenty minutes later, they would wander out again, looking confusedly at the book they had somehow bought. Meanwhile, all the costumed partygoers were sipping drinks and giving them the side-eye. It was glorious.

There is photographic evidence of this nice party, but this photo in particular captures the mood of the room:

Photo: Ellen B. Wright | http://www.ellenbwright.com/

It catches that sense of fun that was going around all night, with Alaya soaking up the good vibes, AND a pair of party-crashers doing the Charleston in the foreground. Dance away, participatory hipsters! (SERIOUSLY, WHERE DID YOU COME FROM.)

It’s official – I’ll be attending Launch Pad this year!

I’m incredibly excited about this, and seriously cannot wait for July. Stars! (I live in New York; if you ever see a decent night sky in New York City, something is horribly wrong and you should try to leave that parallel universe immediately.)

Two brief updates today:

1. My story Light on the Water has been named a storySouth Notable story for 2009! That was a very pleasant surprise, and a great way to start the weekend.

2. Apparently I have decided that the way to go through the rest of the weekend is a complete Netflix tear. I have made a semi-cogent choice to ignore my pile of work to be done and instead buzz my way through as many movies as I possibly can in 48 hours. I left the house today, which was a tactical error, but I plan to make up for lost time tonight!

So far, in addition to movies I’m watching for work purposes, the winners this weekend have been “sweet spot” movies I first saw between the ages of, say, 10 and 13, which I remember just well enough to enjoy but have enough distance on to laugh my ass off about how bad they probably are. (Exception to this rule: Gleaming the Cube, which has vanished off the face of the earth, and which I am willing to bet is as awesome now as it was when I first saw it.)

P.S. I also saw Clash of the Titans. In unrelated news, some truly awful movies get made these days, don’t they?