RIP, little Fassbender Syndrome, Jr.; I shall never forget how many times I was able to drop you before you finally broke.

1. On the Mechanique front, Faren Miller had some lovely things to say about it in May’s issue of Locus. For the curious and pixel-minded, part of the article is also available online. [ETA: There are some minor spoilers, and also Little George, a young man, is pronouned as a young woman; it doesn't affect the review as a whole, but if you had read the book and were confused, no worries.]

(Fun fact: I did the Author Thing of signing stock in the Union Square Barnes and Noble. As a chronic introvert, I was a little unprepared to be smooth about it all, and so it ended up like every terrible 7th grade dance ever – “HI WOULD YOU LIKE TO DANCE WITH ME I MEAN IN A GROUP MAYBE OR YOU DON’T HAVE TO DANCE WITH ME I WAS ONLY ASKING NEVER MIND IT WAS A JOKE I’M MOVING TO ICELAND BYE” – but hey, signed stock!)

2. I have a story in the just-announced The New Adventures of John Carter of Mars, a John Joseph Adams YA anthology that takes you back to Barsoom (or, to Barsoom for the first time! Barsoom doesn’t judge.) The TOC is amazing, and I really enjoyed writing my story, “A Game of Mars,” which follows Deja Thoris and John Carter’s daughter as she goes AWOL from home to rescue her brother from the deadly living-chess game of Jetan.

3. I’ll also be appearing in Armored, which just got cover art and a partial list of contributors. “The Last Run of the Coppelia” is about backwater algae-harvesters, the slightly-dim AIs who love them, and the accidental incriminating evidence that makes them all assassination targets. Whoops!

4. And since Nora did it, I will, too: I’ll be in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s After! Hop over to her journal for a partial list of contributors and a nice teaser for her story. My story is “The Segment,” about a boarding school that houses kids of all ages and takes the nightly news very, very seriously.

5. When I get home tonight, I’ll be packing my bags for the Steampunk World’s Fair! My reading is at 1pm Saturday, but I’ll be around most of Saturday and Sunday; if you’re inclined to say hi, please do! I have a tendency to think that when people tap me on the shoulder Something Gross is On My Face, but if you can get past that initial facial expression, we’re good! Also, if I tap YOU on the shoulder, it’s because I have a spiffy new camera and I want to take your picture; there is probably nothing on your face.

6. (So much for five things.) I am wonderful at knowing what I need to pack, how it will fit in my suitcase, and how to account for contingencies, until the day before departure, when I buy eight pairs of pants, fifteen shirts, and a jacket from a store, then get home and remembered that what I needed to buy was a pair of socks.

This year at WisCon I participated on the Netbook Show and Tell panel as the plug-and-play representative. For those who know their programming, it was an informative panel. For those who are a little more, uh, Luddite, it was a hilarious panel; I’m pretty sure that at some point in the melee, someone recalibrated their warp drive for endothermic propulsion.

People were very generous about showing off their netbooks and going through the pros and cons. I’ve done a layperson’s roundup over at Tor.com..

Hopefully this is just the beginning of my WisCon recapping, but I went back to the day job this morning after letting work build up in my absence, and oh, that’s always fun! (More later, is what I’m saying. Because this place is wild today.)

By all means, head over there to read the column, in which I tried to keep it together. Because below this cut, I just nerd out ridiculously.

Hackers: when cargo pants were king.

There is no good and bad. There is only fun and boring.

I remember watching this movie back in 1995 and thinking how awesome it would be to be a hacker, except that I could hardly DOS my way into our house computer to do my school assignments on ProWrite, and I didn’t even know how to Rollerblade, so it was really a war lost on two fronts.

I bought the soundtrack (with, babysitting money left over from when I was thirteen, I am pretty sure) and made tape copies that I played in my car until they wore out. Since my car was a 1989 Chevy Lumina the color of eggnog and a tape deck that looked like a miniature car wash, tapes usually lasted about a month. Also, my car didn’t go over 50 miles an hour without shaking, so every time I hit a major roadway I would have two baselines – one from the music and one from my car nearly exploding.

What I’m saying is, I think I should have just learned to Rollerblade instead.

Rollerblade nation! Woo! I still cannot get over Rollerblades as an indicator of the hip outsiders of the future, and the skateboard as a sign of an overage wannabe, since in the last decade those roles have pretty totally reversed.

P.S., this cast really was great. They managed to walk the fine line of playing a bunch of cool kids without making us hate them, mostly because they were absolute goobers and knew it. One of my favorite moments of this is when they go to Lord Nikon’s place and he’s dressed like a Jedi and demanding passwords, and when they get inside they eat snacks and watch TV. HACKERS!

I also like that the cast is casually multiracial, and that only one of the group looks at Kate as a sex object, which I had forgotten. It’s pretty nice that even though they acknowledge she’s hot, they really just want to fondle her new laptop. That shit has a 28.8 modem, yo! She’s going to triple the RAM! It’s fly!

I think the saddest thing is that once Phantom Phreak gets locked up, we never hear from that guy again. Is he just there to drop exposition in leopard print? Is he just a piece of MEAT, movie? Damn!

Look at him, all excited, thinking he has the whole movie to be helpful and won’t just be shuttled off because there are only five booths in Grand Central. It’s so sad.

(Hey, remember when Matthew Lillard was super popular, and was in half a dozen movies in one year, and then he disappeared off the face of the planet? What was that all about?)

The plot is so paint-by-numbers I won’t even talk about it, except to say that it employs one of my all-time favorite tropes, where the hero is on the verge of defeat…until the hero looks around and sees that backup has arrived, with a six-pack of kickass and a bag of Mercy Chips – and that bag is empty.

Razor and Blade, the world’s head hackers, with Fassbender’s grandfather! No wonder they’re proud. I bet that thing has, like, a TWO GIG hard drive!

Yeah. I guess there was no budget for extrapolating the near future of computer culture when this movie was written, so the tech stuff is largely laughable, but the subtle contempt for people who don’t understand what computers can do, and the way in which that manifests throughout the movie, is pretty timeless.

Here is what watching Hackers in the year 2009 is like. “Ha! Yeah, right! Please, that’s ridiculous! OH MY GOD IT’S TRUE.” Repeat for two hours.

ETA: Possibly the best moment of the movie is when hackers across the world are battle-notified…by phone. Thanks for nothing, proto-internet!

- Michael Fassbender. You inexplicably turn me all caps, big guy. Can’t wait to see you in your disastrous Wuthering Heights next year.

- Star Fleet wallets. I am the bird! (God, did I ever leave the house as an adolescent? Don’t answer that.)

- Family and friends. Dear Mom, I love you so much. Sorry I’m not changing my name. Apologize to Grandma for me.

- Fassbender, my portable computer. It allows me to be rude in public whenever I want.

- My TV. It took away the dialogue track for this week’s Eleventh Hour. It was amazing. Graeme Revell, one of my favorite composers, gave me a little concert, and I got to see the worst arch-enemy arc in recent memory. See for yourself at Tor.com!

ETA: And I never have to watch another episode of Dollhouse now that I turned in my opinion piece to Fantasy, which makes this day practically Thanksgiving!

I am leaving on vacation this weekend, and will be at home all week, working on the book edits and the 2k-a-day writing schedule I have to be on for the rest of the year to meet my goals. I was planning to bring the large laptop, but my dad called me last night to make sure I was bringing Fassbender, my Acer Aspire One, home for the holidays. He was as excited about the computer as he was about my visit. (Possibly more excited about the computer than my visit. I mean, I’ve already visited him before; the computer is new!)

I’m debating – I love it for short bursts, but am I going to get Carpal Tunnel banging out 2k a day on its teeny keyboard? On the other other hand, when friends at home ask, “What are you doing these days?” I can just hold it up, since I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer for something or other, and it’s cute enough to distract them from my boring night life!