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!)

Here, have a small links list!

* I am on Dreamwidth. (Same name.) I have no plans to move, but maybe to mirror, but who knows since my name on that header’s so freaking big I might as well just leave it empty and call it performance art.

* Eventually I have to stop pretending I’m fumbling around and just admit I Twitter. I’m sure my mom is proud of me.

* And she should be proud, because the Sybil’s Garage TOC that includes me has a lineup of awesome names, the most awesome of which is Enkidu, history’s most unintentionally hilarious name.

Disclaimer: I don’t care about Valentine’s Day except that it gives me a chance to make a list post. I am the Switzerland of Valentine’s day. (Unless people ask me if I’m excited for my “name day,” and then I sigh, because seriously, that joke was old in fourth grade, it’s old now.)

- 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!

So I’m trying to write to deadline, desperately; this of course means it’s time to talk about theories of interior design!

…of which I have none. What I mean is, I tried to clean up my apartment yesterday and got totally flabbergasted, because while there’s plenty of room for the mess, there’s absolutely no space for me to get oranized.

This always makes me think of the one episode of Mission: Organization that ever impressed me, where some poor woman’s jail cell of a studio apartment got remade into an actual living space. It’s still small, and this sort of renovation only works on people who don’t own a lot of books, but I still think about it whenever I look at my living room and think, “This is a cesspool – be like that studio apartment, stupid living room!”

The Before: there’s more information about this on the website, which includes Puritan-level scathing condemnation of her slightly-cluttered chair. Seriously, they put “There’s actually a chair underneath all that stuff!” on the ACTUAL WEBSITE. There’s two books, two messenger bags, and a paper shopping bag on that chair. I should show HGTV the horrors of the chair in my living room that I call “Closet 2″.

Anyway, while the clutter factor is debatable, there’s no question this is a really bland apartment that needed help:

And boy, did it ever get help.
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For those who are curious, a brief photo tour of my home.

(Or, you know, Jay Walker’s amazing personal library, for which he constructed an entire house and pipes in a custom soundtrack to set just the right mood for looking at “a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week)”. via Wired.

And as long as you’re dreaming of impossible things, enjoy their gallery of spaceship conceptual art, of which my favorite is this bad boy.