In the coming days, this may come to be known as the “Trimonthly roundup”. But for those still shivering in the depths of winter, there is hope! For spring is filled with a number of conventions and events of interest to HRSFANS; we bring them to you now, in an attempt to list and discuss events (like sci-fi or gaming conventions) which HRSFANS are going to. It is also announced on hrsfans-discuss, and the updated list is kept on the HRSFANS wiki.

Are you going to any of these events? Got anything coming up that you’d like HRSFANS to know about? Like to see other HRSFANs? Great! Just drop a note and let people know!

February

• 2/9-12: Capricon: Wheeling, IL. Nicely sized general SF convention. Mystery Spatula Theater 11 and Gozer Games will be there.
• 2/12-17: Boskone: Boston, MA. Put on by NESFA, a major Science Fiction/Fantasy convention.
• 2/19-20: Boston SF Film Marathon: Somerville, MA. 24 hour SF film marathon, noon Sunday-Monday. Drew G will be attending.
• 2/24-27: Dreamation: Morristown, NJ. Weiyi G, Jason B., Alden S. and Kay S. and Dev P. and Laura S. will be leading a New York HRSFANS contingent

March

• 3/2-3/4: Intercon L: Chelmsford, MA. The much larger sibling of Intercon Mid-Atlantic. Matt E and Mindy K are going.
• 3/16-3/18:
  

  Vericon XII/HRSFANS 2012 Reunion

  : Cambridge, MA

• 3/21-3/25 IAFA: Orlando, FL. HRSFANS author Marie Brennan will be attending.
• 3/30-4/1 [ FOGcon: San Francisco, CA. HRSFANS author Marie Brennan will be attending
• 3/30 – 3/31 Emerald City Comicon: Seattle, WA. Tony V is interested in attending.

April

• 4/6-4/8 PAX East: Boston, MA. Like PAX, but in Boston. Kevin G is interested in attending.
• 4/6-4/8: Anime BostonBoston, MA. Ada P and Alessandro will be running cosplay events
• 4/6-4/8 Sakuracon: Seattle, WA. Tony V is interested in attending.
• 4/27 WACcon : Seattle, WA. Diplomacy tournament. Tony V will stab you.

It is a quiet time for the Bimonthly roundup. Winter is coming, and winter is a time to bundle oneself up and retreat indoors, to conserve energy and hold back against the cold until the new energy of spring arrives. Still, there are some blooms which can be seen to poke through the snow, calling to those who appreciate their life and beauty.

This is the latest installment of the Bimonthly Roundup, an attempt to list and discuss events (like sci-fi or gaming conventions) which HRSFANS are going to. It is also announced on hrsfans-discuss, and the updated list is kept on the HRSFANS wiki.

Are you going to any of these events? Got anything coming up that you’d like HRSFANS to know about? Like to see other HRSFANs? Great! Just drop a note and let people know!

November

11/18-20, Anime USA: Arlington, VA. Seems to have something to do with anime, which is perhaps Japanese animation? More seriously, it’s a fan-based, fan-run anime convention. Also, their website’s mouse-following multilayer css backdrop is pretty slick.

December

12/2-4, Anonycon: Stamford CT. Small con with heavy focus on RPGs and some LARPs. Jason B and Weiyi G will be running The Dance and the Dawn LARP (by Warren T).

January

1/13-1/16: Arisia: Boston, MA. Arisia is a massive sci-fi fantasy convention, and many HRSFANS are perennial attendees.
1/13-1/15: MIT Mystery Hunt: Cambridge, MA. The Olympics of puzzle competitions, an annual adventure and tremendous challenge. On this year’s writing/organizing team: Emily M, Andrew L, Kevin C, Kartik V, Novalis. Many other HRSFANS expected to participate.

To get put on future announcements, just add yourself (or your event) to the wiki list, or email me to let me know!

Awesomely, one of the New Yorker weblogs published a post musing on another very new-to-me reason for reading, not reading, and/or finishing a book during the same week as the HRSFANS-discuss book recommendation thread I wrote about in July. (By the way, I have started—barely—to collate the recommendations list on the wiki. Please help! “‘Paperbacks-for-the-road’ Recommendations” is linked through from the “Index to the Awesome.”) I considered in parallel from the start Ms. Minkel’s apparent compulsion to show herself “an adult” in her reading life and Tony’s warning of potential future bad volumes in good-so-far series, so here come my musings specifically on the former.

An extract:

On one hand, we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end. On the other, the books we’ve sort of read and glibly lie about having finished. Both of these seem tied to some sort of reading scorecard, one in which the readers are measured and judged by—perhaps even more than—the books that they’ve read. …

But is the reading scorecard internal or external? Or are the two so entwined that it’s impossible to answer that question?

Ms. Minkel could mean the “we” impersonally: “On one hand, we have [here an example of] big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end,” but the rest of her post seems to indicate that she does speak as “we” for herself and her assuredly well-read readers (the comments posted seem to presume this, too).

Yet to me this entire concept of a compulsion to finish a book (painful or not) is foreign, bizarre, and surely detrimental to reading health. Does it ring a bell for anyone? Can you explain how this compulsion could make sense inside one’s own head (or how it can compel regardless of sense)?

People who’ve read my posts before may have noticed that I, if anything, tend to brag about my willingness to drop a book at any point, as if it’s macho, or stoic, to leave the story ever unfinished in my own mind. Come to think, in some cases it does feel internally macho, in that I’m deliberately holding myself back from the experience because I do care and yet don’t feel it would be advantageous to continue (Big Love after “Pilot”, new Battlestar Galactica after “Bastille Day”, A Reliable Wife more than 2/3 through, and to a lesser extent The Pillars of the Earth after 300p); in other cases it does feel internally stoic in that I’m accepting that I don’t care a whit about the next phase of the story and would rather turn to more enjoyable pursuits, without necessarily faulting the author(s) for being unable to keep my interest (Potter V 70p in without a single page free of people yelling at each other, Angel after “Reprise”, Farscape after “Season of Death”). When I discovered Ms. Minkel’s post, I immediately opened a chat to a friend whom I’ve mentioned earlier as a counterpoint to my reading style: he once devoured half of War and Peace in two days as escape reading. I opened the conversation (minor typos & grammatical quirks corrected):

me: you’ll have a COMPLETELY different reaction to this than I will …

you won’t think this whole concept of “we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end” is foreign, bizarre, counter-to-one’s-reading-health

he:i think that reading is just less painful for me

because i read so fast

… i mean, i am a bit compulsive about finishing books, but that’s more my obsessive nature than it is powering through

what would take willpower is putting them down

it’s not that i feel compelled to finish a book because i started it. it’s because i like reading and don’t like putting books down.

me: Usually a reading struggle for me just means my psyche isn’t keeping pace

I still don’t see how liking reading is a reason to keep reading a story you’re not liking—there’s hundreds of others available just as easily (in your case, without even putting down the device if you’re reading on the iPhone)

he: well, but you want to know how it ends

as i said, i don’t task switch well

if i’m in the middle of a video game

i find myself playing it for several more hours

me: no, I only want to know how it ends if I’m interested in the story

and even then, that’s not the important part

If I wanted to know how every story ends, I’d be even more of a basket case about keeping contact with everybody than I already am—and I never would have cancelled my FB account due to lack of interest

Read for your self, not for your private morals or for their public display. Reading is between you, the story, its characters and/or its world, and the author. Everything and everyone outside is just details—and if they aren’t, read something else.

Daniel Rabuzzi (’80) has a retrospective about the recent Toronto Spec Fic Colloquium on Modern Mythologies up on his speculative fiction blog at http://lobsterandcanary.blogspot.com/2011/10/toronto-specfic-colloquium-modern.html. The colloquium webpage itself is at http://www.specfic-colloquium.com/. I guess it’s too late to recommend the colloquium for this year, but perhaps locals and approximate locals might consider attending next year?

In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a HRSFANS event was hosted in the Lowell Senior Common room. The event was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

For anyone attending the Harvard 2011 reunion, there will be a HRSFANS event on Saturday, May 28th, from 3-5 pm in the Lowell Senior Common Room. Come join us for refreshments, good company, and the possibility of going mad if you stay too long.

While we’re talking about innovative solutions to space constraints…

This Hong Kong architect has packed twenty four rooms into his tiny but very versatile apartment, through the magic of movable walls and fold-out facilities.  Apparently, this is environmentally friendly in addition to being awesomely futuristic.

via Palahniuk and Chocolate

I was shocked to learn recently how misguided our approach to drug policy is. In a recent article in The Independent, Johann Hari clearly explains how a policy based on prohibition and policing is counterproductive, and how all evidence favors legalizing and regulating the drug trade. For instance, did you know that Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2001, and that drug use has since fallen, with hard drug use falling fastest? Or that the rate of new heroin addictions in Switzerland has fallen 82% since the country started providing centers where addicts can inject heroin safely and for free? (That’s because addicts no longer need to recruit new users to finance their addiction.)

But despite the evidence, political forces are lined up against a sane drug policy. As Hari explains:

In 1998, the Office of National Drug Control Policy was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific research that might give the impression that we should redirect funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of addicts, or that there is any argument to legalise, regulate or medicalise drug use. … So, to give a small example, the ONDCP spent $14bn on anti-cannabis adverts aimed at teenagers, and $43m to find out if the ads worked. They discovered that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned, so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

Ouch. And while the US might be doing particularly poorly on this front, we’re not alone: In the UK, the chair of the Advisory Committe on the Misuse of Drugs (ie. the country’s top advisor on drug policy) was just fired for speaking out in favor of evidence-based drug policy. There’s an article about it in this weekend’s Boston Globe Ideas section, which is also worth a read. Among other things, it mentions that the Obama administration is taking baby steps in the direction of a more evidence-based policy. Still no Portuguese-scale decriminalization on the horizon for the US, but we can at least be supportive of any move to shift resources into addiction prevention and treatment.

Apparently my father’s friend has a website that contains a large assortment of interesting abstract boardgames (including descriptions and links to the rules) and java applets that allow you to play them online against a computer or another player.  I didn’t recognize most of them, but gipf and its fellows were there and seemed pretty representative.  For those of us who enjoy this sort of game, this could be an awesome way to waste time and meet likeminded people. Hey– if a bunch of us sign up, we might find each other. We could even use it to follow up on the longstanding notion of an online gaming SIG (presumably alongside other similar sites that support other games)…

Speaking of Faith is pretty darn awesome as radio programs go. The tag line is “… conversation about religion, meaning, ethics and ideas …” (formerly “… conversation about belief, meaning, ethics and ideas …”, which in my mind scans better). These topics do produce fantastic conversations, and I’ve encountered quite a few of them just by wandering over to the website and shuffling through the archive episodes. This week, I discover TV and Parables of Our Time, a conversation with media scholar Diane Winston of USC.

I didn’t like this episode at first, but even by the end of the first listening it makes a lot more sense, and I think many of you would be happy to think through its themes, as well–not to mention its references. (Battlestar Galactica serves as the “star” example of a TV show that grapples with big questions; Lost and House play second bananas.)

Enjoy … and while you’re at it, enjoy The Novelist As God and A History of Doubt, Speaking of Faith programs from earlier this year.  All are related somehow to the place for storytelling, and narrative-making, in the human mind.