Splashing around in my archives

On my main blog (as here), I tag blog posts rather erratically, and keep meaning to go back and systematically taxonomize my thousands of posts. One thing that my new blogging platform includes is another way to highlight particular posts for attention: individual "collections" of posts listed on the "Collections" page, which is prominently linked on the top navbar of the site.

Just now I went through about nine years' worth of archives to add posts to a few collections:

• Sometimes-silly ideas: I often dream up business or project ideas. Often they’re silly. Often I have no intention of executing on these ideas. Feel free to implement them. Caution: several are probably pretty bad!
• Fundamental ways I think about things: These posts illustrate some of the underlying beliefs, habits, and approaches that undergird how I reason and act.
• Detailed instructions: Systematic how-to explanations on a variety of topics.

Also, there's a DW feed for my blog at sumana_feed. I recently found out it had broken last year, argh, and have now remedied that, so please do subscribe if you'd like.

I'm glad I did this tonight especially because I ran across an old post in which I share a memory that means a lot to me:

Once, Leonard and I had to have a difficult conversation. As I gulped breath and tried to get up the gumption to go into the living room and talk with him about this thing, I did a bit of math. There are maybe 350 million people in the US, which means tens of millions of couples - maybe even a hundred million couples, just in my country. Some tiny fraction of those couples had the same problem, so, maybe twenty thousand? And it might take years for the couples to talk about it, and there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, but even so, I thought, there must be at least a few other couples having this same hard talk tonight, maybe five. I imagined them as points of light, with bright lines crisscrossing the continent to connect us.

Just the hypothetical existence of this community calmed me. We are not alone, we can't be. We talked and came out the other side together.

DW and RSS/Atom syndication feeds to subscribe to scifi/fantasy magazines

Short stories are great. And there are dozens of high-quality online magazines that publish short, original speculative stories for you to read for free. Even when I have a tough time bringing enough attention and time to commit to and finish a book, I can often enjoy a short story or three.

A couple years ago I listed several magazines that have published work I like, and their syndication feeds you can subscribe to here on Dreamwidth via RSS/Atom. Enjoy!

BTW if anyone makes a big OPML feed out of all of those, please link to it in the comments!

Readings of Odo

I was talking with some friends recently about the Star Trek characters Spock, Data, and Odo. I believe I've read interesting fan analyses of Spock and Data, but not Odo. I'd love pointers to essays (including video essays or comics), tie-in novels, and fan fiction that provide lenses through which to understand Odo. In particular I'm interested in:

• People who found Odo's story reflective of their own in some way, and who are in some way systematically marginalized (adoptees, neuroatypical people, queer people, and so on)
• Odo's and Kira's attitudes towards justice and how they work towards it
• Fiction or speculation about alternate universes where the scientist who found and nurtured infant Odo was from a different culture, e.g., Betazoid or Vulcan or Klingon or The Traveller or Q, or in a different time period, such as Bajor centuries earlier under the D'jarra system
• Comparisons of Odo with Spock, Data, Worf, and Seven of Nine
• What a DS9 with a much much higher production budget could have done to make more interesting use of a shapeshifter character (Odo is a cloud much more often! Sometimes Odo is played by Angela Lansbury or the dog who plays Wishbone! Quark sells tons of of caulk to station residents who just want some assurance of privacy in their own quarters!)
• Gender and Odo, like, what's up with that?

Please feel free to comment here and to link widely to this request!