Sumana

It's hard when no one else is singing your song. A love letter to our favorite Chosen Ones.

• Hamilton: An American Musical, and my Tor.com piece on it which discusses how it uses history and why scifi fans are into it
  
• The contemporary and historical romance novels of Courtney Milan
  
• The Indian comic book company Amar Chitra Katha
  
• thingwithwings's Captain America fanfic Known Associates
  
• The BBC historical fiction TV series Indian Summers about 1930s India under British occupation
  
• Mary Anne Mohanraj's short story "Jump Space" and Ken Liu's short story "Single-Bit Error", both of which appeared in the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments which my spouse Leonard Richardson & I co-edited & co-published in 2009 (Mohanraj has since written a novel in this same universe, and Liu has in multiple interviews called the publication of "Single-Bit Error" a key turning point for his career; "Single-Bit Error" has since been reprinted)
  
• The Archive Of Our Own, a repository for fanworks (such as fanfiction)
  
• Laura Shapiro's critical fanvid "Only A Lad" which critiques the "bad boy woobie" trope
  
• bironic's Ancillary Justice book trailer
  
• The upcoming NASA biopic film Hidden Figures
  
• Benjamin Rosenbaum's blog post about translation of speculative fiction, including several statistics and a link to a directory of translators on the Society of Authors site
  
• The comic book Ms. Marvel
  
• Greg Milner's history of audio engineering Perfecting Sound Forever
  
• Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial (translated from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin) (I didn't finish this book -- I think it's good but I need to give it another go and finish it)
  
• Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers (translated from German) (championed by Orson Scott Card)
  
• Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad and other works (translated from Polish)
  
• "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" (a short story about gun-toting, motocross-driving dinosaurs from Mars) and Constellation Games (a novel about video games, programming, and first contact with aliens), both by my spouse, Leonard Richardson
  
• The Member Assistance Fund, financial aid to help people attend WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention that happens in Madison, Wisconsin that happens in late May every year (Memorial Day weekend)
  
• The Tiptree Award for speculative fiction that explores gender -- recommend works now for the jury to consider, and buy books and T-shirts
  
• Michael Lopp's line that art is "the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions".
  
• Hari Kondabolu, an Indian-American stand-up comic whose work I enjoy
  
• The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl written by Ryan North, who also makes Dinosaur Comics
  
• "Cat, Dog, and Badger Each Own A Bookstore. They Are Friends." and "Quill & Scroll" (art in the latter by Brendan Adkins), my two children's book zines about animals who run bookstores
  
• Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk
  
• Joss Whedon's run on Runaways
  
• The Catwoman arc written by Genevieve Valentine
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates's work writing Black Panther
  
• Kelly Sue DeConnick's work writing Bitch Planet (and the fact that she is one of the guests of honor for next year's WisCon)
  
• Beeminder, a service that helps you stick with habits
  
• !!Con, a conference about the joy, surprise, and delight of programming, and Katie Bechtold's !!Con talk "Code in Spaaaaaace!!!!!" about the constraints (physical, financial, and more) that affect how we write software for space-bound hardware
  
• Gordon Korman, Canadian author of books for children & young adults
  
• Kate Beaton's historical webcomic Hark! A Vagrant
  
• lionpyh's fanfic short story "Fifty Years in the Virtuous City"
  
• The Viable Paradise and Clarion writers' workshops for people who want to improve their skills at writing scifi/fantasy (I haven't been to either of these but I hear they are good)
  
• Changeset Consulting, the company I started that provides short-term project management and maintainership services for free and open source software projects and for companies that depend on them
  
• My past talks and stand-up comedy (and recordings, notes, and transcripts when available)
  
• Saravana Bhavan, an Indian restaurant in New York City
  
• TKTS, a set of kiosks to help you get cheap same-day tickets to live theater in New York City
  
• Free or cheap sightseeing in NYC: the Roosevelt Island tram and the Staten Island Ferry
  
• Dale Carnegie's self-help book How To Win Friends and Influence People, which changed my life when I read it in 10th grade
  

With some arbitrary categorization for ease of skimming, here are some vids I learned from:

Using stills well
( three vids )

Ambition
( four and a half vids )

Multisource/multifandom
( six vids )

Message
( two vids )

Other

And of course I learned from a ton of other sources, like a ton of meta about vidding, and Tony Zhou's "Every Frame a Painting" video series, and the scores of vids I've watched over the years. Anyway, hope someone finds this of interest.

Right now I'm working on an ambitious fanvidding project and am thus watching a bunch of other ambitious fanvids (e.g., chaila's "Watershed", danegen's "Around the Bend", counteragent's "Coin Operated Boy") to take notes on technique (e.g., exactly how many 100%-dark frames serve as a good stutter in frightening montages, versus how many blank frames help reset the eye and prepare it for a new sequence). Just now I was watching "Another Sunday" by Jescaflowne, set to "We Built This City" by Jefferson Starship. I checked the timecode scrubber. "Hey Leonard," I said facetiously. "Did you know that rock songs used to be four and a half minutes long?"

He looked at my screen as we made up Freakonomics-worthy nonsensical explanations of why this used to be the case. "What show is that?"

"Stargate Atlantis."

At this, Leonard developed a hypothesis that Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural are like REM and Belle & Sebastian, viz., if he can't tell what fandom a vid is, and there are spaceships and lots of guns, it's SGA, and if there are no spaceships and nearly no guns, it's Supernatural.

As a data point, I've watched zero SGA and one ep of SPN ("Fan Fiction"), but have spent happy hours enjoying fic and vids about both, particularly the critical readings -- if you're waiting for Ann Leckie's next Ancillaryverse installment, you could do worse than reading "Second Verse (Same as the First)" by Friendshipper/Sholio. I wonder whether the same thing will happen to me with Teen Wolf.