Lindsay Ellis’s The Hobbit “duology” documentary – funny, frustrating, melancholic, nostalgic, overall a great watch – is a finalist for Hugo Award for Best Related Work. I’ve been a big fan of her work since she began a decade ago.

The rest of the nominees look strong, but I’ve been out of sync with SF this year. Hoping to remedy that soon.

ETA - watch the first part here.

Pretty sure this is how Skynet starts.

(via Gizmodo)

For those of you who follow me on social media, you’ll know I’ve been having kind of a rough year.

Last week, I had a severe anxiety flare-up. Through personal experience, I found out that throat constriction, which feels like anaphylactic shock or a swollen thyroid, is a common symptom of GAD. An on-call physician at a walk-in clinic pointed it out immediately.

A new study suggests that sea otters create a distinct archaeological record, and it might eventually have a lot to tell us about their evolutionary history.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/sea-otter-archaeology-exists-and-its-awesome/

Note: This is not an examination of the intentions of Hayao Miyazaki or any of the other filmmakers involved in the production of Princess Mononoke. This is how it speaks to my own lived experience.

(CW: mental illness)

I live with anxiety and depression. I have been going to therapy semi-regularly since 2010, after I experienced an anxiety attack that caused me to flee my workplace. My first experiences with depression were in high school. Anxiety and depression often go hand-in-hand, and I’ve heard it described as a symbiotic relationship – bouts of high anxiety leading to periods of depression.

The experience of an anxiety attack, aka a “panic attack,” is like being stalked by a tiger that’s just out of sight. It’s difficult to breathe. You have to do something right now, come on, let’s go, but you don’t know what exactly needs doing. Your fight-or-flight kicks in, and either you get irritable and angry, or you panic and escape as best you can.

Here’s a bit of spooky fluff for your afternoon. I presented the story below at a Christmas party for some scary storytelling around a campfire. It’s a mix of fact and (mostly) fiction, but the Widowmaker was a very real plane. I hope you enjoy it!

I’ll be back on the mat tomorrow.

I took several months off from Aikido last year. I didn’t think it would be permanent at first, just a short break while I handled an enormous project at work with a hard deadline. Well, that project slogged on for several months, then led into a sequel project (with a slightly softer deadline, but other mitigating circumstances)…

And then I got sick.

I was training for a 5K during this time (just so I could keep active somehow), but my fitness took a huge nosedive while I shook off a nasty sinus infection following a bad cold. When I was able to start running again in late December, I was starting almost from scratch.

Still, I hung onto my gis – one I received when I joined my dojo last year, another I ordered but didn’t get to use – because some part of me knew I’d be back.

Finally, after realizing how much I missed it, I restarted my membership at the dojo last week. I’ve been going over the techniques I tested on last year, doing some stretches to prepare for the rigorous workout, but I’ve backslid considerably.

My short story “Mold” appeared this summer in the anthology Survivor, edited by JJ Pionke and Mary Anne Mohanraj, and published by Lethe Press. I’m tremendously proud of both my story and the other outstanding works in that volume. I highly recommend the anthology as a whole for any eligible categories in 2019.

That said, I don’t know if I can write something like “Mold” again, in part to what I learned recently about my family history. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to read it again.

Total words: 16,507

That…didn’t go as planned.

Despite some thorough pre-writing and my best efforts, I did not reach 50,000 words during November. I didn’t anticipate coming down with an aggressive, flu-like cold. On the other hand, I did know about a crucial deadline at work, so I could have planned around that better.

Still, that’s 16K words on a story I’m thrilled about.

I’m catching up on business I put off while I was sick, but I should be back on it soon.

Word count: 16,507

Best laid plans, yadda yadda yadda. I finally made some time…and then I caught a nasty cold I’m just starting to get over.

I’m getting better. If I hit 20K words by November 30, I’ll be satisfied.