Signal boost...

...yuki_onna, the editor at Apex Magazine, is looking for (speculative fiction) poetry and other material from Muslim writers and writers of Arab descent for an upcoming issue. Deadline October 15, more details at link.

I am looking for material, but most especially poetry, from Muslim authors and authors of Arabic descent. Let's make it easy: if you think you might "count," then you do. Southeast Asian Muslims, yes. American Muslims, yes. Anybody with a connection to the cultures of Islam, yes. The subject of your works can be anything you like, but I am only looking for authors with connections to Islam and/or the Arabic world. Please do not send reprints, we have that covered.

Also!

yuletart (Secret Santa fanart exchange) sign-ups are open!

A-Kon

If you are an A-Kon attendee, please go fill out this short survey. We on the PR/Marketing committee will be extremely grateful! (Also, please publicize the link if you're so inclined - thank you!)

Twitter virus warning

If you use the Twitter web interface, you might want to be careful - an exploit is using the "onmouseover" function to retweed infected links and to reroute you to other websites without you clicking on the link. Links to articles on it here.

Update: according to @safety, it has been patched and blocked.

(no subject)

Fascinating article about gender in Afghanistan and young girls who become, for a time, young boys because of social pressure on their families.

(no subject)

Civilization V is out today.

So much for getting anything done this week.

I may have to buy this book...

I added a bunch of samples to my Kindle and an slowly going through them, deciding whether or not to buy the books for the trip. I mmmight have to get this one:

It is a mistake to think that the overwhelming reason for women to wear perfume is to attract the opposite sex. But as Luca once explained to me regarding the peculiar, temperature-independent scanty dress of many young women at night, what a woman on the prowl requires is something that men will register after six beers. Thus the use of simplified sexual cues, such as short skirts and big hair, and perhaps also a loud, sweet, pervasive perfume that will cut through a fog of spilled liquor, end-of-day body odor, the occasional vomit on the bar floor, and the perfumes of the nearest five girls, dressed identically. Of course, if your mating strategy casts this wide a net, you may drag in more old boots than big tunas. But that is probably fodder for another book.

Perhaps this attention-getting olfactive strategy can also, in a way, explain the second mistake, milder than the first but still quite wrong, that women tend to make when choosing a fragrance, which is to assume that the reason to wear perfume is to impersonate a flower bed. This is a very fine strategy if your aim is to attract bees.

Also: I found a YA series with two books up on NetGalley. One in which an anorexic girl becomes Famine, and one in which a girl who cuts becomes Rage. Yes, two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.