Lorelei Kelly

I've been busy writing drafts of reviews for books I've finished reading, and I keep linking to Amazon for them, and so I thought hey, as long as I am writing these things and including all these links, I might as well set up an Amazon Associates store. I don't expect to make noticeable money from it, but maybe eventually I could make enough to buy another paperback to review, eh? Mainly, it's an easy way for me to put together all the stuff I've found in a place where you can quickly check out the book descriptions and reviews and maybe buy something. The whole point being to increase the market for diverse SF...

Great Sky Woman is the first book by Steven Barnes I've ever read, and before this I'd hardly heard of him. Which is shameful, since he's been publishing since before I was born. My only excuse is that he collaborated a lot with Larry Niven, whose work I've never really cared for. In any case I missed out, because this book is excellent...

This article is about science fiction on TV and in movies and basically ignores others media, which irritates me, since most of the fans I know consume more novels than movies or TV shows (also I'm a jerk and if you tell me you're an SF fan but you don't read books I will roll my eyes at you), but the novels do have the same problems, and it get definitely gets talked about. So many people have written really well about all this, I hardly know where to start linking. Well, an excellent essay by Samuel R. Delany could hardly go wrong. And then there was Racefail 09, which, at this point, there are so many posts just summarizing and linking to all the major posts in the chain, that I just picked the top result on Google. If you've got a couple of hours, it's worth working through the major points...

Sometimes I get strange urges, like, I should make my blog more like Marginal Revolution. I mean, aside from the fact that I have no interest in writing about economics or public policy. Mainly what I thought was this comedy recommendations post was itself kind of hilarious, maybe because it's written in that brief, dry way Tyler Cowen makes all his recommendations, and I do love a good deadpan...

There's been some controversy lately in the design blogoworld! Bruce Nussbaum asks the hard questions in Fast Company with Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

You don't have to go very deep into interaction design to find a lot of people throwing around the word "intuitive." A lot of people talk about the importance of intuitiveness as a design goal, and praise particular products for being intuitive. Search Boxes and Arrows for the word "intuitive" and all kinds of examples come up. What hardly anyone talks about is what they mean by "intuitive." There's a kind of general understanding of that as "easy to use/figure out," someone can sit down and start to use the interface without any special training or guidance, and this is regarded as a good thing...

Life's been sort of weird these last few weeks. I'm back with my parents in Pittsburgh, getting ready to move to Seattle for real and good next week. Most of my time has involved sorting things from my childhood bedroom into trash-donation-keep piles, applying for jobs, or avoiding one of the two. Also watching Battlestar Galactica with my dad. I've made Sim houses and Sim families and lists (to-do, box contents, etc) and done some sewing for mending or clothing alterations and that's about it...

Ok International No Diet Day (I'm sorry, the website is in comic sans. I hope you can forgive it) was like three weeks ago and I missed it even though I had PLANS for THINGS but whatever guys, every day should be no diet day if you ask me...

I keep thinking this blog ought to be about something, because most of the good blogs I read have a particular focus, but I haven't had the spare energy to try and devote myself to developing content about a specific topic. I mean, interaction design is the obvious one, and the one my blog header claims, but I feel like my thoughts and experiences on that topic would need a lot of work to be really *bloggable*, and most of the times I try I end up with a 3/4 finished draft that never makes it out of my draft folder. So it's just been a blog about things I do and think, which is of course never confined to a neat topic. I suppose I'm writing for myself more than for an audience, anyway. I want to work as a designer, not as a blogger, so probably that's ok. The blog is just not the point...

or maybe just...SCIENCE. Last Friday I was recommended for the conferral of the degree Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction Design or whatever it was they said during that remnant of medieval pageantry known as a higher education graduation ceremony. I mean, I participated willingly, and even though it was more of an event where the master's candidates watched the phd candidates get hooded for an hour, I'm glad I did. I like rituals, and sometimes I need them to convince myself that something has really happened and is important. But that doesn't stop me from thinking the whole thing is more than a little bit silly...