(no subject)

My sister, who does not like sports at all, just called me at 12:17am. She wanted to talk about the game.

"It's so exciting!" she said with a certain tone of helplessness to her voice. "They just needed one more out, and they, they got it!"

She was stuck without a TV, so she watched the whole thing on MLB GameDay. I got to tell her about the blood soaking through Curt Schilling's sock and the A-Rod interference fiasco. And the riot police.

"I can't believe you're up," she said at one point. "Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"...Yeah."

(no subject)

The stereotypical thing is to contrast people who stay up past their bedtimes watching a sports event with people who stay up past their bedtimes reading. No one talks about the trials of the poor unfortunate souls who find themselves staying up even later past their bedtimes because, after the ballgame was over, they had to finish reading Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark.

Read it.

I don't care if you think her space operas are clumsy and her fantasies derivative. The Speed of Dark is an entirely different thing, worlds different in tone and quality than her previous novels. It's the story of a near-future world in which autism is curable via gene therapies during fetal development and the neonatal period. In the recent past, effective sensory integration therapy techniques were available, which improved the functioning of autistic individuals without altering the fundamental neural deficit. The protagonist of The Speed of Dark, Lou, is an intelligent, high-functioning autistic man who was born too early for the cure. He holds a job (thanks to supports) and lives independently, yet has to use clumsy memorized algorithms to work out, step by step, social phenomena that we process automatically.

His boss, frustrated by the special supports autistic employees require, puts heavy pressure on him to become one of the first human subjects testing a radical neurosurgery designed to make autistic people normal. The book, essentially, becomes a meditation on what it means to be "normal," how autistic people differ from "normal" people, and where the self really lies. It avoids the easy pitfalls; several autistic characters quote the " 'normal' is a dryer setting" line, but Moon doesn't flinch away from showing their struggles and the suffering they experience. And the autistic-eye view of life and society is fascinating.

Rivka-Bob says, check it out.

Gratuitous icon post.

At therealjae's urging, I made this icon for "and-baby-makes-three" posts.

Thanks to baaaaabyanimals for the cuteness.