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Angel’s Bits – From Famine to Feast

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A few years ago, when I was starting out in this genre, finding safe convention space for LGBTQ+ fiction was difficult. Sure, there were cons who said we could play, there were even some who welcomed us, but it still had that feeling of being the odd man out, the oh, and also those part of the weekend. Now we’re trying to decide which conventions to attend next year, and we’re finding we have to choose, that we can no longer attend all the LGBTQ specific events out there. The last convention I’ll be attending this year was one we … Read more

News: Assassin’s Creed Adds First Transgender Character

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Ned Wynert

‘Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’ will include the long-running series’ first transgender character. The character – Ned Wynert – is a trans male and one of several supporting characters that act as quest givers for the game’s protagonists. Developers Ubisoft have also updated Assassin’s Creed’s opening statement for the first time since the first game’s release in 2007. See the Full Story at Pink News

Massive To-Scale Model Of Our Solar System Will Blow Your Mind

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Solar System Model

Filmmakers Wylie Overstreet, Alex Gorosh and a few of their friends took on a hugely creative, and impressive, task of fittingly creating a to-scale model of our solar system in a 3.5-mile patch of desert known for hosting one of the most artistic festivals in the U.S.: Burning Man Festival. Gorosh and Overstreet documented the process and techniques they used to create this massive model utilizing a mix of technology and agricultural techniques including drones, GPS coordinates, electrical lighting, a click wheel to measure distance and a makeshift farming harrow to create their model within a short 36 hours. Full … Read more

Girls Who Grow Penises at Twelve

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Great fodder for a story: In a village in the Dominican Republic, an estimated one in fifty children are born ‘girls’ before growing male genitalia during puberty. The children are known as Guevedoces – roughly translated as “penis-at-12” – referring to the age they are when their physical appearance starts to change. This extraordinary intersex condition – known medically as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency – has been documented for a new BBC2 series ‘Countdown to Life’ which takes a look at how we develop in the womb and how early changes impact us for the rest of our lives. See the full … Read more

News: Meet Lily, The World’s First Throw-and-Shoot Camera

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Lily

Just toss it up in the air to begin. Lily, the world’s first throw-and-shoot camera, self-maneuvers using a GPS tracker in its owner’s bracelet, soaring though the sky at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. The Lily Camera also shoots high-quality photos and videos, fits snug in your average backpack, and doesn’t mind getting wet. But, did we mention it takes a mean selfie? Engineered with an accelerometer, barometer, GPS, and not one, but two lenses, the “Waterproof Selfie Drone,” as dubbed by photographer Von Wong, has stirred quite the buzz on social media for its capability to … Read more

The View from Kepler-452b

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Kepler-452b

High in the night sky, the bright stars Deneb and Vega mark a star field at the center of a probe unrelated to Benghazi or Hillary’s emails or whether Iran will get the Bomb. NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has discovered Kepler-452b, an earth-like planet 1400 light years away. At 6 billion years old, it is 1.5 billion years older than Earth. This raises the question whether any intelligent life there has avoided destroying itself. How might earthlings evolve over a similar time period? It will be sad but unsurprising if it turns out that Kepler-452b has produced several intelligent life … Read more

Me Me Monday!

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Welcome to ME ME MONDAY at our FB discussion group – your chance to pop in and tell us about your latest success. Have a new book or short story coming out? Let us know. Just sell something? Let us know so we can cheer you on. HOW IT WORKS: I’ll pin this topic to the top of our FB discussion page for the day. –Please post your announcement as a separate post, so I can also share it over to our FB page (as opposed to this discussion group). –If you want, send me your book announcement info at … Read more

News: USC Class Exploring How Sci Fi Fandom Sparked LGBT Rights Movement

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Toward Tomorrow

If you wanted to find life outside the closet in the 1930s, you might as well have started looking for another planet — and that’s exactly what a generation of gay and lesbian sci-fi fans did. They were drawn to a genre that allowed them to imagine new worlds where they could be their true selves and love whomever they wanted. This fall, a senior seminar offered through the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in the Gender Studies Program will look at how Los Angeles’ legendary sci-fi societies overlapped with the early LGBT rights movement, laying the … Read more

WORLDBUILDING WEEK: Day Five – Sex, Marriage, Reproduction

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Worldbuilting Week

Welcome to the first annual Worldbuilding Week at QSF. We’ll talk about all aspects of building a world for your story, including languages; alien/magical races; history and timelines; culture and politics; sex, marriage and reproduction; and tools and techniques. It should be a lot of fun. OK, so you’ve come up with your very own language for your new world. You’ve chosen the most awesome-ever aliens or magical creatures to populate it. You’ve set up a timeline for your history, and you’ve built the culture that they’ll live in. Today we’ll talk about the continuation of the species. Elizabeth Barrette … Read more

News: Watch as Astronauts Eat First Crops Grown in Space

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Nasa harvest

“A crop of lettuce has been harvested from the ISS plant growth system dubbed Veg-01, Nasa’s plant experiment being used to study how plants can be grown in micro-gravity,” NASA’s official YouTube reads. According to Science Recorder: “Expedition 44 crew members, including US. astronaut Scott Kelly, harvested their first crop of ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce from the orbiting laboratory. They will clean the greens with citric acid-based, food-safe sanitizing wipes before consuming them.” See the Full Story at Passport