Monday, Monday, aka The Day After SofaCON

Wow. Wow. Tremendous thanks to everyone who made SofaCON such a brilliant success yesterday. What a day! I had a fantastic time, and I hope all of the other participants did, as well.

A few quick items worth mention:

• From today's Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Professor Who Declared, 'It's J.K. Rowling.'" (This article is free for non-subscribers for 24 hours.)


• From SFFAudio: First published in The Cavalier, January 11, 1913, "Fishhead" (aka "Blood-Brother Of The Swamp Cats") is something of an ancestor to H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." There's a new (and free!) audio version of this story Lovecraft praised ("very few short stories of equal merit have been published anywhere during recent years") here.


• Speaking of Lovecraft, it looks like one of my favorite stories of his is about to get the adaptation treatment: "Hardware Director to adapt H.P. Lovecraft’s 'The Colour out of Space.'"


• A classic gothic film I've been trying to track down for years will soon be available on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection: The Uninvited is back!


• I recently learned a friend/colleague of mine is co-producing an informative and cleverly funny new site that's well worth a look if you are or aspire to be a savvy globe-trotter: Heels First: The Travels and Tribulations of Two Twenty-Something Frequent Flyers Jumping Into the World of Travel.


• The 2013 Prometheus Award winners have been announced! Congratulations to Cory Doctorow for Pirate Cinema (Best Novel) and Neal Stephenson for Cryptonomicon (Hall of Fame). Read more from the LFS press release here.

Last of all, happy birthday, Alexis de Tocqueville (29 July, 1805 – 16 April, 1859).

“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America