RIP

[Montegriffo]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42786749

[Hastur]

Ursula K. Le Guin

Thanks for all the stories.

[Martin Hash]

Ursula K. Le Guin

Thanks for all the stories.

"The Left Hand of Darkness" was my first introduction to sexual ambiguity as a kid. It made me feel creepy, and I thought about it every time I heard Le Guin's name.

[DBTrek]

Ursula K. Le Guin

Thanks for all the stories.

Jack Ketchum too.

[Speaker to Animals]

Couldn't really get into any of her books.

There are only a few female authors who wrote stuff that I like. It's hard for me to read through most female SF and fantasy.

Some of the short literature is really good, though (i.e. Yellow Wallpaper).

[Penner]

Ursula K. Le Guin

Thanks for all the stories.

I heard about her passing always recently and here is one of her obituaries from around the internet:

The legendary Ursula K. Le Guin, a giant in the field of literary science fiction and fantasy, died on Monday, the New York Times reports. She was 88 years old.

Le Guin is most celebrated for her Earthsea fantasy trilogy and her science fiction masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness. Earthsea, which kicks off with 1968’s The Wizard of Earthsea, tells the story of a boy wizard and his training decades before Harry Potter, and gradually resolves itself into a Taoist struggle to establish a balance of power. It is philosophical and esoteric, and staunchly opposed to the dualistic morality of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.

Her 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, meanwhile, takes place on an alien planet without gender and is anthropological in its interests. “I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” Le Guin later wrote.

Le Guin’s writing is fundamentally moral, which she often said was intrinsic to her genre and its emphasis on the power of magic and imagination. Fantasy, she told the Guardian in 2005, is “about power — just look at Tolkien. It’s a means to examine what it does to the person who has it, and to others.”

And where power can dehumanize, she argued, we need imagination to fix the resulting wound: “If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she explained. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/23/1 ... n-obituary

[C-Mag]

Legendary ski filmmaker Warren Miller dies at 93
https://www.circa.com/story/2018/01/25/ ... dies-at-93

WWII Veteran, Filmaking Pioneer

[Montegriffo]

[Fife]

[Montegriffo]

Sir Roger Bannister, first man to run a sub 4 minute mile died yesterday at the age of 88.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/43277715

I brought this up with my 21 year old kitchen porter at work today and was horrified to hear he had no idea who he was or what he had achieved.


British hero's he also had never heard of,
Stirling Moss
Howard Carter
George Formby
Charles Babbage
Alan Tourin
Neville Chamberlain

People he had heard of,
Winston Churchill
George Best (didn't know that he didn't play for England)
JFK (knew he was assainated but couldn't tell me when, where or who had shot him)

He is number 70 in the world at Call of Duty on the Xbox though so there is that (for what it's worth)