Rural Fantasy

I realized the other day that The Dream King’s Daughter is an urban fantasy set in rural Saskatchewan.

It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s true. “Urban fantasy” is a real term that differentiates itself from traditional fantasy by setting its fantastical tales within a contemporary setting. Often that setting is urban, like the Minneapolis of Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks or Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just the connection to modern day Earth that’s important.

After all, you’ve never really heard the phrase “Rural fantasy” to describe a genre, have you?

People can shout counter-examples in the comments.


How to Fix a MacBook Air Which Keeps on Going Back to Sleep

Answer: lift it up.

I recently encountered a frustrating problem with Erin’s Macbook Air. When I opened it up, it woke from sleep, gave me a display for about two seconds, and then went back to sleep again. Hitting the escape key and the power button repeatedly provoked the same behaviour. It was as though a teenaged boy had invaded Erin’s Macbook Air, had rolled the covers over himself and was ignoring our repeated prods to wake him up. Restarting the computer didn’t help. Neither did a PRAM reset.

So I searched online and found frustratingly few answers, except for a page where somebody described a similar problem. One person replied that sometimes the Air goes to sleep whenever it’s running particularly hot, so as not to fry the CPU. I’d previously been trying to work on the Air while it was sitting atop my unibody Macbook, so I lifted the Macbook Air into the, ahem, air.

And the problem went away immediately.

Feeling the outlet of the exhaust told me that the Air was indeed running hot. I must have been blocking the vent or something. So I finished what I was doing and shut down the Air, letting it cool down a bit before I used it again. I came away wiser on how you should hold the thing or where you should place it when it’s in use.

Just a little free advice to anybody encountering the same problem.

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