KyleJelle.com

Human civilization reaches a new high:

That’s right. Cheeseburger in a can.

If anybody doubts that a golden age is upon us, surely this must disabuse them of that notion.

Well, unless it’s a sign of the apocalypse.

Update: A braver man than me.

The trouble with Google Earth:

Wired Science interviews Paolo Bacigalupi. Terrific Harlan Ellison anecdote:

Harlan Ellison called me up out of the blue. It was soon after the short story had come out and I was in my house mopping the floor and I get this phone call and this man on the other end was like ‘This is Harlan Ellison, do you know who I am?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, um yeah.’ So he says, ‘Go get your story.’ So I do. He then proceeds to basically critique every single aspect of my entire story.

He starts out by saying ‘At first I thought that you were some sort of professional writing under a pseudonym because, you know, nobody has a name like Bacigalupi, I know the Abbot and Costello routine blah blah blah…’ He goes off about how Paolo Bacigalupi is obviously a pseudonym or a joke name of some sort. Now he’s getting a bit worked up. He says, ‘You know, I thought you were a professional, and then I got to page 5 and right down there at the bottom you used the word jerked… and then 2 sentences later you used the word jerky–you took all of the power out of the fucking word!’

I’m sitting there on the line sort of terrified of this man just haranguing me. At the end of that whole conversation - a conversation in which he critiques, line by line, my entire story - he finishes up by saying, ‘Well you got some potential, but don’t write in genre, it’s a waste of time. Don’t get stuck in it like I got stuck in it.’ And then he hangs up.

That was the last thing that I heard from this guy–I don’t know what it was–sort of like a love tap I guess, but I actually sort of got to me. I proceeded to write a bunch of stories that weren’t science fiction. I wrote historical fiction novels set in China, I went on and wrote a landscape… I don’t know what you call it… sort of landscape porn I guess is the best word for it. You know, one of those love of place and the rural west sort of stories. Then I wrote a mystery/western story and none of those genres is related to sci-fi in any way, shape or form, and none of them sold.

At the end of all of that, I’m sitting there with all of the rejection letters in my hands and thinking: Well, you know, actually I kind of liked writing science fiction and then I went back into it and started doing the short stories, and that’s when I started writing things like “The Fluted Girl,” and “The People of Sand and Slag” and started finding my niche. It’s been a long process.

A shining example of radical Muslim poetry:

It’s not as messy or hard as some may think.
It’s all about the flow of the wrist.
Sharpen the knife to its maximum.
And before you begin to cut the flesh.
Tilt the fool’s head to its left.
Saw the knife back and forth.
No doubt the punk will twitch and scream.
But ignore the donkey’s ass.
And continue to slice back and forth.

Dan Savage responds appropriately.

Stephen Green finally notices the horrifying truth:

It just occurred to me that one of these jokers — Clinton, McCain, Obama or Romney — is going to be the next President. It’s almost enough to make one pine for the old days of Bush v Gore.

So, Fred’s out.  Bummer.  So much for my endorsement.

I continue to find the rest of the Republican field unappealing, but I suppose the least unappealing of the bunch is John McCain.  My antipathy toward McCain is rooted in the McCain-Feingold act, which still looks to me like a blatant infringement of the first amendment and therefore pisses me off to no end.  Of course, Thompson supported it as well, but at least he admitted it’s not working.

I’m also a little concerned about McCain’s age.  His vice presidential choice will carry a lot of weight when it comes time to decide which way I’m voting in November.  If it’s any of the bozos he’s running against, it’ll be difficult to give him my vote.  Not impossible—especially if Hillary beats Obama—but difficult.

Just finished my second story of the year.  Actually, this is the third story I started, but the second one isn’t finished yet.  It’s called “Overtime.”  It’s 1670 1867 words.  I wrote the first draft after only one day back at work following my vacation.

The cellphone novel comes to Japan:

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

“Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked on the cover of its January issue. Fans praised the novels as a new literary genre created and consumed by a generation whose reading habits had consisted mostly of manga, or comic books. Critics said the dominance of cellphone novels, with their poor literary quality, would hasten the decline of Japanese literature.

First, let’s answer that question: Unless the novel in question is Stephen King’s Cell, and the author happens to be a character in it, then no, cellphone novels will not kill the author. What’s going on here looks suspiciously like the same phenomenon Harry Potter brought to the English-language novel, i.e., new readers. This is not a bad thing for conventional novelists, with the possible exception of these things crowding more conventional novels out fo the bestseller lists. I suppose one shouldn’t dismiss the promotional value of placement on the bestseller list, for those who make it there, but most will never get close. Dead tree bookstores will probably clear a few shelves to make room for these books as well, but it’s hard to imagine them clearing the whole bookstore. Even Harry Potter, with all his wizardly powers, couldn’t do that.

Better to look on the bright side. No, all of these new readers aren’t going to get bored with their cellphone novels and start reading conventional fiction. But some of them might. They’ve obviously learned to enjoy reading. Good conventional writers—though probably few that the literary snob establishment likes—could profit from this a lot.

Additionally, the sales of these books in dead tree stand as yet another refutation of the oft-stated fear that electronic piracy will wipe out actual book sales, the way it has with music. Who is buying these books, after all, but people who already read them, or portions of them, serialized online? Scott Sigler and Cory Doctorow have built their careers on this model and so far I’m not seeing a downside.

Update: Oh, look what Cory’s done:

My books on your hacked iPhone

Ben Rankin has converted my novels Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town so that they’ll read on your iPod Touch or iPhone. To read ‘em, you’ll have to “jailbreak” your Apple device so it’ll run third-party software. Here’s hoping I can be part of the reason you hack your iPhone!

Okay, this one’s for real:

Go to Moviefone for a larger version.

Update: And here’s what it comes from:

Get the inside scoop on Star Trek at TrekRumors.com:

On-Screen Endorsement Deals Rumored for Star Trek XI

A studio document obtained by our sources shows that the following brands have paid for on-screen placement in Star Trek:

• General Motors (Specifically Chevrolet)
• Red Bull
• Samsung
• LG
• Motorola (for the communicators?)
• Swanson’s Frozen Dinners
• Culligan Water
• Bose Home Audio

While this may look like an invasive amount of endorsement, the memo we’ve obtained discusses making the placement in the feature as seamless as possible as to not detract from the audience experience. While fans may protest sight unseen, it’s obvious why such things have to take place. Star Trek XI’s budget, when combined with fiscal concerns on Paramount’s part, means that the studio needs to take every chance it can to get outside financing.

Yep. I believe every word of it.

The 305:

2007. It was to be the year of the new computer.

My existing computer is getting a bit long in the tooth, you see. It is a vintage 2002 Compaq Presario—back when Compaqs were Compaqs, not just re-branded HPs—with a screaming 1.47 GHz Athlon XP, 512 huge megabytes of RAM, and a monstrously huge—I was sure I’d never use it all when I got it—80 GB hard drive. Over the years I’ve changed one or two things. I installed a few USB 2.0 ports to make backups easier. A 250 GB secondary drive, when my iTunes library outgrew the original drive. The original drive itself was replaced with an identical unit when it crashed, which made me very happy I was taking my backup responsibilities seriously. It also got a nice little video card upgrade and a DVD burner.

But there’s only so much you can do with a machine this old. Modern apps are painfully slow. A memory upgrade might help a little, but probably not enough to justify the cost. I decided, at the end of 2006, that it was time to move on.

Ahh, but move on to what? Why purchase a windows machine at the end of XP’s lifecycle when I can just wait a few months and get the new hotness. So I waited. And Vista came out. We all know how that worked out. No sale here.

Well, how about a Linux machine? I could test that right away. Ubuntu is a free download. It’s also a terrific operating system, sophisticated, flexible and not too terribly difficult to use—well, as long as you don’t need third party application and hardware support. I know an awful lot of people want to see Linux grow and prosper on the desktop, but really, if third party vendors won’t bother to make their software and hardware Linux compatible, what are y’all going to do? All I had to do was glance at the horrendous directions for updating the firmware on an iPod without iTunes and it was clear that this wasn’t going to be an adequate solution. Yes, I could do it, but you have to be pretty fanatical to want to when one click in iTunes does it for you on a Mac or Windows machine.

So… a Mac. But why purchase a Mac at the end of Tiger’s lifecycle when I can just wait a few months and get the new hotness. So I waited for April. Then Apple pulled all it’s resources off the project to get the iPhone shipped on time, and I waited some more for October. By the time Leopard did come out, the web was awash in rumors of a hot new MacBook, aluminum-clad, LED-backlit, somewhat thinner than usual, with, perhaps, a solid state drive. Ooh, shiny. That, and the fact that the regular MacBook was still shipping with some painfully outdated hardware—GMA 950 graphics anyone?—led me to wait some more.

So today is the day the machine I was waiting for was revealed to the public. Isn’t it pretty?

Just .76 inches thick. Flat enough to fit in an envelope. And yet, no compromises in the interface: 13.3″ LED-backlit screen, full-size backlit keyboard, big trackpad with multitouch… My initial reaction was entirely predictable:

iWant.

Alas, it is not to be. Rumor had it that it would be aggressively priced at $1500. It is aggressively priced, but at $1,799, not quite aggressively enough. My initial reaction to the price was, “Okay, so I’ll save a little bit more money.” But once the initial passion cooled, I had second thoughts.

The interface may not be compromised, but other things certainly are. I don’t mind the lack of an Ethernet port, but, seriously, one USB port? The bargain basement MacBook comes with a 2 GHz chip, but I’m going to pay a $700 premium and only get a 1.6 GHz processor? 2GB of RAM is a good start, but no option to upgrade it to 4? I don’t mind just 80 GB—I’d be happy with 64 if I could afford to blow another grand on the SSD—but a 4200-rpm Parallel ATA hard disk drive, really? 4200-rpm?

You know, I could actually live with all off these things if that was the extent of it. But I’ve killed notebook batteries before. They don’t last forever. And the non-user replaceable battery just isn’t right.

On the bright side, after a dispute with a credit card company in November, I blew my whole computer fund paying them off. So I’m not going to be buying anything today anyway. The fact that I’m suddenly feeling lukewarm towards this machine will make the waiting much easier. Maybe something else will catch my eye in the meantime.

But I am going to get a new computer this sometime year. I mean it this time. Count on it.

Really.

David Louis Edelman on How to Write a Novel.

Update: See also How to Write a Novel (Part 2)

The Downfall of HD-DVD:

From the opening sequence, to the inevitable “Come with me if you want to live,” Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles gets the tone and pacing exactly right, which puts it light years beyond Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

I doubt if Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker are going to make anyone forget Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong—you know, the way Sarah Michelle Gellar ’s Buffy eclipsed Kristy Swanson’s Buffy—but I don’t think Nick Stahl’s John Connor is going to be missed at all, and it works surprising well without the Governator. (This should not be taken as any personal criticism of Nick Stahl, who was good in In the Bedroom and Sin City, he was just miscast in T3.)

The story begins two years after the events in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah and John are on the run, not just from the usual robot assassins, but also from the law. Sarah in particular comes off as a kindred spirit to Kate from Lost, a tightly-wound mixture of paranoia, fear of commitment, and resourcefulness, but what sets her apart is the one thing she remains fiercely committed to—her son John. He is, after all, what the story has been about from the beginning. John is a little bit older and wiser than he appeared in T2, but he is recognizably the same character, and it’s again possible to believe this guy will grow into the hard-edged military leader described in the first two movies. It should be as much fun to watch that transformation as it was to watch Octavian grow into Augustus on Rome.

Then there are the terminators themselves. The producers made a wise decision to stick with the classic “hyperalloy combat chassis” style terminators rather than the “mimetic polyalloy” T-1000 type. This is not only consistent with the T-1000’s status as an advanced prototype, but it’s also a good idea to hold something like that in reserve as a special threat for sweeps week. That, and I’m just sick of obviously digital special effects.

But, of course, the most special terminator of them all is Cameron. That whole name-as-homage-to-franchise-creator thing is a bit heavy-handed, but I’ll let it slide. Summer Glau captures the physicality of a terminator in a very different package well. In a way it’s a waste of Glau’s natural dancer’s talents—so exquisitely displayed in Serenity—for her to adopt the “Hulk Smash!” fighting style of the terminators, but she’s lethal either way, and always a pleasure to watch. I suspect it would be quite amusing to see the future John Connor’s decision making process. “Let’s see, I’ll send Reese back to protect Sarah, I’ll send this big guy back to protect me as a kid, and let’s see, what will I send back to protect me as a lonely teenager?”

Ultimately, the plot is what sells it. It begins as a plausible continuation of the story from T2, packs in plenty of cinematic action and suspense, and ends with a solution to the can’t-bring-machines-back-through-time problem that’s just too clever for me to spoil.

It’s too early to call the show a complete success—it could go downhill fast if the writing doesn’t hold up—but after seeing so many great franchises ruined by awful prequels, sequels and remakes, this was a refreshing change.

I don’t get this commercial:

I mean, I get the risqué humor. What I don’t get is the tag line. “You got 30 minutes” What, is that like a minimum? It conveys the exact opposite of the old “30 minutes or less” slogan. Whose bright idea was that?

Personally, I think Hiro Protagonist’s employer, Cosa Nostra Pizza, had it right: 30 Minutes or else.

Everything you need to know about voting:

It’s like a cross between Frankenstein and The Tell-Tale Heart:

University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.

By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The research will be published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine.

Oh yeah, bring on the cholesterol now, baby.

Update: Okay, so that may be stretching things a bit. A solution to the organ shortage problem would be quite enough.

This explains a lot:

IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

What’s stunning—and remains unexplained—is that it took them until 2006 to figure it out. Did they have misleading evidence the rest of us weren’t privy to or was it just straight up denial? I’d bet on denial.

And it’s still going on:

Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.

Even if they can get people to stop filesharing, there’s simply no way one-song-at-a-time downloads will ever make up for the lost CD sales. They improve their fortunes a little bit—and serve their more honest customers a lot—by going DRM free, but that doesn’t change the big picture. there’s going to be less money in the music industry in the twenty-first century than there was in the twentieth. This is a permanent condition. And there’s nothing within reasonable limits that anyone can do about it. Sorry.

Of course, unless you’re a record industry executive, this is not necessarily a bad thing. For starters, the “industry” doesn’t need as much money as it used to, not with the tools for pro-quality dropping in price like everything else affected by Moore’s Law, and a two-way distribution network coming into everyone’s homes. That vast network of parasitic middlemen still serves a purpose, for now—their customer base is diminishing, but it’s not gone yet—but they need to remember that when people start talking about trimming the fat, they’re the fat, and neither musicians nor music listeners will actually need them unless they find a way to provide value instead of merely exploiting the scarcity caused by the limitations of the old supply chain.

Artists, I suspect, will make out just fine. Sure their music will bring in less money overall, but if they don’t have a label eating the lion’s share of it, they may actually end up with more. Not that everybody’s going to suddenly start paying for music once the labels are gone, but not everyone is copying music for free right now. A percentage of listeners will always be willing to pay for things they like, and while the behavior of the labels over the last few years has almost certainly driven that percentage down by a large amount for music, I don’t think it’s too late to reverse the trend.

John Scalzi has a good response to a reader who doesn’t like him writing about politics on his blog.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  So I won’t.  I’ll just quote him.

Another day, another letter from someone who thinks that having work out there in the market means that I need to shut up about the political process here in the United States. This is not a wholly uncommon occurrence for me and usually plays out like this: Someone reads Old Man’s War, assumes because it’s military fiction that I am some stripe of conservative and/or Heinleinian libertarian, comes here, catches me on a day I’m writing about politics, has the veins in their neck pop, and then writes me a letter or makes a comment suggesting that I shouldn’t write things they don’t like because then they might not be able to buy any more of my books, hint, hint.

To which my response is always the same: Kiss my ass, hint, hint. Someone who thinks that buying my books entitles them to suggest I need to be silent about anything is someone whose money I don’t need or want.

But I will save this link for future reference.