The crash of Oceanic 815, from all points of view, synchronized:
February 27, 2008
February 21, 2008
Jay Lake’s handy guide to story length:
Flash <500 words Short-short <1000 words Short <7,500 words Novelette <17,500 words Novella <40,000 words Short novel <80,000 words Novel <200,000 words Doorstop <400,000 words Wall-eyed insanity >400,000 words
The Washington Post has a nice article debunking myths about torture today:
1 Torture worked for the Gestapo.
Actually, no. Even Hitler’s notorious secret police got most of their information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Russia and the concentration camps.
Of course, anyone sick enough to cite the Gestapo as a positive example has already lost this argument.
Ever wonder what space smells like?
The Smell of Space
Few people have experienced traveling into space. Even fewer have experienced the smell of space. Now this sounds strange, that a vacuum could have a smell and that a human being could live to smell that smell. It seems about as improbable as listening to sounds in space, yet space has a definite smell. Being creatures of an atmosphere, we can only smell space indirectly. Sort of like the way a pit viper smells by waving its tongue in the air and thenpressing it to the roof of its mouth where sensors process the molecules that have been adsorbed onto the waggling appendage. I had the pleasure of operating the airlock for two of my crewmates while they went on several space walks. Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn’t quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as “tastes like chicken.” The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.
Filed for future reference. (Via Boing Boing)
February 20, 2008
This Evening’s Total Eclipse of the Moon.
Um…
Zack Snyder’s 300 led the field of nominees announced Feb. 20 for the 34th annual Saturn Awards, with 10 nominations by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix followed with nine nominations, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street got eight nods.
In television, ABC’s Lost dominated, with seven nominations. Showtime’s Dexter received five nods, and NBC’s Heroes scored four.
I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade here—and congratulations to all the nominees, really—but can someone please explain to me why a historical drama, even one based on a comic book, is leading the nominations for science fiction, fantasy and horror awards?
I love classic poetry:
Hillarymandias
I met a pollster from an antique land,
Who said–”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand, one in Texas…., one near Canton,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose brow, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The electorate that mocked them, and the press that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Hillarymandias,
Look on my resume and campaign fundraising, ye fellow Democrats, and despair!
Nothing else remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. Heh.Posted by: BumperStickerist | February 20, 2008 at 08:52 AM
February 19, 2008
Here’s a depressing post about the future of SF ezines and the short fiction market in general:
So will this business model work? It’s hard to say; with the exception of Chizine, these publications are relatively new, and I wasn’t given access to any actual income figures for what these magazines are pulling in. And when I asked Mamatas, who reads submissions for Clarkesworld, about the probability of ezines becoming profitable, he gave a sobering reply. “I think it’s important to note that most fiction magazines in the print world are either university-backed non-profits, labors of love, or the least successful of a cross-subsidized bundle of properties that are kept around because fiction copy is much cheaper than non-fiction copy,” he said. “In the periodical trade in general, churn is also very high. Magazines come and go all the time, regardless of their subject, market, or demographic. The magazine business is ultimately the business of selling people disposable content. The challenge of the ezine isn’t all that much different than the challenge of any other magazine, except that if anyone knew what the “best bet” was, they likely wouldn’t try it out on SF ezines when they could launch another massive slick with 75% ad pages.”
Mysterious Creatures Found in Antarctica
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 19, 2008
Filed at 7:30 p.m. ETSYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Scientists investigating the icy waters of Antarctica said Tuesday they have collected mysterious creatures including giant sea spiders and huge worms in the murky depths.
Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before.
Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism that scientists still do not fully understand.
”Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters,” Martin Riddle, the Australian Antarctic Division scientist who led the expedition, said in a statement. ”We have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates.”
The specimens were being sent to universities and museums around the world for identification, tissue sampling and DNA studies.
”Not all of the creatures that we found could be identified and it is very likely that some new species will be recorded as a result of these voyages,” said Graham Hosie, head of the census project.
The expedition is part of an ambitious international effort to map life forms in the Antarctic Ocean, also known as the Southern Ocean, and to study the impact of forces such as climate change on the undersea environment.
Three ships — Aurora Australis from Australia, France’s L’Astrolabe and Japan’s Umitaka Maru — returned recently from two months in the region as part of the Collaborative East Antarctic Marine Census. The work is part of a larger project to map the biodiversity of the world’s oceans.
The French and Japanese ships sought specimens from the mid- and upper-level environment, while the Australian ship plumbed deeper waters with remote-controlled cameras.
”In some places every inch of the sea floor is covered in life,” Riddle said. ”In other places we can see deep scars and gouges where icebergs scour the sea floor as they pass by.”
Among the bizarre-looking creatures the scientists spotted were tunicates, plankton-eating animals that resemble slender glass structures up to a yard tall ‘’standing in fields like poppies,” Riddle said.
Other animals were equally baffling.
”They had fins in various places, they had funny dangly bits around their mouths,” Riddle told reporters. ”They were all bottom dwellers so they were all evolved in different ways to live down on the sea bed in the dark. So many of them had very large eyes — very strange looking fish.”
Scientists are planning a follow-up expedition in 10 to 15 years to examine the effects of climate changes on the region’s environment.
Let me know when they reach the Mountains of Madness.
“ It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. ”
— H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
Patton Oswalt on Star Wars:
I agree with every word of it. Every word.
February 18, 2008
Cory Doctorow’s theory of fanfic:
I have a theory about the cognitive basis for both fanfic and the arguments against it from some authors: as social animals, we have a lot of specialized systems for modelling and anticipating the actions and beliefs of others. The ability to predict whether another human is likely to kill you or mate with you is pro-survival.
I think that when we experience stories, we spin up that “person-simulator” we use on real people and use it to render out the people in the story. It’s how we come to care about them, to empathize with them, to worry about the danger they find themselves in and to cheer them on as they strive to overcome adversity.
When you close the book — or turn off the tube — the simulator doesn’t power down. Those modelled “people” go on living a life in your autonomous imaginative faculty, inhabiting the same numinous zone where the dead relations of whom you say, “Oh, if only great-aunt Foofaw were here, she’d just love this,” the same zone as the characters in your life who are offstage but nevertheless “on your mind.”
This is likewise true for authors. Just because the book is done, it doesn’t mean that the simulator in which the characters have been playing out their lives switches off. The romantic tale of the author whose characters “just refused to go where he put them,” is not just auctorial histrionics. Once you’ve realized the characters in your own mind, they acquire the same limited autonomy that your conceptions of real people enjoy.
So it’s only natural that readers will haul off and write a story — or even a whole novel — about the characters whose adventures they enjoy. Those “people” have taken up residence in the minds of the audience and will continue to dance and caper without the further intervention of the author.
This comes in the context of talking about Steven Brust’s unauthorized Firefly fanfic novel.
If you don’t know what Firefly is, here, get acquainted:
John Scalzi on the SFWA election:
Look: SFWA is in the hole, people. Not just in a general sense, but to the people who SFWA needs if it wants to survive: New writers. How do we get out of the hole? Here’s a hint: it’s not by rewarding through election as our president the guy who dug the hole and then walked SFWA over to the edge and pushed it in. Think about what that would say about the organization. Think about what it says to the people thinking of joining.
Scalzi does good rant. But more to the point, he does an excellent job of laying out exactly the questions that need to be answered by this election.
February 17, 2008
Don’t hold back, Harlan. Tell us what you really think:
Taken from Harlan Ellison’s online community, reproduced in its unedited entirety below:
HARLAN ELLISON ON THE WRITERS STRIKE SETTLEMENT
YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO RE-POST THIS ANYWHERE:
Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I fuckin’ LOVE the Guild.
And I voted NO on accepting this deal.
My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their heads; but this I say without equivocation…
THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse’s asses who kept mumbling “lessgo bac’ta work” over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.
My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.
And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?
You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won’t be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:
You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.
Please excuse my temerity. I’m just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.
I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.
Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison
Ronald Bailey has an excellent response to Andrew C. Revkin’s post on “The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things.”
Which bring us to the question: Just what are all those “unnecessary things” that allegedly clog our shopping malls? Which does Revkin think we should want to give up? He mentions not a single product—yet the implication is that the mandarins of good taste and restraint know best what the rest of us really need. Our cellular phones? Our iPods? Our pink sunglasses? Our kids’ paint-by-number set? The 246 varieties of dog food and 165 kinds of cat food, and even Valentine gifts for your favorite mutt? Necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in fact, consumers in markets winnow out all kinds of unnecessary things every day.
The Malthusian meme always insists “things just can’t go on like this.” Of course, if “things can’t go on like this,” then they don’t. Humanity changes course and things get better. At least that has been the story of the last two centuries and the evidence is that it will be the story of the 21st century as well.
February 15, 2008
Where on Earth do they find these guys?
It’s not enough for everyone on earth to have a single mobile phone—Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser thinks that everyone will eventually have at least two. Glaser spoke at this week’s Mobile World Congress Conference in Barcelona, insisting that it wasn’t possible for a “do everything, no compromise” device to exist and serve people’s every mobile need.
Glaser explained that his belief was fueled by differences in input methods, size, and functionality between devices. No single phone can do everything easily, he said, which is why the public will be driven to carry multiple devices. “Mobile penetration won’t stop at 100 percent,” he told the crowd. “It will go to 200 percent because the notion of a single device that does it all isn’t the way (the market is) going to go.”
That’s optimism. I can see a few power users needing more than one device, but I know one too many people who can barely figure out how to use the functions on their existing phones to buy into this fantasy. At this point, I’m so tired of carrying multiple devices that I’m willing to accept some serious compromises just to get the number down to one—just waiting on that iPhone SDK, you know?—so they’d better be talking about teleportation, time travel and personal forcefields if they think I’m going to go back the other way.
This is not as dumb as this, but it’s still astonishingly silly.
The movie we’re all waiting for:
Did I just see a car chase through the warehouse from the end of Raiders?
Here’s something you don’t see everyday:
I guess spring really is in the air. Go get ‘em, Rocky. Too bad there’s no market for raccoon porn.
