News You Can Bruise for 2012 July 17

(7) Tue Jul 17 2012 09:07 Constellation Games Author Commentary #34: "The Unilateral Extradition Expedition": This was the original ending of the book—not the extradition, but the art museum. Constellation Games is a story about creativity, and I always wanted the book to end with a big action scene based on creating things rather than blowing them up. You can imagine the creation of the museum going where the excavation of the dumps is now, and you'll have my original picture of the ending.

While initally planning the book I talked with my friend Kris Straub about how you plot a long-form serial arc. Kris created a comedy SF comic called Starslip which I mentioned briefly back in the Chapter 30 commentary and probably elsewhere. Starslip takes place on a spacefaring art museum. Kris drew it for seven years and did an amazing job combining blockbuster-movie action with a near-total lack of problems that can be solved with explosions. (The two best examples.)

I don't know how much of Kris' advice on plotting went into the arc of Constellation Games (Brendan has a guess), but this ending sequence, with its monumental redemptive act of copyright infringement, comes directly from that conversation and from the creative debt I owe to Kris over the years.

The microblog keeps chugging along. The stuff you'll see for the rest of the month is still stuff that happened in November, and will be archived under chapter 33. (Last week's stuff starts at November 11.) For reasons that should be obvious now and will be made explicit next week, Ariel will not be live-tweeting the extradition attempt.

• The title of this chapter is my homage to The Middleman, a little bit of levity in an otherwise serious chapter.
• In this chapter Ariel destroys the sterile Human Ring originally seen in "Vanilla", symbolically freeing me of any need to rewrite that story. This is the clearest example of how I now regard "Vanilla" as a test run for Constellation Games: the protagonist of "Vanilla" complained about how awful Human Ring was, but he didn't do anything about it.

  The Pioneer statues seen here and in chapter 11 were present in "Vanilla", and were the very first inspirations for the art museum idea.

  

• Another major inspiration for the gallery of replicas was the Cast Courts in the Victoria and Albert museum, which contain 19th-century casts of famous sculptures, including Trajan's Column in two pieces.
• I once began work on a story about someone breaking into an art museum and smashing one of the copies of Fountain, but after destroying a Fountain in this chapter I think I've got it out of my system.
• The surrealists Ariel mentions are all real (and amazing) artists, but I made up the paintings. I tried to copy each artist's naming technique. Harpo Agonistes is the painting of Harpo Marx that Salvador Dali never painted but clearly wanted to. And of course the best way to convey the spirit of Duchamp is with a puerile pun ("Culmination").

  In the docking bay, the fictional artworks are Eastern Central Mountain Pacific, As Many Moments in an Afternoon, and Damaged Goods. Everything else is a real accomplishment by humanity, as opposed to a minor accomplishment of naming on my part.

  The scene on Spiral Jetty is a special treat for Utahn Adam Parrish, soon to be of "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" fame. If you're familiar with the piece you may be gnashing your teeth at the way Ariel recreated it out of context. I'm not gonna defend what he did, but I'll talk more about this kind of thing in the chapter 36 commentary.

• I had a real hard time conveying what happened to the other end of Krakowski's port. Hopefully you can see why it's tumbling around in a turbulent open space and spraying dirt all over the place, but even the final draft has gotten complaints that people can't visualize it. Sorry. If it helps, the exact details aren't terribly important.
• I was going to say that it's also unclear where Krakowski got the port, but I fixed that in the final draft. The BEA stole it, just like they stole the device they used to bug Tetsuo's office last week.
• The "standing gravity wave" bit was deemed by physicist Nick to be "awesome". Caveat: Nick's field of study is the sun, not gravity waves. As demonstrated by the fact that, while looking for an illustrative image, I discovered that the proper term is "gravitational wave". A gravity wave is totally different.
• The "backup purposes only" bit is (in Ariel's mind as well as mine) a reference to the ass-covering messages on the transient webpages in the low-rent sections of the Internet that distribute game ROMs.
• While writing these commentaries I've become more and more convinced that Krakowski and Ariel are the same character in different situations. You're not seeing Krakowski at his best here, but there are still hints of this essential similarity: specifically I'm thinking of "Ooh, what a burn" and "That was a UNESCO World Heritage Site!".
• And one bonus thing I forgot to mention last week when Ariel reviewed "Occluded Occlusion". The asteroids threatening Down come from an unstable asteroid belt between Down and its star. The belt causes frequent partial occultations as seen from Down, occultations visible to the naked eye except that you should use eye protection when viewing them. That's why asteroids figured in pre-telescope Alien mythology, and why even in modern Alien languages (chapter 12) the word for asteroid is "occlusion".

  Unfortunately, although "occlusion" is a word, it's not a word used in astronomy. The word I was looking for is "occultation". I'm pretty sure the initial "occlusion" was an intentional error along the lines of Tetsuo's arrogation/abrogation confusion, and when Ip Shkoy beliefs about asteroids became important after the book was sold, I forgot that "occlusion" was an error.

You know it's getting serious now. Tune in next week for the book's AMAZING occlusion conclusion, when Dana will say "Nothing should be exploding."

Image credits: Adam Kaplan, maybe?, Wikimedia Commons user M.chohan, NASA/Dana Berry.

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Tue Jul 17 2012 10:47 Mental Organism Designed Only for Kickstarter: Yesterday Jason Scott tipped me off to Kicktraq, a site that gives a much better interface to Kickstarter projects than does Kickstarter itself. Among other things, Kicktraq gives you the coveted list of new projects in a given category. And the creator of Kicktraq seems just as interested as I am in number-crunching backer statistics.

Speaking of statistics, Sumana sent me to The Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats [INFOGRAPHIC], which does have an infographic but also explains things in sensible English text with graphs.

In so far as last year's Month of Kickstarter had a serious purpose, I felt people were distracted by the big-name projects and not getting in the weeds to figure out how things worked. Now there's a ton of attention on the project base as a whole, some of it based on crawls of the entire dataset.

What can I add to this? Since I did this project last year, I can now talk about fulfilment. I didn't keep track of exactly when I received all the different backer rewards from last year's Month of Kickstarter, but generally they post an update saying "the stuff finally shipped", so I just need to go through and find all those emails.

Anyway, on to the Month of Kickstarter portion of this post. There are two new hot sauce projects on Kickstarter today, and I backed both of them. SINNERS + SAINTS Hot Sauce and Blue Owl Vines - Organic Hot Sauce. Will I really eat all that hot sauce? Well, yes, eventually.