News You Can Bruise

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:34:22 GMT

Speaking of Evan, he's started a new weblog, walltype, where he curates photos from Flickr that fit his own baroque categorizations. I think it has explodingdog-esque potential.

Speaking of new weblogs by my friends: Pat Rafferty's Raffertyesque. Now you have something to read while you look at Evan's curated pictures.

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:29:40 GMT

Evan: "You really need to watch Summer School on the original rental VHS. It's like listening to the Beatles on LP."

The Long Joke

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:47:54 GMT

In 2001 my sister Susanna sent me the birthday card you see before you. It said "Whee! You're 3 22!" I thought this was hilarious, and I kept the card.

Then Susanna had a daughter, and I had an idea. Recently Maggie turned three, and I gave my niece the birthday card Susanna had sent me eight years earlier. "Whee! You're 3 22 3!" The payoff was worth it. "I laughed for like 5 minutes," said Susanna.

Recently I was doing a video chat with Susanna and I mentioned:

L: So I'm jogging for an hour every day, and I realized I wasn't doing enough reading, so I decided I also needed to read for half an hour every day. And I also want to devote half an hour to games, though that's not as much of a problem. And I think I should also allocate at least half an hour for writing. But if I keep dividing up my free time like this then my whole life will be...
S: Organized?

Hmm.

"Frankly, I do not feel this hatred."

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:39:55 GMT

The Israeli fanzine Bli Panika (Don't Panic) has published an awesome Hebrew translation of Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Ehud Maimon. Google Translate translates the title back into English as "Mention dinosaurs and glory", and Tark and Entippa's names are transliterated Tariq and Antipathy. Pretty fun!

Back when I first heard about this project, I mentioned to editor Rami Shal'heveth that the story's title is a riff on a phrase originally in Hebrew, but he probably already knew that. Actually, no: "Ben-Sira's book is one of those canonical texts that everybody knows of, but nobody reads."

It's All Fun And Games

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:29:06 GMT

Check out REDDER, the psychotropic game with the palindromic name. I'm a big fan of the strange effect that happens as you play, but I won't mention too much to avoid whatever passes for spoilers when it comes to strange gameplay effects.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:44:37 GMT

Tired of finding kitten? In Robot Wants Kitty, kitten is dangled just out of your reach for the whole game. And since there's a power-up early on that makes precision movement pretty much impossible, I never found kitten. On the plus side, hey, it's another robotfindskittenlike game.

Work humor

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:58:44 GMT

"I will lock you and [x] in a room for a week to sort this out."
"We would spend that week planning vengeance on you for locking us in a room!"
"The scenario you put forward seems all too plausible."

Incomprehensible Joke

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:21:52 GMT

S: "I always wondered what would happen if you put a disc in the Wii the wrong way."
L: "It shows a Koopa Troopa on its back."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:47:46 GMT

Last week Sumana and I went to the launch party for N.K. Jemisin's epic "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms". Nora founded the writing group I'm in, and I read and critiqued a draft of the novel just before she sold it. Then she left the writing group and went off to be a famous novelist.

I always have a difficult time at events held in bars, but Sumana is very good at introducing me to people. For instance, I met Saladin Ahmed, who along with Nora was nominated for a Nebula this year. And then comes this SF Signal interview with Saladin, Nora, and many other Nebula nominees. "If your work couldn't have been on the ballot this year, what work would you have liked in its place?" Saladin:

I'd also have been happy to see more two-fisted fun on the ballot. Two of the absolute best stories I read this year were "Zeppelin City" by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, and "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" by Leonard Richardson. Both were ridiculously enjoyable and Nebula-worthy to my mind.

I'm encouraged!

Star Trek vs. Batman

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:27:31 GMT

No need to dream, it's a filmed mashup of the 1960s Star Trek and the 1960s Batman. The Batman writing is pretty decent, but the Star Trek writing is bland and doesn't capture the feel of the series.

Original Research

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:12:04 GMT

Sumana is planning a trip to the extensive archive of the Museum of Television and Radio, with the goal of resolving a couple nagging pop-culture conundra that can't be resolved by Internet-based means.

Since it costs $25 to get in to the archive, we thought it would be nice to pool conundra. Bothered by something about television or radio history that, if you had access to a huge archive, could be resolved within fifteen minutes? Search the archive index to see if they have what you need to check, and post your comments here or on Sumana's weblog.

Satan vs. Leonard

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:17:43 GMT

In the late 90s I did some work on a rock opera called "Porcelain Puppy vs. Demon Dog". On the whole, it was terrible, and I never completed or recorded it, though some of the better songs have shown up in my subsequent albums ("Royal Jelly" is one). But I did record one tiny test skit to satisfy my love of overdubbing my voice with itself, and for some reason put it online.

A few years ago, Katie Bolte, student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, found this test skit and liked it enough to animate it. She emailed me about it yesterday. So check it out and relish my humiliation as teenage-me tries to do the voice of Satan in a Saturday morning cartoon. The narrator's overblown description of Cerberus is funny, though.

Prime Suspect

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:33:55 GMT

More from Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis:

The 313-degree Shaa compass had no zero coordinate, but began instead with one, the odd number left over after factoring the prime number.

I guess that's true. Maybe the Shaa could help Bill Gates factor those large prime numbers.

Apart from prime number weirdness (and species essentialism), this is a really fun book. There was a lot of boring clan politics at the beginning, but it turns out that was setup for an examination of how totally dysfunctional is a society based on clan politics. I often suspect these authors of being secretly enamored of the petty intrigues of clan politics, but it's clearly not the case here.

Insta-update: Before posting this entry I asked Adi about the compass thing. His response:

I don't understand that statement at all. Do the Shaa simply relabel their compass? Instead of using labels of 0,1,...,360, their compass uses the labels 1,2,..,313? (i.e., their compass has a full range of motion, but simply a different scale)
If this is in fact true, then I wonder what additive identity the Shaa have chosen. From the statement you wrote, it seems as though the additive identity is 1... which can't of course be consistent with 1 working as a remainder after division by prime numbers. And the "odd number left over after factoring the prime number" does not make sense to me... Why one would use the multiplicative identity [ie. 1] as an additive identity is beyond me.

Unfortunately, by this point in the book the Shaa are all dead, so we can't ask them, and it's clear that a bad compass is the least element of their legacy of incompetence.

The Palace At 40 Million Dollars

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:57:37 GMT

Went to the MoMA yesterday with Peter Hodgson (high-quality photos coming soon). I was raving over The Palace at 4 A.M., official Crummy.com Sculpture Of The Millenium (1001-2000).

"I can't believe Alberto Giacometti did all those horrible elongated pinched statues of people, and then he also did my favorite sculpture of all time."

"You know, one of those statues just sold for a hundred million dollars. It's the most expensive sculpture of all time."

"That's awful," I said.

"Well, it means your favorite sculpture of all time probably just tripled in value."

"Great, now I'll never be able to buy it from the MoMA."

I guess I could make my own copy out of kebab skewers.

PS: I structured this entry like the weblog entries in my novel, because I was worried that the style would seem really unnatural in a real weblog. But I think it works okay.

Guess The Verb! (It's "Said")

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:51:05 GMT

This has bothered me for a little while. In general, it's considered undesirable to use too many adverbs in writing.

He ~~messily~~ ate the sandwich.

But you can replace a generic verb with a fancy evocative verb that does the work of an adverb.

He assaulted the sandwich.

In fact, you can replace a whole clause (often including adverbs) with an evocative verb that conveys the same information.

He ~~walked aimlessly around~~ wandered the room.

Except when the generic verb is "said". Using fancy versions of "said" is "said-bookism", also considered undesirable.

"Just as you wish," he ~~preened~~ said.

And you can't use adverbs here either.

"Just as you wish," he said ~~obsequiously~~

Hypothesis: by preventing you from describing the way someone says something, these rules force you to write dialogue that explains how it should be read.

"Just as you wish, O most esteemèd lord."

vs.

"Well," he said, "if such is my lord's wish..."