News You Can Bruise for 2009 March

• "Goldenseed" by Therese Arkenberg
• "Quantum Tropics" by William Highsmith
• "Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Mints" by Carole Lanham
• "Single-Bit Error" by Ken Liu
• "Jump Space" by Mary Anne Mohanraj
• "Welcome to the Federation" by Mark Onspaugh
• "The Ambassador's Staff" by Sherry D. Ramsey
• "Daisy" by Andrew Willett
• "The Last Christmas of Mrs. Claus" by Alex Wilson

Barring unforseen catastrophe, that's the lineup. (A couple of the titles are working titles and might change, but I wanted to announce this ASAP.) These are the stories we couldn't say no to. They've all got great originality and execution. I'd put this anthology against an issue of a pro mag any day.

I'm surprised by the variety in the stories. I was expecting to publish maybe two fantasy stories; we're publishing four. Four of the stories are really funny, but none of them are "funny stories".[0] We're publishing a freaking cat story. A cat story that will kick your ass!

Sumana deserves enormous credit, not just for reading the slush pile and sending out over 200 mostly-personal rejections, but for working with me all the way to the final selections. She pulled one way, I pulled another, and the result was a balanced selection.

In addition to the stories, we've also commissioned pieces by five artists. Our instructions, such as they were, were "draw something awesome." The artists delivered. Here's what we've got:

• "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood" by Patrick Farley
• "Bio Break" by Brittany Hague
• "Times Square" by David Kelmer
• "Pirate vs. Alien" by Erin Ptah
• "Ninja contra Robot" by Marc Scheff

Go to the Thoughtcrime Experiments homepage for a teaser that includes a low-res version of "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood". David Kelmer also put a low-res version of "Times Square" up on his weblog.

[0] I originally wrote that I don't think "funny stories" are funny, but then I thought of some really funny stories we rejected in the final rounds, and realized I was being snobbish. A story can be incredibly funny and still suffer the "funny story" stigma, if there's not a strong plot. That's why Wodehouse's books blend in one's mind into a homogenous mush of hilarity.

"I hate it with the passion of 1,004 suns."
"Why four?"
"Because I like to have more passion."
"Why not, say, 2,000 suns?"
"That's too many suns."

This doll is pretty much identical to one I had as a kid, except this one has a URL printed on it.[0] In fact, although the doll is cool on its own (Pokey's four identical skinny legs make him much more posable than the Gumby doll's larger, unevenly sized limbs), nostalgia is the main reason I bought it. I don't buy a whole lot of things because they remind me of my childhood, but I do have several small items that I've kept for over twenty years. Things I wouldn't stop to save during a fire but that I would put low on my list of things to throw away if I had to throw away a bunch of things, even though they're not useful and have no monetary value.

I bring this up because the Pokey purchase made me interested in what things you, my readers, have bought recently for nostalgic reasons. Or, alternatively, what things you hold on to for nostalgic reasons.

I'll do one of each. I still have a rabbit puppet (copyright date on tag 1976) which was not my first stuffed animal, but which was my first non-lame stuffed animal. I had an earlier stuffed rabbit, but it was this ugly orange cartoony thing that I'm sure I loved dearly at the time but not anymore. It's either long gone by now, or else my niece has it. The rabbit puppet resembles a real rabbit, still looks good after 30 years, and in general puppet stuffed animals are better than non-puppets.

[0] It's a strange URL to put on a toy, because the website is aimed at resellers, not the people who buy the toys. What's the use case here? "The store down the street is crushing me with these Pokey dolls! I've got to find out where they come from! Hopefully, they'll have a low minimum order!"

As is well-known the original game takes place in Hoboken, New Jersey. The remake starts off with the same lovely view of a skyline across the water, but it's been Standards-and-Practiced and it's not the New York skyline anymore. In fact I don't think it looks like a real city skyline at all; the city would have to have two or three downtowns. Way to ruin the realism, game about a shapeshifting blob!

(If there is a real city with a skyline like that, I'd consider that a more interesting fact than you'd think, so let me know. I guess I could see the New York skyline looking like that if you rotated Central Park 90 degrees.)

Sumana said the art was really phoned in, but works of art no longer have any signaling function in our society, so who can tell. Let's turn to the metadata. The exhibition was accompanied by a flyer (also available online), and the flyer was generated with SCIgen. Then there's the name of the exhibition, which pretty much says "Let's phone this one in." At least they didn't rip off the Eater of Meaning.

I'm here to tell you that TiddlyWiki is the solution. I spent most of today organizing my notes, and the story is correspondingly clearer in my head. Tiny ideas have a place to live, and I've got a workshop for developing them into fleshed-out ideas.

Tiddlywiki lowers the barriers to capturing a fleeting idea better than any other software I've used. Since it's a Javascript app that runs in the web browser, rather than a client-server thing, Tiddlywiki is fast. Since it displays your entire edit trail on one page, the snippets don't feel isolated from each other. I can split out a section that's getting too long without losing it.

I've known about Tiddlywiki for a long time, and it's not that I resisted trying it until now; rather, I never really needed it until now. It delivers.

• Neo Classic Space showcases slick modern legO constructions conforming to the blue-dominant 80s aesthetics of the classic space sets.
• If you demand real spaceships, NASA Images is a pretty good attempt to make all of NASA's cool images easy to find. One step closer to my space probe data portal.
• Chrontendo is chronogaming the Famicom/NES in video form. One video a month covering 15 games. Unlike most online videos of NES games, this guy is taking each game seriously on its own terms. This is a huge project; there's like 20 hours of video and he's about 1/10 done.
• At QCon I met a couple people from the Guardian who were working on a project that turned out to be the Guardian Open Platform. The New York Times, whose nerds are apparently the bitter rivals of the Guardian nerds, also recently released a web service for article search. The Guardian web service wins for giving you the full body of the story.

  A lot of brain cells are needlessly expended on Web Service Design. If you're a newspaper or other data repository the web service design is not too difficult. Just put the damn thing on the web in machine-readable form. It can be as simple as putting up a directory listing.

  Semi-relatedly, I really dislike the use of "API" language when speaking of web services. It makes a web service sound like a C library, which in turn (or so I fear) makes people think it's acceptable to put C libraries online and call them web services. Yes, I know that the official name of the Launchpad web service is the "Launchpad web API". This is a battle I consistently lose.

Anyway, the most recent round of Congressional hearings made me realize that the format makes a perfect framework for a role-playing game, a la The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Each player takes their turn in the spotlight and is asked to justify some despicable behavior or advocate for some bizarre appropriation. In fact, it could just be a theme hack of TEAoBM, but you'd want to have a balance of really hostile Congresspeople and those who just threw softballs. I guess the TEAoBM "story complication" mechanism could handle both.

Anyway, I've now read both books and I can heartily recommend at least The Devil You Say. It's not Wodehouse, but what is? (The answer: Wodehouse.) It's funny and clever, and has an excellent tagline: "Satan has risen... and just in time for tea." Strong Spirits has a better conceit, but the production schedule was severely rushed so it was written in not much time, and it's got huge plot holes and not as many jokes.

Both books are really short, like the length of two round-trip subway trips. Elisa has the rights, and the books have a decent fan base, so we told her she should put the books up on Lulu. She was working on a third book in the series when it was canceled in an editorial shakeup, and the manuscript is with the others on one of those deteriorating floppies.

But the most appropriate way to honor robotfindskitten is to make robotfindskittenlike games. Such as the rather gruesome The Favored.

But as Joel Hodgson once said, you don't have to take the ending they give you. You know I haven't been boring you by posting about BSG every week, and I wouldn't post about the finale if all I had to say was "I'm disappointed". But ever since the DS9 days I've considered Ron Moore a role model for SF storytelling with long dramatic arcs, and I need to write this alternate ending so I don't remember the BSG arc as fundamentally flawed.

Obviously this discussion is full of spoilers, so if you're Nandini or someone else who's waiting for the finale to show up on Hulu, don't read this yet.

It looks like the finale was as sloppy as it was because Ron Moore had a few major obsessions that drove the story to a place nobody but Ron Moore wanted it to go. A place the story itself didn't want to go, such that an entire pantheon of B-movie dei ex machina had to be deployed to push it there. I'm gonna take one of the obsessions as revealed in the final episode, and ditch the rest.

For me the wheels came off the story right after Galen killed Tory. That made sense by itself, but not much afterward made sense. I'm gonna back up the story to just before that, get rid of the memory-sharing tech that gave Galen his motive, and start from there.

The five uber-Cylons put their minds together and decrypt the secret to resurrection technology. An uneasy truce is formed between the humans and all models of Cylon. Galactica docks at the Cylon colony and the Five begin work on a new resurrection hub.

What I'm about to write doesn't really have any conflict in it, which is usually a problem, but it has more conflict (read: shouting) than the final hour of the actual finale. There wasn't any conflict in the second hour of "What You Leave Behind", and that was fine. And if you want more conflict you can just add back in Galen finding out about what Tory did.

During their work on the hub the Five make a discovery: there's no reason why resurrection technology can't work on humans. It may have been a human invention in the first place. The inability of Cylons to reproduce sexually is some kind of DRM that can be broken if you understand resurrection tech. There is no longer any fundamental difference between humans and Cylons.[0] The cycle is broken. The human race and the Cylon race merge. Laura Roslin's death is especially poignant because she'll be one of the last people ever to die.

The show ends with a flash-forward to twenty years in the future. Some people we knew as humans now exist in multiple copies. There are some new hybrid characters.

The occasion is the commissioning of a new ship, a colony ship the size of a base star, built with human and Cylon technology. The people who were born human have been living in space for far too long. They've built this ship and are leaving to continue their search for a habitable planet. Of course they call this new ship Galactica and there's bookending and all that good stuff.

That's my basic storyline. There are many possible variations: if you want the cycle to restart in the end, I think you can see a couple ways of doing that. There are problems you'd have to finesse but by and large the real show finessed the same problems. Watch this video of Edward James Olmos at the UN and tell me this ending isn't more in the spirit of BSG.

One last thing. Let's talk about Starbuck. Pretty much the only thing I liked about the final hour of BSG was the revelation of what Head Six, Head Baltar, and Starbuck were. I'd like to keep that, but Starbuck's arc needs some changing now that there's no "real" Earth for the humans to find.

So. Sometime in the final hour Starbuck disappears from human sight, as per the actual episode. But instead of Lee's "that's strange, the woman I love suddenly disappeared, oh well" shot, we go to her POV. She sees Head Six and Head Baltar. They tell her that she is a construct created by God for the fulfilment of the plot prophecy. Prophecy is a very tricky thing and when the instrument of prophecy dies at an inconvenient time, extreme measures must be taken. She was brought back to lead the fleet to Earth. Earth sucked so much that the humans became desperate enough to make an alliance with the Cylons, a move that has now led the human race to its end. Now the plot prophecy is over and it's time for Starbuck to come with them.

Needless to say Starbuck does not take kindly to this revelation. Here you get your shouting. You can resolve this in a number of different ways, most of which are more interesting than what happened in canon.

[0] That was my prediction that came true in a really unsatisfying way, ie. by killing off the humans and the Cylons and making us all descendants of the hybrid.

I was hoping we could make TE an April 1st project, but it looks like it'll be at least a few days beyond that. Hopefully we can get it out in April, though, because I want to launch my secret writing project in May.

I gotta say that, unlike Sumana, I've never been a huge Coulton fan. When it comes to nerd music I prefer the Front. I like about half of Coulton's songs but none with the intensity the fans last night showed. Plus, I hate going to concerts (I'm pretty sure the last concert concert I went to was this one.) And it didn't help that most of Coulton's songs are about the emotional state where you don't like going to concerts, so really what are you doing here?

But it was pretty fun, and Coulton's showmanship was excellent. ("This is my 'last' 'song!'" before engaging in the encore farce.) And afterwards we hung out with Andrew. And now it's the weekend, which I'll probably squander on useless stuff instead of laying out the anthology or anything productive.

Philip Pearson says I need one of these. I dunno. It's designed like an ironic hipster T-shirt, but there's nothing ironic about it.

Sumana got me a copy of Sainsbury's Magazine on her trip to the UK, because the first time I was in the UK, in 2002, I picked up a copy and enjoyed its concentrated Britishness. I gotta say I prefer the 2002 edition. The writing's better, the layout and graphic design are more distinctive, the recipes are better, the big ads are more interesting and there are more weird little ads in the back. Also the 2009 version is trying to be a lifestyle magazine instead of a magazine put out by a supermarket chain about the food they sell at the supermarket.

But, there was one section that made it all worthwhile, under "Health":

DO A TIME AND MOTION STUDY

We British are obsessed with our bowels but monitoring how often you go to loo isn't the most reliable way to check they are working at peak efficiency. Intestinal transit time - how long it takes for food to travel the length of your bowel - is a better measure than how regular you are. Eat a generous helping of sweetcorn and set the clock. If you're eating a good diet and your bowels are working normally, you should spot it 12-36 hours later. Any longer suggests your bowels are on the sluggish side and could probably benefit from more fibre.

At the beginning of that paragraph I was thinking "Surely that's an exaggeration", but no, you'd have to be fairly obsessed to consider this a helpful tip.

My vague idea is that I'll buy one album a week on your recommendations and write a review. For whatever reason I've always preferred music recommendations from friends to recommendations through reviews or (this is real weird) audio samples such as you'd hear on music podcasts.

In general I'd prefer music I can buy from CD Baby, because that's the only online store I've seen that offers a decent full-album download for Linux (known in the trade as a "download over HTTP"; somehow other stores keep screwing this up). Also I did some consulting work for CD Baby once, though it doesn't seem to have borne fruit yet. But suggest whatever and I'll try to get a hold of it if I think it sounds cool.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to publish some of our hard-won Slush Pile Tips(tm), amazing rules that, if followed slavishly, will launch your fiction into some metaphorical orbit. Rules marked with an asterisk are ones that we still consider to be good advice even though we're publishing a story that violates them.

A lot of the things we've noticed are small things, but just fixing them won't necessarily fix the story. These are more like code smells: signs that something is wrong at a deeper level.

• When writing science fiction about particle physics, take special care to correctly spell the names of elementary particles.
• Is there a gun in your story? Do you feel a need to mention the exact make and model of the gun? The gun may be too important to your story.
• Long scenes that take place inside hallucinations are tiresome. Also symbolic dreams outside of fantasy. Nothing in this scene is really happening!
• Don't put the full name of the POV character at the start of your story. This didn't even make sense in the 1950s. It makes your POV character seem like a pompous ass who thinks in newspaper articles describing their exploits. Obvious exception if pompous asshood is your intention. Sumana says: also an exception if character's name is incredibly awesome.
• Memory erasure/recording is overdone.
• Also people throwing up in bar bathrooms.
• Also airport bathrooms.
• * There is an oversupply of SF stories with a noir style or detective mystery theme. We got a lot of really good ones, but we didn't feel like we could publish more than one. I've written one I think is really good that I can't get published. Now I think I see why.

  It's kind of strange, if you think about it. Traditional hard-boiled noir is pretty much dead, but traditional hard-boiled noir that's also SF is alive and kicking.

• If no one in your story is British, do not call any female a "lady".
• Sumana says: unctuous businessmen should either be over-the-top funny or more understated and realistic.
• * Leonard says: do not use "thumb" as a verb meaning "interact with a handheld device."
• * Any reference to Pandora or Pandora's box is a bad sign. Doubly bad if it's in the title.
• Some infodumps are worse than others. If the premise of your story is laughably ridiculous, an infodump will call attention to the fact. The absolute worst is the gratuitious infodump, which painfully restates that which has already been adequately shown, just to make the reader suffer.