News You Can Bruise for 2014 February

The cycle begins anew... OR DOES IT? Check out all the films I saw in January!

• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013): Or as my ticket stub calls it, HOBBIT 2. I love my now-tradition of watching the Hobbit movies with my sister Susanna, but I'm a little disappointed in this one. The thing I loved most about the first movie (dramatization of the totally canonical gaiden in which Gandalf hunts down the Necromancer) was combined with the thing I disliked most (the elevation of a throwaway character to Big Bad status, in a story that already features a frickin' dragon plus the Middle-Earth equivalent of the Crimean War). This made me suspect that the details of the Gandalf B-plot were left vague in the book for a reason.

  Plus, terrible confusing action sequences all the time. The one at the end made me think that not only has Peter Jackson been playing too much Minecraft, he's the guy who wants minecarts to work like boats in lava. It was also unnecessary, since the plot of the book at that point would work just fine as the end of the second movie in a trilogy. I can only blame Hollywood meddling and hope for the best.

  The good news is that we have now stretched out the story enough that the third film contains all of The Hobbit's canonical action set-pieces. But that's really an argument for making two movies, not three. Or four, as I over-enthusiastically suggested last time.

  Smaug was great. I don't see a lot of movies with dragons, and I suspect such movies' dragon effects are generally lacking, because lots of people are really going ape about Smaug whereas I was thinking "yes, good, solid talking dragon implementation." The same thing happened with Gollum in the LotR movies. I guess I don't care enough about dragons in general. They're like dinosaurs... that don't exist!

  Insta-update: After writing that, I listened to the episode of "The Dork Forest" with Tolkien expert Corey Olsen. It didn't change my mind on anything, but it did remind me of all the changes the filmmakers made that improved on the book, or at least made a better movie than a straight adaptation of the book would have. Especially the love triangle, the splitting up of the party to establish a POV in Laketown, the early introduction of the arrow on the mantelpiece, and all the work done to differentiate between twelve characters who are nearly identical in the book.

Yeah, only one film! Because I was travelling all month. I couldn't even count Future Love Drug, a short film made by my fellow Foolscap GoH Brooks Peck, because I came in late and only saw the last minute of the film.

I don't know if the film roundups will continue in 2014. On the one hand, I'm going to try to see, or at least review, fewer films in 2014 so I can do more reading. On the other hand, I love taking fiction apart to see how it works, and reviewing books the way I've been reviewing movies is a good way to make professional enemies. Whereas nobody cares what I say about film. So who knows?

I've put online the slides and prepared text of my Foolscap talk, "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt". On one level it's a simple introduction to algorithmic creativity, but it's also about creativity in general, the anthropomorphization of software, and why the features that make Twitter so aggravating for humans make it such a great platform for bots. Bonuses include a recap of Brian Hayes's article on Markov and a telling of the @Horse_ebooks saga as a reverse alien invasion.

The two site-specific installations that I hinted at earlier were custom scripts displaying variants on Ebooks Brillhantes and Hapax Hegemon. The text corpus comes from a scrape of everything linked to from Free Speculative Fiction Online. The software is a heavily modified version of Bruce, modified a) to stream data from a flat text file and create the slides on the fly, instead of trying to load 20,000 slides into memory at once; and b) when restarted after a crash/shutdown, to skip the appropriate number of slides and pick up where it would be if it had been running continually.

Unfortunately I never got a picture of both displays running side-by-side; if you have such a picture, I'd really appreciate it if you could send it to me.

Just after I set up the ebooks display, I met Greg Bear, who was at Foolscap running a writing workshop. We walked over to the screen and I explained the project to him. He said "I'd better not be in there." AT THAT MOMENT the screen was showing the quote "We zoomed down eleven" from this free sample of Blood Music. It was pretty awkward.

Thanks to requests by Ron Hale-Evans and others at Foolscap, I've compiled the four Constellation Games bonus stories into a single ebook. You can get an EPUB that looks okay and a MOBI that's kinda ugly. If you want to do a better job of formatting, then a) be my guest, and b) let me know and I'll send you the original source files, which should save you some work over downloading everything and putting it together yourself.

My new bot, Mahna Mahna (@mahna____mahna), reenacts the Muppet Show's "Mahna Mahna" skit over the course of a day. It might be my saddest bot.

My secret is that I created this bot hoping that someone else would eventually create a Snowth bot to enact the other half of the skit. I quickly learned that there is already a Snowth bot, but it only talks to @mahna____mahna once a day. So... well, I already revealed one secret in this paragraph, I shouldn't reveal another.