News You Can Bruise

A follow-up project, THE tinySAURUS GENERATOR, brings cute pixel dinosaurs to Twitter. I like the dinos, I like the detailed explanation, and I like the technique of having multiple templates, instead of trying to make one uber-template covering the entire creative space.

1. On Sunday I saw the 1926 Howard Hawks film Fig Leaves. I'll publish a full review in the roundup at the end of the month, but I couldn't wait to mention the dinosaurs! This movie (briefly) features two very cool-looking puppet dinosaurs. There's Adam's pet Apatosaurus, named Dobbin:

   

   Exactly as depicted in Genesis 2.

   More amazingly, there's also a budget-busting life-sized Triceratops that pulls a bus!

   

   Awesome! Not gonna spoil the review, but the first reel of this movie used all the good Flintstones jokes, thirty-four years before The Flintstones even premiered. Except for the unfortunate bus dinosaur saying "It's a living." in a morose voice. And I'm sure that's just because the joke would be really awkward if you had to do it with title cards.

   

   (Screen image simulated.)

2. If you share my belief that dinosaurs are the most interesting part of any movie that includes dinosaurs, you'll love Kevin Maher's deleted scene from King Kong.
3. A recent Ureddit course on narrative structure in short fiction used "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" as one of its example stories. I thought this was a) a good choice, and b) pretty funny, because I deliberately wrote "Dinosaurs" to be opaque to traditional analyses of narrative structure.

   If you'll forgive me being serious about a very silly story, here's what I mean. Nearly every plot event in "Dinosaurs" is a red herring. It's actually a New Yorker type story, in which a series of insane infernokrusher interventions leads to Entippa's epiphany that humans are exploiting dinosaurs' tendency to get involved in insane infernokrusher interventions for their own entertainment. (Those humans including, in a bit of Hitchcock-type moralizing, you for reading the story and me for writing it.)

   I wrote the first scene to have something very close to a literal Chekhov's gun. It's Tark's gun, or at least his desire for a gun. Later on, Chekhov's gun goes off: Tark gets his gun! But as soon as the literal gun goes off, Tark discovers that literal guns are loud and painful, and he throws it away. The Chekhov's gun was fake. Sort of like the keys in my old text adventure Degeneracy, which don't unlock anything—you're supposed to melt them down for the metal.

   But! In the Reddit thread dissecting "Dinosaurs" and the other example stories, the person running the class proves my intellectual superior. It turns out there was also a real Chekhov's Gun in that first scene: Tark's "killing claws", which are in fact used to kill someone later in the story, just like they would in a regular story about dinosaurs killing humans.

   I didn't even notice that. I'd assumed the human-killing scene worked because everyone knows meat-eating dinosaurs have claws. I didn't even realize I'd made a big deal about the claws in the first scene. You win this round, literary analysis!

PS: Never forget.

I can only hope that some future Werner Herzog puts this in his movie.

Based on the original fossil was discovered, with use of modern voice, light, electricity, mechanism to produce. It could accomplish the movements of eyes, mouth, head, hand, tail, stomach breath, walking, laying an egg, [!!] seating and riding, and make voice.

In fact, the city of Zigong is full of companies that make animatronic or large-scale replica dinosaurs. There's also Zigong City Dragon Culture and Art Co. ("simulation skin grafting elaborate process is made available for tourists to view, play, all kinds of dinosaurs to the audience as if return to the Cretaceous era"), Jade Bamboo Culture Development ("Our vision... Leading people to walk into dinosaurs’ world, helping to make dinosaurs stand with you!"), and a dozen more. (Although some of them may not be totally independent companies--Zigong Hualong Art uses the same "Based on the original fossil" catalog copy as Zigong Gengulongteng Science and Technology) Why so many? I guess because Zigong is a really good place for dinosaurs in general--there are lots of fossils and even a museum there. ("As a famous saying goes, one finds a veritable nest of dinosaurs at Zigong.")

Okay, so that's giant animatronic dinosaurs. You can get similar, though less awesome, results with anything else. Not only finished products, but raw materials and intermediate parts, and the machines used to assemble them into finished products. Just browse the recently added products for ideas.

Automatic ketchup packing machine? Here it is, with pictures. Molybdenum? It's sold as sheets, plates, bars, powder, disks, wire, and custom-cast parts. Sodium benzoate? Minimum order 1 metric ton! Things not normally considered to be manufactured products, such as software development or voice dubbing? We've got that B-roll!

On the road between Bangalore and Mysore there's a town called Channapatna, and a big Lions Club-type sign declaring it "City of Toys". And here's a toy company from Channapatna on Alibaba: Kaveri Handicraft Industry. There are probably more, but it's tough to search for a specific city.

A couple more. The Shenzhen Dojust Painting Co. does custom paintings. Those anti-counterfeiting holographic stickers? They have to be manufactured, and the Dongguan Linbiao Anti-Fake Technology Co. manufactures them.

It's really amazing. My only complaint is not so much spam, as that it's difficult to restrict a product search to original manufacturers, so you get a lot of random resellers. (You can do a supplier search and restrict your search to original manufacturers, which is probably what I'd do if I wanted to buy anything.) It's a glimpse into a world you knew was there but didn't think much about apart from the occasional Bunnie Huang essay.

First off, the Daily Mail headline is inaccurate. (Shocking, I know.) It should be "Torosaurus 'never really existed but was just a mature version of another dinosaur'." Why? Look at the dates. The first Triceratops was discovered in 1899, and Torosaurus was discovered two years later. When two species turn out to be the same, the earlier name takes precedence; that's why Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus and not vice versa. The name of the paper is "Torosaurus is Triceratops", not "Triceratops is Torosaurus". So whatever happens, the name Triceratops stays.

But it is just a name. There's not some platonic form of Triceratops that can be taken away from you. Nothing changed about the universe. Pluto is still out there and these animals did exist. But we come up with abstractions like "planet" and "Triceratops" to help us manage the complexity of the universe, and abstractions are always leaky.

All three of the incidents in that Kottke guest post have this in common: you learned to give a name to something, and then the people responsible for names changed the name on you. Here's a 1989 New York Times editorial quoted by Steven Jay Gould in the title essay of Bully for Brontosaurus:

The Postal Service has taken heavy flak for mislabeling its new 25-cent dinosaur stamp, a drawing of a pair of dinosaurs captioned ''Brontosaurus.'' Furious purists point out that the ''brontosaurus'' is now properly called ''apatosaurus.'' They accuse the stamp's authors of fostering scientific illiteracy, and want the stamps recalled.

Apparently there was backlash against this, even though Brontosaurus was formally retired in 1903, so there's no reason except pop culture that anyone in 2010 (or even 1989) should even remember the name "brontosaurus". And people got really angry about the redefinition of "planet" to exclude Pluto. But if scientists made some discovery that shattered our preconceptions, like discovering that Triceratops was a carnivore or that Pluto is actually the size of Jupiter, no one would be angry. There'd be no one to be angry at.

People get angry when they see the social constructs of science being refactored to be simpler. It looks like the scientists are cheating, because the refactoring has no basis in physical reality. But the constructs themselves—"planet" and "species"—are just tools we came up with to make thinking easier. This is why two species can be discovered to be the same species, and why the name of the combined species is chosen according to arbitrary rules. The rules are all there are.

Incidentally, you know how the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus thing happened? Well, in 1877 A.O. Marsh described Apatosaurus in a "typically rushed note" (Gould), and then two years later he described Brontosaurus. As I mentioned, the distinction lasted until 1903. Quoting Gould again:

When [Elmer] Riggs restudied Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, he recognized them as two versions of the same creature, with Apatosaurus as a more juvenile specimen. No big deal; it happens all the time.

That's exactly what happened with Triceratops! A.O. Marsh really loves taking credit for discovering species. He describes some juvenile specimens as Species A, and two years later some more mature specimens as Species B. Still later, some other paleontologists restudy the specimens and call him on it. Same story both times. It's just that in the case of Apatosaurus it took about twenty years, and in the case of Triceratops it took a hundred and thirty.

At the Museum of the Rockies there's a line of Triceratops skulls from juvenile to adult. Jack Horner, one of the authors of this paper, is the paleontology curator at the MotR and probably worked on that exhibit. I wonder if there was some moment where Horner looked at that line of skulls and thought "Maybe that should keep going..."

Seems like someone needs a visit from the Kick-your-ass-a-saurus.

As usual, I've put up a clearinghouse page about the story on my web site. I'm also trying something new with this story and putting up a deleted scene. I toyed with the idea of doing this for "Mallory", but the deleted scene from "Mallory" was deleted because it was boring. This is a fun scene that I had to delete because it became non-canon.

I was really tempted to use the image described here on my clearinghouse page, but that would have been tragically misleading. No mere words could ever be that awesome.

The contract I signed gives the story exclusively to Strange Horizons for 60 days, but after that I plan to release the story under a CC license. I'm working out the details with the editors now to avoid any confusion later.

Now some behind-the-scenes. My friend Kate Lascoutx, student and tutor of classical literature, came up with many of the dinosaur names in the story, especially "alethinosaur" ("truthiness lizard") and "bradupeithid" ("slow-stepper"). She also came up with an incredible name that I couldn't use ("Diopteron" - "brilliant flyer"). I asked Kate for these names and came up with my own (Thymomenoraptor is mine, thanks to an online Greek dictionary) to avoid the impression that dinosaur evolution stopped dead when the story's dinosaurs left Earth. New names that are still obviously dinosaur names accomplished this to my satisfaction without making it a huge plot point.

The main trigger for "Awesome Dinosaurs" was a certain class of rejection letter that corresponds to about #11 on the Context of Rejection: "This story didn't quite grab me." Or its less positive sibling, "Nice story, but it didn't work for me." I get this rejection letter a lot, and at one point in a Jamsetji Tata-esque fit of pique I said, "I will write a story about dinosaurs who drive monster trucks! Maybe that will grab you!"

"Write what you know" is a common cliche, and writing what you know will get you a coherent story but not, I find, one that goes around grabbing editors. I find my stories do much better when I write what I love. I know a thing or two about politics and asteroid mining and secret societies, but my stories on those topics aren't selling, and I'm starting to think it's because I don't love those things as much as I love the Internet, or video games, or dinosaurs.

The other influence, as I've mentioned before, was my disappointment that de Camp's classic story "A Gun For Dinosaur" is not about a dinosaur who buys a gun. I'd pictured it as a children's story, like "A House For Hermit Crab". The first scene of "Awesome Dinosaurs" is what I was hoping for from that story.

Finally, big thanks to my writing group for workshopping the story back in October, and to Jed for his editing comments.

Calca 1: One of my favorite Amar Chitra Katha comics is the one about Jamsetji Tata, founder of Indian megacorp Tata. It repeats a story (the accuracy of this story has been disputed) about an "unsavoury incident" that spurred Tata to build the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai around the turn of the 20th century (you may know this hotel as the one attacked in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks). I'd give you a picture of the panel, but Sumana has the digital camera, so here's a transcript.

Sign: ENTRY FOR EUROPEANS ONLY
Random Guy: Can't you read? You are not allowed in this hotel!
Jamsetji Tata: I will build the best hotel in this country!

Two panels later he's buying land for the hotel, and still going:

Guy #1: This is a good piece of land.
Guy #2: Yes! Beautiful view, fresh air.
Jamsetji Tata: I will build the best hotel in Asia.

The great thing about this attitude is its applicability to a wide variety of situations, not just to foreigners building foreigner-only hotels in your country.

My favorite ACK of all time is the one about Suyya, aka Annapati Suyya, a civil engineer and early proponent of crowdsourcing. I'll write about him later, but that's definitely a comic book worth owning.

The book arrived today and I reread it. The political subtext is only sub-textual if you're a kid, but it did its job. Pretty much everything in the book is part of my adult philosophy, right down to the ham-handed satirical dialogue I write for government employees. Highly recommended assuming you want your kid to turn out like me.

The illustrations are also awesome. My main complaint (also mentioned in the postcard, which will show up sometime in the next 3 years) is that if a chicken gave birth to an evolutionary throwback it would be a theropod, not a saurichian like Triceratops.

When I mentioned this book to Sumana she immediately countered with Homer Price (the book with the story about the donut machine), which I remember being really good. I was also considering John Fitzgerald's Great Brain books for the "lesser-known but awesome childrens' books" list, but those books have a pretty good Amazon sales rank (they're outselling RESTful Web Services) so they're not as obscure as I thought.

Dear God,

If you let the dinasor not exstinct we would not have a country. You did the right thing.

Jonathan

That's tough but fair!

Antigamesgeburtstagsdinosauriergewinnspiel (I can almost pronounce that now) is a Something Awful-style Photoshop contest presenting video game screenshots that have been modified to include a dinosaur. This is in accordance with Kevan's discovery that any game can be made more fun by the addition of dinosaurs. The winners are here and here. Highlights include Tetris, Grand Theft Auto, and Nintendogs.

I discovered Antigamesgeburtstagsdinosauriergewinnspiel via referer logs, when a post-contest entry presented Nethack with dinosaurs, and a commenter pointed out that I already put dinosaurs in Nethack.

"Troodon: Dinosaur Genius" is about the Troodon, which had an opposable finger and the largest brain/body mass ratio of any dinosaur. Pretty soon the documentary will reach the traditional "unwarranted extrapolation" phase, where people will speculate that, were it not for the K/T event, Troodon could have continued its trend towards greater intelligence and become a sentient lizardoid species. Yes, just like in that episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

The main problem with Paleoworld is that there's no warning when it goes to commercial, and the voiceover announcer for the show sounds just like the voiceover announcer in the commercials. So you hear things like this. "But the story of Troodon does not end here. It launches us from the dinosaur age to the space age. The latest Mars Orbiter is about to arrive!" And "Troodon was a dinosaur with incomparable brainpower. All of us have internal plumbing. But sometimes our pipes doesn't work as well as they should."

I once worked with a guy who was going to voiceover school nights, and he said that there is a standard set of voices that you learn in voiceover school. I guess this is so the school and employers can grade you on an objective scale, but it's really creating a voiceover monoculture.

Also, continuing the trend of "museums try to get you to change your terminology", the Museum of the Rockies tried to get us to call birds "avian dinosaurs" and regular dinosaurs "non-avian dinosaurs". This may have made sense at one time but the time was 65 million years ago. If that terminology catches on, I demand to be referred to as a "mammalian cynodont", or "Roy Dalton Richardson Leonard Dalton Richardson".

This site is titled Predator at the Chessboard, and is decorated with dinosaurs; yet the dinosaurs pictured are herbivores. Is this not a contradiction of some sort? In fact it isn't; and this, patient reader, for two reasons.

Yes, now it is the plants who are the prey.

Compsognathus sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah
Compsognathus five miles long, oh the doo-dah day

Study of the sources and this helpful document showed me the way to creating new Nethack monsters, and I was ready to zap my wand of meta-create monster. But which dinosaurs to pick? I thought about that old AD&D monster manual table that lists about 50 kinds of dinosaurs in great detail and somehow manages to make dinosaurs boring. No, I would only pick a representative sample of dinosaurs.

My patch provides but three painstakingly selected lizard-beasts: the fastest dinosaur ever, the smartest dinosaur ever, and the most popular dinosaur ever. The balance is probably off and there's a lot more that could be added (treatment of the fact that, while many dinosaurs have hands, they can't really do much with them; also, I guess you could saddle and ride the smaller dinosaurs), but it makes me happy.

People have mentioned this to me before, but I haven't read the book yet. It's on my list, because it's an incredible coincidence. Especially with the Utahraptor: it's such an obscure dinosaur! The dinosaurs were actually picked because I liked the way they looked. I had to go back and look up what they were when it came time to name them.

There you have it. Most amazing coincidence I've seen in a while. I left my copy of The Diamond Age in Arkansas (actually I gave it to Geoff, which means it's probably in San Francisco but I don't know where), so I can't go back and check, but my half-recollection is that it's really very similar to the archetypal plot of Dinosaur Comics.

Eventually this system will expand to consume Dada Pokey and its spin-offs, and I'll also add a Five-Card Nancy style game and more different webcomics, and everything will be happy because I'll have finally gotten rid of that horrible 1998 Dada Pokey code. For now, at least most is happy; love those comics!

Update: in personal communication, Ryan North says Dadasaurus Rex is "FANTASTIC".

Well, my career plans changed and I'm not likely to discover any dinosaur soon, but I did discover this dinosaur news website fair and square. It's from National Geographic and it descends into software-bug or cross-promotional news that has nothing to do with dinosaurs, but up at the top are arrayed for my vicarious enjoyment all the dinosaurs other people, sweatier than myself, have been discovering. Artists' renderings and everything.

I'd like to see a nice concise expose of the dinosaur discovery pipeline where people find the bones, analyse them, write the paper for Nature, get the artists' renderings done. Who pays for the artists' renderings?

Also, can you still get those novelty newspapers done or has that racket been shut down by humorless lawyers, driving you to use desktop publishing or make fake CNN web pages?

There was an old VR game (that was what we called these games before we called them "first-person shooters") that ran on Amiga hardware, called Dactyl Nightmare. It had a sequel called (surprisingly) Dactyl Nightmare 2. The ad copy promises you will be "plunged into an ultrareal setting trying to avoid the menacing intentions of giant swooping pterodactyls in this game of unprecedented realism" and "You won't sleep through this nightmare."

Hey, wake up! Nightmare! C'mon! You're missing it!

OK, good. Here's a contemporaneous review of Dactyl Nightmare from an Amiga separatist site. The other thing I wanted to show you is this screenshot from Dactyl Nightmare 2, in which the pterodactyl has had big posters of herself printed up and hung in her nest. An egg theft countermeasure?

Man, what a great name. The trademark has been cancelled; does that mean I could write a completely different game with the same name and get away with it?

If you're interested in the progress of the Brendan/Leonard logo collaboration, check out the Gallery of Rejected NewsBruiser Logos. The dimetrodon was my original idea, and in the face of all evidence I still think we could have gotten it to work out somehow.

Now that the scales have been lifted from my eyes I see that all those stale game genres can be revitalized by refocusing them on their rightful subject. Imagine a first-person shooter that's actually a first-person mauler--you are a dinosaur biting or clobbering other dinosaurs. A real-time strategy game in which you deploy your herd of dinosaurs against a rival herd. Even, say, a Monopoly clone in which everything has some strained connection to dinosaurs!

Since the pure, eternal "idea" portion of a project is the hard part, and since the implementation work and will to see it through to completion pales in comparison, I expect these games to start coming out next week now that I've done all the heavy lifting. Hey, I'll even help you out. Look--I started a SourceForge page! It's as good as done already!

Update: despite their British origin, Kevan assures me in comments that the dinosaurs are playing American football. I was kind of wondering where the goalie was in that screenshot. This conclusively identifies the dinosaurs as Paralitian stromeri.

This looks like some kind of ancient Rube Goldberg chain reaction, where the only reactants are dinosaurs shooting lasers at other dinosaurs.

If that doesn't get you to click, I don't know what will.

PS: some people write a transliteration of their name in Chinese characters and think they're cool. I think I'm cool because Steve wrote a made-up translation of my website's name into Chinese.

• Angels from Another Pin linked to a great site about medieval writing. Includes explanations of what the ancients thought they were doing when they went through all that trouble to put into manuscripts stuff that now seems like fancy superfluous junk. I'm talking to you, illumination!
• Stormcaller.net has occasional roundups in categories "Science/Tech", "Geek", and "Stuff", which is partly stuff you've seen on BoingBoing, and partly stuff that could go on BoingBoing but hasn't. Highlights include a one-man cruise missile project, a UK-based site for less destructive tech status symbols, and the awesome, already-linked-everywhere to-scale renditions of fictional spaceships (the cool thing is not just that they're to scale but that they're all drawn in the same sort of semitechnical style, so you could see them all engaged in one enormous, canon-shattering space battle).
• relicious linked to Blogmatcher, which is like an automatic version of The Blog Twinning Project which uses some weird algorithm to decide that your weblog is like other weblogs that link to the same thing. (Incidentally, TBTP now pairs Crummy with The Cynic's Tea Party) I think that Blogmatcher should not consider my links to things which are themselves weblogs, but other than that it's useful (but doomed to be assimilated into Technorati and forgotten about).

  Also from relicious I found an archive of Transformers. I'm not some kind of Transformers freak or anything, but I enjoyed the prototypes and the Transformers Knock-Offs page. The latter does not cover entire lines of Transformers knockoffs like the Gobots; it details actual copies of actual Transformers with pathetic filed-off serial numbers of names ("Ancient Animal?" Give me a break!). It also reminds me how pointless a lot of the later Transformers were. How was a Transformer that turned into a dinosaur supposed to fool anyone? "Oh, it's just an ordinary titanium Triceratops, nothing to worry--GAAH! IT TURNED INTO A ROBOT WITH A GUN!"

• I don't think 101-280 actually linked to TEoM, but they get an honorable mention for being named after the freeway junction I traverse every weekday going to work and back.

I also got a great birthday card made by Susanna. It has a drawing of a dinosaur and one of a fish being confused by a fishing lure. "Happy being 23!", she says.