Anecdotal Evidence

It's just too much science fiction

2011-12-26T08:34:00.001-06:00

A wowser of a quote ends this Paris Review interview of William Gibson ....

If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really excellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but you can’t have them all in one novel.

INTERVIEWER

What are those major plot drivers?

GIBSON

Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

INTERVIEWER

And you haven’t even gotten to the technology.

GIBSON

You haven’t even gotten to the Internet. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.

Gotham City Sirens: Strange Fruit

2011-11-08T20:33:00.000-06:00

On the face of it, the purpose of Gotham City Sirens seems to draw a book full of hot women. Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy band together: what's not to like? But I found this volume to have some pretty good stories in it. Not a lot of criminality actually happens, really. It's more like these characters get in trouble a lot, because of their history.

The stories mostly stood on their own okay, but the Poison Ivy story, the first story, made me feel a bit like I was missing some history.

Science Dog #2

2011-11-06T19:07:00.001-06:00

I didn't know anything about this comic before picking it up. I actually got it off a clearance pile. It was the only one I got out of that pile that was worthy of note.

I liked this one because it was a complete story in one issue, and because it was kind of reflective, and it seemed to counterpoint what I assume is the usual Science Dog story, where he handily defeats his nemesis Walter. It had wacky aliens and time travel and pathos and I liked it.

But I picked it up because it was called Science Dog and it had a picture of a humanoid dog with a jetpack and gadgets on the cover.

Bonus: his teammates call him Science like it's his first name.

2011-10-31T17:28:00.000-05:00

The New Yorker has a great little epistolary fiction story, relevant to Halloween, here on their site: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/10/24/111024sh_shouts_semple?currentPage=all

What I like about this is a) how things slowly go awry and b) how e-mail has created a world in which most of us have had experiences somewhat like the ones described in this story.

Keeping your D&D game fantastical

2011-10-15T17:30:00.003-05:00

Since one of my favorite pasttimes is daydreaming about playing D&D, I'm frequently reading about how to run a good game. Here's a neat post from the guy who does the 'Playing D&D with Porn Stars' blog/video/whatever stuff. Yes, his blog has a NSFW warning, but I looked and looked and couldn't find anything at all salacious on it. And I love his attitude.

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/09/fantasticalisms.html

How to tell The Boring Story

2011-09-18T19:54:00.000-05:00

My youngest was asking me for a story as we wandered through Austin yesterday, spending eight long hours scouring the city for wedding clothes. I shouldn't complain too much: I had my first Orange Julius in years. And the pretzel was nice. But it was also my first mall visit in a long time, and I try to avoid those.

So she wanted a story, and I set about telling her The Boring Story.

My Boring Story was about a girl who lived in a Boring house where nothing much happened, where she was left all alone all day by her parents, except that she had a nanny who was a very tall fellow with long limbs. It wasn't long, despite how Boring the town was, before she was swept up in an adventure, her nanny showing up one morning in full chain armor, with a huge club, and carrying her off to visit a wizard.

At six years old, my youngest was able to figure out that the more I said things were boring, the more crazy they were likely to get. But she wasn't old enough to get tired of that joke. She'd keep asking me for more and I'd keep saying "Why? It's such a boring story, I don't know why you'd want to hear more. But it's true that while they were visiting the wizard, he twiddled his fingers and a cloud flew out of a hole near the ceiling and floated down to her, and it was carrying a bowl of pink stuff, and the pink stuff turned out to be ice cream."

And so on. So far the nanny, whose name is Cranston, has run off with the wizard to fight a dragon and some warriors in black armor, while the girl stayed back at the wizard's tower and watched the action in a crystal ball. The Boring story helped my girl cope with trying on clothes and waiting for her mom and sister rather well.

Madame Lumiere

2011-09-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

I rather enjoyed this story on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine/site: The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere. The story succeeds in both being interesting for itself and hinting at a great larger setting and plot. I love the way it shows a Faerie that impinges on the real world ... as well as humans who impinge upon Faerie.

Scrivener first look

2011-09-03T10:05:00.004-05:00

I've heard good things about the Scrivener fiction writing tool. It's one of these tools that tries to encapsulate everything you need for a complex writing project into one tool. I'm suspicious of that approach, but it has interesting features and there is a free beta right now, so I'm trying it.

Here's a link to the Windows beta page, which is what is new now. The Mac version has been out for a while.

I installed it this morning and had a look. It has a lot of nice features, I have to say.
- Built in templates for short stories and novels. It also has screenwriting and nonfiction; I'm just not interested in it for those as I have lots of tools for that stuff and that's my day job anyway.
- You basically write stuff as chunks of text...but every chunk has an attached index card of comments/metadata that won't show up in print, and you can view and manipulate the cards separately.
In general it seems a great tool for any project where you want to have a lot of notes and associate them with your final text.
- You have a treeview of all the stuff in your writing project.
- It supports PDF, RTF, XHTML, DOC, DOCX and LibreOffice/OpenOffice ODT outputs. Note that DOCX and ODT are XML outputs.

It works a lot like an xml toolchain, in that you are producing source files that get compiled into final output. But it hides the implementation and has a good GUI for it.

So the only complaint I could possibly make about it is that it's not open source so I can't (presumably) hack at the guts of it. I think the price when it is out is gonna be $40, too, which seems super reasonable.

The other thing I'd want is an XML output that semantically marks all the notes and metadata in a simple and easy to understand way. An output like that would allow you to post-process it with XML tools, so you could completely customize it. I wonder if they use XML under the covers or if everything is just in a database.

Not sure if I'll get around to trying an actual project in it before the 9/30 end of the beta. That would be the best test. I don't feel a strong NEED for this thing though...but I would seriously consider it for a novel. That, to me, is where it would shine: it would really help you manage multiple layers of story structure.

As several tools have offered recently, it has a full-screen editing mode too, for when you want to focus on churning out some prose.

It would be hard to lose: even if you decided later that you didn't like it, it would be easy to get your data back out of it and into some other format.

Interesting things about Arabic

2011-09-03T08:18:00.000-05:00

The language has some really interesting features that I didn't know about till I read this article: http://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

Two of my favorites: letters change shape depending on neighbor letters, and the language has a template structure that works like a root: words that share the same template have some common meaning, but the word sound and shape changes more than if you just had a common root.

2011-09-02T16:32:00.000-05:00

The fellow running the Ars Ludi blog seems to have some good things to say regarding RPGs. Here's an article about using Backdrop Plots in your role-playing game. And here's a series about a sandbox campaign, where, interestingly, the players were required to do all the scheduling:

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

What I like about that idea is that the fellow describes how to set up a gaming campaign that is just full of stuff to do, but leave what to do and when to do it entirely up to the players...so that instead of a group of people gathering regulalry to play whatever the GM has planned, the players must garner interest in exploring, say, "the ruined abbey on the west hills" and get enough people to show up for that.

2011-08-31T04:30:00.000-05:00

"Souvenir" by Genevieve Valentine is another great story posted on the Strange Horizons website, and I wanted to share it. This one is about psychics working for the police force...psychics who are able to read places for the residues of experiences there.

I suppose the trope of 'psychic who is tortured by the emotions of others' trope isn't all that new, but darn if it isn't well done here.

Reasonable Armor

2011-08-27T07:37:00.001-05:00

Women fighters in reasonable armor. A Tumblr.

How to win at Drop7

2011-08-11T20:21:00.002-05:00

Drop7 (web, iTunes) is my favorite iPhone game. It's got a Tetrissy-feel to it that I like. This page has some tips for getting higher scores that made sense to me.

At the moment, however, it is not on my phone, because I've deleted it for the second time after my children started to forget my name.

So I'm starting to think that maybe the best way to win is not to play.

The bomb ain't the bomb?

2011-08-09T20:17:00.001-05:00

In this article, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/?page=full the Boston Globe explores a historian's theory that the atomic bomb was NOT the decisive reason for Japan's surrender in WWII.

The article suggests that the historian's contention that the real cause was the Soviet declaration of war against Japan days later is more than the evidence supports....but more striking is the claim that many historians agree that the bomb can't be called the main reason either. Further, that the atomic bomb was not a big striking difference in war, but just an incremental change to a country that had already seen many cities firebombed.

The web is a customer service medium

2011-08-07T20:36:00.001-05:00

Man, it's been a long time since I've read any Paul Ford. But this is good stuff....trying to identify the thing that the web is best at, and along the way explain why some sites succeed and others fail: http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html

America's wealthiest people vs. the economy

2011-08-06T11:35:00.002-05:00

As analyzed by an investment banking guy. Short and to the point: the folks in finance have every incentive to mess up the wider economy for their own profit, and everyone else suffers. And it's no accident: the system has been made that way through legal action.

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manager.html

Heat death of the highschoolers

2011-08-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

Every year, kids in the south who are training for football die...from the combination of heat and exertion. And yet it happens again every year.

http://deadspin.com/5827289/the-preventable-annual-tradition-of-high-school-football-deaths

Metropolis II

2011-08-02T20:34:00.002-05:00

A ginormous kinetic sculpture of die-cast metal cars moving roller-coaster style coupled with toy trains and buildings. Gorgeous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llacDdn5yIE

How Google Dominates Us

2011-08-02T08:24:00.001-05:00

This is a must-read, a review of how Google came to and continues to dominate advertising revenue globally, with some interesting discussion of the "Don't be evil" motto. By James Gleick, author of Chaos.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false

Initiative in D&D

2011-08-02T03:55:00.000-05:00

I'm liking the Ars Ludi blog more and more. It turns out it's by the guy who came up with the weird new RPG 'Microscope' which I've thought about getting.

In this post, about initiative, he talks about the difference between 4th Ed D&D initiative and older versions and how it changes how people play the game. A subtle point that can make a big difference in whether people approach the game cooperatively or not.

The Six Skills of Madame Lumiere

2011-08-01T04:55:00.000-05:00

Wow, I like this story so much: http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/story.php?s=97

Let me see if I can say why. I love the main character's voice. I love the vision of a world infested with fairies, a world where fairies move alongside humans, and humans sometimes visit fairyland. I love the twined obligations, and I love the hints of the larger world beyond this story.

My painting sploded

2011-07-29T17:32:00.003-05:00

I like this piece by Gregory Euclide, which uses two things I like -- miniature scenery and sort of negative-space-pieced-together-flimsy-surfaces...I don't have a word for the second thing.

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/new-work-from-gregory-euclide/

In other news, I'll be reposting things from This Is Colossal until I get tired of it.

Dice people

2011-07-29T17:14:00.006-05:00

I'm getting a kick out of browsing the archives of the blog This is Colossal. Here's some neat human figure art I found, people made of dice: http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/kim-hyuns-dice-figures/

New Bad Machinery: Lonely

2011-07-28T18:07:00.000-05:00

Bad Machinery has a new story going on: The Case of the Lonely One.

I really like Bad Machinery. I like it so much that it's painful to wait for the next episode. I like to wait a few weeks instead and then catch up.

There's something about the way the characters quip at each other; the way their art shows their character. And the counterpoint of the adult teachers vs. the schoolkids is always fun.

I was rereading Giant Days, another spinoff of Scary Go Round, too, and remembering how much I liked it. With that one, I enjoy the college setting and the idea of new friends banding together against bad guys.

I guess I should try to join a forum or something. I feel like these are tremendous comics that you don't hear enough about.

Boardgames as free PDFs, from Cheapass Games

2011-07-23T22:42:00.000-05:00

Cheapass Games, who I admire for Kill Doctor Lucky, have put several of their older games online as free PDFs. Have a look.

http://cheapass.com/freegames