The Infinite Matrix has a rather neat little seasonal short story by John Varley: Beyond Bedford Falls.
In a just universe, there would indeed be a "John Varley Library and Institute for Science Fiction and Screenwriting Studies."
<geek level="high">
Merry Christmas!
better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus <north pole >town
[...]
</geek>
More seriously, Merry Xmas to all my readers, I hope the day brings you everything you're hoping for and more.
Yes, you really are a a beautiful and unique snowflake.
I'm always up for a good analogy for bits of the internet. Steven Johnson suggests that weblogs are like short blocks in a large city.
The power of short blocks is ultimately that they create a more even density in the city fabric: because short blocks offer more potential routes from x to y, they diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic through the city. In the long blocks model, pedestrians are funneled onto a few primary pathways, which quickly become over-crowded. With short blocks, they spread out through the entire street system. So you get some people on every street, unlike the long blocks model, which puts all the people on some streets, and no people on other streets. In the long blocks model, you get Times Square interspersed with desolate stretches; in the short blocks model you get the West Village: a bar or restaurant on every corner, a few interesting boutiques or bookstores in between, an interesting mix on the sidewalk, but never so much that you feel crowded out.
If you translate all this over to the Web, it seems to me that the blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood: the population density is not nearly as oppressive as what you find on the major sites (much less old media networks.) But it's not as atomized as the world of IM. Short blocks is 50 people on the sidewalk at any given time, instead of 5 or 500. The blogosphere is 50 people on the site at any given time, instead of 5 or 5 million. (Which reminds me of Dave Weinberger's line: "On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people.") That's a very human scale, I think — it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time.
I see where he's coming from, but I think he's making too much of the idea of "population density." Sharing a city street with 500 people will feel much more cramped than sharing one with 50, but on a web site I don't really know how many other people there are "around me."
I think what's happening here is that it's being assumed (again) that "weblogs"="sites where a group of people gather to interact" (i.e. leave comments.) I've explained before why I think this is a misguided notion of what a weblog is about.
Today seems to be the day for literary parodies of The Lord of the Rings. First of all, Anita pointed out Jane Austen's Lord of the Rings:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Dark Lord in possession of a desire to rule the world must be in want of a ring."My dear Frodo," said Gandalf to him one day, "are you aware that the One Ring has been found at last?"
Frodo replied that he was not.
"But it has," returned Gandalf, "for I've just been to Minas Tirith to read the old records, and they told me all its history."
Frodo made no answer.
"Do you not want to know who possesses it?" Gandalf cried impatiently.
"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."
This was invitation enough.
But that was just the start. Later in the day, various sites hit paydirt, namely a thread on the Straight Dope message board where various posters piled in with versions by:
H P Lovecraft:
If I were to tell you the true story behind the unmaking of that ring…that ring!…you would think me mad. Horrors such as are scribed in ancient tomes of eldritch evil cannot compare to the terror…the cruel, cold, braincrushing terror!…that we felt in the lair of that foul spirit which raimed itself in arachnid form, that vile scavenger, that horrid arcane leech lingering at the border's of Sauron's Black Land…Dr. Suess:
"Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!"
"I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.
I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.
I cannot take it under Moria,
that's one thing I can't do for ya.
I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border."Neal Stephenson:
Frodo, the Deliverator, belongs to an elite order, a Fellowship of nine members only. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his only mission that matters. His armor is silver like the light of the full moon, jangling only slightly with its decorative gems. An arrow will bounce off its dwarvenmesh weave like a hammer off an anvil, but excess perspiration wafts through it like the winds over the charred plains of Gorgoroth. All the arrows of all the hunters in the world couldn't cut it against this one.When they gave him the job, they gave him a sword. The Deliverator never looks for trouble, but some Orc might come after him anyway—might want his armor, or his cargo. The sword is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of sword a Hobbit would carry; it cuts quickly into load-bearing beams without visible effort, and when you get done using it around evil, you have to sheathe it, because it glows in the dark.
Frank Herbert:
"I am no longer Gandalf the Grey," the wizard intoned, his white stillrobes glistening in the day's heat. "Through the Trial of the Balrog I came close to death, but now the sleeper has awakened! I shall now be called … Gandalf-Muad'Dib, the Mithrandir, the Lisan Al'Maia!"
And that's just on the first page of seven (so far). Subsequent pages include such delights as a musical version based on Bohemian Rhapsody, and a truly terrifying version in "lawyerese":
COMES NOW, plaintiff, Sauron, to file this original Complaint, and would show this honorable court the following:1. Plaintiff and party of the first part, Sauron ("Sauron") is a(n) (un)natural person, and resident and domiciliary of Mordor.
2. Defendant and party of the second part, Frodo Baggins ("Frodo") is a natural person and resident of Hobbiton. Co-Defendant and party of the third part Samwise Gamgee ("Sam") is likewise same.
3. All parties being properly diverse, jurisdiction is proper pursuant to 28 M.E.C. 1332. Damages far exceed the minimum jurisdiction of the court.
4. Defendant has converted and trespassed against the chattel and personalty of the plaintiff, namely, the One Ring ("Ring") and is liable to plaintiff for same.
5. Plaintiff would further show on or about the final day of the Third Age, defendants did intentionally cause the destruction of Ring while plaintiff was engaged in defending his business from hostile takeover. In the alternative, plaintiff pleads that the actions of the defendants toward ring amount to recklessness, gross negligence, and negligence.
6. As a direct result of destruction of Ring, plaintiff has suffered actual damages in the form of irreparable harm to his business and personal reputation, as well as direct and indirect loss of income. Plaintiff has further suffered from mental anguish, humiliation, and loss of consortium.
7. Insofar as actions of defendants were intentional, plaintiff further requests punitive damages in the amount of treble his actual damages.
WHEREFORE, PLAINTIFF, SAURON, PRAYS FOR: all reasonable damages above named; FURTHER, plaintiff prays for all additional relief in law or equity deemed necessary and proper by this honorable court.
Respectfully submitted,
Mouth of Sauron
Attorney for Plaintiff
Middle Earth Bar No. 734925639
Unfortunately I can't see an easy way to figure out permalinks to my favourites, hence the lengthy quotations above. I urge you to go and read the entire thread: it's simply amazing, and a testament to the creativity of literature geeks everywhere.
Fametracker pays tribute to the one, the only, Brian Thompson:
There are times when a casting director is trying to fill a role that calls for more than just another walking column of muscle or barely human tower of intimidation. There are times when nothing but an indestructible killing machine will do. Those are the times when that casting director will call Brian Thompson.
You may not know the name, but I can almost guarantee that you've seen him in action. My favourite Thompson moment involved the question, "What's that do?" (Award yourself 500 geek points if you can name the programme and the situation, and describe what happened next, without googling for the answers.)
This may be the cutest Flash-based Xmas card I've seen this year.
[Via allura ellington]
Dutchbint brings us Crappy Christmas Cards. Some of these I might think about sending to the right person – except the one at bottom right, anyway. (NB/- not entirely safe for work.)
Meanwhile, over at defective yeti, we have one of those unfortunate postal errors which must happen every Xmas.
Catching up this afternoon with recent submissions at deviantART, I found Portrait of Sveta 2 especially striking.
Call me easily pleased, but I really liked the way the walls of the tunnel lined up so beautifully with the model, both framing her head and shoulders and providing a clear but not-quite-symmetrical vertical axis for the image as a whole.
Michele got a very nasty shock when her daughter brought a note home from school the other day.
All things considered, the teacher responsible should be very glad that Michele noticed the name of the letter's signatory. If she'd got as far as actually speaking to someone in authority at the school the phone would probably have melted…
And tonight's excuse for not posting is … The Two Towers.
I enjoyed it a great deal, every bit as much as the first instalment. Viggo Mortensen's quietly assured performance as Aragorn was the highlight of the film for me, slightly ahead of Miranda Otto's Eowyn. Which is not to say that the other performances were anything other than superb: all the regulars from the last film lived up to their earlier work, and newcomers like Bernard Hill, Karl Urban, David Wenham and Brad Dourif were well up to snuff.
Which brings me to Smeagol, a.k.a. Gollum. The CGI work on Andy Serkis' character was far and away the SFX highlight of the film, surpassing even the Orcish army storming Helm's Deep and the Ents at Isengard, but it wouldn't have worked as well without a good performance "underneath." Smeagol felt completely real, as much a part of the cast as anyone. The scenes where Smeagol argued with himself about whether to steal his Precious back made it clear that if you're willing to take the time and trouble you really can make a credible CGI central character – George Lucas take note. It does help that this particular CGI character had a meaty role and some good lines, rather than being employed as comic relief.
Talking of comic relief, I can understand that not everyone would appreciate the use of Gimli in this film. I thought it worked nicely to a) build camaraderie between Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli and b) provide some nice contrasting moments during the fight scenes. ("Don't tell the Elf!" indeed.) Gimli didn't come off as an idiot or a clown, just as a warrior of a somewhat different temperament to the more heroic Aragorn and the eerily effective Legolas.
The last hour of the film, most of which took place in and around Helm's Deep, was quite astounding. The only slightly false note came when Gandalf led a cavalry charge down a rather too steep incline, but that was a tiny blemish on an otherwise exemplary battle scene.
Peter Jackson probably won't get a Best Director or Best Picture Oscar for his work on any of the three films, if only because the three films don't stand alone as well as a traditional trilogy written for the screen and he'll be seen as having got his rewards at the box office. It's a real shame, because he's demonstrated a grasp of epic storytelling that sets him apart from just about every director working today.
The only problem is that I'm going to have to wait a year to see The Return of the King. Does anybody have the keys to a time machine?
At the last minute, the BBC have come through and bought rights to show the uncut, extended version of Once More With Feeling in the repeat slot in the wee small hours of Saturday morning (i.e. in about twenty-five minutes from now.)
I'm just glad that I did a little late-night Usenet reading after my last weblog post, or I wouldn't have known in time to set my VCR accordingly.
In 1953 an amateur astronomer by the name of Leon Stuart was observing the Moon when he saw a bright flash. Now researchers have examined photographs taken by a satellite in lunar orbit in and found a fresh crater in exactly the right spot on the lunar surface.
The resulting explosion would have released 35 times the energy of the Hiroshima atom bomb. On the Moon, that just adds one more crater to the moonscape. If it had hit the Earth, the consequences don't bear thinking about.
Danny O'Brien is applying for permanent residency in the United States. He's posted a picture showing the astonishing quantity of paperwork he's had to complete in support of his application.
Having slogged his way through that little lot, he's come up with a little treat for himself to compensate:
Anyway, I'm buying myself a Christmas present. I'm joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There's only one form to fill in – and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that's the general idea.
I didn't mean to take a day off from this site yesterday, it just worked out that way. First of all I had a really, really bad day at work, starting with my twisting my ankle rushing to catch my bus to work, and getting worse by the hour afterwards – if this were a different sort of weblog I'd launch into an extremely long rant, but I'll spare you. The upshot of all this was that when I got home I wasn't in a mood to do anything very constructive.
Consequently, my evening was eaten up by not one but two distractions. First of all, after work I stopped off at Waterstone's and noticed they had a "2 for £10" deal on their paperback Pratchetts. I read the first dozen or so Discworld novels as they came out, but by Pyramids and Small Gods I felt Pratchett was getting stale and stopped buying them. Since then he's written another dozen Discworld novels, and I've heard enough good things about the recent ones that I'd been thinking about picking one up again, so this seemed an ideal opportunity. I started Men at Arms last night, and so far the signs are promising: two full-on laughing fits which led to me forgetting to breathe, and numerous hearty chuckles, and I'm only some thirty pages in. After Men at Arms, it's Carpe Jugulum. I'm looking forward to meeting up with Granny Weatherwax again, and I definitely want to read Pratchett's take on vampires.
While I was in catch-up mode at the bookshop I also picked up Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I held off when it was published, since a) I wasn't in the mood to tackle another long novel right then, as I'd just finished Peter F Hamilton's mammoth Night's Dawn trilogy, and b) I'd bounced off The Diamond Age at the first attempt and wasn't inclined to wade through an even longer Stephenson novel only to find that he still couldn't pull of a decent ending. Since then I've read a couple of Stephenson's earlier novels, The Big U and Zodiac, and decided to give him another chance. With a nice long break from work coming up over Xmas, this seemed like the right book at the right time.
Finally, once I got home I spent a good part of my evening playing with the Windows version of slrn, a feature-packed online newsreader. I've used Forté's excellent Agent offline newsreader for some time now, but a recent thread on rec.arts.sf.written convinced me that I really need a newsreader with a scorefile. A major rewrite of Agent is coming Real Soon Now which may or may not include a scorefile, but slrn is here right now and is tried and tested. Furthermore, slrn is available for Mac OS X and Linux, so whatever my decision as regards my next PC I'd be able to continue using slrn to read Usenet. This is a not insignificant factor in my choice of operating systems: one factor in my failing to switch to Linux when I first looked it over about three or four years ago was that there weren't any decent offline GUI newsreaders at the time. Now that I'm on an unmetered dial-up I can consider online newsreaders, so slrn is a definite contender.
It's still early days – reading news online using an unfamiliar program is a very different experience for me after so many years of using Agent – but so far the signs are good.
I promise to try and get caught up with my comments (and email) over the weekend.
John Sutherland analyses the reasons for the decline in the sales of Messrs Clancy, Grisham, Crichton, Turow and King.
I'm not at all sure that Sutherland is right to put so much emphasis on the ages of the authors. Fiftysomething is hardly old for a writer, especially one who had another career and may not have started writing until they were in their thirties. It seems to me that it's much more probable that there's no single reason for the poor sales for these authors' latest efforts. King only seems to put out something really good every three or four novels nowadays, Clancy appears to be milking his favoured subgenre dry, and Crichton's latest focuses on a menace which is old hat to science fiction fans but not really on the radar for the general reader. (Which means that a decade from now if some lab in Southern California is turned to gray goo he'll probably be hailed as a visionary!)
What really bothered me was Sutherland's thoroughly specious closing argument:
At the end of the day, it's down to age. As elsewhere, the race is increasingly to the young and swift, not the old and canny. This year's Booker was won by a young contender, Yann Martel, half the age (39) of the oldest shortlisted candidate. The same parameter shift is happening (belatedly) in bestselling books as happened, decades ago, in sport. Can you envisage a 33-year-old winning Wimbledon (as Jaroslav Drobny did), a 44-year-old playing cricket for England (as Wally Hammond did), a 45-year-old winning the world heavyweight title (as George Foreman did), or a 50-year-old playing top-class football (as Stanley Matthews did)?
Let's take those one at a time. The Booker Prize shortlist featured authors aged 36, 39, 42, 50, 67 & 74. An average of just short of 52: not so much a ringing endorsement of the vim and vigour of the rising generation, more a reflection of the length of a professional writing career. What would you bet me that the next Booker winner will be at least 50? (You might also note that the Booker isn't really about bestsellers, but that's another argument.)
Sports are a tougher case for oldies, but even so isn't it slightly rash to assume that Pete Sampras (31) or Andre Agassi (32) have no chance of winning the big one on the Centre Court ever again? It may not be likely, but is it really inconceivable? I'll concede that Sutherland has more of a point with respect to football, boxing and cricket, but I don't know that his argument translates to fields of activity where being in peak physical condition is at less of a premium.
Coming back to the writers, I'll bet that if we look back three years from now at least three of the bestseller authors named above will have recovered from the slump in their sales.
Take a look at the "Language" entry on the IMDB's page for The Two Towers. Cute.
The Guardian is reporting that the Law Commission has responded to a request from the Lord Chancellor to look into how English defamation law affects the internet by suggesting that it may be time to grant English Internet Service Providers the sort of immunity from libel claims enjoyed by their US counterparts.
This is very welcome. The current system makes it far too risky for ISPs to keep allegedly defamatory articles online. It seems to me that it's the individual or organisation which writes the article who should be responsible for taking down the article or facing the legal consequences, not the ISP which is simply providing a means by which that writing is distributed. (I realise that the crux of the argument is that under current law "publishing" is deemed to be what everyone in the chain between writer and reader is doing. However, I'm writing this in normal English, not legalese. Where I use terms like "publishing" in this article, I'm using them in the everyday, non-technical sense.)
That's not to say that I think defamation law in England works well once the writer ends up in court. When it comes to newsgroups, in particular, it's difficult to see the justification for demanding that an ISP remove an allegedly defamatory posting from their news servers given that the person who finds a particular posting objectionable has the ability to post a reply to the very same newsgroup arguing their side of the matter. Usenet simply isn't like a newspaper, where an editor can bury a retraction in small print at the foot of page 23 five weeks later, so it shouldn't be subject to the same remedies. As for web publishing, there are numerous examples of issues where writers on both sides of an argument publish violently dissenting views on a given topic, and it's the job of the reader to sort it all out.
Defamation is one of those areas where the internet genuinely is different, and where the law needs to adapt to those changes.
Jann posted a rather wonderful list of genuine excerpts from GCSE English exam papers. Some of these are much too good to be accidental:
There are lots more where they came from: go now and read the rest.
Having famously seen off Star Wars a couple of years ago, David Brin takes a swing at Tolkien's epic.
Let's start by remembering that history is written by the victors.How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told?
We know because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel, ridiculous scenarios that are laughably easy to disprove. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a press that, for all its faults, is relatively free. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true, and worse than anything previously imagined.
Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.
But things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)
My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.
So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?
Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?
In truth, the title of Brin's latest essay is needlessly provocative. In fact, he's just gently reminding us that it's both important and more fun to think "what if" about the fictions we encounter, to explore the implications of the stories.
While googling for Brin's Star Wars vs Star Trek essay I came across his comments on Attack of the Clones. At the end Brin notes that he's figured out a simple way to resolve all the plot holes in the Star Wars films to date, one that explains it all very elegantly. I can see where he's coming from, but there's not a cat's chance in hell that George Lucas would use it.