Month: February 2010

Thursday various

  • “I will come and find them and kill them so dead I’ll murder their ancestors!” Yeah, that sounds like Harlan Ellison.

    I don’t think he’s being completely unreasonable, despite the typical fervor of his invective. The publisher might have been tempted to rewrite his blurb, and I don’t think it should have done so without his permission. (We edit author endorsements at work all the time, usually for length, but also for other reasons, like if it repeats words or phrases used in other blurbs or in the book’s description. But we always ask the endorser’s permission first.) But I do note with amusement, as others do at the link above, that Ellison’s alter-only-under-pain-of-death endorsement contains a spelling error.

  • Some rookie mistakes: advice for first-time novelists. [via]

  • At the beginning of the year, I made the odd — and, given that I work in publishing, probably self-defeating — pledge not to buy any new books in 2010. I did this for one reason: to compel me to get through the mountain of as yet unread books that I already own. (“Mountain” here being a relative term.) Yet it seems like every day, there’s a new book — or, in this case, set of books — that I’d like to own. I may just have to break down and declare this pledge, this moratorium on buying new books, a failure. [via]

  • Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yeah, but only the boring stuff before 1877. [via]
  • And finally, How to Report the News. [via]

Oh, THAT snowpocalypse!

It snowed a whole lot here today, and is in fact still snowing, with no sign of letting up any time soon. The photo up above is from about nine o’clock this morning. I wouldn’t want to guess at how much snow has fallen throughout the day since then, but we’ve had to shovel and snowblow the driveway and path several times just to keep it clear.

Our office closed at noon today, but I’d already decided by around seven not to go in at all. The entire Long Island contingent (all three of us) stayed home, though my father braved the railroads and snow to get to his job. He said it actually wasn’t that bad, though even he came home early, since I think it was the uncertainty of rush hour that everyone was most afraid of. There’s no telling right now what will happen tomorrow, but I suspect I’ll be pulling on my boots and going in to the office. An unexpected snow day is a lot of fun, but there’s only so many of them to go around.

Besides shoveling and playing in the snow with the dog, I didn’t do a whole lot. I wrote a little bit, finished editing what I think is the last story for Kaleidotrope‘s April issue, and watched last night’s episode of Lost. I also watched Moon, which arrived this afternoon from Netflix. I really enjoyed it. It’s a small, quiet piece of science fiction, but it’s atmospheric and Sam Rockwell’s really quite good in it. It was actually kind of nice to have the option of watching a movie in the middle of the day.

Right now, I may watch a little something else or read a little, but then I think it’s time for bed. Despite my snow day, I was actually up a little earlier than usual, deliberating about whether or not I should go into work. Though I was home all day, I’m still kind of sleepy.

Wednesday various

  • Number 9, number 9… I’m in there somewhere.
  • Dear god, it’s a pig on wheels!
  • Noel Murray:

    It doesn’t take much tweaking to turn a great idea for a TV series into something ridiculous. Want to make a show about a diverse cross-section of humanity forging a new society? Or about race relations in Manhattan? Or the dangers of humanizing automatons? Slant it the wrong way, and you may end up with Gilligan’s Island, Diff’rent Strokes, or Small Wonder.

    His whole review of the latter’s 1st season DVD set is interesting — though it will come as no surprise to anyone who saw the show growing up (or who has been forced to cap it regularly on HCC) that it’s pretty terrible.

  • Is it just me or does the Authors Guild’s argument here seem to be: “we could lose, so we won’t fight, because even if we won, we’d have to keep fighting, so we’ll just give up”? Frankly, I think I may be with Ursula K. Le Guin on this one.
  • And finally, you wouldn’t think an episode of the ’90s Hollywood Squares would be particularly funny, but I think this one’s definitely worth it, just for Gilbert Gottfried [via]:

Snow’s a’comin’

They’re predicting a lot of snow for tomorrow — all that we didn’t get, I guess, over the past weekend and then some — but to hear people talk, you’d think they were predicting the end of the world. My sister, who works in Washington, DC, where they did get a lot of snow already, has been snowed in at home since the weekend and will be lucky if she goes back to work at all this week. We were reminded about our company’s emergency phone number this afternoon, just in case, but snow accumulation tends to be much less of a problem in Manhattan, if only because of all the tall buildings that keep it from getting to the ground (and all the traffic that keeps the ground from being there for the snow that does make it down). The snow on Long Island is sometimes another story altogether, and the railroad seemed almost giddy this evening with the prospect of canceling trains on Wednesday. If it’s really and truly bad tomorrow, just getting to the station or getting a train into Manhattan, I may take the day off regardless.

It’s already started to snow a little outside, but it’s not all that impressive so far.

Beyond the weather, there’s not much to report. I spent most of the day working on test questions for an art therapy research book we’re developing, occasionally posting grammatical questions to Twitter out of idle curiosity and boredom. (“Suppose a sentence like ‘Lions, tigers, bears, etc. are living in these woods,'” I wrote, for instance. “Should there be a comma after the etc.? If so, why? Why not?” I think the jury’s still out on that one.) That’s just the kind of Tuesday it was.

Tuesday various

  • The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
  • All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.

    There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:

    There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.

  • Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
  • I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
  • And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:

    Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)