Month: October 2010

Tuesday various

  • Paul, the World Cup predicting octopus, has gone to the great octopus’ garden in the sky.
  • Sony will stop manufacturing the Walkman. In other news, Sony was still manufacturing the Walkman. [via]
  • Further proof that science fiction is more about the time it was created than about the future: 5 Things ‘Back to the Future’ Tells Us About the Past. [via]
  • Meanwhile, Realms of Fantasy closes shop. Again, and this time it looks like for good. I’m really disappointed by this news, not least of all because I subscribed in their recent save-the-magazine effort. It raises questions about the viability of print magazines in general, which, as somebody who puts together a twice-yearly zine, is something I’m quite interested in. Realms was a good genre magazine, and I’ll be sorry to see it go.
  • And finally, kind of weirdly tying all of this together in a way: The Space Squid Cuneiform Clay Tablet.

    Of course, it’s not a real squid…and a squid isn’t the same thing as an octopus anyway…but there’s something fascinating about a zine (Space Squid) “printing one of their issues on the ultimate form of Dead Media: inscribed in cuneiform on a baked clay tablet.” Maybe that’s what Realms needed to do. Maybe that’s what I should do with Kaleidotrope. It’s a funny and clever stunt if nothing else. [via]

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Last week, I read Charles Yu’s lovely How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I think these two passages are maybe my favorite parts:

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

My mother finishes her kneeling, and places her incense into a large ceramic urn filled with the accumulated ashes of a thousand, a million, a hundred million earlier sandalwood incense sticks, the dust of past events collected there and made tangible. She pierces the ash pile, fine, talcum-like, soft gray powder, slides her own incense stick down into it, in a perfect vertical, and appears to consider it for an instant, a thin marker, flimsy and direct, an axis, a conduit for prayer, an object and a process that will turn itself from a material thing into the dust around it, transform into visible and invisible substances, will convert itself into heat and smoke to fill the room. The present incense will become the very stuff that props itself up, and allows other, future incense to stand vertically, for a time, each current incense unable to stand alone, only able to perform its function with the help of all other past incense, like time itself, supporting the present moment, as it itself turns into past, each burning stick transmitting the prayers contained within it, nothing but a transitory vehicle for its contents, and then releasing itself into the air, leaving behind only the burnt odor, the haze and residue of uncollectible memory, and at the same time becoming part of the air itself, the very air that allows the present to burn, to combust, to slowly work itself down into nothingness.

One fish, two fish, red fish, stamfish

Today was kind of weird, both a regular Monday and everything that comes with that, and almost a Friday, given that I’m off from work tomorrow. Unfortunately, it’s for a doctor’s appointment. I was originally going to be off this coming Friday, the start of a three-day weekend, but I rescheduled when I needed to make this appointment. That seemed easier than taking an additional half day this week, which also would have left me with one half-day less to use later on, in the likely event that I need to make any additional appointments.

So it’s kind of like Friday, although also not anything like it at all.

The word for the day on my Forgotten English desk calendar is “stamfish,” meaning “to talk in a way not generally understood.” I’ll leave it to you to decide how much I live up to the ideal in Matsell’s 1859 Rogue’s Lexicon.