Month: October 2010

Monday various

  • Jonathan Coulton remembers Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last Thursday at 85:

    I can remember stumbling across his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” in my high school library, reading it and not really understanding it, but finding it mind blowing nonetheless. To me, that particular brand of hazy understanding feels like the correct way to think about a lot of things – fractals, electron clouds, cats in boxes waiting to be poisoned – the natural world is really too complicated and beautiful for any of us to fully understand, and that’s OK. That’s in fact what makes it so beautiful.

  • I don’t even watch Mythbusters and I still find the idea that Barrack Obama will appear on an episode pretty cool. [via]
  • The Sunburst Awards need your help:

    We’re looking for short (30 second to 2 minutes) videos that say what you think about Canadian speculative fiction. These should be interview-style videos in the vein of Speaker’s Corner and can be recorded as simply as with a web camera. Prior interviews or footage can be submitted provided that you have permission to do so. We will host these individually on a YouTube channel (sunburstaward), but will also edit them in order to create a series of short videos to promote awareness of the fundraising campaign. A longer video will be shown at the opening remarks to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.

  • Seven Authors Who Wrote While Nude thankfully includes no photographs. [via]
  • And finally, I really liked this Paolo Bacigalupi interview, not least of all for the pronunciation guide to his last name (“BATCH-i-ga-LOOP-ee”) and the idea that it translates to “kiss of the wolf.” But he also some interesting writing advice:

    But mostly I sat down and said, I’m not going to write a boring story. And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. Don’t dick around too much in the weeds of, oh, gee, this character’s deep interiority or anything like that. Get it done and make this character do some stuff and make stuff explode. That seems to work pretty well. [via]

Such was Sunday

Another quiet day, spent mostly like any other Sunday: working on the New York Times crossword, and later working on a short story. I didn’t manage to finish the puzzle — and I sort of disliked the theme once I learned what it was — but I did somehow manage to get another 500 more words down on the page. The story is still a little directionless, but I’m hoping I can pull it together before the end of the month, in time for a particular submission deadline.

Back to work tomorrow. Where did the weekend go?

True Gritterday

A quiet Saturday. I bought some books, I did some writing, I went for a walk. And this evening I watched True Grit, which, while maybe a little dated at times, has John Wayne at his best and most John Wayney. I particularly liked this exchange:

“When’s the last time you saw Ned Pepper?”
“I don’t remember any Ned Pepper.”
“Short feisty fella, nervous and quick, got a messed-up lower lip.”
“That don’t bring nobody to mind. A funny lip?”
“Wasn’t always like that, I shot him in it.”
“In the lower lip? What was you aiming at?”
“His upper lip.”

I’m interested to see what the Coen Brothers do in their upcoming version.