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Some kind of Sunday

A pretty average Sunday. An enjoyable episode of Fringe, a disappointing crossword puzzle, and a fun bit of writing:

“Step away from the teleporter,” says Dupree — or maybe it’s his clone. Has that even happened yet? I glance at my watch, but of course it’s stopped — not just stopped; a large crack splits the face of it, the numbers beneath not just frozen but obscured by broken glass and chipped paint — and there’s no reason to think it would even be accurate if the hands were still moving. I can’t tell you the amount of trouble I’ve caused for myself lately by putting my trust in clocks. I look back at Dupree for some kind of telltale sign — his clone has…had…will have a thicker beard, doesn’t he? Or maybe a prosthetic leg? — but between the thick haze that settles in my brain every time we go through this dumb routine, and way he’s shouting and waving that gun at me, it’s hard to concentrate on much of anything but the most immediate concerns.

It’s only an hour later, when I’m tied to the chair in his cabin, that I realize, hell, what does it matter if he’s a clone or not? Dupree’s always hated my guts whichever version of him I’ve run into. I should just be glad this time he managed not to shoot me.

I should maybe back up. You find yourself saying that a lot when you’re a time traveler, especially when it’s of the accidental variety and you’re slingshotted back and forth without any real sense of control. You find yourself saying things like, “I should maybe back up,” and “Haven’t we had this conversation before?” and “Jesus, Dupree, for god’s sake this time around don’t shoot me in the goddamn head.” And yet you still find yourself repeating things, explaining yourself, and instructing Dupree’s clone on how best to pull shrapnel from your brain.

This is clearly an earlier Dupree. I should have known by the way he smells. Before I got here, he was living alone, in this badly heated shack in the woods, his own private Siberia, and he almost never bathed. It’s tempting to call him a mad scientist and just be done with it, but that implies some kind of basic understanding of the science he was toying with. Mad tinkerer is probably more accurate. He barely understood the principles he was building upon, much less the practical applications of his inventions. Take the “teleporter,” for instance. Before I got here, it just sat in a heap of other junk out back. It wasn’t until I stepped inside it — which, from the odors still wafting from the Dupree sitting across from me, I’d say is still months away — that he learned it was really a time machine.

A piece of crap time machine, if you ask me, but a time machine nonetheless.

I’m doing a little better cold-wise, but I still haven’t quite got it beat yet.

Somehow this was a Saturday

Still fighting the cold, which is at its worst when I try to do something silly like sleep. I had to get up early this morning, to drive my father over to the local car mechanic, and there was a point, maybe around three or four in the morning, when I thought, hell, sleep isn’t working, maybe I should just stay up. I’m glad I didn’t, because as is I needed a nap in the late afternoon.

We went out this for dinner to celebrate my mother’s birthday, and then I came home and watched Drive, which was quite good.

I also watched this past Sunday’s Walking Dead episode, which I think I’ve been building up the courage to watch. The episode right before it, the big event right before the season’s most recent brief hiatus, was…well, pretty damn intense. It’s a good show, despite some problems, but it’s not always the most fun zombie apocalypse going.

Weekend’s end

I spent all of yesterday in Maryland to celebrate my sister’s birthday. Like last year, we met up for lunch in Towson, and then she and my mother went off to shop, while my father, brother-in-law, and I drove over to the Maryland Historical Society, which turned out to actually be a quite interesting museum. Then we met up for dinner at a tapas place in Baltimore, where I had some of the tastiest duck I’ve ever eaten.

This morning we drove home, and along the way I finished reading He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond. There are some good things to say about the book…although maybe more about the person who bought it for me as a gift. Ultimately, the bleak and grimy poetry of some of the noirish writing aside, the book was a disappointment.

I’d probably say the same for Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, although that, obviously, was a disappointment of a different kind. Now that I’m all caught up on the show — minus, of course, the new series being filmed now — I have to say, my favorite remain the earlier episodes. Somewhere around series 5, the show took a turn. Maybe it was the loss of Holly, maybe it was the new filming process. It rallied a little in the series just before BtE — shooting again before a live-studio audience — but my common complaint watching later episodes was: more money, less funny.

This is what I’m doing instead of watching the Super Bowl, mind you.

Tuesday various

  • Netflix is pretty sure it has no future in DVDs. You know, I like streaming and on-demand, but the selection is still not that great, relatively speaking. If Netflix could ensure the same level of selection and quality with streaming as with the physical DVDs…well, I’d still occasionally be annoyed they were most often DVDs without special features of any kind, but I’d be more willing to switch over to streaming-only. (If the high cost of having both doesn’t force the issue for me at some near-future point.) But Netflix can’t promise that. Some of it is out of their hands — studios are covetous of their movies and shows, and some (like HBO) see Netflix, maybe rightly, as a direct competitor. So I really do hope Netflix doesn’t continue their push towards streaming-and-only-streaming, that they realize it wasn’t just the Qwiskter name that upset customers. I want a wide and varied selection of movies and shows. I don’t want more of “You can’t watch that, but have you ever tried this…?”)
  • Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost [via]
  • Want to smell like a superhero? [via]
  • “Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.”
  • And finally, Basil Fawlty Impersonator Chat:

    As Mark Evanier notes, “There are literally more professional impersonators of Basil Fawlty around than there were episodes of Fawlty Towers.”

Monday various

  • Fringe wasn’t originally meant to have alternate universes. I am not even a little surprised by this. It’s only when the show settled on the alternate universe storyline, when it started having an ongoing plot that wasn’t based in creatures-of-the-week, that it went from being one of the worst science fiction shows on the air to being one of the best. (I highly recommend io9’s primer to anyone looking to get into the show for the first time. There’s a lot early on you can, and will probably want to, miss.)
  • In case you missed it, the best New York Times correction ever. [via]
  • Genevieve Valentine on suspension of disbelief (particularly in the movie In Time:

    If your movie is super high concept, and I decide to see it, I have probably, to some degree, already accepted the concept, you know? “Everyone in the future has a puppy surgically grafted to their chests.” Okay, fine, I promise not to spend a lot of the movie going, “Surgically grafting a puppy to your chest is a weird thing for a person to do.” I will, however, question every piece of outerwear that does not have a dog-head flap in it, or any moment in your movie where a character is like, “Well, now my dog has grown too big for my chest cavity and medical science didn’t allow for that in the many generations we have been living with these grafted puppies, so now it’s too late for me, you go on!” Because that is worldbuilding, and that you need to do. And the higher the concept is, the more work you need to do. (Moon, for example, requires little. Dark City requires more.

  • See also: Why fiction’s freest genres need its most rigid rules:

    In these genres, the fundamental realities of a world can be anything imaginable: There can be wizards, or dragons, or intergalactic spaceships, or time travel, or dragon-wizards in time-traveling intergalactic spaceships. Nothing can be assumed. Which makes it mighty easy for authors to cheat by changing the rules whenever it’s convenient to the plot: “Oh, did I not mention that dragon-wizard time-travel spaceships are sentient and can crossbreed to produce baby spaceships? Well, they can.”

  • And finally, Writers are Like Porn Stars. There, that ought to bring in some more comment spam. (SFW — it’s another io9 link — though the image is maybe a little risque for the workplace.)