Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 518

There’s a new version of the Color Wheel up, with a slightly er and much prettier PNG image of the wheel. The missing colors haven’t been found yet.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean, which was pretty good. To be more specific, Johnny Depp was amazing, the special effects were cool, and the other characters were average. At some point it became clear that Depp’s pirate was undermining the whole movie - the Young Hero paled beside him, he had more chemistry with the Young Heroine than either her fiance or the Young Hero did - he was the movie.

You Are Sam From "Benny & Joon."

You are very talented at physical comedy. People are in awe of your abilities. However, you have many quirks which can either win people over or completely annoy them. But you’re a sweetheart through and through, and it’s hard not to love you.
Take The Johnny Depp Quiz!

ASC, Enterprise and Beyond, and the LiveJournal set are all aflutter about the ENT problem. I don’t mean the problem that Enterprise is courting cancellation or even that it’s managed to alienate so much of the huge Trek fanbase. I mean the apparent problem that some unspecified number of ENT writers don’t post to ASC. Here’s what I posted to ASC on this thread:

To be more explicit about it, I know the vast majority of J/C writers either never post to ASC, or have posted once or twice and then given up. And ASC is better for it - that quantity of fic would be overwhelming, especially during the awards.

Most of the alternatives to the newsgroup have a lower barrier to entry, which results in either badfic or too much fic - fanfiction.net is a good example of both. In Real Life, publishers and editors are the barriers to entry that guarantee a certain quality to the fic. Online, the barriers are woefully low and getting lower all the time. Newsgroups aren’t hard to use, but you do have to be geeky or persistent enough to figure out how to post - the first barrier.

Also newsgroups are completely public and unowned, so no one is responsible for coddling bad writers or preventing flames. This lack of feedback for mediocre fic is the second, and probably bigger, barrier to entry. It means that people who are cranking it out for the feedback have little incentive to post to ASC. It’s not exactly an editorial process, but nevertheless the result is that the best Trek fic has all been posted to ASC at one time or another.

Those of us who benefit from these barriers to entry are sometimes too willing to try to break them down for new people. But the truth is, not wanting to post to ASC already says something about a Trek writer, whether of ENT or any other series - and I hear it, even when they don’t say it aloud. I’m not crying over fic that never made it to ASC.

The color wheel is missing some colors, as I suspected. I’ll have to figure out the algorithm and fix it, but not today. Today I’ll just list a few cool links: NASA’s Flash Mars page, Destination: Mars; the latest cool designs at CSS Zen Garden, Entomology and Hedges; and a cool new, somewhat free landscape generator for the Mac, terragen. Check out the image gallery, especially Mars.

The 4096 Color Wheel is new and improved for Version 1.2 with a sidebar of clicked color choices and some basic instructions. It still needs a blurb about the 4096 web-smart colors, or at least a link to moreCrayons, home of The Cube.

The new image and a choice of wheel sizes will have to wait for later versions - I’m all geeked out tonight.

There are fandoms that are a threat, and fandoms that aren’t. When someone (namely, Seema) gets interested in X-Men or JAG fandom, I don’t worry. On the other hand, when someone (namely Jerie) gets into SG-1, I know I’ll never see that fan again.

Least threatening of all are the TV dramas and comedies like JAG or Friends. West Wing was the biggest thing there, and it seems to have come and gone. The appeal of real life is clearly dwarfed by the appeal of…dwarves. For me, a show needs the element of the surreal to hold my interest, and that seems to hold across fandom.

Fandoms based on a couple of movies combined with books or comic books (Harry Potter, LotR, X-Men), while huge, don’t scare me. I don’t see myself being tempted by that kind of fixed canon, and so I don’t worry that my favorite writers will be lured away. Maybe they will be anyway, but how long can it last? The difference between a fix every week and a fix every year is too great. Note that there is no second tier of fandoms here - other movie or book-based fandoms are either too to notice or short-lived fads.

What pushes a fandom over the edge into greatness? I think it takes a long-running TV series (or series of series) that’s about science fiction or the fantastic. So the big fandoms are Star Trek, X-Files and Buffy, with Stargate and Smallville the new contenders. They have both allure and staying power.

I’m even afraid I’ll end up in SG-1 fandom.

I’ve been looking for a nice 4096 color picker forever. Yesterday I found one by D10n, somone who is long 404, which was close to what I wanted. Unfortunately it didn’t work in Mozilla or Mac IE, which meant it was useless to me. After a lot of struggling with javascript events (for which mozilla.org and Experts Exchange were quite useful), I managed to get the script working in modern browsers.

I also changed the script to display both the nearest 4096-ed color and the true hex color. I may add added the nearest web-safe color as well. So, without further ado, click on over to the 4096 Color Wheel, Version 1.0 1.1.

Another improvement I intend to make is in the image quality and size. I’m going to make a full-color 512×512 pixel PNG to replace the rather compressed 256×256 JPG I got with the original script. eDev Cafe seems to have all the information I’ll need to do that.

For a note on web-safety of the 4096 colors, see Web Color’s 4096 Color Picker and screenshots.

Word cound: zippo

I know what happens next in my story, but I wasn’t excited enough about it to write today’s scene. Instead, I’ve been playing with Javascript color pickers like this one. It’s an antique, so it won’t work in modern browsers, but the concept seemed cool. As far as I can tell, though, it doesn’t actually show the 4096 colors - it shows either a different set of 4096, or more than the 4096.

Speaking of antique Javascript, the moreCrayons color cube was updated to work with Mozilla a while back, and they’ve linked Eric Meyer’s color blender in their blog.

Word count: 1055

I’ve finally put Holodeck Hero, formerly just a blog entry filk, up at Freeshell.

Seema’s entry on the neverending title rant got me thinking about my titles. For filk, the title usually comes directly out of the song, but for stories I tend toward the blunt, one-word style of title. They may not be very artsy or creative, but they have the advantage of high recognition value. “Lurking,” for example, is an easy title to remember once you’ve read the story. “The Museum” is unlikely to be confused with another fic. My titles may not be “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” but they get the job done.

You can see some typical filk and fic titles in the sidebar (if you’re at the main blog page - click the blog button if you aren’t), and as an extra updating-day bonus, the links now work!

Dark, mysterious, and clawed…

be sorted @ nimbo.net

Well you’re one smart little cookie, aren’t you? You’re wise and clever, and just love to use your wit and learning to your advantage, and sometimes even the disadvantage of others. Well, you nerd, there IS a world outside of that copy of ‘Hogwarts: A History’, ya know.. Oh don’t worry! We all know you’re special. You’re just a naturally good learner, right? *mummble mummble* Not too much is known about your house right now.. Wow! You’re not only intellegent, you’re also an enigma!

Evolution should not be mistaken for a novel, though it exists in the same ecological niche. Stephen Baxter’s latest is at best a series of short stories set at turning points in the evolutionary history of man. I say “at best” because only a few of the chapters cover primates intelligent enough to count as the protagonists of a real story.

That’s not to say that the adventures of mole-sized proto-primates aren’t engrossing in their own right, but Evolution is naturalistic fiction with a vengeance. The attention to excretion alone is staggering. The cumulative effect is to make one embarrassed to be Homo sapiens, and as the violent, weary, feces-filled history of man progresses, suicidal.

The story doesn’t end with anatomically modern man, but don’t hold your breath for the singularity - in Stephen Baxter’s dystopic vision, you and I are as good as it gets. If you thought the Dark Ages were a bad scene, wait until you see the year 500,000,000.

One of the more striking chapters of the “novel” is a Planet of the Apes-style scene of a group of modern humans accidentally awakening from cryosleep long after a worldwide collapse. Rodents are on the rise and mankind has already lost the gift of speech. The latter is highly unlikely in general and not particularly believable the way the author does it, but it’s not the worst offense of the chapter. In a proper novel, the band of Rips van Winkle would have gone forth and taught the feral humans to be human again, or died trying. You can’t just give up on the entire species - if you’re the last intelligent form of life in the universe, you have to try to do something about it.

But they don’t, and thus they seal the fate of Homo sapiens. Other interesting moments include the birth of religion (it’s founded by a madwoman) and an intelligent dead-end on the dinosaurs’ evolutionary tree (published elsewhere as a short story). There are a few almost cheerful moments of technological discovery involving flint and canoes, but these are outweighed by the heartless murders of a Neanderthal and a Roman.

I had my doubts about Stephen Baxter back when I read Manifold: Origin, but now I wonder why he writes at all. Yes, I’ve been known to let the Borg assimilate the Alpha Quadrant, but when I wipe out mankind, I do it for the tragedy. He seems to have done it because he believes feces and decay are not a tragic flaw in our higher nature - they are our nature. Evolution is not a tragedy; it’s a horror story.

The only thing worse than horror is unintentional horror.