Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1055

Come on, everybody’s doing it! You too can filk like Lori. All it takes is a midi and the Lycos Rhyming Dictionary.

Many thanks to Lori for this link to the Pirates’ Keyboard.

Word count: 924

As I was catching up on my newsgroup reading earlier this week, I was surprised to find that a filk had been posted to rec.humor.funny: Smeagolian Rhapsody. Nor is this the only work of the unique filker MC Smeagol. I hope he can provide you with a few moments of amusement while I’m busy writing dear departed Seska into my retro leather-clad VOY fic.

Word count: 106

I don’t think this was the first time someone emailed me about Species 2461, Icheb’s alleged species as listed at the Startrek.com library. I don’t think Startrek.com had a Borg Species List back when I first compiled my version, and I don’t particularly trust them not to make up species that were never actually mentioned in canon. Nevertheless, I have added 2461 to the list with an appropriate disclaimer.

It’s not canon unless it happened on-screen. Not that I’ve watched all those episodes - I just searched through Jim’s Reviews for the word “species.” That’s how I managed to get the facts of Species 571 wrong - I had it listed as Lansor’s species from “Survival Instinct” but just now I was going over Jim’s Review of the episode with a fine-tooth comb for an AU I’m writing, and figured out that P’Chan was 4 of 9 and Lansor 2 of 9. (Lansor’s species isn’t named or numbered at all, that I can tell.) Marika is the important member of the trio, but I think I should make an effort to add some character to the two I couldn’t tell apart.

So I stopped at 100 words, an order of magnitude short of my daily goal, to figure out who belonged to Species 571, that it wasn’t Lansor, and then to correct the Borg Species List and to upload the corrected version to the old host and here. I’d forgotten just how time-consuming story research can be. I already have doubts this story will be done in time for the contest deadline.

Word count: holding steady at zero

The cat and I watched Unbreakable tonight. She was unimpressed, but I was blown away, which means this entry will be very similar to those for Signs and The Sixth Sense. Once again, I knew something odd was going on, and in the end that slight tickle of a breeze turned out to be a baseball bat headed straight for my temple.

But in a good way. M. Night Shyamalan is superhuman - with just one reluctant superhero, he makes the X-Men movie machine look…well, like a comic book. In fact, he makes 99% of movies look like comic books; I wish I understood, or could express, how.

One thing in particular I wonder: could his sort of surprise ending could be done in a novel, or is essentially a visual effect? I was trying to think of an example of a surprise ending in literature; the best I could come up with was mysteries, but even then you always know that the truth will out, and that the genre practically demands that it be a shocker. That’s not quite the same as being lulled into thinking you have a handle on this movie, right up until the moment baseball bat meets temple.

I have a new story idea, so I should be back to writing by tomorrow. The story already has a theme and several other goals - I want it to answer my Leather-clad challenge and to be ready in time for Die J/C Die Phase II, but I think a surprise ending could be squeezed in there somehow. I just need to figure out what that ending is.

Word count: let’s not and say we did

I’ve managed to move all of Jade’s stories from Freeshell. I was going to be especially industrious and move some of mine, but I got mired in fixing just the broken links that are already here.

Word count: zero

Seema wrote Behind every good writer is an absolutely awesome and patient beta reader. Now this is so clearly untrue that it won’t take long to debunk. Behind some writers there are five or ten unexceptional and impatient betas. Other writers have no betas at all.

“Beta reader” is a strange term for an editor. Like all weird fandom terms, it covers a huge range of activities and attitudes. I suspect its origin is “beta tester,” that is, someone who tries out the beta version of new software and (ideally) reports any glaring bugs. That’s what I want out of a beta reader - I’m not looking for awesomeness or patience or heavy participation in the writing (programming) process.

I’m not against editing, but I think being a good writer means, among other things, being a good editor. A second pair of eyes is always handy but shouldn’t be an excuse for the first pair’s laziness, especially among people who for whatever reason are trying to improve their own writing skills.

Since I’ve finished the draft of the story I was working on this week, I don’t feel too guilty for not writing anything these last two days. In fact, I’m considering extending the not writing for another week or so. Dr. Deb has gone to Seattle for reasons which I don’t quite recall, so I will be feeding the feline and enjoying the DVD player. I’m hiking over to Brookline every day, I may as well make the most of the facilities. I’ll have plenty of time to get back on the 1,000 word wagon come August…

Word count: not looking good

I picked up a Dover Books edition of R.U.R. by Karel Capek (there’s supposed to be a Czech hat on the C but I can’t find it in the HTML entity set) and read it on the T. R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots and is the source of the word “robot.” See Maxfield & Montrose Interactive for the full derivation.

The play was written in 1920 and became an international hit. The theme is hubris and the dialogue is quite striking at points. The men who run the world’s first robot factory are flooding the labor market with cheap, soulless labor created using their secret recipe. For reasons which are never specified, this leads to a drop in the human birth rate. Between that and wars fought with robot soldiery who have no qualms about genocide of civilians, mankind seems to be taking the express train to extinction even before the robots turn on their masters. It may be the end of the world.

Speaking of the end of the world, I also saw 28 Days Later tonight. (That’s my excuse for not writing anything.) I include it here only because I’d heard it described as science fiction. There is actually no sci-fi content - it’s just a disaster movie. Think Day of the Triffids (sans triffids) meets Night of the Living Dead. The disease around which the movie revolves is an eclectic mix of ebola, rabies and bleeding ulcers.

[Spoilers ahead] I can’t resist - I have to nitpick. Can anyone name a disease that manifests itself fully in 10 to 20 seconds? I thought not. I understand that for plot purposes (that is, having to hack your friends to death with a machete within 10 seconds of exposure), the unprecedented incubation time keeps the movie moving along, but it’s never justified.

First things first - when we first meet Our Hero, he’s been unconscious in a hospital for twenty-eight days. Later developments would seem to imply that he’s been abandoned for at least six of those days. That’s a long time to go on one IV bag and no bedpan. (By long I mean medically impossible.) Somehow Our Hero misplaced his johnny, so we get that Full Frontal shot American audiences have come to expect from British movies.

So Our Hero gets up, drinks some Pepsi, and explores the empty hospital and empty city. Eventually he runs into some of the Infected and is saved by some of the Uninfected. Although there’s nice Molotov-cocktail action to start with, the disinfection process switches quickly to the manual machete approach. And that’s not even the gross bit.

[Gross spoilers ahead] The grossest thing in the movie is some violence against eyeballs near the end. The second most icky thing is the projectile hematemesis. (And you thought there wasn’t a word for it!) At random but frequent intervals, the Infected manage to vomit huge clots of blood, preferably onto the Uninfected, but any nearby surface will do. They don’t seem to do anything besides grunt, spit, twitch, and barf - such as eating to replenish all that lost blood.

Some of the Uninfected are smart enough to wear biohazard gear to prevent just such projectile eventualities. You’d think more of them would catch on to such a lifesaving fashion trend, but no…

I’ve barely begun to scratch the nits, but there’s one I just can’t overlook. I know that survivalists never end up the main characters of post-apocalyptic stories, and that nobody stuck on a savage, deserted island (in this case, Britain) has ever read Robinson Crusoe, and I accept that. However, some of the survivors were army officers, so there is no excuse for this nit. I’m only going to tell you this once, and you, too, will have no excuse. If you’re ever wondering whether a disease has wiped out all mankind or just Britain, there’s a very simple way to find out. Turn on a shortwave radio.

I’m not saying don’t see the movie; I’m not even saying it was bad. The characterization was pretty good, for horror. I’m just saying that if the hero can’t put a shortwave radio together out of, say, shortwave radios and batteries, and instead has to watch the sky for planes like some sort of cargo cultist, then don’t call it sci-fi. It’s an insult to the genre.

Word count: 711

I read Finity to give John Barnes (of A Million Open Doors fame) a second chance. He hasn’t won me over.

Finity is in the first person past tense, which is always a strike against a story for me. As in most first-person stories, the protagonist never quite gels as a character for me. He has plenty of unpleasant experiences but nothing transformative. At the end of the novel he realizes that he’s just a dull guy who wants to stay home.

But good characterization just gets you insults in this field, so I’ll move on to the science. This is a multiple/parallel universe novel with a twist - some American expatriates are trying to phone home and nobody’s picking up the line. This is where I began to suspect John Barnes of being Australian, since the hero was from New Zealand and, as I told the Mad Chatters, the entire population of the United States was in the cornfield. The ideas here were interesting, but the characters didn’t go particularly deeply into the histories or the science behind them.

The question of where the US went is neither resolved nor left unresolved. Overall, there’s a lot of material here that fits together in that loose, Golden Age way that you’d think people would be over by now.

And speaking of the Golden Age, I read a classic of military sci-fi, Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, previously mentioned in the context of Wolfling.
I was more interested to see the same eugenic theme to the story than to see what’s now an antique example of the art of military sci-fi.

Nevertheless, the text is clean and light and the resolution neat, though I’m tempted to say it wasn’t foreshadowed enough. The theme, I’ll guess, is the inevitability of both social and individual actions - social for the military side, and individual for the eugenics.

Word count: 1230

RJ inspired me to cheat on this quiz. I got Elrond twice, but third time’s the charm:

An enigmatic recluse with a mysterious past and even stranger loyalties, you are an intensely serious presence.