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Sydney's Homebush Bay is home to many a broken and forgotten ship, but at least one of those derelict boats still houses a bit of life. The SS Ayrfield, long decommissioned, has a mangrove forest growing from its corpse.
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While many of us today use our cell phones as cameras, "point and shoot" had a very different effect when your camera was shaped like a handgun. Here are some of the weirdest vintages cameras, from cameras shaped like pistols and watches to one that could photograph an entire train at once.
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http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/fu
Every week, we share a number of downloads for all platforms to help you get things done. Here were the top downloads from this week.
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A lot of people are uncomfortable with haggling, but just one quick question at a hotel's front desk has a great chance of earning you a better room on your next vacation or work trip.
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Safari/Chrome: If Twitter's web interface is a little too busy for your liking, Twipster converts it into a minimal and responsive list of Tweets, with none of the clutter.
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Shona has spent two tours working a dangerous lunar mine so she can pay for her daughter's expensive medical treatments. But the ultimate loss comes while she's still on the job, and Shona isn't sure she can return to Earth.
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Jeff Christensen paints oil portraits from a more macabre dimension, spotlighting fearsome gods, tortured monsters, and animals engaged in vicious magic. They would serve as fabulous concept art for a surreal horror fantasy film.
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It's a lovely day for a walk, especially if your walking companions happen to be of the fire-breathing variety. Let's hear the tales you have in store for this lovely lady and her unusual entourage.
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Not a dream! Not a hoax! Last night's episode of Da Vinci's Demons pit Leonardo against Vlad the Impaler, and our hero's usual scheming and quipping isn't quite as successful as he hoped. Spoilers ahead.
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The totally improvised, 7 1/2 minute filibuster from an episode of NBC's Parks & Recreation last month, in which Patton Oswalt outlines his vision of Star Wars: Episode VII (with Marvel crossovers) could not possibly have been more perfect, could it? Well, yes, it could, actually ...
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There are few sights in science fiction as iconic as the various starship Enterprises cruising through the stars. Steve Schnier decided to create his own high-flying video of the Enterprise by launching a model into the stratosphere.
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Everyone loves a good backyard garden, but hunching over a pile of dirt to plant all of your seeds isn't much fun. If you want to take some of the back bending out of the equation, this PVC seed gun should do the trick.
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When you need lemon juice for a recipe, nothing beats fresh-squeezed, but it's always a struggle to coax a lot of juice out of the fruit. As it turns out, the secret is to cut the lemon lengthwise.
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A lot of nice gaming keyboards come with backlit keys, but you don't get any say over the color of the light. Some don't even let you make fine-grained adjustments to brightness. Luckily, it is possible to make some alterations on your own.
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OS X: If you see a color on the web or in an app that you particularly like and want to save for later, Sip makes it incredibly fast and easy to store it for later use.
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http://conceptships.blogspot.com/2013/05/c
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TobiasBuc
http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/?p=8481
Another interesting trailer, this one forwarded to me by my friend, Nick Oettinger:
Next time you go to the dentist, consider the terror that you're inflicting on the microorganisms that have made a home in your filthy teeth.
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Whether you need to brush up on your chemistry, or just love it when someone sets the Periodic Table to music, AsapSCIENCE's The NEW Periodic Table Song is for you.
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http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/io9/full/~3/0
You're living in the future, but nobody goes by foot anymore. You need a car. But what car do you get? And which dystopian future are you in? These are the best cars in all of sci-fi.
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Looking for an alternative to turbines for capturing wind energy, Belatchew Arkitekter has proposed adding a hairy addition to Stockholm's Söder Torn. It would serve as more than an architectural toupee, capturing energy through the movement of all those tiny straws.
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Andry Rajoelina's Justice Families series casts DC superheroes as the parents of their own little families, grabbing the hands of their now pint-sized sidekicks. It's a mostly sweet series, although Hal Jordan has to improvise.
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In a land where demons roam the Earth, Guardians have always protected the villages. The role has always been passed from father to son—until one Guardian's wife gives birth to a daughter. So the doctor and his assistant decide to quietly switch her with another baby, the newborn son of a local shop keeper.
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Looking for an antidote to J.J. Abrams' slick, lens-flared vision of Star Trek? The Mythical Show with Rhett and Link gives us a Star Trek that doesn't even begin to take itself seriously, right down to its singing all-child cast.
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Yesterday's 263-foot drive by the NASA's Opportunity put Mars Rover's total distance driven at 35.76 km, breaking the 40-year-old record for the greatest distance driven by a NASA vehicle on another celestial body. But Opportunity still hasn't quite beaten the record set by the USSR's Lunokhod 2.
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http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/05/18/a-m
http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=21883
Me and Jay Lake at the Nebula Mass Signing yesterday. I taste of executive power. For another few weeks, anyway.
Picture borrowed from jay’s site, here.
Sometimes, you can do something the fast way, or you can do it the right way. Other times, those two things are one and the same. Here are 10 everyday tasks that you can do in 10 seconds or less.
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Eventually, if you’re trying to make it as a writer, you’re going to despair. You can’t write well enough. This story will never sell. If you do sell it, it’ll never be popular.
This terrible feeling like you’re just wasting your time and nobody cares happens, absurdly enough, to very popular writers. It happens to nobodys. It happens to writers, period. If you’re putting words down and trying to get people to read them, there will be times you’ll want to take everything you wrote, set it on fire, and then fling yourself in to burn with it.
Here is what you do when those down days come: you write more.
Took a nasty rejection straight to the sternum? Write more.
Had a confidence-shredding bad review? Write more.
This grand story in your head is completely beyond your ability to commit it to the page? Write more.
This terrible book you’re reading made millions, and your better work can’t find a home? Write more.
Feel like you’re a fraud who’s somehow lucked out when better writers languish behind you? Write more.
Your favorite author just told you he abhorred what you wrote? Write more.
The thing about writing is that so much of it comes down to tenacity. The most popular writers in the world can all tell you about this fellow they knew when they were starting out, a colleague who could write stories that would charm the petals from a rose… and yet these natural geniuses didn’t stick with it. They either let life swamp them, or couldn’t stand the rejections, or didn’t feel like it. And these magnificently talented people never became Writers, because for whatever reason they never pushed through.
It’s not that they weren’t very good. It’s just that they stopped knocking on doors. While the writer you’ve heard of kept ringing doorbells until she got an answer.
So pushing through is what you need to do. Write when you’re sad. Write when you’re busy. Write when you’re uninspired. Write when you’re utterly consumed with the idea that you cannot do this. Learn to take all of that despondence and to transform it into beauty, for writing in the throes of despair will do two things: when you are writing sad scenes, you will have so many more emotions to cram into it, and when you are writing happy scenes, you will be forced to emulate joy. One will make for better writing, the other will elevate your mood.
The truth is, though I’ve written in both despair and elation, I can’t really tell which mood I was in when I go back to revise. You must learn to write without hope. Keep creating through those dry spells, keep sending out stories during the rejections; decouple your personal contentment from your creative muse and make that bitch dance for you. She’ll be clumsy at first, foolish… but with time, you can make her do the most elaborate pirouettes when you’re barely able to move off the couch.
In fiction, there’s often a plot sequence: Try/fail, try/fail, try/succeed. In real life, there may be a hundred try/fails before you get to that succeed. But you’ll never know unless you stay in that execution loop.
Write.
Write more.
And then write more still.
(Inspired by Catherine Schaff-Stump’s Writers and Despair.)
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/303034.hJust discovered: I could pretty much ruin any woman’s day when she’s about to leave the house by asking, “Oh, you’re going out like that?” and then muttering that it’s fine, it’s fine.
I just said that to Erin hypothetically, and she knows I didn’t even mean it, and she’s still itching to change her clothes.
(Cue tides of women saying that they’re above that. You may thank me for making you feel superior.)
Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.
This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/302666.hhttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-sta
(This is going to be a slightly abbreviated discussion, because I discussed the book's ideas at length in the supplementary essay bundled with it, and answered a number of questions about it in the blog entry immediately preceding this one.)
So what's left to say ...?
Rewind the clock to 1993. I was living in Watford, part of the suburban sprawl that surrounds London proper, working for a Californian software multinational and not writing enough fiction. One of my problems was starting stories and not finishing them. One of the starts I made, was this rather weird, chillingly distanced third-person-omniscient vision of a CIA photographic analyst in a world where the cold war produced even more baroque technologies than in our own: his memories of a childhood visit to an air show where nuclear-powered NB-36s were on display (in our universe, the NB-36 program was cancelled before anything flew under actual nuclear power, as with the Soviet Tu-95LAL (the follow-on Tu-119 never flew either)). His memories merge with his angst as he pores over recon imagery of .... what?
Forward to 1997. I'd read a short story by Bruce Sterling, The Unthinkable. It's a short throw-away in which a pair of arms negotiators are reminiscing about how they agreed to back away from the precipice and cut the Cold War horror arsenals by ditching the ICBMs and Hydrogen bombs chained Lovecraftian horrors ... and I suddenly realised what my analyst was looking at. I'd also been re-reading "At The Mountains of Madness" and decided, in classic naive non-metaphorical science fictional mode (where a rocket ship is just a rocket ship every time) to tackle the alienation and ennui engendered by constant exposure to the threat of annihilation, and also to make the Mythos frightening again by linking Lovecraft's horrors (by then reduced to the stuff of silly jokes and plush bedroom slippers) to a terrifying reality that had only receded into the background in the past few years.
The result was a story titled "A Colder War". I sold it, and it garnered quite a bit of attention—I get a reprint request pretty much every year.
Fast-forward to 1999. I'd finished working on "Festival of Fools" (aka "Singularity Sky") and it was on its way to an editor's in-tray. I'd written "Lobsters" and it was doing the rounds ("meritless, vapid, style-obsessed trash" said the rejection letter from the first editor I sent it to, he who had just bought "A Colder War": there's no accounting for taste). I needed a novel-length project and I had bits of the wreckage of "The Harmony Burn" to cannibalize (this was the unpublishable novel from 1994-96—unpublishable for structural/characterisation reasons, not because publishers are stupid). Secret government agencies dealing with the suppression of hard take-off singularities seemed a bit dubious to me by then, but I'd just sold "A Colder War" and, while that particular story was far too bleak to work with, the idea of rebooting the Lovecraftian/spy nexus appealed. So I began writing. And the first thing I came up with was Bob, mentally swearing at his boss as the rain trickles down the back of his neck and he tries to break into an office I used to work at in Watford to steal a deadly thesis.
At which point everything was hopelessly cross-infected by my memories of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy inside that particular company's technical publications department. And then I had Bob go back to work the next day in a grim little civil service office maze not unlike to one I'd spent three months working in as a contractor in 1996. Both jobs were so soul-destroying that you had to view them as black farce in order to work there: the software company, for example, was the one where whenever senior executives came to visit our managers would trawl the cubicle farm first thing in the morning to take down all the Dilbert cartoons pinned to the walls.
I was working in a dotcom startup at the time, and spending too much time reading Slashdot. And it occurred to me that the staid British civil service would have serious indigestion if it tried to swallow a Slashdot-era dotcom geek. But what if the bureaucracy in question wasn't allowed to fire him? There's scope for comedy there, the comedy of dissonance: round peg in a square hole, and so on.
So there you've got the ingredients. Lovecraftian horror; the secret agency dedicated to protecting us from the scum of the multiverse: the protagonist (Bob, a put-upon hacker who is an utterly inappropriate hire but who can't be gotten rid of): the cold war ambiance: the dark humour. I probably ought to mention the novels of Len Deighton, which I was re-reading at the time—one of the most significant of the British cold war thriller writers.
The whole thing snowballed into a short novel. In early 2001 I sold first serial rights to the same small Scottish magazine who'd published "A Colder War" and "Antibodies"; it ran in Spectrum SF issues 7-10 after John Christopher's last novel and was read by maybe a thousand people. (Thereafter, Spectrum SF ceased publication. I like to think I didn't kill it.) This was my first published novel, and I sold it myself; my agent's first reaction when I sent it to her was, "this is great fun but it'll be impossible to sell: it's far too cross-genre". She was, in fact, quite correct ... for a non-name author in 2001.
The rest is history, although it's a rather weird history: at some point I'm going to have to write down the tortured publication track of the first four Laundry novels just to provide some context, just to show that rules are for breaking. This series broke all the rules of publishing and somehow prospered, never mind merely surviving—even though the dice were stacked against it from the beginning.
But that's enough for now. (I've just finished the first draft of a new Laundry novella, set between "The Jennifer Morgue" and "The Fuller Memorandum", and my hands are too sore to continue typing!)
This week in the world of cartoons, the Decepticons take a cue from the Galactic Empire and begin cloning armies to fight the Autobots, Finn and Jake give up on their vocal cords, one of the regulars on Regular Show is in health trouble, and we take an advanced look at a new Disney/Marvel release.
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Dentists recommend buying a new toothbrush every 3-4 months, but it's hard to remember when it's time to get a new one. One simple way to remember is to just buy a new toothbrush whenever you buy toothpaste.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
the_child
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/05/18/rt-b
http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=21880
Welcome to Saturday.
First: Look! A video interview with me from RT Book Reviews, taken during the Booklover’s Convention a couple of weeks ago in Kansas City. I talk about The Human Division, the RT convention and some SFWA matters:
Second: Jamie Todd Rubin reviews The Human Division in Intergalactic Medicine Show, and has nice things to say about the book. For example:
The Human Division is not just John Scalzi at its best, it is science fiction at its best.
Yup, that’s a jacket blurb right there.
Third: Nebula Weekend fabulous so far. Wish you were here.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/a
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