Tag: geeky stuff

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geeky stuff

MileHiCon and W00tstock: More Geek Than Should Be Legally Allowed

MileHiCon 42 was a lot of fun. At least the little bit that I saw of it was a blast. While I paid for a full weekend, I didn’t make it on Friday since I was too busy punching things, and today I was helping someone move. (Or more accurately, waiting up in Westminster to help someone move who didn’t get there until much later than expected due to a flat tire near the Wyoming border.)

So yes. Fun.

I got to go to several very interesting panels. One was a little workshop to make a two-sentence elevator pitch. I was very pleased with how mine turned out, since I tried to come up with one for Throne of Nightmares. I wrote my two sentence summary, the panel chopped about half the words out, and now it’s quite lovely. Are you ready to witness its awesomeness? HOLD ON TIGHT!

Drew suffers a traumatic injury at the hands of his former friend, and emerges able to see interdimensional predators. Soon Drew must choose between godhood and a normal life, between saving his friend and saving himself.

BOOM.

Yes. I can sense that you wish to shower me with dirty handfuls of cash now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Also I went to a panel about applying fiction skills to writing non-fiction. I was expecting it to be more about the actual writing process, but the panelists had a lot of useful advice on how and where to look for non-fiction work. So if I ever have time to do so, I will try to apply that advice. Some extra money would be quite lovely.

Late in the afternoon there was a fun panel about all sorts of misconceptions about fighting (of all kinds) that get perpetuated in books and film. Dan Dvorkin moderated it, and it was mostly a ridiculous amount of fun. I think “boisterous” or perhaps even “rowdy” would be a good word to describe the panelists.

And now… are you ready for the name dropping portion of this blog post? Because here it comes.

An event that I almost chickened out on – since I’m absolutely crap at meeting new people and not acting like a giant space moron – was “Speed Date a Science Fiction Author.” I’m pretty sure that’s what it was called. Anyway, I’m glad that I hung in and gave it a try. Something like 20 authors got packed into a room, and you could go around for three minute “dates” to get to ask them about their books.

I can’t quite go down the list of all the lovely people I got a chance to (briefly) talk to. It took about thirty seconds to cover the “What of yours should I read” and then after that, conversations normally veered off into all sorts of random topics.

Ian Tregillis was the only one of the authors in the room I’d actually heard of, since I’d seen his book Bitter Seeds mentioned in io9 and it sounded like something I wanted to read. He was very sweet and seemed a little shy, but he was a lot of fun to talk to. His day job is as a physicist at the National Laboratories in Los Alamos (that’s one hell of a day job) so I mostly just asked him questions about that. I’m really looking forward to reading his book.

Rather than repeat again and again that each and every one of these authors was nice, and charming, and lovely, I’ll just say here that they all were. Then again, I wouldn’t expect a writer willing to participate in an event like this would be an egotistical jerk. But yes, everyone was a lot of fun and I’m glad that I didn’t wimp out.

I spent a lot of time before the event chatting with Donita K. Paul prior to the event. She’s also doing an MDA lock up, so if you’ve got a few extra dollars, maybe consider helping her get out of jail a little quicker, since it’s for a good cause.

I’ve actually sort of heard of Daniel Abraham before, to the extent that I’ve seen the book cover for his short story collection on a blog and thought it was very nice looking. (I’m a sucker for watercolors.)

Rob Rice was definitely the most snazzily dressed of the bunch. And yes, he was wearing exactly the same thing as he’s pictured wearing on his website. He’d also been on the panel that did the elevator pitches, and he told me that he thought my novel sounded interesting. Squee!

Sarah Hoyt and the rest of the Hoyt trio were quite fun. I actually finished off the event talking with her son, who is in pre-med. We spent a lot of time mutually complaining about just how awful it is to be in school and have no time.

Melinda Snodgrass has the best last name ever. And I love her hair. And she wrote the script for the freaking “THE MEASURE OF A MAN” Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I am unashamed of the amount of fangirling I did.

Nicole Kurtz was one I spent more than my three minutes talking with. She gave me a lot of really excellent advice. And she writes books where the heroines are best described as “sassy,” which I just can’t get enough of.

So that was at least some of the highlights of the speed dating. And I of course must also mention that I went to the one hour reading/Q&A that Paolo Bacigalupi did. I now now how to pronounce his last name, which means I’m at least one IQ point smarter than when I started out. (Clue: Not “bunchachalupas”) He read a bit from his new novella, and talked a lot about his interest in environmental issues, economics, and the interactions between them.

I want to be Paolo Bacigalupi when I grow up. But with a last name people can pronounce. And still be a girl. But really, I just mean I want to be able to write stories that involve big issues like that, and still have them be compelling and fascinating stories.

I fled from MHC at five, since I needed to get home for the Not-Quite-But-Almost-W00tstock in Boulder. I was hoping to get to eat dinner beforehand, but that was not to be. There was construction on I-25 and so I got home barely in time for David to collect me for the ride up to Boulder.

W00tstock was definitely worth it. Paul and Storm were HILARIOUS. Phil Plait’s litany of astronomical dick jokes was likewise hilarious. (And even funnier, that was the first time David had actually seen Phil lecture. So there you go.) And Adam Savage? Oh, the glee. He got the one standing ovation of the night for making an absolutely horrific Michael Jackson joke that almost caused me to pee my pants, I was laughing so hard.

The Captain’s Wife’s Lament took 23 minutes to finish. I know that’s not a record, but I still feel like I did my part.

ARRRR!

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geeky stuff

Fun with colors

xkcd did a survey of what people called different colors and has now posted the results. It’s all pretty funny, for a variety of reasons, so you should read the post.

I was actually surprised that there wasn’t really that much of a difference between what men and women called the various colors. And that there was some consensus between the genders regarding “teal.” Because let me tell you, maybe my X chromosomes are faulty, but I have no clue what the hell kind of color “teal” actually is.

What I was most amused by, however, was the giant list of all the various colors, and the most frequent names given for them: Color table here. A lot of it is fairly ho-hum, but as you scroll down, you’ll find some real gems, like “blurple.” Also, “puke,” “ugly brown,” “bland,” “poo,” “windows blue” and “bile.”

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geeky stuff science fiction

Terry Pratchett on Doctor Who

Terry Pratchett has written an interesting guest blog post about Doctor Who, and I have to say that I pretty much agree with him. And not just because I think Night Watch is an amazing book because it both made me laugh out loud and made me cry.

I tend to be more liberal with my definition of what science fiction happens to be, probably because I grew up reading fantasy and then moved over to science fiction when I got sick of unicorns. All I really want out of my science fiction is an element of scientific plausibility and some sort of logic to the laws of physics. I’m not that demanding. And in fact, I prefer my scifi almost unforgivably loosey-goosey compared to what hard science fiction fans like. I think long explanations about how faster than light travel could work incredibly boring. Really. Just tell me “It’s something to do with wormholes,” and I’m good to go1.

That said, even by my own incredibly forgiving definitions, Doctor Who really isn’t scifi. It’s magic cleverly tarted up with machinery. I don’t think even whipping out Clarke’s third law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) helps the case all that much when, as Pratchett cites, there’s an alien using pills to transform body fat into little baby aliens. And you know what? That’s totally okay. It’s a fun show, and I actually don’t think it matters all that much if people want to call it scifi or fantasy or superhero adventures, though I’m sure whoever feels that their genre is being abused will disagree with me. And I suppose it is something of a culture shock to people who have watched Doctor Who if they go to the local store and pick up some scifi and discover that it doesn’t go quite like that.

What I actually think is more interesting about what Mr. Pratchett had to say were his comments on how the Doctor has become increasingly god-like, particularly in these new episodes.

The Doctor himself has in recent years been built up into an amalgam of Mother Teresa, Jesus Christ (I laughed my socks off during the Titanic episode when two golden angels lifted the Doctor heavenwards) and Tinkerbell. There is nothing he doesn’t know, and nothing he can’t do. He is now becoming God, given that the position is vacant. Earth is protected, we are told, and not by Torchwood, who are human and therefore not very competent. Perhaps they should start transmitting the programme on Sundays.

I think here, he’s hit on a bigger narrative issue than the tissue-thin science of the supposedly (winkwink) science fiction show, and something that I think really ruins some episodes that could have otherwise been interesting. I tend to think that the Doctor’s increasingly god-like tendencies are probably connected to the need the show feels to threaten to blow up bigger and bigger things, which I’ve already complained about at length.

During The Waters of Mars I felt like the writers at least recognized the problem and did something quite dramatically fantastic with it. The Doctor buys in to his own image for a moment, believing in his god-like powers, and then at the end of the episode he gets a good metaphorical gut-punch to show him that no, he’s not everyone’s savior. It was lovely, and unfortunately ruined by what followed it. Here’s hoping that the new season will let the Doctor go back to being very smart and inventive, but not some sort of deity.

1 – I actually have another reason for this beyond my own intellectual laziness. I don’t think that those sorts of explanations make for good narrative or believable characters. For example, unless your character is the guy that invented the FTL engine, or someone intimately involved in its maintenance, it just doesn’t seem all that plausible that they’d be that detailed about how it functions. Just think about people today and cars. If you ask someone who isn’t the sort of person that changes their own oil how a car functions, you’d probably get something along the lines of “well, it burns gas and that makes the car go.” At the risk of generalizing too much, I don’t think most people give a crap about how their car functions so long as it gets them from home to the ice cream shop without exploding. And I bet that some day, when we’re zipping around faster than light in shiny space ships, most people on those space ships will feel pretty much the same.

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geeky stuff

Also: Zombies

I am not ashamed to admit that I’m more than a little excited about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn Of The Dreadfuls. We read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for our little book club last year, and I absolutely loved the book. Elizabeth Bennett as an ass-kicking kung fu master that defeats both zombies and a horde of ninjas belonging to Lady Catheine is just irresistible. I’m just hoping this book lives up to the first’s standards, since they are written by two different people.

I did, however, recently pick up another book by Seth Grahame-Smith (co-author of P&P&Z): Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I hope that it will finally answer the immortal question of “Who was the better vampire hunter – Abraham Lincoln or Jesus Christ?”

And one last bit of zombie related news: On Monday, I watched Dead Snow. If you like ludicrously gory horror comedy, I definitely recommend it. It has Nazi Zombies – fast, strong, and incredibly smart Nazi Zombies – which is really all you really need to know.

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geeky stuff wtf

The i…WHAT?

Okay, seriously. Was there no one in the Apple offices to let them know that their new device sounds like it was named after a feminine hygiene product?

I’m sure it’s cool and stuff, but really. I feel like I should be sticking it in my underpants to hold the red menace at bay, not be reading books off of it.

On the other hand, I’m sure there are plenty of male geeks that want to stick it in their underpants, and for an entirely different reason.

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geeky stuff

Taking a moment to geek out for a good cause

DriveThruRPG, my favorite source of non-paper tabletop RPG books, is running a donation fund for Haiti, aimed at Doctors Without Borders. They’re matching all donations. Even better, if you donate a measly $20, you get an absolutely stunning number of PDFs as a thank you. The list of books is 12 pages long.

Now, most of the books on the list left me with a profound feeling of “meh” since I’m ridiculously picky about my RPGs. However, one of the books you get is the core book for the Serenity RPG, which is my second favorite game of all time to run. (The first being White Wolf’s Werewolf in any of its “garou” rather than “forsaken” formats.) That alone is worth the price of admission, if you’re selfish enough that you require more for your $20 than the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re helping out a good cause.

I’m looking forward to adding my Serenity PDF to my RPG book collection. It’ll feel right at home since I also own two paper copies of the book as well. But you can never have too much Serenity.

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doctor who geeky stuff science fiction tv

The End of Time

Thanks to April, my big brother’s wonderful girlfriend, I finally got to see the second part of The End of Time last night. For those of you who aren’t giant Doctor Who geeks, move along, move along. Nothing to see here.

SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I will start by saying that the first part really didn’t impress me. It was loud, bombastic, needlessly explodey, and involved far too many shots of the Doctor either walking or running somewhere accompanied by rather overdone music, which really just made me feel like they were trying to add some filler to the episode to make it long enough. But at the end, I was still excited about the second part, because if nothing else, there were going to be Time Lords. Apparently lead by a very spitty Timothy Dalton. The general Time Lord culture was something I’ve really missed out of the new Who, and I was excited at the prospect of them making a comeback, since that would open up all sorts of new plot as well. Also, I was hoping that if the Time Lords did make a return, maybe we’d get to see a new incarnation of Romana, who was one of my favorite characters ever from old Who.

Sadly, I was disappointed, on many, many, many counts.

Before I get down to the real kvetching, there were certain things out of the second part that I really, really liked. There was a lovely scene between the Doctor and the Master, which involved them not shrieking at each other, and it was beautifully done and very dramatic. I liked spitty Timothy Dalton as Rassilon, and even though I’d already spoiled myself as to who he was, I still just about wet my pants when the Doctor used the name. Dalton makes a wonderful Rassilon; sure, he’s the founder of the great and noble Time Lord civilization, but I think it adds some real dimension to the culture when we get to see that Rassilon was also a giant, scary bastard. And for all that the Time Lords did not in fact make a comeback like I’d been hoping, I think that some of the plot was very interesting. If nothing else, the revelation that the doctor destroyed the Time Lords not as collateral damage in the destruction of the Daleks, but on purpose because they’d become just as evil, just blew me away. It casts the Doctor in a whole new light and was very well done.

That said, the rest of it? I’m not going to claim it was awful and that Russel T. Davies and I are through (not that it matters at this point) but of all the big, explodey, bombastic, over the top season enders, this one was definitely the worst. It was a lot of sound and fury, and very little substance. The Doctor saving the Earth at the end just seemed a little too easy and clean. And I’m sorry, but whether it’s the long pre-regeneration goodbye sequence, or just the intended-to-be-dramatic-but-not-really bit where the Doctor can’t seem to decide if he should be pointing his gun at Rassilon1 or the Master, I spent a lot of time wanting to yell “GET ON WITH IT!” at April’s TV. That’s never a good sign.

As a good example of just what was wrong with the episode, take Donna. I was incredibly excited about Donna being in the episode, since she’s by far my favorite of the companions. I cried, quite literally, when she had to have her memory erased at the end of last season, and it made the wonderfully poignant point clear that yes, thing really do go terribly, terribly wrong in the Doctor’s life and there aren’t always happy endings. And then in this episode… what? She gets surrounded by a bunch of Master copies and then her head sort of explodes and… that’s it. She has basically no bearing on the plot at all, other than as a footnote. It’s not that I wanted something bad to happen to Donna, goodness no. I love her to pieces. But after the frantic warnings from the Doctor about what will happen to her if she remembers, and then basically seeing her brain explode on screen, suddenly at the end she’s all better and nothing seems to have happened. What? What was the point of the build up?

The Doctor’s death also annoyed me, frankly. I do like that it wasn’t Rassilon that did him in. I thought David Tennant did some amazing acting when it came to the sudden swing from high to low, as he goes from thinking that he’s escaped fate to realizing that his death is inescapable. I can even go for him giving up his life to save Wilf, and the wonderfully nasty, egotistical things he said to go with it. But hinging all of that loveliness on a booth that apparently requires someone to be locked in it for no apparent reason really just takes all the steam out of the sacrifice. They had to find a way to kill the Doctor off, and that was the best they could do? Really?

And then of course, the Doctor gets irradiated and sort of killed and it’s all quite heart-wrenching until he gets up and then spends the next fifteen minutes wandering around and exchanging significant looks with nearly everyone who has ever been in more than two episodes with him. The thing that was often so emotional about other Doctors regenerating was how abrupt it seemed. Take the Christopher Eccleston regeneration; it made me cry. He went from fine to basically dead and regenerated in in only a few minutes, and even though I’d been expecting it, it was still emotional and well executed. What they did with Tennant seems to me the equivalent of if Eccleston had paused, made himself some tea and sandwich, done some phone calls, answered all of his correspondence, and then finally kicked the bucket. Bleh.

Then the fact that the Doctor regenerating this time apparently made the Tardis catch on fire? Don’t get me started.

Admittedly, The End of Time had a tough act to follow. Right before we watched the second part, April let us watch The Waters of Mars since we hadn’t seen that yet. That episode is amazing. It was creepy, it was suspenseful, and the ending just blew me away. But what I find so frustrating is that it’s obvious that this sort of tight scripting and emotional roller coaster is more than possible on the show, and then they get to the season finale and just sort of blow it all on the Master having a fake glow-in-the-dark skull for a head.

I think maybe the biggest problem is that every season finale of the new Doctor Who has been over the top and explodey. We can’t seem to have a finale that doesn’t involve the possible destruction of the Earth at best or the entire universe at worst. And I find that frustrating, because many of what I consider to be the best episodes of the new Who have been the very ones where the stakes were relatively small. The weeping Angels in Blink weren’t threatening to destroy space and time. Midnight was just about a few people, on a single ship. The Girl in the Fireplace was about one woman’s life. The problem is, every time you have to end a series by threatening to blow up the universe, you paint yourself a little further in to a corner, since next time you feel obligated to somehow ratchet the stakes up higher2. And frankly, after one or two threats to destroy the universe or space/time or whatever, it gets sort of boring, because you know they can’t destroy the universe because there’s going to be a season next year.

It just makes me sad to think what they could have done with this story, with this revelation of how awful and evil the Time Lords were at the end of the war, if they hadn’t needed to put it hand in hand with the threat of total destruction. How much more interesting would it have been, if the Doctor had come face to face with Rassilon and had to reenact is final decision, not because he was worried about space and time getting destroyed, but because he was once again face with the ghost of his own people becoming just as monstrous as the Daleks.

It’s obviously possible to have a lot of drama and tension and excitement without threatening to destroy the universe again. Hopefully the next round of Doctor Who scripts will keep that in mind.

1 – After seeing Rassilon being an all powerful giant bastard earlier, I was forced to wonder in this scene why, after the Doctor first pointed the gun at him, Rassilon didn’t simply pop the Doctor’s head off like he was a giant Pez dispenser.

2- My brother illustrated this point nicely last night. A not quite verbatim quote: “[Author whose name I have somehow spaced out] wrote a book where at the end he blew up the Earth. And then he wrote a sequel where at the end, he blew up the universe. And then he wrote a third book where at the end, he blew up all possible universes. After that there was nothing left to blow up, so he had to end the series.”