Earth Rules, and stuff on it is awesome

My friend sees coyotes in Chicago:



I can't decide if this is awesome or terrifying. I guess it's both.

In other news: there was a naked lady in my driveway earlier. She was sunbathing, so I guess that makes it summertime. Or, it just means I live in California these days.

Also, this is a thing that happened today:

We Are Handsome, and Talented

Ben Costa, Amy Martin, and your humble author, selling our wares at APE in San Francisco, April 21, 2007. Details, memories, dirty secrets to come.

Better Than the Best SURVIVOR Episode Ever

Via Warren Ellis:

"Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the former mayor of Cleveland who is seeking the 2008 Democratic nomination for president for the second time, has selected a date to introduce articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney."

"...Multiple congressional offices confirmed to RAW STORY that they had received the letter, but none had been apprised of the impeachable offenses with which the Ohio Democrat would charge the Vice President."

Command D

So I won't lose it: a run-down on KAMANDI. I love the "world name" Kirby came up with -- "Earth, AD."

TV on the Interweb

Make Internet TV is a website that helps me n' y'all make, um, TV on the internet:

"This guide has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.

"Very soon, this site will feature short videos from experienced internet video publishers. If you're interested in sharing your expertise, visit the Make Internet TV (MITV) wiki and find out how."

#7: Robots Conquer Earth

6 Ways to End a TV Series.

Worldbuilding

Found via Warren Ellis -- it's from M. John Harrison's blog:

"Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

"Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

"Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid."

And when you are done you sit on it

Cave Story, an 8-bit style video game with very basic controls and a whole lotta plot. I played for about two hours tonight, and I still get flustered when I fight a Boss -- having the movement keys on my right and the action keys on my left is almost too much for my Nintendo-trained brain to handle. But it's fun, and it has a video game kind of storytelling technique that might be interesting to use in a certain upcoming comics project ... our hero wakes up with no memory of his past, in a strange land where rabbit-folk need his help ...

Also this, from Jame Kochalka's Cute Manifesto, specifically the essay "Craft is the Enemy":

"You could labor your whole life perfecting your 'craft,' struggling to draw better, hoping one day to have the skills to produce a truly great comic ... If this is how you are thinking you will never produce this great comic, this powerful work of art, that you dream of. There's nothing wrong with trying to draw well, but that is not of primary importance.

"What every creator should do, must do, is use the skills they have right now. A great masterpiece is within reach if only your will power is strong enough (just like Green Lantern)."

And then, from "Craft Is Not A Friend":

"Creating a powerful work of art is like running and leaping across a chasm. It takes all of your strength and you'll be dashed on the rocks and fall to your death. Being a craftsman is like sitting in your woodshop all day carefully building a chair and when you are done you sit on it."

That, and a well-timed and well-worded email from a certain Amy Martin, was what I needed to get my writerly head back in a good place today. Another of the day's victories was when I narrowly avoided supergluing my fingers to an Abe Lincoln button ... although there are worse things to have permanently stuck to your hand.

Go read American Elf. Read it every day.

A BoingBoing kind of day

BoingBoing also has this picture today, from a blogger who has "a small collection of photos of mothers disguised as chairs."

Another one

This Vonnegut quote turned up on BoingBoing:

"Do you know what a Humanist is? I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. We Humanists try to behave well without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

"We had a memorial services for Isaac a few years back, and at one point I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to a group of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in Heaven now." That's my favorite joke."

So it goes.

The NYT is reporting that Kurt Vonnegut has passed away:

"He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

"His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago."

The article goes on to talk about Slaughterhouse-Five, of course:

"The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”"

But they touch on the hope that lived in his stories, too:

"To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”"



Goddammit, you've got to be kind.

We won't hear your dreams, unless you really, really want us to

The house is bigger than anyone can tell. No, bigger isn't the word - it's the size of a house, as it should be. But it's more expansive inside, there are balconies without a clear path to reach them. And once reached, without a clear path away. But again, "balcony" isn't the right word - "loft" is better.

The point: the outside has four walls, and clearly defined beginnings and beginnings, but on the inside there are doors that open, and no map to where they lead.

There's a boy there, and a girl. They have shared history. They're acquaintances, but here's the thing: they are closer now than they ever were before, not because of a thing that they've gone through, but because of a thing they haven't gone through quite yet. Time goes both directions. They don't have the memories yet of what they'll experience, but they have the inner knowledge of what the experiences will bring.

Questions Raised, Never Answered

"There's mystery in the world, and we don't get all the answers ... seldom is a thing truly exhausted and known completely, and when it is, it cast aside as an empty husk, learned and experienced, but also forgotten. It becomes the empty shell of a mollusk, wrapping paper, a conveyor of something, but not the thing itself. It was once experienced and loved, but is now forgotten - it never remains the thing of affection.

"But a person, or a time, loved and taken away, or explored but not fully known - that is the thing. That becomes song, or poetry, it is remembered with longing and never forgotten. It becomes what endures."

A quick one before the shuttle

(And then last night I had a dream that George Strait was sitting next to me at some kind of cafeteria lunch, but I was kind of a dick to him. But it was because he had his boots off and was putting his feet up on the table.)

I was an ensign

I had a dream last night that I was playing the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR board game ... only I was playing it with Captain Picard, Riker, and Worf.

Usually my dreams tend toward pretty ordinary but uncomfortable things, like I'm working at my old bookstore again, or I've moved back in with my folks, or the brakes on my car don't work anymore. I've always wanted to have those dreams where you get to fight with lightsabers or fly spaceships.

So if the closest I can come is pretending to fly spaceships with fictional characters that fly fictional spaceships? I guess I'll take it. Riker was into the game, but Picard got bored pretty fast.



There are stickers that came with the game that look like the Star Trek communicator badge, and I was wondering if the other guys would stick them on over their ACTUAL badges, or like put them to the side, or what. But then I forgot to pass them out.

Thinking Ahead

From Warren Ellis, who found it wherever he finds these things:

Vampire Dictator Stopped with a Stake:

"Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back - by driving a three-foot stake through his heart.

"Miroslav Milosevic (no relation) said "he and his fellow vampire hunters acted to stop the former dictator returning from the dead to haunt the country". His team explained that the wooden stake had been "driven into the ground and through the late president's heart"."

Ha-ha-ha

Someone over at the Engine posted this, and it made me laugh:

Clk*Clk*Whirr

Artist Eric Poulton has undertaken an awesomely nerdy art project - reimagining Star Wars as Steampunk.



That's Darth Vader! There's a bigger version on Eric's blog, as well as some rad renditions of Han & Chewie and Jabba the Hutt. Jabba even has a little mustache.

I wonder if they say it in the paperwork

From the BBC:

The city council of New York has voted to ban the use of the word "nigger".

"The resolution to ban the so-called "N-word" is largely symbolic as it carries no weight in law and those who use the word would face no punishment."

There's more in the link, but that's the meat of it.

Great Magneto's Tail!

NASA's New Horizon's space probe was pointed toward Pluto and the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system on a nine-year journey after getting a gravity boost Wednesday from Jupiter.

Yeah yeah, etc. etc., New Horizons is flying to Pluto at 52,000 (!) miles per hour, giving us a view of Pluto we've never, ever had before.

But!

Here's the best part:

"Project manager Glen Fountain said the craft will also travel through Jupiter's 'magneto tail,' which he described as a "tear drop-shaped bubble of plasma," streaming away from the planet into space."

Jupiter's Magneto Tail!



















""This is a region never before seen," Fountain said."


















Speak for yourself, Fountain.