I signed up a couple of weeks ago for Tor’s “Watch the Skies” promotion, where they send you a dozen of their books, once a week, in PDF format. I’m always on the look for more books to put on my Sony Reader, but PDF files are usually formatted to a much larger page than on the Reader, and this was no exception – the text, even zoomed, was unreadable to these old eyes. It displays well on my faithful Linux box, Baphomet, in fact very well. ...
Tuesday – American Idol begins Hollywood week, which winnows the people who made it through the audition process to the twenty-four people who will make it to the actual contest. This year, people are allowed to play instruments. I don’t know how this fits into a singing show, but I guess, anything for the ratings. Also, Jericho season 2 starts. Fans demanded the return of the show, and CBS delivered. I’ll be watching! ...
Kind of a mishmash post today. I start out with some EQ2, then move on to TV and lastly a little bit about work right at the end. Being a recruit in a highly successful raid guild going through Veeshan’s Peak for the first time leaves me plenty of time to play alts and watch TV shows :) The night before last, I worked a couple more levels with Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser who is bringing the fear to Butcherblock and about whom I’ll write later. Last night, I played Dera, whom I hadn’t played much since she reached 80 over the weekend. ...
Inspired by Wilhelm and Potshot, who both see the barriers against any sort of MMO with a science fictional basis as nearly insurmountable… I found I disagreed. Strongly. I love science fiction – Peter Hartwell once said “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve”. All life and possibility is open to you, and yet you have questions about what will happen to you in the future… where you’ll be living. And how things will be. Will life be better? Different? How will we change? ...
A new book by Iain [M] Banks is always something to celebrate. Humor, action, politics, joy and despair (but usually more of the latter than the former, alas) combined with meticulous world-building and characters real enough to care for… he is one of the most brilliant SF writers of his age. io9 has news that the prologue to his new book, “Matter”, is available on his publisher’s web site. It’s set in his popular “Culture” universe. The Culture is vast utopia spanning thousands of star systems, and it always seems to be fraying at its edges. Which is where its stories take place. Because the people of the Culture are fundamentally boring and decadent until you shake them up. ...
When Wired ran a story headlined “Apple Plotting an Avon Power Play”, all I could think was, “Damn that Avon! Which side is he ON?”. Of course, he’s always on his side, but then I wondered why they mentioned Blake’s 7 in a “Cult of Mac” article. Turned out they meant the cosmetics company. Ouch. When the Stargate MMO press release came out a few days later, I got wondering about when they were going to make MMOs on the SF series I watched when I was a kid. The blame for these rests, by the way, entirely on my father, who used to watch them on PBS when I was young. It’s his fault I got into SF. My mom’s to blame for giving me the Lord of the Rings boxed set on my 8th birthday. ...
Via boingboing, I found a great LA Weekly profile of Devo co-founder Mark Motherbaugh’s turn from New Wave post-punk icon to noted, “quirky”, soundtrack and jingle writer for his omni-art creative emporium, ‘Mutato’. That swept me back thirty years to those dusty shelves in the back of the Uxbridge Free Public Library’s fiction stacks, and “The Metallic Muse”, a collection of wonderful stories by the writer with the weird name, Lloyd Biggle Jr. You don’t hear much about him anymore. I don’t think I ever found even one other person who had ever even heard of him until I saw Orson Scott Card do a reading at a Baycon one year, and he mentioned how Biggle’s story “Tunesmith” got him into SF as a kid. (And he would later do a double-book with his story “Eye for an Eye” on one side, and Biggle’s “Tunesmith” on the other). ...
I don’t game all the time, though you wouldn’t know it from this blog. I also enjoy reading, dinking around with 3D renders, playing real instruments (gotta keep my pennywhistle skills up should I find an Irish band without one), writing fiction…. Anyway. I planned awhile back to try and branch out to perhaps other interesting things besides MMOs, but I’m not really sure how to go about it. But what the heck. We all start these blogs because we’re passionate about something, maybe many things, and we want to talk about it, and I want to talk about science fiction. If Abalieno can start talking about fantasy books over on Cesspit, I can talk about SF (and some fantasy too!) here. I’ve added back the categories over on the left there, so if you want to just read the MMO stuff, you can! ...
Way back in the 70s, Vernor Vinge wrote a short story called “True Names” which is about a bunch of people who hang out in a virtual world, talk, hack, have fun… until some of them start dying, one or more of them may not be human at all, and the only way to find out what’s really happening is to leave the virtual world and meet up in real life to defeat an enemy that wants to kill them all. ...
Countdown for blast-off. X Minus 5, 4, 3, 2, X Minus 1, Fire. From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future. Adventures in which you will live in a million could-be years on a thousand maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Corporation in cooperation with Galaxy Magazine presents . . . . X Minus One ...