They keep stealing my ideas

For a while, a certain breed of writer/Doctor Who geek was near-certain to have a pitch or two (or three) for the Doctor Who: New Adventures line of spin-off novels, by Virgin Publishing. In the 90s these kept the Who mythos alive and, surprise surprise, they were actually very good – inventive, quirky, and boundary-pushing in ways you can only be when your parent TV show has been dead for years and it never played by its own rules either. These were followed by another line of spin-offs by the BBC, which weren’t as good, but were sometimes just as wild and woolly and neat. It’s not just fans who think there was quality in there -a significant number of people who worked on the hugely successful Who TV revival earlier wrote for Virgin or the BBC.

Guilty as charged, m’lud. (Nor was I alone, as a certain award-winning Wellington-based theatrical personage might admit after a few drinks.)

I had, in truth, only three worthwhile ideas for Doctor Who novels.

Only one of them actually got submitted. This was given a bemused but encouraging rejection, as recorded on this blog here. The letter said “the idea of the support group set up for victims of the Doctor’s actions is a little too controversial to use as the basis of a novel.” Roll on the series revival, and the episode Love and Monsters, about a support group set up for victims of the Doctor’s actions. Well okay, not victims of the Doctor, more like fanboys of, but the core idea has a lot of similarities. An UNCANNY number of similarities. Like they STOLE MY IDEA.

This past weekend’s episode of Doctor Who was called The Lodger. I haven’t seen it yet because it hasn’t screened in New Zealand yet and there’s no possible way I could acquire it otherwise. It was about the Doctor going to live in a flat with ordinary people, while trying to make sense of a mystery unfolding around them. Here is the trailer for it:

This is UNCANNILY like one of my other two really good ideas:

An uninhabited bedroom, one of four in a cramped flat in Pilham Street, right on the outskirts of London. An ad goes up at the local video store. Only one person answers it. All three flatmates are there when he shows up to take a look at the place. He’s odder and older than any of them, with a clownish manner and a rolling Scottish brogue. A loon for sure, but probably harmless, and most importantly he has money. So he moves in. He becomes that old guy that some flats seemed to have, only he’s in this flat, not some other one. He doesn’t ever tell them his name, says he doesn’t have one, only a title. The Doctor.

He sure doesn’t seem to sleep very much. Up all night. Once Paul went to the kitchen for water at 3am and the Doctor was in there frying up a scale model of an aircraft carrier, flipping it over with a fish slice and playing the spoons with his spare hand. Paul had drunk his water and gone back to bed.

And then there are those times when the whole flat is asleep except the Doctor, who is in the living room. And he’s talking to someone with a sad, sad voice. She says she’s from the future. She says she might kill herself. She sounds like she means it.

I think it’s clear that they STOLE THIS IDEA too, which is even more sinister because I never even sent this one anywhere.

I have only one good idea for a Doctor Who story left. No, I’m not telling you what it is, are you insane? IT WILL BE STOLEN. They are very good at theft! And no I wouldn’t put it past them. Just look at what Jennifer Aniston and Vin Diesel did to steal GI Joe 2, and how they keep the secret that there are 25 slightly-different Megan Foxes! TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION.

SO THAT IS MY ADVICE FOR WRITERS OUT THEREYOU NEED TO WRITE YOUR IDEAS AND MAKE THEM FAST AND TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THEM AND SEND THEM TO PREDISENT OBAMA SO HE HAS PROOF WHEN IN TEN YEARS TIME THEY MAKE YOUR IDEA THAT IT WAS YOUR IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE AND OTHERWISE PEOPLE WILL SAY YOU ARE CRAZY BUT YOU CAN TELL THEM TO CALL UP PRESIDENT OBAMA IF THEY DON’T BELIEVE YOU

Also, Matt Smith is a great Doctor.

[edit: Megan Fox link fixed. Clicky, it’s worth it.]

It’s An Outrage Linky

I know it’s been a busy week when the most substantial blog post amounts to “I wear pyjamas”.

Play Paintball with the cast of the Wire: a great fundraiser idea, or the greatest ever fundraising idea? It’s on tomorrow in New York, still time to sell all your possessions and go.

Hot nerds reading comics. If I remember right, Warren Ellis dared them to; an hour later this was a real thing.

This American Life’s Ira Glass on the importance of wrongness. And other stuff. It’s a neat interview.

OffBlack showcases an amazing timelapse video of the Space Shuttle being readied for launch (and launching).

Investigative foodery of the weirdest kind: figuring out how to replicate McDonald’s fries at home via reverse engineering. Crazy detailed with lots of photos.

Sometimes you can tell which staff member is the IT guy.

The shortest possible game of Monopoly: 21 seconds

Been lots of sarcastic, cynical chatter lately about how those Glee club kids are copyright infringers. See here and here for the best of it.

Dude makes his own version of Rambo: First Blood in his basement, for $96, starring himself in all the roles.

And finally… an unlikely product idea from Achewood is now available for realsies.

Clothes Maketh The Man

Well, how about that. Pyjamas are way better than I remember them being.

Maybe it goes along with having your own hoose? And with winter. And a fireplace. Nothing like sitting in front of a fireplace in your own hoose in winter, wearing a good set of handsome pyjamas.

PJs, I take back everything bad I ever said about you. You’re all right by me.

ICONS for oil spill relief

More news related to ICONS, the new RPG for which I have a minor co-author credit: all sales from the forthcoming EPUB and MOBI-format editions are going to relief efforts around the Gulf oil spill. So if you like those formats, consider making that purchase (when it becomes available).

Adamant Entertainment and Steve Kenson will be devoting 100% of the proceeds of the 2010 sales of a special EPUB and MOBI-format release of ICONS: Superpowered Roleplaying to relief efforts surrounding the Gulf oil spill.

On April 20th, 2010, an explosion on the BP operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven crew members, sparking the greatest environmental disaster in United States history. Current estimates put the amount of oil being discharged from the broken well at above 1,050,000 US gallons per day, with no end in sight, devastating wildlife and fishing communities along the Gulf coast, potentially moving into the Florida Keys and up the Eastern seaboard of the United States by later this summer.

“My grandfather was a clammer, and worked on the water nearly his entire life,” says Gareth-Michael Skarka, Director of Adamant Entertainment, “and my brother has worked as a fishing captain — I wanted to do something for those whose livelihood depends on the sea, as well as contributing to ongoing conservancy and clean-up efforts. It seemed to me that a game encouraging players to become a hero represented the perfect outlet for this.”

“New Orleans is a place very dear to me,” adds Steve Kenson, designer of ICONS, “and I’ve wanted to be able to do something for this tragedy.”

ICONS is the newest superheroic roleplaying game designed by Steve Kenson, published by Adamant Entertainment– now available in PDF and shipping to game stores world-wide in the next two weeks. The game is currently also being readied for release in the EPUB format for sale on Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble and Sony via Smashwords.com and for the Kindle-ready MOBI format for release via Amazon., and should be available this month across those sales sites, and for download via DriveThruRPG and RPGNow.

From June through December 2010, all proceeds from the sales of the EPUB and MOBI versions of the game will be donated to the Gulf oil spill funds of Oceana, the largest international organization focused solely on ocean conservation, and The Greater New Orleans Fund, who are providing critical services to Gulf fishermen and communities directly impacted by the disaster.

Oceana, an international ocean conservation group, works to restore and protect the world’s oceans. For more information, please visit http://www.Oceana.org.

For more information on the Greater New Orleans Foundation’s Gulf Oil Spill Fund, please visit their website.

The “Be A Hero” editions of ICONS will be released in June. Watch for further announcements of their availability on Adamant Entertainment’s website, or via Twitter at AdamantEnt.

Take Linky With Water

Woke up at 4am with horrible headache and feeling bleah. Nurofen has helped. But perhaps I need stronger medicine – a strong, clean dose of linky?

IRON BABY

Doctor Who section:
Who theme recreated with guitar and effect pedals. And also with giant Tesla coils.

A wonderfully inventive map of the TARDIS. Definitely a different imaginative approach to mine, but I love the creativity on display here.

More map goodness: anagram tube map

Possibly my favourite ever article on the AV Club, which is saying something: Cinematic apocalypses, and how much we should worry about them in the real world

Depressing oil spill section: China linked to this in comments earlier this week – a short video, by someone who knows how harm is prevented during oil spill events, showing clearly and obviously how this is not being done in this case. Contains bad language born of massive frustration. Also, via making light, How you get a BP: Because for decades now, wherever some herkimer-jerkimer objected that our business was coming on a little too strong for their precious “community,” we had the answer that never failed: Step aside, buddy, you’re standing in the way of the Free Market.

Via everyone, a LEGO felt-tip-matrix printer:

And finally, via Jenni, Girls in Cardigans. Photos of girls in cardigans around Wellington. Except… not.

Broader, not higher, please

Another few hours invested in tech support for the parents, and it always inspires the same feeling: massive resentment.

Not at the parents, of course, who are lovely and patient and appreciative. No, at the stupid Microsoft-led home computer industry that still, 30 years in, hasn’t worked out how to make it easy to work with their material. Basic needs that have been iterated billions of times around the world – “my old computer isn’t working any more, how do I get all my material across to the new one I just bought?”, “I mistakenly allowed this program to launch automatically when I turn the computer on, how do I stop it?” – are frustratingly complex to resolve. Help systems are incomplete, assume too much, or are downright misleading. The desktop + files metaphor is a nightmare. (And lets not even mention the havoc unleashed by switching platforms.)

Illustrative point: two people are in a room together with their laptops, connected to the same wireless network, and they want to share files. It is several orders of magnitude simpler for them to sign up to Dropbox, using servers on the other side of the world, than to use the wireless hub they’re both ten feet away from.

This is boneheaded and wasteful in the extreme. Unfortunately, it’s what we’re stuck with. There is, apparently, no consumer imperative driving OS designers to build broader, more usable, more accessible forms. The consumer imperative is overwhelmingly for building higher: teetering sky towers of speed and prowess that offer only one narrow stairway up. (Honorable and notable exception: the iPad)

I’m not suggesting that building broader would be easy, mind you. Usability is hard. Distilling complex systems of interdependent logic into usable everyday tools is an enormous challenge. But, come on. We deserve better than this. We *need* better than this.

I just can’t figure out why there isn’t more focus on this. Surely all those designers are doing parental tech support too, right? Forget dollars – isn’t that motivation enough?

ICONS pdf available

The electronic version of ICONS is now available! Currently half-price! US$15, down from US$30.

The print version is shipping mid-month if you want to order it through your friendly neighbourhood game store or direct from the publishers.

Very pleased to see it hit!

The character generation process is almost a game in itself. In our playtest group (Dale, Jenni, James P and Norman) we ended up with some inspiring and weird characters. James rolled up a character with almost the same powers as Jenni’s character Salamandress, just a bit more useless. James turned this sows ear into a super-strong purse by deciding his character was in fact a huge fan of Salamandress and had built a metal suit that copied her powers, poorly. Thus was born Robo-Zard! Poor, terrifying Robo-Zard. (Other characters also extremely cool. huzzah!)

Gaza Flotilla

Lots of politics, lots of misinformation, lots of chaff over the flotilla/blockade/raid/deaths.

I’ve seen footage of Israeli soldiers rapelling to the deck of a ship and being met by a bunch of people beating them with poles. The flotilla’s twitter feed says there’s video of soldiers landing and opening fire but I haven’t seen that anywhere. These might have been on different boats, it’s hard to know. The exact course of events during this raid will be picked over at length, as will the legal basis for Israel’s action and for resistance to that action by people on the boats.

Unchanged is the bigger picture. The blockade of Gaza is a massive collective punishment. Basic supplies in the territory are insufficient. Previous aid shipments have been turned away. Israeli ambassador on Radio NZ this morning said that the flotilla was a political provocation; of course it was. The flotilla wanted to either make it through the blockade, or to be stopped by it and arrested and deported; either way they get political wins. Israel’s decision to drop armed commandoes on to the flotilla at 4.30am was a bizarre answer to what was essentially a political problem. Surely there are other ways to stop ships arriving in a blaze of publicity to test your blockade, ways that don’t risk the deaths of unarmed civilians, or indeed risk the deaths of Israeli personnel.

There is already massive international condemnation for Israel’s actions in this raid. Rightly so. But I can’t help but wonder how there is any way back to peace. Israel is increasingly isolated politically, even the US is standing at a distance from it now, but its status as a regional power is undisputed. If there’s any way to wind back the pressure in the Middle East, I just can’t see it. And the only other way to go is towards confrontation.

It’s an unhappy day.

Obama is failing the planet

Reuters 30 May 2010:

Although the Obama administration has put the blame squarely on BP, polls show Americans are losing faith in the government’s ability to mitigate the disaster.
In his second visit to the Gulf in the 40-day crisis on Friday, Obama faced criticism that he responded too slowly. He told people in Louisiana that they “will not be left behind” and that the “buck stops” with him.
There is not much Obama can do other than apply pressure to BP to get it right and put his best scientists in the room. The government has no deep-sea oil technology of its own.

I, personally, don’t understand why Obama hasn’t swum down to the leak and used his super-breath to blow all that oil down into the centre of the earth, then used his heat-vision to weld the top of the pipe shut, then flown over the surface of the ocean at super-speed and scooped up the oil inside a gigantic satellite dish, then poured it gently into a gigantic tank for later use. I think it’s because he doesn’t love America/because he is a corporate tool. Curse you Obama!

[The scale and the depressing inevitability of the oil disaster make me furious, but not as much as the fact that BP’s gonna emerge from this with little more than scuffs.]