Category: Uncategorized

One literary passage, translated by two different people. Interesting if you read translated lit and wonder about how well the sense of the work survives.
Awful Library Books – librarian snark at books being stripped from the collection.
This one is not safe for work, not because of violence or nudity but because of a bit of Japanese-cultural sexual weirdness. But actually I think this is even less safe for your sanity. It can only be: RoboGeisha
(from Al) On a cruise, no-one can hear you scream
100 characters from science fiction drawn in the Simpsons style.
Writer types: ten fiction editors talk about what they look for in submissions.
And finally… Got that not-so-fresh feeling? Afflicted by a sense of unnameable dread at your insignificance against the eldritch depths of space? Here’s the product for you!

This is the episode that takes it up a notch. It does so. It does so smartly and enthusiastically and swiftly. It is good stuff.
It means that I’m going to stick with Dollhouse to the end. What they are doing here is seriously interesting ideas TV, and there’s precious little of that on the box.
Warning, however: the procedural stuff that so conspicuously failed to sing in the first five episodes will still be a major part of the show for the rest of the season. We shall hope that it is done more cleverly than it has been so far; we shall hope also the interesting stuff is integrated into the procedural content, rather than sitting alongside it as has been the case in most of the episodes so far. Whether or not this is achieved will determine whether Dollhouse will be remembered as an incredible one-season show that took a little while to hit its stride, or a weird one-season oddity with great ideas and poor execution.
The fan service/bra shots moments were noticeably missing this episode, too. This episode makes it abundantly clear that they do know what they are doing, and while you can argue their choices, they aren’t putting in salacious content without being aware of the implications. They are, in fact, aggressively positioning the viewer as complicit in systems of exploitation and abuse. The way the episode ended, with a beautiful heartbreaking song as [edited because it was a spoiler], seemed like it was reaching too far except it also worked on its own terms – because despite myself I did sympathise with that [character].
(Prediction: within a week there will be on YouTube a “clips compilation” from Dollhouse eps 1-5 gathering all the important bits together, so you can watch all the background you need then jump straight into episode 6.)
[Apologies for the spoilers. They were minor but they were there. Brain was not in gear.]

Getting away from all that serious stuff for a bit, I want to give due respect: the Alligator’s birthday adventure on Friday night was incredibly fun.
How it worked: we turned up for drinks at Mollys, and split into teams. The Alligator, looking smug, issued each team a water pistol and an envelope full of clues. We had to figure out the locations referenced by the clues, and snap photos of our team members at the locations; if the location was a bar, it was compulsory to have a drink and get a camera shot of the proof. One clue marked the final location; first team there with a full set of correct photos won the trophy.
(Yeah, he made a trophy. It looked like a large silver phallus with the words “smarts” and “speed” on it, and was therefore extremely desirable and a worthy object of competition.)
So we burst out into the night and proceeded to run around Wellington, solving clues, snapping photos, downing shots, and having a grand old time. Seriously, it was a huge amount of fun, easily the most stupidly good time I’ve had in a while. (Wedding doesn’t count of course because that was a non-stupid good time.) There’s just something straightforwardly cool about rocketing around the streets, taking goofy photos and trying to make sense of clues, then stopping for a drink. And the water pistols… well, we didn’t spot the other team so ours didn’t get used. But it was cool to have it there…
Take this as proof of concept that you can do the same sort of thing in future. I reckon it would be more fun with more teams; six or so would have been even more fun. Give it a try for your next work teambuilding exercise, sports team social, or religious meeting. If you’re in Wellington you can even steal the Alligator’s clues.
(All y’all who didn’t make it, you really missed out on something special. This alligator, he’s a partyin’ alligator, and that’s all there is to it.)

Those smouldering eyes are guaranteed to get your sleighbells ringing, know what I mean?
Signing off for the year. Much love to the From the Morgue whanau. See y’all in 2008!
[edit: sorry for the giant hoff. That’s what you do when you rush out the door.]

Attention. This is your Friday Linky.
Warren Ellis has been recommending the inferior 4+1 weblog for a while – a collective LJ by a bunch of SF novelists. He particularly recommended this piece, and I recommend it too. Lucius Shepherd shares a true story about a man who fights a monkey. And then doesn’t learn his lesson. Gordon was given a pair of boxing gloves and ushered into the pit. He was in good spirits. A few minutes later, a half-grown chimp was shoved through a door in the pit wall…
My favourite thing of the week was revealed to me on Blogorrhoea. It is called speak you’re branes. It is a lovingly-collected assembly of all the comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say system that might induce you to bang your head against the wall. All gathered in one place, the wall-denting absurdities pile up so rapidly that it almost makes a danceable rhythm out of your head knocking into the plaster. Wonderful. This is now the world.
My *other* favourite thing of the week came from Svend. It is Square America, found vintage photos gathered into great categories. This one opens the “Photo Booth” category:

It’s great, this site, and will chew up your time in a very pleasant way.
I commend to you Make Tea Not War’s guide to life. “19. If you deride people who are trying to do something that is kind or generous or hospitable you are a twat.”
If you like escaping from rooms, d3vo supplies a good link. Escape from many rooms here.
Obligatory Friday linky geekness: Mr Jonny Nexus drew attention to a site called The Secret History of Star Wars, which is an exhaustively researched piece on the how we ended up with the cinematic pieces we did and what happened along the way. It is a 600-page book worth of stuff. I’ve only just barely skimmed it, but it does mention how in early drafts Lucas called the dark side of the force “the bogan”, which explains to Aussies and Kiwis why Darth Vader always wore black. Presumably he also listened to AC/DC and drove a Holden.
Also: coincidental Achewood.
This was your linky. It is Friday.

It was a benign mole.
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So Peter J is doing The Hobbit. Suppose I should probably read the second half of the book then, what?

The Kite Runner, a bestselling first novel by Khaled Hosseini. It is now a film that has made headlines for the treatment of its young actors in their native Afghanistan.
What I find most remarkable is how Hosseini crafted some engaging and credible children for the first half of the book, and yet laboured the second half with a magical redemption child of the most cloying and unbelievable type. The contrast is amazing.

“Astuteness” is a very clumsy word, isn’t it? It should be something different, something that delights you when you say it, like “perspicacity”. Ah, perspicacity, now there’s a word that knows how to say what it’s trying to say.
Wgtn journo-blog Poneke has delivered some news that the mainstream media, er, printed shortly afterwards – the evidence against Peter Ellis is very dubious indeed.
Ellis is the man at the centre of one of NZ’s most discussed criminal cases. He was convicted in 1993 of sexual abuse of children, and served six years, maintaining his innocence the whole time. As well he should have done – the whole affair was a textbook example of the type of Satanic Panic that turned up occasionally throughout the 80s and early 90s, where suggestive children are led into describing wild tales of ritual abuse. The prosecution excised all the wild bits of the stories and just left in the more conventional evidence, and Ellis went down for the crime. Many who were involved in the prosecution fiercely maintain his guilt, but public opinion was always iffy and came down firmly on the side of his innocence with the publication of Lynley Hood’s incredible account of the case, A City Possessed.
The source of this news is the Innocence Project, which grew out of the Psyc department at Victoria University, principally driven by Prof Maryanne Garry, who is passionate about how misconceptions about psychology can damage the course of justice. Her principal interest is memory, and particularly the fallibility of eyewitness testimony and the suggestibility of witnesses. Maryanne taught me for several years, and I unashamedly admit that she has convinced me about these matters. Ellis should have his name cleared. It is an appalling state of affairs that the merits of his case are still being argued.
The Innocence Project (led by Dr Matthew Gerrie) means to draw attention to cases where wrongful conviction is a distinct possibility. The Scott Watson case, another prominent conviction about which New Zealand has become uneasy, has also received attention.
I applaud the Innocence Project, and look forward to the day when our collective wisdom about ourselves has grown to the point that it will no longer be necessary.
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Also on the wires: in Colombia, the government has mounted a big campaign to stop people from involving themselves with the drug trade. The premise of the campaign: what would your mother say? As Bob Harris notes at the link, I can’t quite see that working over here…

The miracle is that I actually went, of my own volition, to a medical service provider in the past week. It’s a plural, actually, because I went twice over.
First to a physiotherapist about my back; she gave me some exercises and said it’ll be better in a couple weeks. Which I hope and expect it shall be. Today I even larked about in a field with a frisbee and didn’t end up in agony, so that’s a very good sign. (Although I admit being perturbed early on – after the injury, I noticed the warmth of the shower made me feel much less painful. So I applied a hot water bottle to my back and felt much better. Then a physiotherapist mate of mine asked me, upon learning of the injury, “are you icing it regularly?” “Er, yes,” I ventured, while the roasting heat of the hot water bottle gave my spinal column a thorough toasting.)
Second to a General Practitioner, to inspect a mole that had become Supicious TM. I’d been suspecting it of perfidy for some time, and after I caught it whispering in a foreign language the other day, I figured that was quite enough. So I popped into a GP and had the whole thing chopped out with a scalpel and sent off to the Guantanamo Bay for skin features, where they will test it to see if it was cancerous or if it was just suspicion-inducing. (In the War on Skin Cancer, moles are innocent until proven guilty.)
Good lord, Christmas is just around the corner. 2007 is almost done for!

Another Friday has rolled around, and Christmas is around the corner. Few responses to my anti-Fables vitriol; I expect all the Fables lovers are making friends-locked LJ posts to talk about me behind my back. Well, when my X-Ray Specs arrive in the mail I will read all of those hidden posts, so you all better just watch out! (Also I will see through walls. Maybe YOUR walls!)
First review of Unearthly: Cosmic Heroes has come in, and it’s a nice 4-star thumbs up! Calls the book “very well written”, which made me very happy. It’s easily the most successful thing I’ve written RPG-wise, having reached the heady heights of being a “Copper Pick” and briefly making it into the Top 10 of the RPGNow Top Sellers chart. Hurray, etc.
Remember early-80s Indiana Jones rip-off Tales of the Gold Monkey? I sure do, with its seaplane and its gold monkey! Refresh your memory with this little-seen comic set in the GoldMonkeyVerse! I can only presume that the dude who scanned this in is the same one who enhanced the TotGM wikipedia page with a detailed chronology for the show’s fictional backstory, beginning a thousand years before the first episode.
I like that I got to say “GoldMonkeyVerse”.
Catching up on Stephen Fry’s blog got me to this post in which he talks about a dinner-table conversation that got a bit out of hand, and springboards into his view of the climate change situation – which, I was pleased to note, is somewhat familiar. Check it out..
And speaking of blogging, especially in light of Doris Lessing’s lecture discussed earlier this week (and in which I messed up the link to the lecture, thanks Karen): the other moose pointed me at the blog of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Had to check the spelling on that. Got two of the vowels the wrong way around.) The President’s blog does seem to originate from his office – his pledge to spend “15 minutes a month” on the blog sounds reasonable for a very busy head of state whose main problem is PR. And speaking of that main problem, take a look at the site. It shows reader comments on the right of the screen, apparently unedited, tagged only with the flag of the poster. It’s flabbergasting. Keep an eye out for the American flags, and you’ll see such gems as: “die slow …” “You are a nigger” “Shut up please, would you? I get headache reading your nonsense stuff.” and “You are a terrible, despicable human being. You WILL be attacked by the US or Israel and will be destroyed!”. These comments are turning up on the webpage of the Iranian President! I am astonished. Now, if there’s one thing all Iranian leaders know, it is how to exercise the power of censorship. And I can’t imagine the decision being made to allow this stuff without it being cleared with him first. That means it must be deliberate on his part – he’s canny enough to see the merit in letting everyone see the internet sewer as it comes crawling out. But, really. Can you imagine a Western leader who’d let that kind of stuff stand?
Meanwhile, at home, the office of the NZ Prime Minister comments, on the record, to a blog discussion. I’m sure it was meant to say “pwned” at the end.
Or perhaps Merriam-Webster’s Word of 07, “woot”. (Has anyone else realised that the abbreviation of Word of 2007 is Wo07? That’s right – woot acronymises its own award!)
I downloaded ZoneAlarm earlier, to get my firewall situation under control. Install went very smoothly, but right afterwards it tried to use my browser to open up an intro tutorial. Which would be fine, except that it hadn’t given the browser permission to access the net yet. Someone didn’t quite think that through. It reminded me of the charity collection can we used to have at the Todman St flat, the one that said “Opening Instructions Inside”.
Also, I’m trying out Google Analytics on my Apocalypse site to keep track of traffic. Go on, click through and give me some stats to look at why don’t you…
Enough of this madness. Time for different madness. Such as those guys from Knocked Up in a zombie apocalypse film trailer.