Yes, really. A former Canadian defence minister says be believes advanced technology from extraterrestrial civilizations offers the best hope to “save our planet” from the perils of climate change. Which is a tremendous insult to all the people working in alternative energy, technology, science, research, for the environment, studying climate change, studying ecology, and to the mothers and fathers and spouses who tell one another and the kids to turn off the lights when they got to bed. What an embarrassment. (And yeah, I read this as a link from a story about Haut’s letter on Roswell, which actually hit …
Month: July 2007
Monohomouniwoori
My internet connection was blocked for half an hour today, which is, yes, a short time, but it was infuriating. It was infuriating because it happens every semester. The IT guys on on campus are always installing some new kind of “security” or “firewall” or “anti-virus” application. So for half an hour, the University server showed me this everytime I tried to connect to the Net. It was telling me that I could not access the Internet unless I installed something called InciterX. Of course, that’s some kind of Windows thing, but when I searched for informaiton on it on …
Charles on Translation
Charles at Liminality has some interesting things to say about translation. Personally, while I have to respect anyone who translates a whole book, or even a whole short story, I’ve come across some in Korea that are just clinkers, and I’ve discovered at least one translator who is consistently poor, or at least, I haven’t liked any of the things I’d read that were translated by him. Lime and I looked through the list in the back of one of my books, which is from a pretty ubiquitous line of translated Korean short stories — The Portable Library of Korean …
Recommencing
I’ve started again, after way too long away. I never got a really satisfactory explanation of the whole continuous-awareness-of-heartbeat thing but anyway I’m less freaked-out about it now. Did 15 minutes on the treadmill and 20 minutes on the stationary bike. That’s enough for a first day back.
Write-a-Thon Week 3
Off to a good start this week, in a way. I decided to take a break from To the Happy Country for today, and I started work on a new ghost story set in my home province of Saskatchewan, called The Empty Slough. It’s meandering, but that’s fine: I fully expect to draft it to roughly 5000 words and then cut 30-40% of that in the end. It’s a weird ghost story, but I’ll say nothing more about that until I find out whether it works or not, since the “twist” in the story is metaphysical, and by “metaphysical” I …
Write-a-Thon, Week 2 Complete
Whew. I just ran right to the end of the stuff I thought up yesterday and today, and I have a vague idea what’s coming next, but I have some time tomorrow to think it over and plan it out. Plus a lot of time in the next week to work on it. Here’s my wordcount update. Saturday, June 30th, 2007 To the Happy Country…: 4418 words Weekly Total: 15166 words Writhathon Total: 30,845 Four more weeks to go, and Lime’s laughing at me for finally figuring out that, yeah, my goals and quotas were a bit, well, optimistic. But …
Pimping Hell
Postcards from Hell is a new fiction venue that sends you little stories on little postcards. It’s a new market, which is a rare bird in SF these days, and the start of something big… maybe. But for it to be that, it has to pay for itself. That depends on how many people are willing to pay a little chunk of money for a subscription. 13 weeks, 13 stories, and the cost (for subscribers in the US) is $6.66. You gotta love that. And anyway, it’s a cool idea. I thought it was a cool idea as soon as …
Things You Learn Surfing the OED
Here I am, looking for a K-word to complete an acronym for a Superhero Teams Control Board — the Shoopah Units Control K_______ — and what do I find? A beautiful new word: kakistocracy “The government of a state by the worst citizens.” That’s just begging to be used in a title somewhere. There’s a story I’ve long wanted to write, about a mailing list meltdown I experienced once, long ago. I always wanted to write something of an allegory about it set in a space station, or a generation ship, or something. This word will be in the title …