Well, I have submitted the final corrected version of my paper on Korean SF films in the 21st century to Acta Koreana: it’s been approved for publication, pending those edits, so I figure that’s one more paper in the can, to bring my current total of pending academic publications to two: “Politics, Ecology on the Korean Left: Anti-Americanism and Environmental Dystopia in The Host” supposedly forthcoming in the Arena Journal. “Another Undiscovered Country: Culture and the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in 21st-Century South Korean Cinema,” which if all goes well should be appearing in Acta Koreana sometime …
Category: SF
HP Lovecraft and the (Monkey) Puzzle of the “Good Lovecraftian Film”
I was talking with my friend Chris about a bunch of SF- (and, to a lesser degree, fantasy-) -related things the other day — one of those discussions where you are trying to get at the heart of how we read genre and why, reader/viewer expectations for genre texts and media, and so on. One of the interesting points that came up was how it’s so difficult to make a good Lovecraftian film, and the fact that people keep trying and trying. This has stuck out in my mind as a question to myself, since for a few months now …
Yeasts and Gaming and Why I Wish There Was 30 Hours in the Day
Well, there are things that are new, but I’m trying to stem the tide of crap and use my blog to talk about things either neat and shiny, or interesting and cool, or personal-but-not-complainy. So anyway, let’s see. Coming home to find the Bavarian Weizen I’m got brewing is cool. It’s pretty encouraging because it’s actually bubbling like crazy now. It took about 40 hours to start up, but now it’s going well.I’ll probably try to pitch a second wheat beer, same approximate grist but slightly different hopping, onto the yeast cake and build it up a little more, when …
Some Stuff to Check Out
Stories: That New Yorker story about the AD&D gaming group… what? Yes, really, and it’s pretty good, too. (Thanks for the link, was it Ben?) Some MP3s narrated by Miette: Alfred Jarry’s “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race” and the story it inspired, JG Ballard’s “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.” Okay, this is just a book review, but I loved this book, and have had it in my mind often lately, for reasons obvious to those who are in the know, but which those who don’t know might guess wrongly about. …
Subscribing to eMagazines Online from Abroad
You know, I expected this was going to be easier. I mean, why should it be harder to subscribe to the electronic version of a magazine than to the paper version? It ought to be a lot easier, considering that you don’t have postal workers and airplanes and delivery trucks involved in the electronic delivery. This was what I was thinking when I decided to shift from print magazine subscriptions to online ones, anyway. Since I’m considering getting some kind of tablet computer this year, or maybe a used iPad (since the newer generation is out now), it would mean a …
Where are the Robots Indeed?
I was thinking the other day, when work by human workers at Fukushima had to halt completely due to radiation levels, why the hell no robots were being used to continue work onsite. Seems I wasn’t the only one to think of this, and now even BoingBoing had picked up on it. I want to recall my recent post about robotics for a moment. If you look at the article above, the point is made that Japanese robotics research has lately involved building robots that do things like run marathons, play the saxophone– –and I’ll confess I’m not in principle against …
Books and Covers?
I think it says a lot about us, and about our approach to robotics (and to AI, likely) that we coo and wow over how much robots can be made to look like us: Not that I think the verisimilitude would be easy, but folks, these things are profoundly not-us, and the more we try to hide that away, the more it will become apparent, and bother us. In the long run, all this investment of money into research and prototyping suggests that robots are thought to be useful in some kind of economic sense–not that they ought to have …
Lovecrafty Links
Too busy to post that review of my trip to Italy–it’s coming soon–so here are some links: not really a “walking cactus” but a look at some weird critters from 520 million years ago, this looks right out of HPL’s nightmares like Lovecraft? Facebook’s got a feed for the Lovecraft e-zine, so you can sign up for tidbits… and of course go look at the zine itself! here’s a free ebook containing (almost) all of Lovecraft’s prose works, courtesy of Cthulhu Chick (yes, yes, most of it has been available online since forever, but it’s all in one single file, …
More About Korean SF, and Some Dougal Dixon Links
You might think that I’ve given up on the topic, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve been working on a few papers on the subject. I don’t know if they’ll ever see the light of day, but I’m sending them out, slowly. In the meantime, I’ve had a few discussions with Anselmo Quemot, a blogger over at Acheron LV-426. You can see the discussions in the comment threads to these two posts: Placing the Future in South Korea? An open letter to Gord Sellar about South Korean sci fi Acheron LV-426 is full of other interesting stuff, too; it was …
Jazz and SF
I’ve heard people, time and again, compare jazz to SF in terms of them both being very “American” artforms, and, along with the cowboy movie, among America’s original contributions to the common human repository of art and culture. The cowboy movie, I’m afraid, has roots that go way deeper than American history, which is why it resonates so powerfully with other forms of literature and narrative. I see a lot of the Gothic novel in the Western, and a lot of the Bible too. As for SF, let’s be honest: it didn’t really begin in America: the historian/theorists can fight …