First, one of my favorite Beastie Boys tunes, and one of my all-time favorite videos:

I wasn’t blogging last week when MCA (a/k/a Adam Yauch) passed away, and I don’t think I would have said much about him had I been: The Beastie Boys were never a big influence for me, and despite being a teen in the early 90s, I wasn’t their target demographic. Something about how I didn’t think, at least at the time, that anyone needed to fight, as such, for their right to party. (That and I did, and still do, find a lot of their early stuff to be mired in easy misogyny, but let’s not speak (too) ill of the dead.)

That said, I realized that this would be a perfect time, albeit two years late, to propound on one of my favorite paradoxes involving The Beastie Boys. That being, if they’re around in the Star Trek universe, for young Kirk to be listening to in his step-dad’s car in the latest Trek movie, how can they refer to the fictional Mr. Spock in their song “Intergalactic”? I think the lyric specifically is “like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock.”

And the answer actually came to me pretty quickly, because in Star Trek IV, Spock is referred to by name in public and… knocks out some annoying punk, to applause, on a city bus with a pinch on the neck. And then it kind of writes itself. Spock and Kirk and company aren’t aware of it, but “Mr. Spock” becomes a sort of folk hero in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s, big enough to come to the awareness of MCA, et al., and it’s just the kind of obscure, local, subculturish thing they’d include in one of their songs.

Dumb and unnecessary, but I thought I’d share anyway and let that little bit of geekery stand in for a proper tribute to Yauch.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

• I did this thing last night that I do sometimes wherein I go to bed almost as soon as I get home (my wife totally loves me), then get up somewhere between 10 and midnight, then basically take a long nap just before it’s time to get up for the day. For some reason, this completely recharges my batteries. I kind of wish it were something I could do on a really regular basis, but I’m afraid my wife doesn’t love me so much that she’ll let me get out of dinner, helping with homework, and bedtimes (to say the least) every night. And, oh yeah, I’d hate to miss out on my kids growing up or something.
• A bumper sticker I see too much around West Michigan: “Work Harder! Millions on Welfare Depend On You!” I realize that it’s supposed to be a put down of welfare or the poor, but whenever I see it, I think of it as a call to action. “Oh shit, you’re right!” is usually my reaction. I wish we had more of a “we’re in this together” attitude in this country, but if we ever did, we’ve lost it, and I fear what it would take to get it back.
• I could watch this all day, on infinite loop: Takedown. Watch it at least once, you won’t be sorry. (And no, not embedding it here, since it’s a rapidly cycling .gif)
• It turns out 2am is a great time to write, see point one. Also? As it turns out, the sort of music I’m listening to does actually impact how well I get into the mindset of writing in certain genres. Listening to Our Lady Peace’s Healthy in Paranoid Times [iTunes | Amazon] last night on the drive home actually put me in the mood to write cyberpunk. Which is odd, because I never have. But, it put me in that mood anyway.

I want to be excited about Prometheus. I see stills like the one above, and I really want to be excited about Prometheus. But I’m not.

Why?

Because it seems to fit in this movie genre bucket that I dislike. It’s as though movie makers have three of them, when it comes to science fiction with spaceships and other worlds and stuff. One is for Star Wars, one is for Star Trek, and the other is labelled “Survival Horror in Space.” And if you want to make a movie with spaceships, it has to fit in one of those buckets.

Alien? Sunshine? Event Horizon? Survival horror.

Hell, even 2001 is basically a horror movie in space. You have to step down to the B-grade, basically, to get to movies that are Star Wars-style adventures, and then they’re not always very good. Or, really, hardly any good at all. So then we’re left with the likes of Prometheus, which they’re marketing basically as survival horror, and you have Guillermo Del Toro throwing his hands up on one of his projects because Prometheus basically taps the same Lovecraftian horror vein. Which… if there’s one thing I like less than survival horror, it’s Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

And I get it, on some level. There’s been two ways to deal with aliens in science fiction movies, and one is “they’re just like us (no, really, they’re just like us)” of Star Trek/Star Wars, and the other is “they’re unspeakably different, no common ground, we’re hamburger to them” of the survival horror science fiction. (And by this I mean the, we go out there and seek them out aliens–aliens visiting Earth is a whole other thing.) There’s been very little middle ground in the last 30-40 years, it seems. Enemy Mine? The Last Starfighter? Can’t think of much more, and none recently, other than Serenity (which still had to have a horror element in the Reavers, so… blah).

Frankly, it’s kind of annoying. I think the spaceship-and-other-worlds spectacle is part of what the bigscreen experience is for and it’s been hijacked by Lucas, Rodenberry’s ghost, and horror. There are, there have to be other stories, other sorts of stories to tell. But either no one wants to tell them, or the studios don’t think they can make any money. Which, given the middling performance of Serenity, they might just be right.

Still, annoying. And disappointing. Which is why I can’t get excited for Prometheus. I appreciate it for what it is, and I wouldn’t want it not to be. But it’s not for me, and it’s one of those funny experiences, feeling outside of geekdom by not being able to get excited about this movie.

One of the other things that inspired my post on taking things a little slower was that I’ve taken to watching and rewatching streamed shows at a much slower pace than I’m used to, or most people do, altogether. Especially in my peer group and younger, there’s this almost unspoken understanding that when you rewatch something, or discover something several seasons in, you devour it in as short a time as possible. I remember doing that when I got the first three or four seasons of Stargate SG-1, years and years ago, sitting in my wife’s apartment, years before we were married, on Spring Break and just cycling through DVD after DVD.

And that was neat, and fun, because I had the time and I had an appetite for more of the story, more of the excitement.

Times being what they are, though, as a dad and husband and part-time writer and such, it’s a) nearly impossible to do that and b) by necessity, I’m discovering that I enjoy taking my time, even my first time through shows. Right now I’m working on watching Dr. Who (Nu Who, starting with Eccleston) and Farscape for the first time, and rewatching MacGyver, Stargate SG-1, and Burn Notice (though at some point all of those will turn into catch-ups as I lost the thread on all of them during their original runs). And I’m contemplating rolling on into Star Trek, X-Files, and a few others, eventually, at the same leisurely pace. (My one crushing disappointment, currently, is that I can’t seem to find Magnum PI streaming online, in its entirety anywhere.)

Obviously, this will take me a long time. Probably four years for Stargate SG-1 if I keep a steady once a week pace. But, honestly, that’s okay. I don’t get too torqued about spoilers (I know a TON about what happens in Who in the most recent seasons, so there’s not a lot of surprises there), and I don’t mind learning to savor some things again, giving me an opportunity to dwell on the episode I just watched for a while, without them all running together because I never watched them on their own. It will also, I hope, keep me from getting fatigued or exhausted with one show or another, which was a problem when I did watch a ton all at once, and I’ll be less likely to skip episodes that I have other-than-favorable memories of.

At any rate, this isn’t a manifesto or anything, but I would encourage you, gentle reader, to think about the way we interact with culture and consider whether a long-term thing might be ultimately more satisfying than a binge.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Hey, check it out:

“Jungle Walkers,” the story I wrote with Tobias Buckell for the Armored anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams, is featured as a teaser/sample thingy on io9.com. You can read it here. Of course, I’d still love for you to buy the book, as there’s a ton of great stories in there, but if you just can’t wait until next Tuesday, March 27, for it to actually hit the shelves, you can scope it out there.

For more information, including an interview with me and Tobias (and interviews with the other authors), checked out the Armored website. You can buy the book all over the place, but the ebook is only available from Baen Books’ online store.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

As of this fall, I’ll have been “on the internet” for 17 years, pretty much uninterrupted. (The longest single break I had was Boot Camp in 1999.) I think that’s probably enough time to have a good idea of how the internet has shaped discussions and changed how we interact with one another, and further to figure out how to react and respond to it.

The first thing to note is how intoxicating the rapid back-and-forth discussions can feel, at least for me, on the internet. In person, I really love long, in-depth discussions, and relish them when I find them. The exchange of ideas and information spurs the brain to action and stimulates the imagination. I’m not sure precisely what’s different about blog- and forum- and Twitter-based discussions, but there is something there, maybe with just enough isolation from the other people involved, but enough immediacy to make a rapid response the expectation.

Now, to me, that’s often led to a heated atmosphere in online discussion. Again, something about the combination of immediacy and distance creates a friction that can (often but certainly not always) create an atmosphere that is really the opposite of conversation and rational debate. In some ways, I suppose it just intensifies certain human behaviors, but at least for me personally, I’m thinking they’re the sort that can use some ratcheting down of intensity. Being more slow and deliberate allows the opportunity to let arguments and counterpoints sink in, time to digest as it were, and maybe lead to more fruitful responses.

This is, basically, antithetical to how the observed internet culture works currently. Rather than allowing conversations to slowly grow and evolve, for facts to be uncovered, for analysis to be teased out, blog posts have to be commented on within 48 hours or not at all (with occasional exceptions). A Tweet is old news by the time six or eight hours have gone by. Everything has to burn hot, intense, immediate… and then we forget about it. Protests are firestorms of activity, followed by (at best) low simmering discontent, if not cool apathy.

I’d like to change that, at least with myself. And as far as manifestos go, that’s not all that inspiring, but what the heck. It’s how I’m deciding to interact with the flow of information (for the most part), and the rest of the world can follow me or not. I am hoping, though, that it will lead to more robust and thoughtful commentary from me, if not necessarily the most timely.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

3. One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters
4. Monk’s Hood by Ellis Peters

These are from Ellis Peters’ (a/k/a Edit Pargeter) about Brother Cadfael, a fictional monk from Shrewsbury Abbey in the 12th century. Cadfael plays the role of detective in these historical mysteries, an herbalist and monk in later life, who fought in the Crusades and was a ship captain in the Med before becoming a monk. They’re somewhat standard mysteries, couched deeply in their milieu, and a rather enjoyable read just the same. I’ve finally found all of the books in the series, and I’m embarking on reading all of them this year.

5. Helix by Eric Brown

A first contact novel, focusing on a last-ditch human effort to fling a hibernation ship to the stars to try to keep humanity alive after we’ve jacked up the Earth too bad, and the rather human-esque aliens they find at their destination.

6. King Maker by Maurice Broaddus

A retelling of the Arthurian legend (sometimes maybe a little too faithfully) transported to an inner city neighborhood of Indianapolis. This is another entry in my personal joy of seeing flyover settings used in modern America. I don’t really see it enough. But that seems to be changing a bit with more writers emerging from the middle of the country and more choosing to live there.

7. The Lions of Lucerne by Brad Thor

I haven’t read much in the technothriller/spy genre outside of Clancy, Ludlum, and a couple Vince Flynn novels, but apparently Thor is another big name in that genre. Pretty serviceable conspiracy/spy novel in the Robert Ludlum vein, showing off a lot of the author’s knowledge of exotic global locations.

8. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold

One of my all-time favorite books, and just a plain old awesome space opera adventure. One of the best cavalry-to-the-rescue stories, and some excellent “comfort food” reading.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Ran across an interesting, if gloomy article yesterday on the peril that cheap/easy self-epublishing has brought to the entire publishing field.

While it is a very interesting article, which attempts to map the concept of bubbles onto the phenomenon of ebooks, I think the effort shows a bit of strain at the edges, and discounts a couple of pretty critical factors. On the plus side, the article points out some things that maybe should have been obvious: Amazon doesn’t care if it pushes 500 million units of crap, they’re just pushing units. I think that’s a little short-sighted of them (if true), for reasons I’ll get into, but it seems like something they might do. The article also posits a possible bursting of the bubble, which probably isn’t such a bad thing, as most of those trying to cash in on the boom get bored and wander away.

But I think the bursting of such a bubble is potentially more problematic for the likes of Amazon than it is for readers or authors, and here’s why: there’s never been a shortage of self-published crap, especially since the internet flourished. What there has always been a shortage of is good stuff, and curated stuff. There are only so many authors who have invested time and talent into their craft, only so many editors who have had the ability to separate wheat from chaff, so many copyeditors and book layout designers and proofreaders and so on that can help elevate a text. And whether or not it looks like it right now, most readers can appreciate the “value add” that brings to a book.

True story: a college buddy of mine recently bought a Kindle and has been raving about rediscovering books. Recently, he read Ready Player One and started complaining about the author not having it all together because of the typos and such present in the text, and I had to tell him that was probably due to a bad transfer from the original text. Point is, people do notice that kind of thing, even non-readers such as my college buddy, and that colors the experience for them. I can imagine all too well what his response would be if he read some poorly edited self-published monstrosity. And that’s where publishers can and do offer more than $0.99 per book’s worth of value.

To put it another way, has the proliferation of community theatre programs hurt Broadway’s bottom line, despite the much cheaper tickets? Probably not. People go to see professional productions, expecting not only professional-grade acting and directing, but also all that other stuff, like the orchestration, lighting, even the atmosphere and seating. There’s something more there that they are expecting to pay for, and the same is almost certainly true of books. Once the initial rush to publish has passed (and I haven’t seen it anything like what Ewan Morrison describes, even though most of my friends are professional or aspiring writers), I think the market will come to appreciate that there is a certain dollar value for professionally edited and produced fiction.

And as a last point: just as Morrison argues that self-epublishing has produced a huge crop of new writers, ebooks in general have brought along a lot of new readers, such as my college buddy mentioned above. He was (and remains to some extent) the sort of dude who buys a new video game every week. But he’s gotten excited about reading again, and is buying books, and good books like Ready Player One and American Gods. And if the pool of self-epubbing writers starts to dry up, there may well be more people ready (and willing) to buy the good stuff.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

As usual, right around Christmas (and just after) I wind up with iTunes gift cards and such and pick up some new music. Here’s what’s new to the playlist:

Nursery Cryme & Foxtrot by Genesis — Actually, I got these as part of the big 1970-1975 Genesis box set that my wife gave me for Christmas, and it’s the first time I’ve owned these albums. I’ll probably write more about the whole box set, but I’ll say these are a couple of really good 70s prog albums.

The Muppets Soundtrack — I loved seeing the movie with my kids just after Thanksgiving, and the soundtrack is one of the best parts of the movie. I’m still having trouble with the idea that they covered Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” with a bunch of Muppet chickens (titled “Forget You” in keeping with the single release, of course) and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with a barbershop quartet… of sorts. But all the music is great. Especially “Man or Muppet?” which has been nominated for an Oscar. Not sure how much I like these recordings of “Rainbow Connection,” but they’re about all there is these days.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Greatest Hits — When I was in high school, I had a tape version of Blood Sugar Sex Magik that I wore out pretty good driving back and forth to school, but haven’t bought anything from them since, for some reason (other than the individual track “Especially in Michigan” from Stadium Arcadium). So I figured I’d at least catch up on all the songs I love from them, even if I’m taking the wimpy “Greatest Hits” route.

Maybe You Should Drive by Barenaked Ladies — This was BNL’s second album, and I heard a lot of “Jane” and “Alternative Girlfriend” on the radio when I was in high school, so it’s another sort of nostalgia-trip for me. I haven’t heard much else on the album, though, so it’s a little like rediscovering them for the first time. And I think I preferred this earlier, quirkier sound on this album and Gordon to much of the later stuff (though I liked that, too). This album also gets bonus points for having been in our college radio station’s CD library, so I would play a couple of tracks off it every week on my college radio show freshman year. (Especially “Alternative Girlfriend” since I had, at the time, a girlfriend not much unlike the one the song describes.)

Fallen Empires by Snow Patrol — Just got this the other day, so I’m not 100% sure what I think of it yet, but so far, so good. It’s the same band doing the same (but just enough different) sort of things they did on the other two albums of theirs that I have (Eyes Open and A Hundred Million Suns). We’ll see if it grows on me like the others did.

The King Is Dead by The Decemberists — Likewise just got this the other day, but it’s growing on me fast. I’ve heard them mentioned quite a bit, here and there, and decided to give them a chance now. Pretty glad, so far, that I did. They remind me a lot of other folksy/bluesy sort of music that I have enjoyed over the years (especially by Canadians), and this seems lodged right in that wheelhouse. I understand their backlist might be a little different from this album, but it’s certainly worth exploring.

“Everything At Once” by Lenka — The only single I’ve bought so far, and it came to me by way of a commercial trying to sell me some Disney online product or another at the beginning of a couple of the kids’ new Blu-Rays. No idea what they’re selling, but the song was damn catchy, so I picked it up. Only downside is that when the kids hear it in the car now, they expect it to be followed up shortly by a movie.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Just a little chest-clearing, real quick, if I may (and I may, it’s my damn blog).

I’ve noticed this meme a few times in the last couple of months; coming along with the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, and with the Ocean Marketing fiasco. In formulation, it went something like this: “Oh sure, you all can get up in arms enough to protest this kind of dick move thing, now why can’t you get all worked about my pet issues?” And, on some level, I agree, especially with the protests of the Ocean Marketing douchebag. That might have gone over the top. But, you know, there’s a point short of over the top. Probably somewhere near, you know, the top, where you achieve critical mass and inspire people to make a change. And I think the sort of person I paraphrased above would probably still think it too much fury over too small an issue.

But here’s the thing, and I wish people would understand this better: it’s not that the same number of people don’t get worked up over other issues, it’s just that so few issues are as clear cut as a marketing douchebag talking to a customer like a condescending asshole (with a poor grasp of spelling and grammar). It’s really easy to get behind that. Same with SOPA and PIPA. The only people who might have really supported those bills were those who didn’t understand them (and thus not invested enough to protest or counter-protest) and the accountants running Hollywood.

Most other issues have been a crapshoot.

And that’s okay, on some level. As much as I might like there to be greater consensus on really important things, like taxes and healthcare and war (not that SOPA wasn’t critical, actually), the lack of consensus is the result of living in a multi-cultural society. It’s part of the bargain. A maddeningly frustrating part, sometimes, especially when we do see people coming together and making that kind of concerted effort. But, part of the bargain, just the same.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.