And Scene

“We really need to deal with climate change issues before there are no workable ways to solve some of the enormous problems from it that are already under way.”

“What are we going to do about rogue killer robots?”

“We don’t have any actual rogue killer robots. But we do have melting icecaps, rising seas, massive amounts of drought and environmental refugees.”

“Should we treat rogue killer robots as a kind of human legally and prosecute them for their crimes?”

“Right now we’re trying to figure out how to sustain and adjust our food sources in higher temperatures, acidified oceans and loss of key pollinators to pesticides.”

“Some of the rogue killer robots will look just like humans! How will we tell them apart?”

“We’ll be the ones who are dead from global warming.” 

“Rogue killer robots are shiny!” 

Catching Up on Links

Some links on pieces about writing and related matters I had collected but not passed on:

 

Fonda Lee, who is making waves with her new novel, Jade City (more on my impressions of that book later,) did a good, practical Twitter thread essay on awards versus sales when it comes to marketing buzz.

Tim Pratt did an interesting piece on the process of writing his alien creatures in his SF novel, The Wrong Stars.

John Scalzi did a piece about attempts to tabulate authors’ sales from limited sources and the markets for fiction in general.

Anaea Lay recounts the story of her glamorous author travels to WorldCon in 2017, useful for those who may be doing convention traveling.

Chuck Wendig didn’t particularly like a piece of writing advice someone gave on Twitter and so did a comic riff on it followed by some useful writing advice as a Twitter thread essay.

Ineke Chen-Meyer points out an interesting difference between our fictional characters and the real world.

Re-Focusing (With Spam!)

Flying Books Giph by A.L. Crego

Hello! Yes, a lot has been going on. Wildfires, hurricanes and floods, political hurricanes, and what I’m coming to think of as the year of the Troll King. I also was traveling, which was fun, but causes pile-ups. I don’t know how the businesspeople do it, but I can tell you I got to try out a couple of their airport lounges, as it happens, and they do not stint themselves.

I am going to be putting out new stuff, links, book coverage in the coming weeks. (Stop laughing, you’ll scare off my new followers. Hello new followers — you are intrepid!) But for tonight, to celebrate the return of autumn/spring (depending on your hemisphere,) here is some Double Entendre Spam Poetry! I have not had that much to work with in the Spam Poetry of comments for awhile. My spam all but disappeared for a bit, and then I started receiving hundreds of not very interesting spam comments about medical products. I guess the idea is that a tiny percentage of blog owners will see the comments in their spam filters and think, I need to buy some Viagra from Russia! It’s one part of the WWW I do not get. But these particular spam musings are delightful — and a little disturbing:

This mess which is used so that you can propel the liquid plastic resin right out the kick the bucket may be the crucial part of your bang extruder.

Well I definitely want to make sure my bang extruder is operating at key effectiveness. I think.

Special construction and shaft sealing devices are available for bloweer service requiring zero or minimal gas leakage

I think we agree that this is probably important. For the sake of the children.

the Glide Mouse mat ensures amnple room for your gaming mouse to roam fearlessly
without concern for soaring ooff the end of the mat and costing you that highly-valued headshot.

You know, I’m not entirely sure we want the gaming mice to be roaming fearlessly and shooting, um, heads.

I am gonna watch out for brussels.

Well that’s just rude.

 

Stay safe, good luck and good wishes.

Jim C. Hines Returns to Modeling

Fantasy author Jim C. Hines took a break from working on his new series to do one of his famous here’s the ridiculous sexist poses they put women figures in on SFF covers for no reason cover poses. Although Jim has mainly retired from doing such photo shoots, in order to save his back, he came out of retirement for a good cause — to raise money for the Pixel Project, which works to end violence against women. A donor paid $500 and they selected imitating the cover for the YA novel The Selection by Kiera Cass. Here’s the photo here, and you can check out Jim’s blog for info about donating to the Pixel Project.

 

Hopefully his spine remained intact!

 

Well, What Do We Do Now

So it’s been a wild couple of months again, including some unexpected medical crises. And we really don’t know what’s going to happen in the future except that it’s looking bad and probably will involve another global recession. So I’m thinking about what I am going to do/need to do and that includes how I want to handle this blog, which has gotten rather intermittent the last couple of years. For now, I am chugging through the end of the year, and I hope all of you chug through it too without disaster.

In the meantime, I enclose this very sweet piece by author Maureen Johnson about dealing with one’s spoons, this up-lifting quote from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from his work A Man Without A Country:

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

And lastly, the latest video from OK Go for their new song “The One Moment,” which includes all their favorite things: paint, explosions, Rube Goldberg machines, geometric patterns and umbrellas, plus you can check out the charity causes being supported by their sponsor, Morton’s Salt. And if you don’t want to do that, if you can, support your local food bank.

 

 

The Internet Amuses Me

That Was a Summer That Was

So I had another gap, because family stuff this summer got a bit crazy. Not always in a bad way, mind, and I got to go on vacation, which was 95% part pleasant (I may have gotten a little food poisoned.) And returned to Trump and white supremacists parading around, and the fainter echo of bigoted nonsense going on with planning for the World Fantasy Convention and at the recent WorldCon. (The good news being that MidCon II, which hosted WorldCon, apparently rocked at announcing and enforcing their code of conduct, having access for all, and generally prepping stuff. Which is really quite a bit of progress. And was achieved by people being pushy, loud and undeterred about bringing up the issue so that people couldn’t pretend it wasn’t an issue anymore.)

But I really, really don’t want to spend all my days ranting about this stuff. (Although I did some ranting at Whatever and Jim Hines’ blog if you want to go read that.) So next post will be about books. In the meantime, enjoy Scott Bakula being totally silly in a Quantum Leap sketch with Stephen Colbert on Colbert’s show:

(I just remembered the sketch makes a lot of fun of Trump with a very good kid actor. Oh well, but it’s not me specifically ranting. Technicality counts.)

Some Light/Heavy Music

No, I did not fall off a boat into the ocean. Working on several things, have them up soon.

 

In the meantime, enjoy Jennifer Hudson and James Corden hamming it up performing public domain songs, because it was a Monday, and we could all use some nice singing:

 

Various Geek Article Links

Some interesting bits and news from the Internet:

 

Mindy at Skepchick ponders the science of Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Starkiller base. 

And speaking of Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Starkiller base, blogger Matty Granger fisks and debunks a really obnoxious article in the Huffington Post about plot holes in the movie. Not that there weren’t any plot holes in the movie, but I agree with Granger that there’s a big difference between inattention and actual plot holes.  Plus, it’s just a fun piece if you’re a Star Wars fan.

An announcement that Vanessa Hudgens will headline a new DC Comics sitcom. Which sounds like an interesting experiment.

The New York Times digs out a business piece from 1985 expressing that laptops and mobile computers is going to be a limited market, just to show that tech prediction is frequently not very predictive about how we’ll use tech.

Author Kevin Hearne gets author Ursula Vernon to do her rant about the potato apocalypse on Twitter.

An interesting experiment based on the Harry Potter world, though she seems to have cheated a good bit.

A rundown on everything you need to know about upcoming Disney movies. (The Mouse will not be stopped!)

 

A Little Silliness

For those of you who find the topic of fiction publishing utterly boring, here are some silly videos:

 

First, Alanis Morissette and James Corden update the lyrics of Morissette’s iconic song “Ironic”:

 

Second, Sesame Street tackles “Game of Thrones” in one of the best parody sketches they may have ever done:

 

And finally, actor McCauley Kulkin revisits his most famous character from his child actor days, Kevin from the hit movie “Home Alone” as a rage-filled Uber-like driver for a web series called “Dryvrs”:

And his co-star in that movie, actor Daniel Stern, responded to the video as his thief character Marv from the movie:

 

Enjoy!