FxChiP

I could hear chemists weeping openly when the synthetic water was introduced.

I hate it when I’m reading along, enjoying myself, and I realize that the writer doesn’t have a story.

I think this could potentially be one of those articles that gets a lot of comments and the reason is that after giving three examples of how writers disguiss non-plots, Messinger ends the article with

What about you? Do you have some tropes to add to the list? Examples of the ones I’ve pointed out? Want to refute my claims?

... on THAT OF WHICH WE DO NOT SPEAK:

I went on another photo safari (this seems to be a new Saturday morning tradition), this time at Hobby Lobby, a terrifyingly huge artsy-craftsy emporium. (The reason the photo safaris happen on Twitter is because you can take a picture on your phone and email it straight to TwitPic from there, which then appears automatically on your Twitter feed.) I mean, I spent fifteen minutes in that thing and I am ready to craft THE SHIT out of something. You take TLE there, he'll think he's died (again) and gone to heaven. Note on photos: we did not even get into any of the vertical aisles at the store. This is simply the shallow end of the pool.( Read more... )

Back to work. Apparently the best part of the movie (minus John Cusack's best line) is online completely legally. Enjoy.



(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

I seem to be about as comfortable watching things from now > past as I am past > now.

This is the only intersection I've had multiple people stop me at so they could complain about having just nearly been killed by a driver careening through a left-hand turn.

OK, multiple = two so far but that's two more than any other intersection I frequent.

Over on tor.com, a very interesting comment:

Fred [Pohl] is working on a second volume of memoirs and I hear he's completed quite a bit of it.

Questionable Content strip #1536


Poll #1486245
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 142

Is Questionable Content strip #1536

And would it matter if the snuggler was male and the snugglee was female?

Centauri Dreams on WISE

This is exciting stuff. For one thing, WISE should be able to measure the diameters of more than 100,000 asteroids.

[...]

We can expect WISE to see 450-K brown dwarfs out to a distance of 75 light years, and brown dwarfs as cool as 150-K out as far as ten light years. All eyes may be on Kepler and CoRoT for terrestrial exoplanets, but a nearby brown dwarf would be huge, putting WISE on the front pages.

Planetary Society Blog on WISE

WISE Homepage

Every year, we know our neighborhood that much better.

I am linking to this not so much for the discussion of Lunar water (or the possibility that "“there are hints of other intriguing substances” = organic materials) but this discussion of 3He:

( Read more... )

Oh my sweet God, no movie as stupid as 2012 has any right to be TWO HOURS AND THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES. I drank HALF a smuggled 12 oz bottle of Coke (Tiny Coke, if you will), and nearly DIED. My bladder is BRUISED.

My mom's the disaster movie junkie--she hasn't seen a movie in the theater in six months (I think she last one she saw was Up), so I went for her sake. Man, I hate disaster movies. I worry about this stuff enough, you know? I'm not really into watching implausibly connected characters run and weep and do noble shit and die horribly for two hours (AND THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES). I'm okay with watching shit blow up; I just don't want to watch the cast meeble on about it. And let me tell you, internets, shit does not start blowing up until FIFTY-SEVEN (57) minutes into the movie. If you think I give a shit about John Cusack's ex-marital problems, you are WRONG, Roland Emmerich. And even the next hour and a half has way too much wibbling about humanity. BLOW SHIT UP. BLOW IT UP NOWWWWWWWWWW. Seriously: go buy a ticket to this thing, walk in fifty-seven minutes late, watch John Cusack and family outrun an earthquake in a limo (because this part is THE MOST AWESOME THING I HAVE EVER SEEN, at the very least the most awesome thing I have ever seen involving either an earthquake or a limo), and then after they get to Vegas, LEAVE. If you've seen Deep Impact and The Poseidon Adventure, you've pretty much seen everything else. In fact, you can probably just watch Dodge the Freeway in the trailer; I didn't watch it, but my mother says pretty much all the awesome stuff is in there, and the rest of the movie is just a game of Guess Who's Gonna Die (a winner is me!). I was also able to call not one but TWO ridiculous romances, because it was that kind of movie. Honestly, earthquake in a limo and Thandie Newton's French: best things in the movie. Everything else I laughed at until I was seized with urinary tract regret for the entire last hour.

(OMFG THE WOLFMAN TRAILER WAS SO AWESOME IT IS WHAT THE INSIDE OF MY HEAD LOOKS LIKE. I was seriously just sitting there all a-squee, clapping my fists [so it would be quiet!] chanting "WOLFMAN WOLFMAN WOLFMAN!!!!!!" and my mother was like, You are so weird.)

I also grabbed a few sheets of printer paper to fold up and stuff in my purse--turns out that you can just squeak by on six pages and the back of the first page if you take notes sparingly.

(THIS IS THE THING OF WHICH WE DO NOT SPEAK. WE DO NOT JINX IT. IT MAY STILL NOT HAPPEN.)



(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

The Rise and Fall of the Military Techno-Thriller

Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade—novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.

Brand's annotations

[Yeah, not much there now but that will change in a month or three]

( Read more... )

Than IDing a gorgonopsid at a glance while watching Primeval?

If not for him, I'd never have seen this idea or this reaction to it. Happily it seems to died faster than that open source boob project.


As a former store owner, allow me to add my voice to those saying "what a very bad idea this very bad idea is."

[21:26] dethtoll dot mid: mailboxmistakes: so i got really wasted at the party i mentioned and guess what i did
dethtoll dot mid: fucked a man?
mailboxmistakes: awesome idea, but no
mailboxmistakes: i made out with my wife's hot redheaded friend
dethtoll dot mid: you would think it's awesome
dethtoll dot mid: oh yeah? what's his name
mailboxmistakes: leslie.
dethtoll dot mid: like leslie nielsen?
[21:30] NecroVMX: owned
[21:31] NecroVMX: owned HARD
[21:31] dethtoll dot mid: so quote it
[21:32] NecroVMX: already on it like mailboxmistakes on man ass
[21:32] dethtoll dot mid: quote that too

The annotations for the next chapter, Gene Dreams, are

The annotated version of this chapter will be completed after I get off book tour—in November and December, 2009.

—SB

Should I keep going or wait until the annotations are up?

"Thatcher has died."

( Read more... )

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2009) — Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

Brand's annotations

Actually, this chapter might annoy environmentalists even more than the previous one did.

( Read more... )

Jo Walton's enthuses about Fred Pohl while K Tempest Bradford does much the same for Dollhouse's deserved cancellation.