bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Chugging along!

Prologue and index here!

Previous chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

CW for a depressive episode, a repressive dad, and the words "suicidal ideation." Also a slightly nonconsensual bath; I know someone on Twitter found that sort of thing upsetting. It's more of a surprise bath, but yeah.

• I feel as though we're going to have to have a cultural conversation about robots as stand-ins for people in fiction, because I've been hearing people being concerned about robot stories being "pro AI" when the robots are clearly not written as the dumb computer tool AI actually is. Come on, dudes. We anthropomorphize everything. Doesn't mean we're pro-technocrat.

• As somebody who can happily live in a story for months or years at a time, I absolutely do not get people who "already saw it once" and then never want to watch a thing again. In that sense, I guess I'm Jonathan Sims' Wario.

• Sometimes when you're trying to discipline your kid, he drops a total shocker about alternate endings to the cool movie you enjoyed, and you have to tear yourself away from that rabbit hole and try to focus on discipline. Parenting is hard.

---

"I don't want to tell you how to do your job," Thoren said to Dexer, "But do you think Lone Light Distribution could get some new stuff in? I'm dying to see Ugly Blood, and I don't think the Board's gonna approve of it."

"We'll take your suggestion under advisement," Dexer said, zeir voice pitched to a perfect customer-service drone, spitting out the disc Thoren had rented. "But we are experiencing a slight technical issue, which has slowed distribution."

"You gotta get going," Jod complained, looking over the menu. "I've seen all of these before."

"You don't like repeat viewings?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

"Why would I watch something again?"

bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Index and Prologue!

Previous Chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

  • George Axelrod's 1952 play The Seven Year Itch is about a married asshole who has an affair with his bimbo upstairs neighbor and is then racked with guilt about it. Billy Wilder's 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch is mostly about Marilyn Monroe's legs, but also, with the stringent guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code, it is about a married asshole who wants to have an affair with his bimbo upstairs neighbor but whiffs it dismally, and is then racked with guilt about that. It is, for my money, infinitely funnier than the play: in the film, Tom Ewell's dipshit character torments himself with imagined scenarios based solely on his own insecurities. Marilyn Monroe plays The Girl as utterly innocent, less like a sex kitten and more like an actual kitten, and it leads to a rather bittersweet story on her character's part of a lonely girl who just wants a friend and thinks she's made one in a self-absorbed idiot who spends his time catastrophizing about how SoCiEtY will perceive him.* The content constraints annoyed Axelrod, who also co-wrote the screenplay, and the Hays Code was overall bullshit, but I find the results surprisingly interesting in that it leads the main character to be struggling solely with himself and his anxieties while The Girl remains completely oblivious to his nonsense.
  • Tech Demo sounds like some unholy combination of Blade Runner and The Seven Year Itch—a description which, come to think of it, could also apply to Ex Machina. (Let's hope Tech Demo is funnier.) I'm not sure how the hell it got past the Board of Civic Hygiene; I guess somebody at Beacon Studios is a highly skilled editor.
  • The role of robots in fiction is completely fascinating to me. On the one hand, we have rock-stupid AI nowadays, only as smart as its programmer, and not an emergent consciousness. In that vein, they're dumb machines and you can yell at them all you like. Plus, I like the concept of famous sex pest Isaac Asimov's I, Robot being a series of logic puzzles trying to figure out robopsychology. On the other hand, robots are often coded for the Other** and, as such, we use them to explore interesting themes of humanity's social tendencies and our regard for and treatment of the Other. It also shines a light on our blind spots and biases with regard to that; look at the droids' social status in the Star Wars franchise. Specifically, Solo's use of L3-37's droid rights agitating is, y'know, pretty klutzy. Robofiction is Complicated, y'all.
  • Someday I will write my thesis on how The Real Antagonist In The Alien Franchise Is Whatever Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi, Megalomaniacal Incel Programmed All The Robots To Have Completely Whack-Ass Ideas About Sexuality And Reproduction.
  • That being said, I really ought to delve more into the history of this star system. IN ANOTHER STORY, DAMMIT.


*It's worth noting that the dickwaffles who do assume he's adulterous are completely supportive and assure him they will uphold the Bro Code.

**Data is an autistic icon and you cannot change my mind.

---

Vilda set the stewed courgettes in front of us, with a large helping for me.

"You'd better put something nourishing in your body, what with all the fast food Ms. Trandy says you've been putting away," she told me.

I grimaced. Sometimes living on a tiny space station was a pain.

# Next Chapter!
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Index and Prologue!

Previous Chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

Hyperfixating on dumb shit against my will was a source of great angst to Little/Teenage Amelia. I thought I needed to be Intellectual and follow classical pursuits when all I really wanted to do was make up long, sweeping sagas about Super Mario or Star Wars or othersuch lowbrow nonsense. When I expressed my interest in writing, people would ask if I was going to write The Great American Novel, and my soul would die a little bit. It sounded like hell.

Fortunately, when I grew up I realized that writing silly shit about autistic gorillas in Space Pleasantville is totally valid, and leads to a great deal of insight that Deep, Serious Fiction™ might not. It's been a real relief, I tell you.

I also "hated" horror for a lot of my life. I think it scared me and, like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, I had a hard time separating that reaction from the concept of it being immoral. I definitely got over that, too!

---

I had to hand it to Thoren: he did come through in earning the money to pay his fine. He did it with bad grace, but he got a job with Mx. Plim running deliveries, and he also did the odd jobs Dad had suggested around the neighborhood. The neighbors teased him about it. I wasn't sure what I'd have done if I got that kind of teasing, but Thoren adopted a carefree, cocksure, bad-boy-but-you-love-it attitude, liked Drack from The Golden Hammer, that the adults seemed to find charming. It wasn't too long before he could spend his pocket money on other things again.

That was good news for me: I had been busy, as well.

Giro had shown me how to burn movies, and I was getting prolific. The only difficulty I had was in trying to gauge what other teenagers would find interesting—I was still stuck on The Golden Hammer, which had hijacked my brain completely. But the other kids had moved on from it, at least as far as I could tell. Zarla was offering recommendations about what was popular, and it was easy enough to see what the theater was running and to go find the original cuts of those films.

Jod was easy enough to guess. )

Next Chapter!
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Index and Prologue!

Previous Chapter!

Oh, hi!

Yep, still writing this, just at a slower pace. Updates will probably be sporadic from now on, but I do have a Plan, so hopefully I can fill that in.

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

CW for that extremely frustrating feeling when your "friends" are doing something deliberately stupid and you're stuck trying to be the voice of reason. Also for autism misinterpretation.

The original draft of this study done on "atypical" autistic morality interpreted having a conscience as a neurological dysfunction. Pathologizing autism is a real pastime amongst scientists, it would seem.

---


"I'm so bored," Jod complained. "This station sucks."

We were sitting in 225 Park, Jod, Nielli, and Thoren pitching rocks into the pond. I wasn't sure if that fell under the Do Not Throw Things Into The Pond signs around the area, but just to be safe, I wasn't joining them.

"We gotta find something to do," Jod went on.

I was trying to figure out a way to excuse myself to go hang out with Giro. But Thoren had sort of swept me along with him after school. And now we were aimlessly loafing around and complaining, which wasn't on the approved list of Correct Uses of Leisure Time as outlined by Beacon Studios, and the movie file Zarla had shown me how to download was burning a metaphorical hole in my tablet.

"Why don't we go to the library?" I suggested.

To nobody's surprise, Jod blew a raspberry. )

Next Chapter!
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Index and Prologue!

Previous Chapter!

Hooray, an on-time update!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

CW for body horror and self-sacrifice (in a movie)

  • I'm not going to expand on the issues Zarla mentioned in the last chapter. She's got superpowers, but they're not really relevant to this particular story. Though she does come up in others!
  • Somehow relevant to this chapter is the song "Belle" from Disney's Beauty & the Beast, where Belle really wants to talk about cool books and stories but nobody else cares. Belle's attempted infodumps really resonated with me. DREEDO'S GONNA GET THE TOWNSFOLK DISCUSSING MOVIES IF IT KILLS HIM
  • Many thanks to my buddy Fade for consultation on ADHD medication. Giro's brain is a complicated labyrinth.
  • The running courgette joke is a running gag for my own dislike of zucchini, which, if you ask me, can go fuck itself, but which I am assured other people enjoy. Those people are weird.
  • One time in college I happened across a TV edit of Ridley Scott's Hannibal, and it was the funniest thing ever. I mean, okay, that movie's pretty ridiculous anyway, but Ray Liotta kept his frat-bro hat on all throughout That One Scene, and it was completely unintelligible.
  • As a Utahn, I actually had a few friends who swore by CleanFlicks, or would have, if any of them swore. I can totally understand the appeal of getting a movie that won't trigger an upset, but on the other hand I've had some really good mind-blowing feelings when I've gone out of my comfort zone before. The tale of my discovery of horror through Alien is a long saga, and it also includes Ridley Scott, so shoutout to Ridley Scott, I guess.

---

Zevon, we have a problem with PQ896.

What do you mean? The study's over. It was a wild success.

I've been going back over the questionnaires, and have noted a discrepancy.

The two that reported adverse reactions had handwriting that didn't match the signatures of the guardians at the bottom.

So what?

So it appears that in those two cases, the subjects themselves filled out their questionnaires, whereas in the others, the parents filled them out.

This error in our protocol has led to differing reports. It's possible that many more subjects had adverse reactions, but they were not recognized as adverse by the parents.

I would like to do post-study interviews of the other subjects.

Bel, we've closed this. It's over. We're moving on to PQ now.

Yes, but new findings have come to light. It is possible the other patients are experiencing similar problems. E06 reported myoclonic jerks, disrupted sleep patterns, lethargy, drowsiness, mood swings, nightmares, ataxia, vertigo. The implants need further refinement.

The parents are reporting satisfactory results. I'd say we've done our job.

That depends on what our job is.

Look, if you want to refine it, you're always welcome to submit a new proposal. But this is a done deal, Bel.

Sorry.

Let's focus on CN12.

#

Next Chapter!
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)

Prlogue and Index!

Previous Chapter!

I was in my mid-30s when I read a Twitter thread explaining to autistic people that when people are angry and ask you questions like "Why were you late?" they are not actually looking for an explanation and will regard your answers as excuses. Holy hell, y'all. That explained SO. MUCH.

It is extremely jarring to talk to someone who remembers a movie/book as being utterly different from what you remember. I once had a conversation with someone who insisted that the Shitty Kids die in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when I clearly remember a chapter called "The Other Children Go Home." It was very confusing and upsetting, and I had to go look at my copy of the book to prove that it was there. I have always wondered about that, especially after finding out about the Oompa Loompa revisions.

CW: Shitty family members, animal death, animal dissection, upsetting movie gaslighting, I guess, and Autism Warrior Moms. Also space tobacco.

---

Civic Hygiene recommended going to the theater for Sightseeing movies as a way to connect us to our planet of origin; to help us contemplate our connection to it and our duty to it. History class told us to consider where the Great Protector got zeir start. (I probably should do something to get on the history teacher's good side after accidentally making an enemy of her; it turns out you're not supposed to ask about plot holes in scripture.)

But Thoren and his friends had decided we were going to see the new action flick, The Golden Hammer. He and the rest of the Ball team were passing a pouch of dust between them, which was not only delinquent, but also unsanitary, , plus it led to a lot of obnoxious sniffling and a few sneezes. I should really report it, but I remembered how Mr. Sordell and Nielli had reacted last time I reported a problem, and it seemed like way too much trouble. I didn't take any when Thoren offered me the pouch, though.

bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Prologue and Index!

Previous Chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

CW in this one for animal death—though it occurs to me that I should go back and warn for the station mouse on the stoop, too. It was already dead! It didn't register to me! Also some gnarly surgery stuff.

Zarla's messages are a ton of fun to write. I also liked working out her emojis, which are approximations, since she is writing in SpaceTalk.

I really want to know the story of Hobbie and the Blast Crabs. That must have been an interesting day.

---

Balancing a crate full of disgruntled sixcat on my bicycle had taken practice, but by now I was a pro. This one was particularly disgruntled, too; she was still growling as I carried her into the veterinary clinic.

I must have been whistling: "Well, aren't you cheerful today," Dr. Kellek observed.

"I caught Zip, sir," I said, presenting the crate.

He peered inside. "Very nice. The wily one, yes?"

"The Colony C leader, yes, sir."

"Excellent. Though I was looking forward to seeing anything you'd caught on camera."

I tried to look noncommittal. I had used a camera. But it wasn't the one he'd suggested. Zarla had shown me the capabilities of the one on Dad's tablet, and I knew using it was probably Eroding My Values or somesuch, but it was so much easier than applying to check out one of the library's huge, unwieldy models that needed a rig and lighting and magnetic tape cassettes.

I hadn't had to leave the tablet out for more than one night, anyway; Zip had picked that point to finally trip the trap.

bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Prologue and Index here!

Previous Chapter!

It feels a little weird to add a ✨Paypal link, ✨ but hey, writing is hard, so if you want to tip me, I wouldn't say no!

Note that the formatting is a little weird; you might have to sidescroll through certain parts to read all of it.

Do I have feelings about group projects? You bet I do!

Also, the pressure to change the world as a kid is strong when you take things literally. It's really difficult.

But hey, social media opens up new horizons even if your home doesn't have a horizon!

---

I wound up doing most of the project by myself, of course. I don't know what Mr. Sordell expected; the others didn't take it seriously. The work they did was halfhearted and slovenly, so I had to redo a lot of it anyway.

Dad had suggested that we start with observations, so while the others went to practice and games, I found two colonies of feral sixcats to observe: one that gathered near the library's garden, and one that roamed the maintenance alleys behind Plim's and the surrounding businesses. (I suspected the latter was Toast's original colony. I wondered if I should put her back with them, but Dad said she seemed happy where she was.)

Dad's tablet was immensely useful. I found an old charger in a junk pile behind Plim's, so I could hang onto it indefinitely. I was learning where and how to look for information on ecomanagement and feral sixcat colonies. And Dad's various experimental notes were excellent models for my own studies. But the amount of helpful information in the Greater Galactic Database meant I could find help with that, too.

Also, the sixcat videos were adorable. )
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Here's the prologue, and the index page!

I have no idea if I'm going to update on a schedule; signs point to no. Sorry about that!

Assuming good faith bites me in the ass all the time. Took me a lifetime to realize that was the problem.

I'm avoiding physical descriptions in the actual text because I am led to understand that readers have difficulty connecting with alien main characters. Regardless, if you're wondering, koranos are not actually humans, but they are human-equivalent: furry humanoid aliens who resemble archaic humans and might be mistaken for large, fuzzy Homo habilis. You know, space gorillas.

Paquos resemble rubber-hose cartoon characters. They're bipedally humanoid, shortish (around 4 feet), ambiguously mammalian, red-green colorblind, dark-furred, and have high-contrast light markings on their faces. They also have highly mobile, expressive ears.

Both species are native to Feavah.

---

Dad's experiments didn't have many outliers like the Palbert boy. The pilot trials for the implants ended by the next school cycle, and the experimental groups joined the public schools.

Technically, so did the control groups. Though the experiment was over and unblinded, it wasn't necessary to tell nonparticipants who was in which group—but it was easy enough to figure it out by the classes the teachers placed them in. The control participants, the ones without the implants, were disruptive, unfocused, unable to consistently do school work, antisocial, and messy—overall, leaning toward delinquency.

Maybe his being in the experimental group was why it was hard to reconcile the amiable-looking Palbert boy with the delinquents we saw in Civic Hygiene videos: hoodlums who threw cigar butts on the ground, stole packets of settling dust from the store, and scribbled rude things on bathroom walls and diner booths. Maybe he would have been more like them if he didn't have an implant.

Nielli Brones wasn't part of Dad's trial, being a korano, but that was pretty much all I knew about her until one day when she suddenly became relevant by sitting in my recess Quiet Spot.

Recess was another one of those things I did wrong, but how was I supposed to play with others when we had to spend so many hours trying to hold our attention on boring things? How did the other kids not need to relax their brains with a nice walk or a few minutes sitting in a copse, a Quiet Spot, staring at the sky panels or examining blades of grass while they contemplated the universe?

Nielli was not examining grass. She was fiddling with … something. Something small and shiny that cast a flicker of colorful light across her face.

It beeped. )
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) staying up late reading (COMICS)
Anybody want a space-gorilla-doctor origin story?

This is a project I started for no good reason. I'm pretty sure there isn't a market for Autistic Space Gorilla Delinquent Sets Up Technology Black Market In Stanford-Torus Pleasantville, but I've been having a blast writing it. I might make the book this is spun off from, the infamous Space Doctors Alien Medical Drama, available, but for now I'm just gonna post this one. If you like autistic main characters and space opera, this is gonna be your jam! It's a bit of a love letter to Mystery Science Theater 3000, too.

So: Here goes!

Gonna make this an index page for all the chapters, so:
Prologue (You Are Here)
Chapter 1: Civic Hygiene
Chapter 2: Focal Citizens
Chapter 3: New (Metaphorical) Horizons
Chapter 4: Healthcare and Ecomanagement
Chapter 5: Arts and Culture
Chapter 6: Hidden Gems
Chapter 7: Beacon Studios
Chapter 8: Safety Protocols
Chapter 9: Societal Breakdown
Chapter 10: Lessons From History
Chapter 11: Policy Amendments

Oh, hey! Here's a ✨Paypal link ✨ in case you want to tip me! No pressure, but there it is.

CW for shitty family members and a reference to a gruesome death!

---

In retrospect, I don't think I was supposed to know my dad was experimenting on children, but that never stopped adults from talking about it in front of me.

Not that it was a secret, exactly. But apparently I wasn't supposed to join the conversations about it. Once I asked Grandma and Ms. Coralym if they were talking about one of my dad's subjects, and Ms. Coralym's response was, "My, my, somebody has big ears."

Then she smiled at me in that way some people have, that always makes me feel guilty, as though I should be ashamed of myself for reading in the backyard hammock when she decided to lean over the fence to talk to Grandma.

I had no idea how to respond to something like that, so I ignored it. "But are you?"

They'd been using a lot of the same phrases Ms. Palbert had heaved out between sobs when she'd brought her son over to our house the night before: "wit's end," "unmanageable," "damaged," "unmotivated." The son she was describing stood a bit behind her on our porch, gazing at the sky panels dreamily. I thought he might be older than me, but it's hard to tell with paquos; they're smaller than koranos like myself, and they mature faster. At any rate, he seemed not to hear his mother's complaints, but when his gaze crossed mine through the front window, he flicked his ears amiably and continued scanning around at nothing in particular.

(Come to think of it, this might have been another discussion I was not supposed to hear, even though I was sitting on the floor doing a jigsaw puzzle not two meters away.)

Dad stood at the door, listening to her in his characteristic stonefaced silence until she ran out of superlatives. Then he said, "No."

Ms. Palbert stared at him, openmouthed. )
bloodyrosemccoy: (Lobot!)
I wasn't planning to write this, mind you, but then this scene--set somewhere in the middle of The Force Awakens--showed up in a dream and then it WOULD NOT GO AWAY until I wrote it. So, you know. Blame the dream. And my current slight bout of hypomania, which is space-opera-themed. Y'all, I just finished the first Doctors! book's overhaul and I can already tell you that the sequel's gonna be EPIC.

But anyway. This had to come out first.

---

Spoilers! )
bloodyrosemccoy: Lilo and Stitch in a rocket ride (Space Adventure!)
The Book: The Martian by Andy Weir, a breakaway hit. Maybe you've heard of it.

The Basics: Things have not gone well for the third manned mission to Mars. Just six sols into their thirty-sol mission, a dust storm threatens their ascent vehicle to such an extent that that they have to abort. But as they're fleeing to the vehicle, the storm takes out the communications array, and its collapse kills astronaut Mark Watney super fucking dead. Unable to go back for his body, the crew is forced to leave it behind. And thus, the crew is going to spend the ten-month trip back to Earth very dispirited.

But not nearly as dispirited as Watney is when he WAKES THE FUCK UP STRANDED ALONE ON MARS.

OH SHIT: Yeah, so, he may not be as dead as previously indicated.

So, What Now?: Obviously, Mark's situation is the definition of hopelessly dire: he's on a planet with a very thin atmosphere, enough food to last six people seventy days, living in basically a high-tech tent. It will be four years until anybody can rescue him, but because they think he's dead and he has no way to contact them and tell them otherwise, even that is a longshot. He's clearly going to die.

Except that Mark Watney is an awesome astronaut type person, so after his initial Oh Shit response, he immediately begins considering ways he can survive. Using resourcefulness, creativity, humor, and lots of math, he immediately gets to work making his impossible situation possible. Every time an obstacle is flung in his way, he figures his way around it with duct tape or potatoes or something, and you find yourself looking forward to finding out how he's going to get through THIS completely insurmountable mess.

Sometimes NASA Butts In: And the switch from Mark's first-person log entries to the third-person NASA bits is Weir's weakness. Those portions feel a little like a screenplay or script, and the characters seem a bit stock-Hollywood. One particular character, Mindy, does have an arc, but it's an oddly clunky one. Still, it's got some fun stuff--NASA's eventual realization that Something Is Up is pretty entertaining.

Favorite Bit Of Survivaling: The part where he builds water. Yes, he survives some more immediate and alarming things, true, although his water building is explosive as hell. But I just love that he can fucking BUILD WATER out of its components.

Space Place Book Club Time!: So for some reason a whole bunch of us Space Placers independently decided to start reading this last week. I did because my sister's been after me to read it. I think the others did because the movie is coming out. I waited to finish the book before watching the trailer. And while Matt Damon does not look at all like the Mark Watney in my head, hot DAMN I want to see the movie now.

In Conclusion: I am really pleased that OMGSCIENCE! is becoming so popular in media recently. Especially when the stories are as great as this one. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing away from this too fast, because I want more things like The Martian. Go check it out!


DISCUSSION QUESTION: Do Hindus really say "Oh, gods"? I appreciate him diversifying his cast, but I'm seriously wondering if that's a thing.

The FUTURE

Mar. 26th, 2015 09:43 pm
bloodyrosemccoy: (Science!)
So as a final going-away present, Mom'n'Dad decided that by god I needed to finally get me a Smart Phone.

I've been resisting for a while because I had a perfectly good tablet for doing apps and internetting, and a perfectly good Dumb Phone on which to make calls and text. And I really didn't (and still don't) like taking calls on a big rectangle. It just seemed annoying.

But, I had to concede, I was falling behind. And Dad really wanted me to be up to date, as my failure to smart phonify has been a thorn in his early-adopter side for years. So I was equivocal, eh, whatever, sure, why not ...

And then I got into the phone place and saw the smart watches.

"Hey, Dad," I said. "Um ..."

Dad looked at the watches, then looked at me.

"Well, might as well go all at once," he sighed.

So, uh, I have a smart watch now! And I can do fun stuff with it, like answer phone calls and text and check my schedule and email and get yelled at when I sit around for too long (thanks, fitness apps). And, uh, here's the thing:

I really, really like this dumb gadget.

Until I saw a couple of Space Place people sporting them, I had no idea that I had always wanted one. But I realized I absolutely HAD. They're ... they're Spacefuturey! They're neat and tiny and easy to carry! Now instead of yelling into a rectangle I'm getting hair/ear grease on, I can yell into my wrist like some kind of secret agent or Power Ranger!* And I feel a little like Turanga Leela, and of course she is pretty damn cool.

So yeah, I have gone over to the Dark Side.

I have no idea if these will catch on. But if others like them as much as I do, they just might.


*Still trying to figure out how to make it beep the Power Ranger communicator noise, because of course I am.
bloodyrosemccoy: (Venus By Air)
SO I SAW INTERSTELLAR Y'ALL.

I ... hmmm.

Um ...

Huh.

That sure was a movie, that was.

I guess I hadn't really considered the fact that, as a Christopher Nolan movie, the thing could conceivably be made entirely of climaxes. Or that, like pretty much all the Nolan movies I've seen, I'd come away not with a big picture, but a sort of composite of Things I Liked and Things I Didn't Like. And as far as the story goes, the bits I was interested in (I really love the humanistic message that we can transcend ourselves) were fused inextricably with bits that just kind of annoyed me (no, seriously, you are fucking with causality like you're a goddamn Star Trek episode).

It was overwrought. I got really tired of the long, drawn-out climaxes and Hans Zimmer's All-Heartstring Orchestra Score. It was a huge oversell. But then, it's not hard to sell me on OMG SPACE!--I already am all about going and checking it out.* However, I know a lot of The Public is not interested in "wasting" (FUCK YOU) money on space, so I hope it does what it was trying to and inspires some people who aren't so into our spacey future to rethink that stance, because getting to space is ultimately going to be necessary (and awesome) for us. Ultimately I think that's probably a good thing.

But, uh, for my money? Erik Wernquist's three-and-a-half-minute video Wanderers was far more inspiring than this three-hour blockbuster. I am glad others have been inspired by it. But me, I'll stick with those Wanderers.



(Although I may have shrieked in excitment when, almost at the end, Matthew McConaughey sees a thing. ) Those things are cool.)


*Though not with Mars One. WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED that Mars One's plans do not appear to be all that well-thought-out?
bloodyrosemccoy: (Space Madness)
So I finally got to Chanur's Legacy. I never read it before because honestly Hilfy was insufferable. And I stand by that assessment, though she seems to finally be getting the glimmer of a clue through her thick skull. And I do love getting deep into alien minds.

Definitely going to go on to Cherryh's other stuff, too--the Alliance/Union universe to find out Tully's context, and also I've got Foreigner here. (Tried to get into it once and never got very far.) But I'm wanting other sci-fi, too. Definitely on a kick. You nerds got any recommendations?


PS: LOOK AT THIS FUCKING COVER I FOUND. Suddenly I want to learn French just to find out what the everloving hell the translator who described Pyanfar THAT way to the illustrator was on about.
bloodyrosemccoy: (Bookstore Belle)
Rereading the Chanur Saga. This series is still awesome. And I love rereading because I pick up so many details I didn't notice before.
bloodyrosemccoy: (Change)
Playing through Starfox 64 3D (I love that title) again. I swear this game makes me SO HAPPY. You could just play the audio track of those darn kibitzing wingmen for me forever and it would probably kill any stress in my life.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: more than a little of my sense of science fiction comes from this damn game. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend it. If you don't believe me, check out the trailer:



Poor Slippy. My brother liked the idea of him as the guy who wasn't innately talented but worked damn hard to get there. But that was the SNES version. The N64 version ... yeah, I can see where Honest Trailer Guy is coming from.
bloodyrosemccoy: Bert from Sesame Street reading a book entitled "Boring Stories" (Boring Stories)
Had a couple of people tag me for that Book Meme that's been going around on Facebook. The idea is to pick 10 books that have stuck with you. Which is RIDICULOUS. Ten? Like all the other book dweebs before me, I have trouble narrowing down my list of a hundred favorite books. But I want to toss out a few. If I stop to analyze it anymore, I'll never actually get it done.

So! A random ten of the Books That Stuck With Me:

1. All I See Is Part Of Me, Chara M. Curtis, ill. Cynthia Alrdich - a picture book told in rhyme about the connection everyone has to Life, the Universe, and Everything. I love the illustrations, and it's a nice sentiment.

2. Matilda, Roald Dahl - yeah, you don't need me to explain more, do you? Book is great.*

3. Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain - an unfinished book, but a useful one for a secular kid who was just discovering that religion was a Thing and wanted to know if she was the only one who had noticed how bizarre it was.

4. The Belgariad/TheMalloreon/Belgarath the Sorcerer/Polgara the Sorceress, David Eddings - Yeah, I am including twelve books in one here, but as always, when you have a saga of books it makes sense to count them as one. God, I read this in junior high and it blew me away. It has its problems, but it also has Polgara, Belgarath, and Silk, who are fascinating characters, and one of my favorite author self-inserts of all time in the form of The Voice Of The Purpose Of The Universe. You know how everyone else seems to consider Middle-earth to be Standard Fantasyland? In my brain it's the world of the Belgariad.

5. Circle of Magic quartet, Tamora Pierce - The first I read of hers. Love the characters, the worldbuilding, and the magic system. I was also kind of a fan of the fact that three of the books' conflicts weren't about villains; they were about other problems, like natural disasters and plagues. That was different. And it was also one of the first Fantasyland stories I read with racially diverse characters, which was a revelation.

6. Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens, various - this was like Baby's First Sci-fi. The first Ray Bradbury story I ever read was in this book,** as was "To Serve Man" (Christ, I'm glad I read the story before seeing the Twilight Zone episode). It opened up vast and wonderful new worlds for me.

7. Our Mutual friend, Charles Dickens - one of the few classic books I really enjoyed from English class. It was funny, dammit!

8. Who Talks Funny? A Book About Languages For Kids, Brenda S. Cox - a nonfiction book taking one on a tour of the weirdnesses of language. One of the books that really got me on my path toward linguistics.

9. Room, Emma Donoghue - One of the few books that actually belongs in present tense. I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, but the darn thing was in the book drop at the library one day and it got stuk to my face. It was just so darn interesting.

10. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien - My all-time favorite book. I could go on forever about it, but suffice to say, the adventure is great, and goddamn I relate to hobbits in general and Bilbo in particular. Making your hero just an average middle-class schmuck without making him annoying is almost impossible. Tolkien pulled it off perfectly.


There you have it! I've been considering doing a weekly retrospective of books that made an impression on me (I HAVE LOTS), but I am incredibly lazy and so it may not get done. Perhaps I will find the follow-through now. But either way, y'all are welcome to do this meme too if you're interested!


*I'm surprised at how many people from my generation fondly remember that godawful MOVIE of Matilda I was infuriated at it. Regardless, Mara Wilson is great and I will hear no ill spoken of her.

**My favorite, "The Veldt," I found in a book from a school program called Junior Great Books like a year later. That story just creeped me right the hell out. And I felt super smart for realizng that the holodeck nursery symbolized television. That one was the beginning of my long love/hate relationship with Bradbury.
bloodyrosemccoy: Calvin and Hobbes looking at the moon with binoculars (Moongazing)
Still getting used to my new Space Place schedule,* but by god I'm having a great time. Got to play with the dome theater today--you know, the big motion-sick domes that can give you some great night sky tours. You can tour the solar system and get 3D From Space views of all the planets and moons and little space greebles and a few of the stars floating around out there, or you can do sky views from any of the aforementioned things. Or you can show their orbits. And while they default to real time, you can run them to any length of time. You can mark all the constellations and then charge hundreds of thousands of years into the future till they've scrambled into unrecognizable scribbles, or you can head out to Rigel and render them unrecognizable thataway.** Or you can stand on Mars and watch Phobos and Deimos do their weird little zigzag, or watch Jupiter change phases from Europa.

And then I found a bug.

I wanted to see how the Earth looked from Tranquility Base, and how its phases might change over the course of the month. SO I set up the simulation, cranked the digital dial, and--

--the Earth started moving.

Not, like, the wiggly changes you'd expect. Darn thing was cruising from horizon to horizon. I don't know how much you nerds know about tide-locking, but, uh, it's not supposed to do that. It's supposed to hang in the sky and change phases. We have whole lessons devoted to how the Moon faces the Earth, dangit. And now I'd gone and broken the moon.

Naturally, as this was like Day 3 of me using the dome, I figured this was a user error. SO I asked The Boss about it, and he did everything right, and--god dammit, the Earth was still moving.

It took us a while to figure out why. Finally we realized that the dial we were using to speed up time also moved us around on the surface of the Moon. The other dials, like the daily one I used when watching Mars's moons or Jupiter's phases, leave you in one place, but the yearly one sends the viewer's location just zooming all over the place.

"I think you found a bug!" The Boss said. "I'll talk to the computer guy about this!"

"I HOPE it's a bug," I said. "I really don't want to have broken it."

Really, though, I'm sort of stupidly pleased that knowing a bit about astronomy actually made me savvy to the problem. Plus, we managed to finagle a way around it so I still got to see the Earth phases. And now it's Somebody Else's Problem, so I'm left with nothing but smugness. Good times.


*For example, I keep forgetting when it's Tuesday, so my [livejournal.com profile] torn_world updates have suffered. Sorry, Ellen!

**An experience that holds sentimental value for me after reading all those sci-fi books where the seasoned space captains lament that they're so far from Earth they don't even have constellations anymore.
bloodyrosemccoy: (Weirdos)
MOM: What are your plans for tonight?

ME: Try to TAKE OVER THE WORLD Got me a new novel to read!

MOM: What's that?

ME: It's called Parasite, it's a science fiction novel, and I will stop there because I suspect that's all you want to know.

MOM: You totally get me.

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