On scifi, science and geeky miscellany

I got back from Readercon 22 about half an hour ago. Rather than attempt to write a con roundup which I always swear that I will do and rarely, if ever, actually get around to doing well, I will merely say that I enjoyed it: I got turned on to some new authors that I haven’t read before and I got to listen to smart people say smart things and to silly people say silly things (sometimes, of course, simultaneously).

I was stunned that the audience actually won the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition this year for the first time ever. I am looking forward to seeing how (if at all) they will deal with that fact in next year’s competition (as, usually, the winner is an on-stage contestant in the next iteration).

I have (as usual) a truly sickening pile of new books to read (only about half of which are really new-new) and I re-upped my subscription to Lady Churchill’s Rosebut Wristlet. (Can I pause for a moment to say how much I adore Small Beer press? I adore them SO FREAKING MUCH.)

The con was much fuller of things to do than my weekend was full of time in which to do them. Kind of like a microcosm of life itself, I guess. I am currently suffering from a mild case of what a friend of mine used to call PCBs – post con blues. The abrupt dissolution of the cheerful, focused intentional community that a con as small and specific as Readercon creates can leave one feeling a little bereft. But, of course, I will see folks again next year, if not before.

For now, there shall be rest, and laundry and a totally veggie-intensive dinner.

Last night, I went to a memorial party for James Welborn, the owner of Hub Comics. I don’t normally do well in really crowded places. This one was full of incredibly friendly and sympathetic people, though, so I stayed for quite a while even though it was really packed.

I’m glad I did. I met a lot of people (though, of course, I wish it could have been under better circumstances). I wish James could have been there to see the turnout and participate in the inevitable piles of nerdery.

I didn’t know James that well. I chatted with him many times when I was in the store. He was always friendly, always willing to chat…I wish I had known him better. I wish I’d made a point of it.

What I do know is he created a space for a community I of people I care about. He made sure it was welcoming to women and didn’t make a big deal about that. So many of the people I met were in the store once a week and not just to pick up their subs. James hosted lots of activities and groups at the store. People often even came in just to hang out on one of the big sofas in the store and chat with him.

Hub Comics truly is a hub, due to James’ willingness to let people in and make space for them to stay a while and due to his friendly presence that will be sorely missed.

Inception:
Beautiful and deals with interesting concepts. Worthwhile and gripping even though I spoiled myself on the whole film before I went. (I was concerned about whether the level of violence in the film would be too much for me. It wasn’t.) Provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion in the group I was with, upon exiting the theater.

History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present
This was a class taught by Prof. Margaret Lavinia Anderson at UC Berkley in the Spring of 2008. It’s available via ITunes U, and I’ve been listening to it while knitting, and I’m finding the lectures flow and are quite interesting, in addition to being chock full of information. The course covers a lot of time and space and sub-topics in history. Each lecture has a particular focus (sometimes it’s one person, sometimes it’s religion, science, commerce, etc.). More information on Prof. Anderson and on the individual courses she teaches is here.

Primeval
Okay, so, I like cheesy T.V. as much as the next person. In fact, I probably like it more than many. This show falls into a very comfortable zone, for me. Pretty people (in that television way) with sexy accents (to me) fend off various threats from earth’s history that are coming through portals around present-day London to snack on the populace or otherwise wreak various forms of havoc. Who knows if any of the paleontology is remotely accurate? Who knows if the zoology is correctly applied? How come issues of paradox and alternate reality seem to matter only when convenient for the story? And who cares, anyway? It’s madcap hi jinks, it’s stupid fun action with a coating of specfic lite. Just don’t count on the writing or internal logic to wow you. Keep looking at the pretty, pretty cheese. This is one where I get about an equal amount of mileage out of mocking it as I do out of watching it.

The first time I saw it, I approached the movie with caution, as it were. The trailer made it look like one of those re-tellings that throws the source material out of the window with total abandon and replaces story with action, explosions, etc.

Thus I went in with low expectations. It turns out I had theorized ahead of my data. I was pleasantly surprised. I remained pleasantly surprised on a second viewing. It wasn’t just my low expectations that made the movie seem good, it actually really was good.

While the action and explosions are definitely there (along with fistfights and some spectacular deaths) I was surprised at how true they stayed to the character of Sherlock Holmes and how much source material they actually used from the original stories to make this film.

There is a lot more action in the film than in the average story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which tend to be more about the mental feats than the physical. Doyle’s original Holmes was not averse to confronting the bad guys with his gun and his wits on occasion. Where the film portrayed Holmes as a far more physical being than he had been in the stories, it at least extrapolated his strong mental faculties and presented them as inexplicably intertwined with his physical prowess.

I don’t want to say too much else about the film, for fear of spoiling it for anyone, but I will say that the plot was engaging, the character interactions rang true to life and had plenty of humor and the depiction of turn-of-the-century industrial London was very effective.

By the way, if you, by chance, haven’t read the original Sherlock Holmes stories, I highly recommend it. There’s a reason that they’ve been adapted, parodied and re-envisioned in every medium available. The stories are available for free on Project Gutenberg, here. The stories are also out in very inexpensive editions, for those of us who can’t stand reading a whole book from a screen, and I guarantee they’re available at your local library.

The lens of history doesn’t leave the stories completely untouched. Women and romance are dealt with in a much less sophisticated manner in Doyle’s stories than they are in the recent movie and Watson gets a little breathless in his amazement, sometimes, but they’re still very engaging and Holmes is a Character in any decade. And, of course, the best part are the actual mysteries to solve.

Mostly, that I should really get more sleep before heading to 24-hour movie marathons.

The final marathon tally was Ericka 8, sleep dep 4. Four being the number of movies (mostly horror films, with lots of screaming) I slept through most of.

The things I most enjoyed seeing were Labyrinth (I had seen it before, but not on the big screen) the PBS version of Lathe of Heaven from the eighties (which I had never seen) and Moon (which I saw when it came out, but was jazzed to see again). I also liked all the shorts.

Stuff I missed by sleeping through that I really still want to see: The Thing, Night of the Creeps and Rabid – all horror films with varying degrees of camp value. The other film I slept through, before giving up and going home to sleep on something more comfortable than a theater seat, was The Day the Sky Exploded, an Italian scifi film from the fifties that seemed to suffer from bad overdubbing and a surfeit of stock footage. I base that on the first fifteen minutes and the last five, which were all that I saw.

I missed seeing Night of the Comet on the big screen, which I was really looking forward to, but it became very apparent, around the 18th hour or so, that even if I was still in the theater for the film, I would still really miss it. Thus, I surrendered and went home.

The marathon is an experience that is worthwhile for its own sake. It’s definite nerd fun, with or without the traditional tin foil hat competition and the extremely non-traditional burlesque dancers.

Once you’re in a room with a bunch of people through bad movies, junk food and inordinate levels of sleep-deprivation, you wind up feeling a sense of camaraderie. I recommend trying it at least once. You should probably bring more caffeine than I did, though.

Also, for the record, my favorite film out of the entire group shown in the festival and the marathon was Ink. It is a film better seen without any spoilers at all, so I will merely observe that it’s apparently available on netflix streaming.

I’m in, tonight, watching the Olympic games and thinking about physics.

It seems to me that, while the summer games are about biology, the winter games are about physics. Or, actually, more accurately, the summer games are about fighting physics with biology. The winter games are about bending your biology to the service of physics.

I’m thinking here about luge, bobsled, downhill skiing, ski jumping, even snowboarding events versus swimming, high jump, long-jump, running events, javelin, and shot put. The former are about harnessing momentum, gravity and inertia, the latter are about defying them.

These are generalizations, of course. the physics isn’t particularly on your side in, say, the biathlon or speed skating, whereas in diving the physics is more friendly to your sport.

Both sets of athletes work extremely hard to achieve their goals, obviously, but the different physics problems are part of what makes different kinds of training and different body types desirable in different sports.

No point, really, here. It’s just interesting and cool to remember, sometimes, that physics doesn’t just affect our world, it is an intrinsic part of our world and that affects everything else.

Tonight’s cooking experiment:

Take apples that are a bit past their prime, cranberry juice (with about a tablespoon of sugar added, because it’s 100 percent cranberry juice).

Boil the whole mess till the apples are falling apart.

And you get:

Looks good, huh? It is good.

(Yes, I know it’s basically applesauce, but it’s still very tasty.)

Some of the shorts we will be watching, today, are available for viewing online:

Frank Dancoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer

A cyberpunk neo-noir film with a hard-talking relentless woman reporter. NSFW.

The Kirkie

Nerds hanging out and encountering non-nerds. Definitely has some nerd self-hatred, but also lots of laughs and in-jokes. Also, that one guy’s tron costume is awesome.

If anyone knows of more links, please feel free to comment and I will add them to this post.

Apparently, Stephen Fry is doing everything he can to extend and honor the legacy of Douglas Adams’s work. I already knew about Fry doing new audio versions of Adams’s books.

I did not know that in 2009, 20 years after Adams traveled the world and wrote his fantastic book Last Chance To See on endangered species and the people who are attempting to keep them alive, Stephen Fry traveled the world to look for endangered species himself, for the BBC.

Last Chance To See, the TV series, apparently revisited the places and animals that Adams originally sought out with zoologist Mark Carwardine (who also co-authored the book).

Carwardine is also in the TV series. The web site for the series (linked above) seems to have lots of good content, including blogs by both Carwardine and Fry about their travels. Unfortunately (for me), the multimedia content is only available in the UK. Doubly unfortunately for me, the DVD doesn’t appear to be available for Region 1.

This seems like a great project, and I’m glad that Fry took it up. If anyone out there is not familiar with Adams’s book, it is well worth a read. It has all his wit and intelligence, Mark Carwardine’s zoological expertise and it is still depressingly and startlingly relevant today, over 20 years after it was published.

And now, I shall leave you with a brief clip from the show:

Every once in a while, I get confronted by a new fandom. Sometimes I’m just not interested or it all looks like something I’ve heard before. Other times, it will surprise, delight or absorb me.

Tonight, one of the short films at the Boston Sci-fi film festival was ConLang. It’s a funny little romance film and worth watching, but it opened my eyes to a branch of geekdom I was only vaguely aware of before.

I’ve been aware of made-up languages for a long time. Everybody learns at least one simple one as a kid, maybe more than one. I remember learning pig-latin of course. I was exposed to Tolkein’s languages in sixth grade, upon first reading The Hobbit, and exposed to bits of Klingon at around the same time. The idea that someone would actually learn one of these languages well enough to speak it was pretty foreign to me.

In high school I took a brief stab at learning Esperanto (via a correspondence course – this was in the dark days before internet access was common). It wasn’t till college that I met a person who had seriously learned a fake language (Tolkien’s Elvish).

It all seemed very cool. Languages, after all, are interesting. They say something about the culture (or person) that created them. Being able to communicate in a way you couldn’t before is very cool and being able to communicate in a secret way that only a few people know is even cooler.

This same feeling is something that provoked a lot of reading on cryptography, for me, but I guess I never considered the possibility of making my own language out of whole cloth. Other folks, however, have.

The Language Creation Society has archives of articles on how languages are put together, how to play with them and how to build your own. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be playing around on this site for a while.

The language in the title of this post (apart from English), by the way is Uscaniv, a language constructed by Kári Emil Helgason, which was featured in the short film.

There are more nerds in the heaven and the earth than are dreampt of in my philosophy. Hurrah for the geek community.