Frankenfoods...

You know, it's 1:02 AM, and I spent literally all day sitting at a computer making cool stuff up. (My next novel is going to be made into a movie starring Ewan MacGragor, by the way. As soon as I'm done writing it, naturally, Hollywood will come on board with this. I'm trying to get Ewan's inevitable character into some sort of brown robe, with space boots, spouting wisdom-y goodness.)

I was eating corn chips. And, I got to thinking about Frankenfoods. Genetically modified foods are going to be awesome. They will make frog-broccoli. It will be like a chia frog, but totally edible, healthy, and it's blood will have the flavor of white chocolate sauce.

They will make jellyfish with actual jelly in them.

They will make tiny, little chicken wings that grow in fungal vats, and make strange squishing noises when they try to get up and walk around.

Nature will be violated.

And, I can't wait to start eating all this crazy stuff. The sooner we master the biology of beet/beef hybrids, the sooner we'll master the kind of bodmods we need to make our puny, pathetic speck of humanity a giant swarm across the cosmos!

Let's get cooking, chef science!

That is all.

This is not a good hotel room for Video Game Writers!

I went to all the trouble of packing up my XBox and getting it through airport security, and carrying it to my hotel room.

I pull the TV around to plug it in last night, and lo and behold, the whole thing is clamped down with all sorts of boxes, screwed over everything and attached securely around everything and there's no way I'll be able to get my XBox cables into there.

In this day and age, when games and technology are becoming ever more portable, and travelers - like me - want to game on our own games, hotels really ought to allow that.

Right.

In less ranty news, Alpharetta seems like a nice town. In America, we have so many retail chains that you can travel all over the country and encounter all sorts of familiar things. There, a Starbucks. There, a Walgreens. There, a Mickey D's. I'm not really moving to a new city. I'm moving to a remix of the last city.

Even the apartments look the same.

Where is the original city? Where is the Platonic ideal of America, upon which all others are remixed?

Somewhere in America there is a city with streets both grid-like, and meandering, and with buildings as pure to the vision of Americana as possible.

Is it in America? Maybe it isn't even *in* America. Maybe it's in Canada. Architects and city managers accidentally stumble upon it in the course of normal travel. They tell each other to go there, see this city. Maybe it's in Europe. Full of American chain restaurants and shops. Full of familiar, bland retail facades. One could not imagine art that was not for a hotel, or the friendly, inoffensive walls of a Starbucks Cafe. In Okinawa, where Asian girls speak "Engrish" slang and drive big cars around to Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, and grocery stores with huge aisles.

Cities, like disco tracks, iterate across the dance floors of the world. Designers and architects twisting around upon a single, simple theme: "Inoffensive, clean, plenty of parking, mixed use retail, gated communities" repeating like an ode to joy in the subconscious brain matter of all these designing men and women.

Goin' to Atlanta, Live Out This Fantasy...

Some of you know already and many of you don't.

I am moving to Atlanta, GA very quickly to commence work with the talented folks at Xaviant Software.

I am pleased. I expect great things.

My ConDFW Status is hopeful, but I can not promise I will be there. The Con folks are aware of this, and we all have our fingers crossed.

And, just to be clear, yes, I will still be working on my own, original fiction. I suspect I will not be producing nearly as many short stories in the near future. But, that's not the sort of thing that ever, ever stops.

So, I'm going to Atlanta. This morning.

I will get to combine two things I love: Writing and Video Games!

Expect light blogging...

I'm swamped. I'll have some good news soon, unrelated to publishing, and I'll resume blogging again when I can.

Busy day...

Sorry, folks. I was quite busy today. I'll be quite busy tomorrow as well. I hope you all manage to find some meaningful things to read this weekend instead of reading my little blog.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Two things to read together to get you thinking about America's Economic Future

First, here's a livejournal entry from brilliant fantasist Catherynne M Valente:

http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/417489.html

Now, here's the new book by Cory Doctorow compiling many of his essays about copyright law, the internet, piracy, creativity and what-have-you.

Makes for a fascinating duo. The decline of big business, and America nostalgia, hand-in-hand with the ways that big business is scrambling to contain a future at the cost of the consumer, contrary to the true nature of the technologies in question.

I think it's fascinating. One writes mythic fantasy, and the other writes activist SF. Together a picture is painted that points to the way things will be, and the way things could be.

After Looking at Obama's Executive Orders...

I think it is kind of disheartening that the president's first groundbreaking executive orders are 1) We will now obey international law, starting now. 2) We will now obey national law, starting now.

Because they weren't being obeyed before.

एअर्वोर्म...

It's been in my head for days, now.

In case you were wondering what working on the Nebula Novels Jury does to your reading habits...

My Best 15 of the year list (from last year) appears at Omnivoracious, the Amazon Book Blog.

*Link*

When you spend so much time reading deep in genre, you end up not straying too far when new books come out. That literary novel just needs more zombies. That biography could use with a few more space ninjas, and assassination plots.

Even when I strayed from the Nebula Novels Jury, I washed ashore among deeply genre short story anthologies.

I have weird taste. Everyone does. Feel free to disagree with me, here, there, and everywhere in the comments.

Take 28 Minutes to Watch This Amazing SF Classic

La Jetee, inspiring both David Bowie and Terry Gilliam, in countless ways. And that's just scratching the surface of the influence of this incredible, and incredibly weird film.

you know you want to read this...

Take a deep breath with me. *In...*



*Out...*

The world seems like a better place today than it did yesterday.

You know you want to read the full transcript.

Because the King of Thailand is a stooge:

Here is the paragraph - courtesy of Alina's investigations - that managed to get an Australian self-published author six years in prison:

"From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives "major and minor", with a coterie of concubines for his entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a child they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumored that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives, and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with her name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever."

Now, your job is to re-post this at your blog. This is a human rights violation and the international community of writers should speak up about this.

अ नोट तो थे थाई रोयल फॅमिली...

A book that had about fifty copies published (I can't find the book on Amazon or ABEBooks or anywhere else) has a single paragraph that gets an Australian author jailed.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/19/thai.jail/index.html

So, I'd like to say this:

The Thai Royal Family are a bunch of stooges. The Crown Prince? Stooge. The King? Stooge.

They are both only comparable to the portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in Rowan Atkinson's BBC Series, "Blackadder".

I hope everyone re-posts this information, and continues do so until this author is freed. I don't care what that paragraph said.

My favorite part of the CNN Article?

[quote]CNN has chosen not to repeat the allegations made by Nicolaides because it could result in CNN staff being prosecuted in Thailand.

Nicolaides had been living in Thailand since 2003, lecturing at two universities about tourism.

He was about to leave Thailand when he was arrested on August 31 last year. It is not clear why the authorities waited three years after the publication of his book to bring charges against him.

[\quote]

Can anyone find the paragraph in question so we can blast it across the internet like it's never been blasted before?

EDIT: Update to add that someone found the entire text of the 127-page book. I've started skimming it.

EDIT 2: I can't find "three sentences" that offend the Royal King or the Crown Prince. As this is a self-published text - which does not diminish the injustice of the situation in the slightest, in fact, it ramps it up a notch or two - I must confess to being unable to slog through the material in total. This isn't really the time to go into a detailed review, so I'll skip it. Needless to say, I would love someone to point out the exact three sentences that got this fellow in all this trouble.

Full text is here:http://psydj.tv/text/verisimilitude-harry-nicolaides.pdf

Dance Party!

Everybody needs to dance today! (Because Arroxane and Mike are getting married! WOO!)



Woo!