Month: January 2012

Monday various

  • Fringe wasn’t originally meant to have alternate universes. I am not even a little surprised by this. It’s only when the show settled on the alternate universe storyline, when it started having an ongoing plot that wasn’t based in creatures-of-the-week, that it went from being one of the worst science fiction shows on the air to being one of the best. (I highly recommend io9’s primer to anyone looking to get into the show for the first time. There’s a lot early on you can, and will probably want to, miss.)
  • In case you missed it, the best New York Times correction ever. [via]
  • Genevieve Valentine on suspension of disbelief (particularly in the movie In Time:

    If your movie is super high concept, and I decide to see it, I have probably, to some degree, already accepted the concept, you know? “Everyone in the future has a puppy surgically grafted to their chests.” Okay, fine, I promise not to spend a lot of the movie going, “Surgically grafting a puppy to your chest is a weird thing for a person to do.” I will, however, question every piece of outerwear that does not have a dog-head flap in it, or any moment in your movie where a character is like, “Well, now my dog has grown too big for my chest cavity and medical science didn’t allow for that in the many generations we have been living with these grafted puppies, so now it’s too late for me, you go on!” Because that is worldbuilding, and that you need to do. And the higher the concept is, the more work you need to do. (Moon, for example, requires little. Dark City requires more.

  • See also: Why fiction’s freest genres need its most rigid rules:

    In these genres, the fundamental realities of a world can be anything imaginable: There can be wizards, or dragons, or intergalactic spaceships, or time travel, or dragon-wizards in time-traveling intergalactic spaceships. Nothing can be assumed. Which makes it mighty easy for authors to cheat by changing the rules whenever it’s convenient to the plot: “Oh, did I not mention that dragon-wizard time-travel spaceships are sentient and can crossbreed to produce baby spaceships? Well, they can.”

  • And finally, Writers are Like Porn Stars. There, that ought to bring in some more comment spam. (SFW — it’s another io9 link — though the image is maybe a little risque for the workplace.)

Sunday

A quiet day, spent mostly failing to finish the Sunday crossword and joining my regular free-writing group. I wrote this:

It was the year of the dragon, which meant the restaurant was closed. There had been talk about a private party, local businessmen renting out the back rooms with their wives and children, sampling a fixed menu of platters and drinks, but in the end the cook refused — “Not for what you pay me,” he’d said as he walked out the door, taking most of the wait staff with him — and the businessmen’s families had gone somewhere else. Dao-ming had reluctantly shuttered the front doors, sent the rest of the staff home to be with their families — with pay, of course — and switched the restaurant’s phone line to voice mail.

Not that there were a lot of regular customers calling for reservations these days, or that she herself had anywhere else to be. Dao-ming stood in the door of the darkened kitchen, listening to the stillness of her father’s restaurant. The one he had opened in the year of the rat — how many years ago was that, now? Neither of them — nor her mother, nor her two brothers, all of them gone now — had ever paid much mind to astrology. “A bunch of old country crap,” her father had said; it was the kind of thing Americans liked, that customers expected to see: the red lanterns and gold Buddhas he had openly detested but still decorated the restaurant with on any occasion.

Only at the end, after he’d been diagnosed, after the cancer had spread through his liver like an oil slick across the surface of a lake, had her father found religion. Only then had he talked of omens and curses and fate, inauspucious signs he said he should have recognized, on which he should have acted. They never openly talked about the fire, about her mother, about Chang and Baoqi. He never blamed her; not once in five years had he ever blamed her. And like a good little drone, her father’s daughter, she never dared mention it herself. She kept the restaurant open, even as it continued to fail, and she buried him in the family plot where her mother and the two boys all were laid.

She was still here, still managing the books, though they saw a lot more red these days than ever before. She would have joked, had there been anyone to joke with — anyone but the staff, the cook and waiters, the hostess who most nights still worked the door — that it was red for the new year, the year of the dragon, each debit and loss secretly an omen of glad tidings. She didn’t believe it — that’s what would have made it a joke — but what else, really, could Dao-ming do?

That is all.

Saturday

I find it very difficult to believe it snowed only a week ago. You would not have been uncomfortable walking around, even outside, with your sleeves rolled up or at most a light jacket. It’s colder and windier now, but the weather was weirdly pleasant all afternoon.

Not that I did an awful lot with it, beyond watching a few more episodes of Red Dwarf, reading a little Tintin, and helping my father put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting times, no doubt.