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.)