- Oh sure, when you pee on a colleague’s office door it’s a crime. When you pee on another author’s grave, however, it’s an artistic act. [via]
- Could we really have two suns and no night by 2012? Get ready for a Mayan apocalypse/sparkly vampire crossover! [via]
- We all work for Facebook now. [via]
- A Guide to Lunchtime Social Groups, Through Life [via]
- And finally, Bing caught cheating off of Google, totally has to go to the principal’s office afterward. [via]
ethics
Wednesday various
- Realms of Fantasy back from the grave again…again? Naturally, there’s lots of reason to be dubious.
- Also dubious: this “apology” from Cooks Source. (First mentioned here Monday.) When you’ve been demonstrably proven to have a history of stealing your content from other sources, and your only excuse is an indignant cry of “the internet is public domain and you should be thanking us!” — a bizarrely dumb thing to hear an editor say — then you really don’t get to paint yourself as the wronged party, much less complain that your “issues and photos [were] used without [y]our knowledge or consent.”
- Editing Monty Python & the Holy Grail:
I would like to get back to the Censor and agree to lose the shits, take the odd Jesus Christ out and lose Oh fuck off, but to retain ‘fart in your general direction’, ‘castanets of your testicles’ and ‘oral sex’ and ask him for an ‘A’ rating on that basis.
- Is Stephen King America’s favorite author?
- And finally, from someone else who made that “favorite authors” list, a look at how J.K. Rowling plots. [via]
Tuesday various
- Peter Sagal on the difference between an opinion and a bias:
A bias doesn’t mean that you think that what a certain candidate says is idiotic; a bias means that not matter what he says, you’ll attack him. Or, if it’s a bias in favor of him, no matter what he says, you’ll forgive him, or simply choose not to draw attention to what doesn’t make him look good. You know your opinion after you read the day’s paper; you know your bias before you open it.
- Maybe it’s just me, but I bathe every day. [via]
- In case you were wondering: what happened to the Doctor Who companions?
- Original estimates of the untapped oil reserves in Alaska only off by…oh…about ninety percent [via]
- Amal El-Mohtar on a steampunk without steam:
I submit that the insistence on Victoriana in steampunk is akin to insisting on castles and European dragons in fantasy: limiting, and rather missing the point. It confuses cause and consequence, since it is fantasy that shapes the dragon, not the dragon that shapes the fantasy. I want the cogs and copper to be acknowledged as products, not producers, of steampunk, and to unpack all the possibilities within it.
I think I like the idea of calling this subgenre “retrofuturism,” with steampunk just one sub-subgenre of that. While, of course, differentiating the whole thing from alternate history, since that posits a specific branching point, a moment in history — the Nazis win, the South doesn’t lose, etc. — rather than an historical era. It’s only the ubiquity of steampunk that, to my mind, is the problem — insofar as this is a problem; it’s the fact that it chokes out other retrofuturistic viewpoints, necessitates a very specific and limiting aesthetic, keeps retrofutrism tethered (much like steampunk’s zeppelins) to specific countries, eras, worldviews.
If steampunk were just one type of story, rather than the all-consuming and defining aspect of retrofuturism, I think we’d be seeing less backlash against it.