- The next Twilight movie, which doesn’t open in theaters until November 20, is already selling out. On the plus side, this means it’s less likely that anyone can force me into seeing it.
- Meanwhile, Television Without Pity wonders what if every vampire kept a diary? [via]
- Just last week, Gail Simmons was reminding Top Chef viewers that “The language and structure of the kitchen in America is still very much dominated by French terminology…”
Now I learn that Julia Child, author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, has never been translated into French. Apparently, the French see her cookbook as dated and a caricature. C’est la vie.
- In praise of the sci-fi corridor [via]
- And finally, Russell T. Davies and David Tennant’s exit interview for Doctor Who. They’ll be missed! [via]
sci-fi
Thursday various
- My sister is getting married in a couple of months — a little less than, actually — and I don’t think she’s taking her fiancé Brian’s last name. Apparently, however, 50% of Americans think she should be legally required to do so. I’m curious as to what these people think the legal repercussions for not taking your husband’s name should be. Thirty years hard labor? My future wife needn’t worry. I ask only a dowry of ten cows and three oxen from her village patriarch. Anyway, as I noted yesterday, my last name is frequently misspelled and -pronounced. [via]
- N. K. Jemisin on describing characters of color:
Because so much of fantasy takes place in settings that in no way resemble the real world, featuring species that in no way resemble human, fantasy writers often have trouble dealing with regular people. This is something that, I think, isn’t as much of a problem for mainstream writers, because they can simply describe the world around them and come up with a reasonably accurate representation of humanity. They can also fall back on the plethora of real-world terms used to describe human beings, racially and otherwise. But using these terms makes no sense if you’re dealing with a world that doesn’t share our political/cultural context. You can’t call someone “African American†if your world has no Africa, no America, and has never gone through a colonial phase in which people of disparate cultures were forcibly brought together, thus necessitating the term in the first place.
- Got $8,000? Why not buy your own Personal Satellite Kit? [via]
- On the other hand, if you have eight million dollars, maybe you want to bid on your very own rare T-Rex skeleton. (Maybe you could get an Ankylosaurus skeleton and make them fight.)
- And finally, if you’re going to complain about your job on Facebook, at the very least make sure your boss isn’t one of your friends. [via]
Wednesday various
- Jack of all trades, master of none? The people who multitask the most are the ones who are worst at it. I’d post some further thoughts on this, but I’ve got about fifteen dozen other things I need to do right now.
- Zack Handlen looks for meaning in the films of Michael Bay. An unenviable task, to be sure:
[Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen] is, by any sensible measurement, a lousy piece of work. But it has a personality behind it. That personality is childish, shallow, and has some definite issues with women, but every time Bay frames up those giants staring to the heavens, I don’t have a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch means it. I sort of wish I could mean it too. Because sometimes the shit gets real, and that’s when winners have to fuck the prom queen, since fate rarely calls on us on a moment of our choosing to stop a giant asteroid from killing everyone we love.
- Jonesing for some poetry? Swindle is “an automated daily aggregator of contemporary poetry,” pulling in poems from literary journals, magazines, and other RSS feeds. Its creator describes it (at Bookslut) as “a little like Google News, if Google News had been built by a virtually unpublished poet using a second-string web server and a three-year-old book about web programming.”
- Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, A Brief History of Appropriative Writing. This was interesting, more so than I expected actually, though I still have issues with appropriation without attribution or at least passing acknowledgment. Artists borrow or steal all the time — that’s the nature of art — but it’s good form, if nothing else, to acknowledge the debt where it exists. [via]
- And finally, while I wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing Jack Harkness on Doctor Who again — and I think the ending of Children of Earth definitely made that a workable possibility — I definitely don’t want to see the two shows combined. Doctor Who can go into dark places — by its nature, there’s few places it can’t go — but it’s still at it’s heart a smart adventure show and at least partly aimed at kids. Torchwood, on the other hand, is best when it’s at its darkest…even it it’s at its worst when it’s just being dark (read: sexualized and “adult”) for its own sake. I don’t want the Doctor to be Torchwood‘s comic relief, any more than I want Captain Jack to be a dose of dreariness in Doctor Who. John Barrowman fits well into both worlds, but I’m not convinced the two worlds would fit well inside each other.
Then there’s The Longest Poem in the World, which, at about 4,000 verses a day, “aggregat[es] real-time public twitter updates and select[s] those that rhyme.” It’s an intriguing project, although any resemblance to good poetry is probably accidental. (There’s something reminiscent of flarf about these “verses.” I wonder if any of my tweets have ever turned up there. [via]
Monday various
- Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
- An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via] It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.
- Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]
- Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.
- And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)