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[links] Link salad tells you what to do, baby
Urban fantasy author (and very good friend of mine) J.A. Pitts is having a book launch tour in July this week [my error yesterday!] — He’ll be in Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego. Check him out if you can.
I Have a Theory… — Richard Parks is wise about the theory of fiction.
Science gets burned by Prometheus — Ridley Scott had this viewer feeling like his innards were plucked out by birds.
The Secret of a Successful Programming Language? A Really Great Beard
Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden
Experiment raises doubt over Standard Model of physics — Um…
Spherical Flying Machine — This is rather unnerving. Basically, it’s a helicopter insofar as I can tell. But weird. (Via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
willyumtx
Planes on the landing strip — An-12s to be specific. A gorgeous photo from x-planes.
Chinese astronauts board home-built space station — Kind of a bizarre headline.
Non Sequitir on the intellectual fraud that is Intelligent Design — Heh. I always do wonder how Christianist evolution deniers square their behaviors with that whole Biblical thing about bearing false witness. I guess some of God’s laws are more immutable than others. (c.f. eating shrimp vs. being gay.)
Reporter Who Heckled Obama for ‘Favoring Foreigners’ Is Himself Not American — Ah, the unbearable lightness of the conservative mind. Confidential to GOP in America: How in the hell do you people get up every morning without your heads exploding from cognitive dissonance?
Right Gives GOP Hell On Health Care, Taxes As Crises Loom — It’s so rare to see the GOP paying any price at all for their incredibly destructive pandering to the far right. I don’t have a lot of hope this will be any different.
Mitt Romney Spends Father’s Day Lying About His Past — Today he told CSPAN that, “I didn’t go to law school, I didn’t practice law, but I like the idea of arguing points back and forth…” Somebody better tell Harvard Law School to demand their diploma back because Romney’s web site says that “After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1971, he earned dual degrees from Harvard Law and Harvard Business School.” This will of course pass unnoticed in Your Liberal Media, and low information conservative voters will simply nod and agree as usual.
Romney, cows and ice cream: Targeting conservative, white ‘backbone’ — Obama has the cities? Well, Mitt Romney is aiming to strengthen the GOP core — older white and blue-collar voters. And he has something to pin his effort on: the economy. That would be the same economy that crashed hard under the last period of Republican governance? That Obama has spent his entire presidency trying to dig the country out of in the face of absolute Republican opposition to any steps that might actually work, and thus make the president look good? Good thing for Romney and the GOP that voters apparently have no long-term memory.
?otD: Hey, kids, where are you?
6/19/2012
Writing time yesterday: 2.5 hours (WRPA and a piece for the League of S.T.E.A.M.)
Body movement: 30 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 6.5 (interrupted)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Shattering the Ley by Benjamin Tate
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Posted: 5:21 am Tue June 19 2012 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Re: prometheus and science:
The thing to keep in mind about this movie and the Alien series in general is that it is not a real scifi movie, it is a horror movie in a scifi setting. The sciencey stuff and space ships are just there to move the plot along. You get the scientists doing abjectly stupid things, just like you have the ‘bad’ sexually active teenagers in slasher movies going into the dark basement with the scary music playing saying “Gee, I wonder what that funny noise is? *giggle*”.
Prometheus uses scientific notation in at least a couple of intros. They’re trying to be scientific and realistic and had an astrobiologist science advisor (cousin of Liz Hand) consulting on the aliens.
The thing to keep in mind is that when a movie makes mistakes in how people behave (bad acting/writing/directing), how the things behave (bad science/writing/directing), or how the story behaves (bad editing/writing/directing), it’s a problem for a lot of viewers and they have every write to compain about it.
And it’s not just sceince in this case. Despite having great visuals and some great actors, there is an abundance of things that don’t make sense as science fiction, horror, or any kind of coherent story. The filmmakers did not set out to make a cheap non-sensical movie. They set out, based on interviews with them, to make a serious, profound movie about many deep and thoughtful issues. That doesn’t preclude some horrific thrills, but it does mean that stupid is as stupid does isn’t a defense for them.
Alien was a terriffic science fiction horror movie. Prometheus is a mess.