I really enjoyed this book: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics: Hollywood’s Best Mistakes, Goofs, and Flat Out Destructions of the Basic Laws of the Universe by Tom Rogers. It’s a fast, funny read, and focuses mostly on sci-fi movies, so I think it would be perfect for teenage science fiction writers who want to get an entertaining overview of some of the knowledge that science fiction writers need to be familiar with. And I think everyone will probably find a few nuggets in here that’ll make them say, “Oh yeah, I never really thought about it, but yeah, that is pretty dumb.” For example, in the movie Independence Day, a big deal is made over whether or not it’s reckless to deploy nuclear weapons against the alien invaders. Eventually the alien ship hovering over D.C. is destroyed by other means. But, the book points out (crediting the numbers cited to physicist Lawrence Krauss), if you actually shot down a fifteen-mile-long alien saucer, the saucer would plummet to earth, releasing in the process “10,000 times as much energy as the nuclear bomb used on Hiroshima.” Another example: In the movie Armageddon, a ragtag team of drillers/astronauts uses a nuclear bomb to blow apart a Texas-sized asteroid that’s on a collision course with earth. But the book asks you to imagine: What if you dug a big hole in the middle of Texas and set off the largest nuclear bomb ever made — 100 megatons? The resulting explosion will seem big to us but will barely make a dent in Texas. And finally: During the Zion siege scene in The Matrix Revolutions, The Kid uses his trusty wheelbarrow to keep the APUs (giant gun-toting robot suits) supplied with ammo. Only: “Let’s assume a firing rate of six hundred rounds per minute for each APU cannon, and a cartridge similar to the 30 x 113-millimeter round used by the U.S. military in Apache helicopter gunships. Each cartridge has a mass of 447 grams. The total mass of ammunition required for one minute of sustained fire by an APU with both cannons blazing is a whopping 1,180 pounds. A box containing one hundred rounds would weigh over 98 pounds. With both cannons firing, the box would last a mere five seconds.” |
Archives for January 2008
Illustration for My Short Story “They Go Bump”
Here’s my illustration for my story “They Go Bump.” I wrote “They Go Bump” at the Odyssey workshop in 2001, and the story appeared in the anthology Empire of Dreams and Miracles, edited by Orson Scott Card. The story is a science fiction/horror hybrid involving invisibility suits and freaky aliens. Since all the characters in the story are invisible, I had to use some creative license in order to actually have anything interesting to illustrate.
Illustration for My Short Story “The Skull-Faced Boy”
It’s an unfortunate fact of life that not all published stories receive illustrations, but it occurred to me that I’ve become pretty good (or at least facile) at producing animation-style artwork of the sort I did for my “Save Me Plz” video, and that I could do similar artwork for my stories that are sadly bereft of visual complement. First up, my offbeat zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” which appeared on Gothic.net back in 2002.
Like the Library at Alexandria … Only Better
So I managed to successfully copy all the blog posts from my livejournal over to my new wordpress blog. In this mixed-up, crazy world, it gives me some small measure of assurance to think that in the event of a monumental catastrophe (thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, virulent strain contracted from dirty telephone booth, etc.) this indispensable archive of observation and commentary is now twice as likely to survive to instruct and edify future generations, be they human beings or giant mutated squirrels.
Crazy People Who Insist on Talking to Me
Regular readers of this blog will know that people always ask me for directions and that crazy/eccentric people like to talk to me. I don’t know why, because I emphatically do nothing to encourage them or to appear sociable. The other day, as I was walking down the street minding my own business and listening to my moody music, an older gentleman barks at me, “Smile! You’ll look younger.” What the hell? Did I ask you? And then as I was walking back from the store recently this little blond kid sticks his head out the window of his SUV and taunts, “Nice backpack!” Again, what the hell? I mean, I could understand if I was wearing a “Hello Kitty” backpack or something, but it’s just a normal black backpack that I use to carry groceries in. Screw you, kid.
There’s also this diminutive Asian woman over at the 3rd Street Promenade who always accosts me. She comes up and says, “Can I ask you a question?” I could tell from the first moment I saw her, just from something about her body language I guess, that she wanted to recruit me for some stupid religious cult or something (Hare Krishnas, as it turns out), so I always just sort of smiled and said, “No thanks,” and walked on by. Well, I’m over at the Promenade a lot, and I know she recognizes me by now, and she’s becoming ever more aggressive about hounding me, even though I start waving her off and hurrying away as soon as she homes in on me. I finally lost it when she approached me twice within five minutes, and when she asked, “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “No. Leave me alone.” This has not deterred her. I think I’m actually going to have to start avoiding that stretch of the Promenade, which is a pain, since that’s where one of the movie theaters is, but I just can’t take any more of her.
Authors on YouTube, Trailer for Sly Mongoose by Tobias S. Buckell
If you have a second, please consider popping over to YouTube and giving a five-star rating to my “Save Me Plz” video. I don’t know what effect this will have exactly, but it can’t hurt.
And while you’re there, check out the cool trailer for Tobias S. Buckell‘s upcoming novel Sly Mongoose, the third of his books about Caribbean-descended characters living in the far future:
Anyone know of any other authors who are doing interesting things on YouTube?
“Save Me Plz” Scene 1 YouTube Video
“Save Me Plz” Scene 1 as a Video Picture Book
EDIT: The “Save Me Plz” video picture book described in this entry in now available at YouTube.
For a long time now — over two years — I’ve been thinking that it would be cool to turn one of my short stories into a sort of “video picture book,” like the show Reading Rainbow, if anyone remembers that. Not really animated, but sort of a slideshow to accompany an audio reading, with a new image that pops up every so often. Then I could post my stories on YouTube. But I didn’t know what sort of software I would use, and I figured that even to do a short story would take weeks, so I never got around to it. But recently it occurred to me that I wouldn’t even have to do a whole short story. I could just do the opening scene, to pique people’s interest, and then if they liked that first scene then maybe they’d go and read the story or listen to a podcast of it. So two days ago I decided to quit waffling, and I just downloaded the first free animation program that came up in Google, and taught myself to use it. I did the first scene of “Save Me Plz,” which takes up about three minutes in audio, and which took about thirty hours to render as a pseudo-animated cartoon. Man, animation is hard work. I can’t imagine how long it would take to actually make the characters, you know, move. I don’t have any special art equipment — heck, I don’t even have a mouse — so the artwork is necessarily pretty basic, but I think it looks pretty good. (Incidentally, drawing spiders is really hard. Seriously, try it.) The whole thing is basically done now. I’m waiting on a few things before I can post it, but here’s a sample of the artwork:
Tobias S. Buckell blurbs Thunderer by Felix Gilman
So I was in the bookstore the other day, and in the New Books section my interest was piqued by the gorgeous cover art for Thunderer by Felix Gilman. I picked up the book and scanned its back cover, and what should I see but a blurb from Tobias S. Buckell! How about that? I think it’s really cool that one of my good buddies, who’s been in this with me since the beginning, has now achieved such stature that not only do they put his name on books, they even put his name on other people’s books. |
The Disciple on film?
I was recently contacted by an Australian film producer, Simon Smithers, who heard my story “The Disciple” on Pseudopod and is interested in turning it into a feature film. Simon has already done some work with Matt Wallace, who was able to confirm for me that Simon is legit. (Matt recently had a very cool story, “Akropolis,” on Pseudopod.) As with any film project, it’s all very tentative. Simon has to pitch the story to his financiers, and if they don’t go for it then that’ll be the end of it, but Simon sounded optimistic. Apparently horror is hot in Australia right now after the success of Wolf Creek. I figure that if I wait until things are more definite before announcing anything then there might not be anything to announce, so I should enjoy myself while I can. If I don’t mention it again, that means it didn’t go anywhere.
I’m glad now that I went ahead and got “The Disciple” up on Pseudopod. I’d been thinking about doing this for a while, but when I looked back at the story, which I wrote when I was about 22 (and which originally appeared in Weird Tales back in 2002), I decided that the story needed a lot of polishing. I ended up spending an insane amount of time polishing it, I think about 80 hours, and about halfway through that process I started thinking, “This is insane, to spend so much time on this. Pseudopod could very well reject the story, and even if they don’t it’s only 50 bucks.” But I couldn’t stand to send out something that I wasn’t satisfied with, so I kept at it. Like I said, I’m glad now that I did.
The Importance for Authors of Having People Remember Your Name
A bit more on Walt Disney. In the early days, Walt had a small staff and almost no money, but he always believed that he could rise to the top of the animation field through his obsessive focus on quality. One time, he screened one of his cartoons for an executive, and the exec passed on it. Walt, stung, was kind of like, “But the cartoon is great!” In response, the exec picked up a roll of Life Savers and said gruffly, “See these? These are Life Savers. People pay money for Life Savers. You know why? Because they know Life Savers. They don’t know you or your mouse.” That made a big impression on Walt. He was already resolved that people were damn well going to know his mouse, but now he resolved further that they were going to know him too, and he started putting his name prominently on everything that he did.
That seemed sensible, and looking over my website I realized that I didn’t even have my name on it, except in my bio and in tiny letters way up in the title bar, so I did a quick redesign in hopes that now people who stumble across the site and don’t have any idea who I am might have a chance of noticing my name and remembering it.
So, the old:
And the new:
If you’re a professional writer, it’s vital that people notice your name and remember it, but that’s hard, particularly for short story writers. I was recently at a social event for people who write for or listen to the Escape Pod podcast. One of the young women there told (Escape Pod host) Steve Eley that my story “Save Me Plz” was her favorite recent story from the show, so he called me over to introduce me to her. During the conversation, I mentioned that I’d recently had a story on Pseudopod as well, and she said, “Really? Which one?” I said, “‘The Disciple’ … it’s at a college, and there’s this evil professor … ” and she exclaimed, “Oh, I really liked that one too!” But despite the fact that she’d obviously enjoyed both stories, she’d had no idea that the same person had written them, let alone what that person’s name was. (Parenthetically, my impression from talking to some of the Escape Pod listeners was that they conceptualize the show differently than I do. For them, it seems, the stories aren’t so much “A Tim Pratt story,” or “A Greg Van Eekhout story,” or “A David Barr Kirtley story,” but “An Escape Pod story,” in much the same way that you might watch The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits each week and not particularly pay attention to who wrote the individual episodes.) Of course, I wish people would pay close attention to the names of short story writers, but I understand that people are busy and have other things to think about, and I can remember before I started writing professionally that I didn’t pay that much attention to authors’ names either, and how eye-opening it was when I started putting together a more comprehensive mental picture of who had written what and realized how many of my favorite stories that I remembered vividly were written by the same people.
Walt Disney by Neal Gabler
I’ve been reading Neal Gabler’s mammoth new biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. I didn’t really know anything about Disney’s life, particularly his early life, and it’s been striking, given the magnitude of his eventual success, to read about just how long and hard he had to work for it, and the unbelievable amount of stress and disappointment he had to weather. For example, here’s an episode I just read about. At this point, Walt has created Mickey Mouse and produced “Steamboat Willie,” the first-ever sound cartoon, and now Walt, desperately broke and having triple-mortgaged everything he owns, is trying to get people to care: “Increasingly desperate, Walt began hiking to studios again with his animations, hoping to interest one of them in securing the rights … The writer Francis Marion claimed that two editors at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had seen Disney’s cartoons and recommended them to Marion and Metro directors George Hill and Victor Fleming. Standing in the projection room, Walt was, as Marion remembered, ‘A tall, shy youth who wore a shabby suit and whose apprehensive glance at us told very clearly of many past disappointments.’ He even apologized for the crudeness of the animations. But the group was enthralled by Mickey. Fleming, his long arms flailing the air, exclaimed, ‘Man, you’ve got it! Damnedest best cartoon I’ve ever seen!” Marion said that Walt had also brought along a second cartoon, a Silly Symphony … and that the group was just as enthusiastic about it. So much so that Marion immediately headed to the office of Metro head Louis B. Mayer to drag him down to the projection room. Mayer, however, was not impressed. Watching the symphony, he pressed a button to stop the projector, pronounced the cartoon ridiculous, and growsed that while men and women dance together, and boys and girls dance together, flowers do not dance together. When Mayer rose to leave, Fleming eased him back into his chair and advised him to see the Mickey Mouse. No sooner did the film start, however, than Mayer let out a bellow and demanded that the cartoon be stopped. Driving his fist into the pit of his stomach, he declared that pregnant women go to see MGM films and that women are terrified of mice, especially a mouse ten feet tall on the motion picture screen. Mayer stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him, while Walt stood there in embarrassment.”
Escape by Carolyn Jessop
If, like me, you’ve been considering joining a fundamentalist polygamist cult, you might want to reconsider. Turns out that life in such a community is not all beer and skittles, by which I mean, actually, that beer and skittles will get you excommunicated, as will, no exaggeration, uttering aloud the word “fun.” At least, according to Escape by Carolyn Jessop. I picked up this book after being intrigued by the cover copy: “I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out.” The book starts out weirdly fascinating, becomes arduously grim, but then ends on an upbeat note. The author’s ex is a husband so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and life in his family is horrific in a way that I would not have thought possible in 21st-century America. Seriously, no matter how much you think your life sucks, you haven’t had to care for seven kids, one of them requiring round-the-clock care, while in the midst of your third life-endangering pregnancy, and while also being forced to have really, really bad sex with a husband whom you hate more than anyone on earth, in order to afford the barest measure of protection to your children from constant physical abuse. And the most terrifying thing of all is that everyone you know — your parents, your siblings, your neighbors, the police — believe that all of this is God’s will, and they will do anything they can to stop you from trying to leave. And that’s before an obvious psychopath who makes animal torture a part of his sermons ascends to the highest leadership position, “Prophet.” There’s something so backward and otherworldly about all of this that I always did a mental double-take whenever the author mentioned a specific year (Wait, this is 2003?). There’s too much outrageous stuff in this book to even summarize in a blog entry. If you’re curious about all the gory details, check out the book. The resilience of the author in the face of so much adversity is flabbergasting.
Movie Review: Cloverfield
Cloverfield, in my humble opinion, is made of 100% pure awesome.
Astro-NUT “LUST in Space”!
I was recently browsing YouTube for videos related to writing, and I came across some very long and interesting videos of Cory Doctorow discussing issues with new media. One questioner asked him why Boing Boing has become so popular, and I thought that part of his answer was worth sharing here for aspiring bloggers. He said that writers who come to blogging via journalism tend to write catchy, witty headlines. I forget his exact example, but here’s mine: You remember that story about the lady astronaut who drove halfway across the country to assault her romantic rival and was in such a rush that she even wore a special astronaut diaper so she wouldn’t have to make any bathroom stops? Many writers would be tempted to title a blog post about that with some witty headline such as Astro-NUT “LUST In Space”! The problem is, nobody searching for coverage of that story is going to be searching for “astro-nut lust in space.” They’re going to be searching for something like “astronaut assault rival drive + diaper,” so a more pragmatic, descriptive headline, such as “Astronaut drives halfway across country to assault romantic rival,” might be better. If you want to be witty, be witty in the second paragraph, where you won’t be shooting yourself in the foot Google-rankings-wise. Anyway, I thought that was really good advice, though nevertheless you may have noticed that I was not able to restrain myself from giving this very blog entry a catchy, witty headline.
Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 Table of Contents
Rich Horton has posted the Table of Contents for his upcoming anthology Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008, which will include my story “Save Me Plz.”
New Blog
I set up a new blog over at www.davidbarrkirtley.com. I’d heard about this software called WordPress, and I wondered if I could use it to add a blog that matched the design of the rest of my site. I decided to give it a shot, and after a few (okay, fourteen) hours of tinkering, I think I’ve finally gotten it working. I’m actually amazed that I’ve made it this far. I had to edit the code for the default WordPress theme, and I did not understand 95% of this code. I spent several hours trying to figure it out, but then my big break came when I realized that I didn’t have to understand it. I could just delete chunks of it at random, and if something important disappeared I would restore that piece of code. In this way I hacked the code down to its bare minimum, then rebuilt the layout in a way I can understand around what was left. I’m terrified that I accidentally deleted something important, but it seems to be working, and I can always try tossing code back in if I have to. There’s not a whole lot of content there right now, but no one can say what is there doesn’t match the look of the rest of my site.
My little secret
I have a brand new blog and nobody knows about it except me. I can write anything I want about anyone, and they will never know. Bwahahahahaha!
“Save Me Plz” and “Blood of Virgins” in Text Format
At Christmas, my uncle Bill suggested that I should post some of my stories on my website in text format, for people who prefer reading over listening to podcasts, so I decided to go ahead and post the full text of two of my stories, “Save Me Plz” and “Blood of Virgins.” I also did some (I think) nifty art design for them.
First post
This is the first post on my new blog.