So last night I watched this documentary America the Beautiful (instant download on Netflix), about the role of beauty in American society. The film is a little random and rough-around-the-edges, but it contains a lot of information that I can’t believe I wasn’t aware of, such as:

– Plastic surgery in America is basically completely unregulated. Anyone with an MD can operate as a “plastic surgeon,” even if their medical training is in something completely unrelated, like they’re an OB/GYN. The film interviews a woman who had been a rising star in cable news and who went in for a brow lift. The botched surgery left her in constant pain and so sensitive to light and noise that she no longer leaves the house. (She is also now uninsurable.) She found out later that her surgeon had learned the procedure during a weekend course at which he had practiced on a tomato.

– American cosmetics contain hundreds of toxic chemicals that are banned in Europe. (The EU bans 450 chemicals from cosmetics, the FDA bans 6.) Attempts to introduce regulations here have been stymied by the cosmetics industry.

– One reason fashion designers want models who are frighteningly skinny is because the fabrics are so expensive. The difference in making an outfit for a scary-skinny model versus a super-skinny model might be ten thousand dollars or more. So it’s not just about warped aesthetics, it’s also about the bottom line. This makes models seem almost like workers in mines or on oil rigs, where people are forced to work under extremely unsafe conditions because their employer is cutting corners.

– One binge-purge cycle can disrupt your electrolyte balance enough to kill you.

– The celebrities you see sitting in the audience at fashion shows are paid to be there. Media outlets wouldn’t bother covering these events if the celebrities weren’t there, and celebrities wouldn’t bother coming if they weren’t being paid.

Doug Cohen, editor of Realms of Fantasy magazine, has posted an open letter about the magazine’s finances.

Oh yeah, one other thing about Lightspeed magazine. The entire first issue is available now as a $3 download for Kindle and other ebook formats:

Which means that instead of enduring the agonizing two week wait, you could just spend a few bucks and in mere moments be curling up with “Cats in Victory,” a hilariously skewed tale about the things that matter most — chases, swordfights, hero worship, mistaken identity, sudden epiphanies, shattered illusions, genocide, creation myths, puppy love, the evolution debate, Clarke’s law, religious zealot anthropomorphic cats, and wry allusions to Planet of the Apes and ThunderCats. And hey, not to mention all the other stories and articles in the issue.

Lightspeed, a new online science fiction magazine edited by John Joseph Adams, has now officially launched. My story “Cats in Victory” will be posted there on June 15th. Lightspeed also has a brand new Facebook page. The beautiful cover is by artist Vitaly S. Alexius.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast, Episode 22!

George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones (now a new series from HBO!), joins us to discuss editing anthologies, playing games, and competing with Clifford the Big Red Dog. Dave and John discuss the life and works of GRRM.

So while googling for new info on the Monkey Island 2 special edition I came across a glowing recommendation for Machinarium, a traditional point-and-click adventure from Czech developer Amanita. You can play the first few screens for free online, and it’s a $20 download, which I bought. Here are my thoughts.

First of all, the visuals are breathtaking. This game is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. It looks like a really gorgeous picture book, and the quality of the animation is impressive as well.

The game is so incredibly wondrous to behold that it just makes me wonder once again what LucasArts could possibly have been thinking when they made Monkey Island 4 in 3D. 3D adds nothing to an adventure game, and in the case of Monkey Island 4 it also just looks like total dogshit.

Anyway, back to Machinarium. The graphics are fantastic, and the puzzle design is generally pretty good. I didn’t want to spend too much time playing it, so I was looking up the solution if I got stuck for more than about fifteen minutes, and the majority of the time I felt like I should have been able to figure out the solution on my own.

There are some big problems with this game though. The first is the interface, which is horrendous. You have to be standing right next to an object in order to interact with it, which makes it inordinately difficult to locate hot spots on the screen, and makes it a chore trying to use inventory objects with the environment. You can also make your robot taller or shorter, but if you then try to walk somewhere he walks really, REALLY slowly, which is just ridiculous.

There’s also no text in the game. All the conversations are conveyed through little cartoons, which is definitely an interesting choice, but half the fun of an adventure game for me is the amusing dialogue. A bigger issue with the lack of text is the confusion that sometimes results. Once or twice I ended up with an item in my inventory and I had no idea what it was supposed to be, especially if I hadn’t played the game for a while and couldn’t remember where the item had come from. In a typical adventure game you could hover your cursor over the item and some text would identify it for you. Also in a typical game your character would give you text/verbal feedback on whether you were on the right track or not. For example, the character might say, “I can’t reach it.” In Machinarium your character just shrugs all the time, so you’re never exactly sure what he’s unable to do and why not.

The biggest issue for me is that the game is full of stupid “brain teaser” puzzles, and they get more intrusive and time-consuming the further into the game you get. If there’s anything I HATE in adventure games, it’s action sequences and brain teasers, and this game has both. (By brain teasers, I mean stupid “rearrange the colored blocks” type puzzles that have nothing to do with the characters or story.) If I had known how much of the game was going to be brain teasers, I would never have played it in the first place, and I finally got so fed up with them that I gave up on the game and just watched the remainder of it on YouTube … though it turned out that I was almost at the end anyway.

Apparently this game was made by a few guys on a shoestring budget, so I’m inclined to cut them some slack. The good parts of the game are absolutely superb. The brain teasers killed it for me, but if you actually like that sort of stuff the game is definitely worth checking out. It was a lot of fun to play a new adventure game, something I haven’t done in years.

ETA: Speaking of adventure games, listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Just watched this. It’s great!

Here’s a great shot of Maisie Williams, who’ll be playing Arya Stark in the upcoming HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones, posing with one of the “Needle” replica swords produced by Valyrian Steel.

io9 has dubbed Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy episode 19 the “best discussion of human identity and the Tuvix Voyager episode ever.”

Editor Annalee Newitz writes: The highlight of the episode is Adams and co-host David Barr Kirtley interviewing Robin Wasserman, author of Skinned, about how you transfer human consciousness into a high-tech body. This later kicks off a whole discussion between Adams and Kirtley about whether transporters are really killing you and then creating a perfect copy at the other end of the transporter beam. And that in turn leads to actual intelligent commentary on the Tuvix episode – you know, where Tuvok and Neelix are merged into one Super Awful Being as a result of a transporter accident? Yeah. You’ve got to listen.

Just saw the sad news that Frank Frazetta has died. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the documentary Frazetta: Painting with Fire (it’s on Netflix). Frazetta’s story is absolutely fascinating, even if you have no particular interest in his art. The film has been criticized I guess for bordering on hagiography, but personally I really enjoyed its boundless enthusiasm for its subject.

Here’s a list of some recent episodes of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, just in case you missed any:

Episode 019: Immortality! Automata! Consciousness Transfer! (Robin Wasserman)
Episode 018: Organ Repossession! Con Men! Dystopian Satire! (Eric Garcia)
Episode 017: Dragons! Fan Fiction! Copyright Law! (Naomi Novik)
Episode 016: Geek Rock! Mad Scientists vs. Zombies! Dave’s Alien Ancestry! (Jonathan Coulton)
Episode 015: The Black Death! Archimedes! Counterfactuals! (Dan Carlin)
Episode 014: Fairies! Unicorns! Action Figures! (Holly Black)

The church-state separation advocacy group the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently won a court case declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional. Here’s the group’s co-president Dan Barker (a former evangelical preacher) on FOX “News.” Dan does a superb job of giving the breathtakingly ignorant host a quick five minute education on basic American history.

I just noticed that artist Huan Tran has posted another iteration of his artwork for my short story “Blood of Virgins.”

If you’re curious, here’s the original version that appeared in Realms of Fantasy magazine, and here’s another alternate version.