The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Emmet:

I'm not recognising the original poem here, but dang does that go nicely to the tune of the verses of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", which by the principle of associativity means it also goes to the "House of the Rising Sun".

Kimiko@32

I don't have a problem with CSI's unrealistically short turn around times for DNA tests. I giggle a little bit at the fingerprint matching graphics flashing by, but hey, that's part of the show. But when they misapply a tech that I use every day - Photoshop* - that jogs me out of the show every time.

Whereas given my line of work, unrealistically short turn-around times for DNA tests would be quite likely to be problematic, and, to take the most egregious example that comes immediately to mind, having your plot rest on the purpose of junk DNA being to develop into a series of increasingly "more evolved" monsters [ according to one of those Victorian hierarchical trees of more and less evolved organisms, which is one of those notions that's wrong to the point of actively harmful ] with the underlying purpose of protecting biological life against rogue AIs, that's liable to see your book hit my wall rather hard.

I think "will not make someone whose job is in the field in question froth at the mouth" is not an unreasonable standard. Or at least be aware that you are doing it, as well as you can be at the time, and have a reason. I have no problem suspending disbelief in stories set on a tidally-locked Mercury that are old enough for that to have been a reasonable thing for an author to assume, for example.

Come to think of it, doesn't the super-ultra-Photoshop in Blade Runner zoom in on a bit of the photo and then turn a corner in the room depicted as if it were a three-dimensional image ?

Greg@25: To my mind many of the most memorable bits of Hitch-Hiker's Guide stick precisely because of the brilliant bits of logic in them - absurd logic, but with its own continuity. Douglas Adams had an absolute genius for explaining really quite complex intellectual constructs fluidly and transparently enough that you barely notice - I'm thinking of things like the description of the invention of the Improbability Drive - which reading Last Chance to See convinced me he was as capable of doing to convey real-world information and make real-world and quite serious points as in the interest of the sort of tale-telling the best bits of the Hitch-Hiker corpus are doing.

The recentish mash-up that I find most sticks in my head is Nathan Chase's The Ghost that Feeds, which combines the theme from "Ghostbusters" with Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds".

Bruce@14:

I feel that in the end it fails to do the critic and analyst much good. Or at least I feel that it failed to do me much good when I needed it most

This is a lovely piece of writing, and I can entirely sympathise with where you are coming from; the uncritical bond I have with James O"Barr's The Crow and pretty much all of its various spinoffs comes from encountering it at a point of severe upset when it was precisely what I needed, and I wouldn't begin to defend that on any criteria of reasoned analysis.

And yes, I am generalizing a bit, because I think that if art doesn't help one in times of real need, or worse, leaves one unnecessarily unprepared, then there's something wrong with it.

The residual concern this leaves me with, as someone who aspires to be able to reach people through writing, is that I have seen human reactions in times of real need vary quite widely, and I'm not sure how many of the meaningful choices one has to make in putting any piece of art together can be made without excluding some of that range of possible reactions. It would feel presumptuous to me to assume I know how any particular reader is going to handle grief or what any particular reader will find meaningful, nor would I want to feel that excluding something had to come across as not regarding it as valid.

Serge@10: Also, one person's intense emotions, struggles and epiphanies are another person's repetitive melodrama and wallowing in angst.

I have nothing against people deriving whatever gratification they like from whatever fiction they like, or there being fiction to suit every taste. Personally, I'm more than a little OCDish, and reasoned criticism and in-depth analysis are things it takes a conscious effort for me to turn off when experiencing fiction; I would prefer not to have to do so by default, I would prefer fiction that holds together at those levels, in whatever medium and whatever format. I do not see this as being at all exclusive of having real and moving emotional content. In an ideal situation I would hope these virtues could be mutually complementary.

When I see exercising reasoned criticism and analysis being described as ego-driven, as knocking holes in things just because one can, it feels like an active personal attack, because it feels like being sneered at for the way my brain is wired. As if the underlying assumption is that people don't think about logical consistency and world-building and so on except with destructive ends in mind, and I am being assumed to be nasty-minded and hostile just because those particular metrics are part of what makes something enjoyable to me and I kind of like things to be enjoyable to me.

If we're going to point people at things in this hemidemisemigenre, let us not forget Bruce Sterling's "The Unthinkable", in the collection Globalhead.

My understanding of the situation with the I, Robot movie is that it was a late-in-the-game purchase of rights to a name, and sticking-on of the Three Laws, to a project which had got into trouble with its original name, viz. Hardwired; the logical supposition that suggests is that someone representing Walter Jon Williams objected to it, but I have no information on that.

"Spring has sprung
The grass is green
Get off your horse
And join the Marines."
-- John Wayne

I can see the point of these, if what you want is to write like Elmore Leonard. On the other hand, when I think what an application of these rules would do to The Worm Ouroboros or the Gormenghast books, or even The Lord of the Rings, I find myself wanting to carefully take them somewhere a long way away and leave them there.

Jury-rigged and jerry-built, I thought ? Or is this one of those transatlantic usage differences ?

The existence of such things as witty and effective nudge notes is a revelation to me; still don't think I could bring myself to send one, the particular value of shyness I'm lumbered with makes anything that feels like nagging basically impossible in this context, but I shall bear in mind this example of it being possible to do so and get a positive reaction.

Tina: Gregorian "Scarborough Fair" is just like the original. Gregorian "The Sound of Silence", however, is really growing on me.

There are several Masters of Chant albums, I only have the first, and considering the number of misfires on it am unlikely to get the others. The Metallica track, "Nothing Else Matters", is however, by fortunate concidence of source material and style, absolutely outstanding. Makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

In the future I want to live in, everything that can be usefully transplanted when this body becomes non-viable will do so, and what's left will be dropped from a suitable altitude to burn up brightly on re-entry. Sometimes I like to think of children making wishes on my remains.

Costumed crusaders seem to be quite a fashion in Mexico, going by this article. I had heard of Super Barrio before, but not realised that he was not unique.

Those who have taken to this after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean may be amused by Nice Hair, of which I am becoming quite fond, in a sweet and simple way.

Kellie: aagh. Dang it, I really should have thought of that variant.

I've also seen several Unixy ones along the lines of

chown -R us /home/you/*base*

which I may get on a button at some point.

Comment statistics for Emmet on the Making Light blog

Total: 39 comments. View all these comments on a single page.