Tag: scifi

Writer’s Block: Prophecy or Fallacy?

Happy birthday, Nostradamus. Many people consider the prophecies of Nostradamus to be uncannily accurate, while others remain skeptical. Do you think it’s possible to predict the future?

It’s absolutely possible to extrapolate certain aspects of the future from current and past events. The sun has risen and set every day for the entire length of human history, so we can say with certainty that it will do so tomorrow, even if it’s hidden behind clouds. We can predict large-scale weather and climate patterns, though not details like where next year’s hurricanes will make landfall. We can predict that major earthquakes will hit California over the next few decades, though we don’t know for sure where or when they will strike.

As far as human activity and society, we can predict some things, particularly in the short term, again by looking at what’s happened up to this point and extrapolating. But there’s always the chance that something unexpected will completely derail it. I suspect sociologists and science fiction writers have about as equal potential for accuracy.

As for prophecy and Nostradamus? Say something vague and cryptic enough, and there will always be someone happy to go throught he contortions needed to make it fit something they consider important.

Highlights

Windswept CoupleLast Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.

Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.

Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)

Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new "Diamond Jamboree" center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.

Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)

Day Off

After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.

That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).

Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.

Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.

Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.

Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.

Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.

Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.

Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.

Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

Electronica

I’ve finally done it. After resisting for years, I’ve bought an iPod.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Our music collection is on alenxa’s computer, which is old enough that its USB port is USB 1.1. This hasn’t been a problem until now, since she syncs her iPod with Firewire. Little did I know that the latest generation of iPod only supports USB. I charged it this afternoon, and started the initial sync this evening. So far it’s about 1/3 through.

At least future syncs won’t be so bad.

In other news, I’ve found myself in the middle of an online firestorm twice this week. Safari for Windows and a relaunch of the Flash comic book.

Collection of interesting links

Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.

The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.

Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think “I’m just the cook” in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of “No, I’m a postman” in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, there’s a wealth of cheese to be found.

Ursula Le Guin doesn’t like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesn’t like it She really, really doesn’t like it. She really, really, really doesn’t like it. And she’s not alone.

Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.

Irony, Luck, and Coincidence

Irony: Walking through Trader Joe’s and hearing “It never rains in California” on a day that really soaked.

Luck: The rain and clouds cleared up in time for a great view of the lunar eclipse (when we weren’t in a store or eating dinner). Post-eclipse, it started up again.

Coincidence: Watching Lost for the first time (fully aware that Merry Brandybuck and Lt. Matheson/Gavin Park are both on the show), and at the first commercial break, Buffy’s mom pops onto the screen to talk about painkillers. Tons of genre connections surrounding an apparentely non-genre show.