I hopped onto the recent bandwagon and wrote an article on dark matter. Before the announcement earlier in the week about the possible discovery of dark matter in the Bullet Cluster (two clusters of galaxies colliding 4 billion light years from here) I had decided to write about MOND which is a leading criticism of the existence of dark matter. I started pursuing an interview with the main physicist responsible for championing MOND. I still want to write about that as well, as I'm not fond of dark matter as an idea, so I'm excited to see what he has to say about all of this.

During a horrible fit of procrastination, I designed an internet access icon for the Nextfest icon contest. It probably wasn't worth the time, considering all of the things I absolutely have to get done tonight (and blogging doesn't help *hangs head in shame*).

I was trying to get into the mood to grade assignments from my online students, and I was just geeking out, listening to the album "Computer World" by Kraftwerk, a recent find at my favorite bookstore (so much so I work there), and a very familiar track came on. I couldn't quite place it at first, but the track "Computer Love" has the exact same melody as the too-often-played-on-the-radio "Talk" by Coldplay.

I was a little annoyed at first, I wanted to enjoy the song for what it was rather than have Coldplay's version rattling through my head as an automatic earworm, but I looked it up on the web, and apparently Kraftwerk was okay with it. The part that still bugs me though, is that Coldplay said that it was a sample, and maybe it was, but they seemed to have ripped off the entire melody. I have to say though, that the lyrics for the Kraftwerk version are much better (and funnier).

In other news, we've had some interesting weather here in the East Valley. I thought the monsoon was over, or at least my air conditioner thought it was over since it stopped leaking condensed water all over my bathroom floor, but we had two huge storms converge yesterday and it actually rained sideways for at least an hour. There wasn't any preceding dust storm, I don't think it got hot enough, but it almost looked as if the clouds really wanted to make some tornado babies. This was all eerily reminiscent of a dream I had where I was at work, but it wasn't normal work, I was actually a hired actor portraying a character there, when a tornado started to rip up the roof and suck up all the bookshelves. Fortunately, I'm not clairvoyant.

After slowly coming to the conclusion that my Other Writing section was positively awful, I decided to redo the page, and list every significant piece I've written. Missing are my columns; I think they would just dominate the page after awhile - plus they have their own area to play in.

I was actually amazed to see how much I've written - I might actually end up being one of those prolific writers - maybe not Nora Roberts though. I swear she must be group of people, kind of like V.C. Andrews who continues to be productive long after her death.

This also reminds me that I need to start a page for my feature screenplay Magnus. I've decided to try this as an experiment in using the web to get things done - so I'm basically intending to document the whole thing from beginning to end. This was all inspired by A Dog's Breakfast. We shall see what happens.

I've just posted a new article on the controversy of the meaning of the word "theory" in the context of science up at Suite101. It's a tad bit late, but I think a nice departure. My editor has been bugging me to be less academic and more like Richard Feynman. That's really an unfair comparison for anyone to live up to (he's my all time idol). So now I must say when writing these articles, What Would Richard Do?

I just received a rejection letter in the mail for a book proposal, and I thought I had pretty thick skin when it comes to these things, but this letter was scathing, and not in a cool, Dorothy Parker sort of way! I'm not going to say what it said, though she didn't say I was a bad writer (whew!), but it was quite lacking in politeness.

One more stripe earned, of the metaphorical scarring of skin variety.

Today I way overdid it with caffiene consumption. I've been feeling strange, I've sort of got that "waiting for Christmas" feeling you get when you're a really little kid and haven't yet been jaded by the crass comercialism and stress of holidays. I've been really focused on producing fiction lately, after several years of neglect while I worked on the non-fiction end of things. I think the process of writing fiction has been making my brain produce way too much dopamine - more than I can handle I guess without having the urge to counteract it with caffeine (which actually only seems to make things worse).

I'm making it sound bad, but I'm not sure I like being suddenly taken over by a feeling of, well, glee, at any inopportune moment. The two main culprits are the feature script I'm writing, which I'm really excited about, because it is really something different, and a short story called "Factory Day" I'm trying to finish up. The latter is a dark fantasy piece and I figured out the ending today at work. I nearly wrote all over my arm, I almost couldn't find a piece of paper fast enough. I've decided to send it to INTERZONE which is published in the U.K. They're accepting email submission during the month of September (they usually only take them by mail, and I can't find a post office that has IRCs), so this is good timing. INTERZONE is the name of the um, alternative place from Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

The feature script is about an android, set in the present day. I was inspired by videos of some of the robots being developed in Japan; many of the major manufacturers over there are having their own kind of space race - always trying to trump one another with innovations in robotics, and now even with creepily human androids. I'm seriously not kidding - that's what inspired me to start writing the story, I don't think we are all that far away from having androids that look and behave indistinguisably from humans - though I think it's still far off before they could pass the Turing test.

The other thing that spurred me to write it is that every live action movie with the possible exception of Blade Runner, has depicted androids under one of two archetypes: Frankenstein or Pinnochio. Either the android is malevolent and wants to destroy humanity, or desperately wants to be human. But what I find more interesting about androids, is the questions they make us ask about ourselves. We have a love-hate relationship with our bodies, our flesh. A lot of the violence in the world is, I think, rooted in this complicated relationship. We want to be more than animal, but find ourselves so deeply shackled to that part of our nature. Women are often treated badly because of the obvious associations with mammalian characteristics - lactation, menstruation, childbirth. These are considered dirty, animal things in many parts of the world.

Most people crave transcendance to the divine, and have tried many ways to reach it, though hallucinogens are arguably safer than shoe-bombs. Most people would assume that an android, being artificial and man-devised, could never transcend the sum of it's parts. It took a supernatural being to transform Pinnochio into a "real" boy. It reflects our attitude that it is incredibly difficult to transcend our flesh. But, would an android want to even be human? Would it seek divinity? What if it found satisfaction in being exactly as it was? I seriously doubt that android armies will rise up and kill all of human civilization, though if you use pop culture to measure the common zeitgeist - that's exactly what most people fear would happen if we manufacture too many of them (the energy consumption would be prohibitive).

That's also a reflection on us - we fear the "other" intensely. An artificial being the looks and acts like us, but is not us physically, is the perfect alien. We can't get over the "other" fear. It consumes us - and is one of the things that holds us back from transcendance (even if such a thing exists). It's part of our hard-wired predator/prey programming, part of our feral nature. It's there for survival, but it prevents us from connecting to the Other or Others that we seek, the beings that we cannot be because we are not them; it ties us to the "Earthly realm" that so many seem to despise (not me, I like my planet, warts and all).

So, my goal was to create a character that blurred all those lines, that wasn't malevolent, and didn't crave transcendence to mere humanity, a character that makes you forget he's artificial, a character that will get you to question what it is that makes us human, that will get you to broaden your definition of sentient, worthy life. Moreover, I wanted to write a scifi script that wasn't a whore to gratuitous cgi special effects. I mean, I'm kind of sick of every scifi movie being realeased being this popcorn fest of mind-slushing action sequences. One notable recent exception is the film "Primer" which had I think, no special effects but is one of the most innovative scifi films ever made. Anyway, it's still a work in progress, but I'm very proud of it. If it can get made into a film, it'll be really cool - might not make much money, but at least it will be something no one has seen before.

At the last minute, when I was submitting the short script online, I noticed that there was a mysterious blank page between the title page and page one. I tried everything to get rid of it, but to no avail. Either I had the proper page numbering and a blank page, or no blank page and the title page was numbered.

After much frustration (seriously, I thought I was going to a have a seizure because I usually have fantastic computer karma), I investigated on the OpenOffice Writer boards and found that this was actually a "feature". The blank page is apparently inserted after a title page so that the first page of text lies on the right hand side. The developers' argument, apparently, was that everyone who ever wanted to write anything at all, would of course, choose to use a book format!

After having used LaTeX to write my book, I would never use Writer or anything else to write one, or a least format one. Even though LaTeX had a hellish learning curve, it could do pretty much anything and make everything look shiny in the end. It's like, would you use vi or type? I'd take vi. However, I'm still a staunch supporter of OpenOffice and all things open source; the less I have to use commercial products, the happier I am.

It's tropical cyclone physics 101:

The Physics of Hurricanes

Yay! Now I have to get the the five billion other things I need to write.

I actually started and finished a short subject script last night! Of course, that probably means it's crap, but I had a lot of fun writing it. It's a comedy scifi piece with an alien invasion theme. Yup.

Now I have to write a new column, which was what I should have been doing, because one is due today.

I've uploaded some new stuff to my gallery:

Cigarette
C-Note
Sunglasses Self Portrait
Wall of Dust

I finally crashed after about three weeks of pretty bad sleep deprivation - I slept for about 18 hours straight. But hey, what's vacation for? The only problem is that this is supposed to be a working vacation, I've got a ton of stuff to write. On top of that, the screenwriting expo has extended their deadline for their writing contest. I wanted to enter a short when I first heard about it, but there wasn't any reasonable way to get one done. So now I have some time to try, and it's worth a shot because the prizes include a paid trip to the expo. This would be nice (though I'm sure my odds are bad), since I don't want to spend a bazillion dollars on an LA hotelroom.

Yesterday I sent out a query letter to a certain studio. It's always hard to let go of the creative process and just wait for a response. I don't mind if someone doesn't like what I've written, but waiting after I've sent something out into the ether, like a zephyr, makes me feel like I've lost control of the process. But, if I never did it, I'd never have gotten anything published.

My latest Netflix treasure was the film "Dark Star", John Carpenter's debut student film. It had simply awful special effects, but it was totally enthralling nonetheless. It's charm lay in its completely irreverent story - an anti-adventure played out by four slightly insane anti-heroes (five if you count the sentient bomb with a god complex). Highly recommended.

Here in Arizona, in the Phoenix area, we've had two concurrent serial killers. One of them, called the serial shooter, just killed a woman a mile from my house on July 30th, just at the time I was getting home. Naturally I was a little perturbed, and decided to make sure I was extra aware of my surroundings. The shooter picks on anybody who is walking or biking alone at night.

Last night, after I dropped off a carless co-worker so he wouldn't have to walk home alone, I was driving home, and about a quarter of a mile before my place, there were several police cars converging. My heart sank. As I passed, I saw a body lying motionless on a bus bench. I immediately assumed that the shooter had just struck, and I began to freak out. By the time I made it home, I was full on hyperventilating. I ran as fast as I could into my house and slammed the door. I was scared, but I was also angry. I mean, what's the point? The poor guy was probably just waiting for the last bus home after his crappy minimum wage job. The guy did nothing to deserve that - none of the victims did. Why pick on random people like that?

After I calmed down, and talked to my best friend on the phone, I realized that the guy might have just passed out from heat stroke or something, there could be any number of explanations. So far, I haven't heard anything about on the local news, so maybe that is the case after all. I don't like being terrorized by some nitwitted gun-happy misanthropic [insert expletive(s) of choice].

Okay, procrastinating again. I'm actually working up the nerve to write my next post - and you'll see why when/if you read it. So, I'm going to pay attention for awhile to something that is non-stressful, interesting, and highly entertaining: the fan frenzy surrounding the movie "A Dog's Breakfast", which has now officially been abbreviated to ADB by fans.

Now that I'm working on another feature film script, I'm really interested in the independent filmmaking process, and ADB is shaping up to be an excellent example of what works in getting an independent film to market. Of course, the advantage that ADB has is the huge established fanbase - writer/director David Hewlett (DH to fans) has a slew of fan sites devoted to him, and especially his portrayal of SGA (Stargate Atlantis) character Rodney McKay. Of course, DH was smart enough, and nice enough, to tap the talents of many of his costars as well, sucking in the entire SG fanbase.

About a week ago, a clip of the film was posted on youtube, followed by an anouncement about it on the main Stargate fan site. The clip got swarmed, and fans squeeed. The word "skyjockey" found its way into the geek lexicon. And the frenzy over the clip reportedly generated industry interest in the film.

Meanwhile, a film blog (flog?) was started. I decided to comment, and posted a list of websites that I thought the producers ought to look into to help promote the film for free. I thought the filmmakers would have a long slog towards distribution in any form. After my experience with the Phoenix Film Festival, I thought it took a miracle to get any independent film noticed by distributors, no matter how good the film might be or the talent involved. I thought there was a slight chance my comment might get read by someone associated with the film - but I actually got a personal response by someone who's name apparently starts with D (could be anyone), and I quote "kaos! How great are you?!" Okay, I had major geekout moment :-)

Since then, a whole ADB fan community has sprung up. There's a livejournal group, and someone has already generated ADB icons. All this has taken place in less than two weeks, so it just amazes me how well the internet lets people self-organize.

Here are my predictions for the future of ADB fandom, and I think that at least some of them will happen before ADB gets distributed (which is all but certain at this point):

- an unofficial ADB fansite(s) will emerge
- a fansite for the fictional "Starcrossed" TV show
- a fansite for the character of Colt on Starcrossed
- South Park icons depicting the main characters in the film will be generated
- someone opined that ADB will be as quotable as The Princess Bride, so I think as clips come out, people will be collating the quotable dialog on one or more fansites

Watching all this develop has spurred me on to write more - and I actually finished a script I wrote for a certain aforementioned TV show (not Starcrossed....but that's an idea-I should add Starcrossed fanfic to the list above). I started it to see how to work around the five act structure of a TV episode, and I figured I might as well write it for a show I like. I think it worked out well - at least I like it. It's nonlinear and somewhat Weir-centric, since I think that character gets short shrift. Now I just have to figure out what to write in the query letter to Bridge Studios; for that I have writer's block, because I haven't a clue.