burger_eater

THE MATRIX if it had been made during the silent film era.

Ah, pies. Sweet wonderful pies.

Mirrored from Twenty Palaces. You can comment here or there.

bookviewcafe

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2009/11/16/dr-horrible-a-very-short-review/

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/?p=5272

Everybody has seen this, right?

This video originally was sui generis, one of a kind, and an instant hit to boot.  This state of affairs could not of course continue; there is now a comic on line as well, one of a series.

I have a theory that the first iteration or incarnation of an idea is almost always the best one.  Transplanting it to the comic form usually doesn’t take.   Thus the comic Dr. Horrible is much less witty and amusing than the video; the current Muppet Show comic cannot be as good as the original Muppet Show, and the appeal of the Simpsons cannot translate over to the comic book of the same name.  It works in the other direction as well — Peanuts on TV is not as good as Peanuts in the newspaper.

Successful translation is rare, but not unknown.  Modesty Blaise is at least as good in novel form as in the original comic strips, and then you get real hybrids like this.   From comic book to television cartoon to musical theater, oh my!

kakubeki

• 20:55 wondering if Google Chrome OS will really drop this week...

bookviewcafe

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2009/11/16/psst-hey-dobbin/

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/?p=5225

The “horse whisperer” thing was very big a few years ago. All the pony people were doing it or learning how to do it, and then there was that movie with Robert Redford being all craggy and sensitive. Then inevitably came the backlash: a big kahuna of the genre turned out to have, er, improved on his autobiography, and his colleagues lost their shiny new luster as other fads came and went. Some are still out there on the clinic and expo circuit, making a substantial living hocking their special method with its special tools and even, in one case, a whole special pen to do it in (just $2895 plus shipping).

Why bother to blog about it, then? Because for a writer, especially a fantasy or historical writer, there’s still a vein of plotting gold in the person who can talk to horses and the horses will listen.All of these “pony boys” and “game players” and “round-pen reasoners” are simply applying old horsemen’s wisdom and common sense, packaged for the modern consumer. Under the hype and the mythologizing and the marketing is a core of basic truth: that a sufficiently observant and attentive human can communicate effectively with a horse.

Some techniques are just nonsense when they’re not active abuse. The genius who “tames” wild Mustangs by trapping them in a box and pouring in a ton or so of wheat kernels may produce a subdued animal, but it’s the quiet of catatonia. The ones who force a horse to lie down and then sit on him are not much better. They’re triggering one of his worst fears, depriving him of his ability to run and then cutting off all possibility of escape. It’s torture, quite simply.

The writer, being a naturally evil being, can use this. Anyone can write standard abuse–whipping the living daylights out of the horse, starving him, working him to death, and so on–but there are other ways to wreak havoc on the livestock, and this is one. So is the “trainer” who ties up the horse’s leg and leaves him for hours “so he’ll learn not to run away,” or straps his nose to his saddle all day “so he’ll learn to bend.”

That’s the dark side. The light side is as wonderful as the dark is distressing, and can, if done well enough, look like magic–like this video. Here is a close bond between horse and man, deep communication and willing partnership on the horse’s side as well as the human’s.

It’s not about whispering, not literally–but there is a softness to it, and a subtlety that can be all but invisible to the uninitiate. Horses themselves are very subtle communicators–most of their interaction is close to subliminal. A human who can turn the volume down to that level is rare, and what he does takes both talent and long training–with the horses as trainers. See here, but allow time for it; it’s over ten minutes long (and if you can go to the show, do; it will inspire you). Here’s beauty, and a genuine symbiosis of human and equine. It’s extraordinary and wonderful and magical, and it’s all real. You don’t even have to make it up.

apod

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091115.html

It looks like a ring on the sky.

xkcd_rss

http://xkcd.com/663/

comfort_soup

http://litsoup.blogspot.com/2009/11/2009-nebula-eligibility.html

kestrelct
whatwasthatbook

I'm looking for a YA book with a female protagonist. At the beginning, she has a migraine headache, and when she wakes up from the drugs she's been given for it, there has been a big earthquake (?) and everything is flooded. She packs up her family's sailboat and takes off. She finds a young boy in a flooded apartment building, and I want to say she knew he was there through some kind of telepathic link. Eventually they wind up at a complex with a number of other children who have survived the disaster -- I think they have to crawl under a barbed wire fence to get in. I remember one more scene, where the protagonist is talking to a guy at this complex and he gives her a book to read (I want to say it's a quantum physics text?) and she reads something like a hundred pages in ten minutes, and he tells her that she and the other kids there are "matrix thinkers", and that rather than going from point A through B and C, to point D she just skips straight from A to D. This might also be the reason they have psychic powers, or something?

This is all I can remember, and I've been looking for this book for years, it's got to date to the mid-nineties at least. Thanks very much!