The Republic of Zombies

"Into the Zombie Underworld", a September 2009 article from Men's Journal about the search for a young Haitian woman reportedly turned into a zombie, and the legal and political battles that were fought to recover her.

Effeminate sheep

The Gay Animal Kingdom, the 2006 SEED article about animal homosexuality that Illinois high school biology teacher Dan Delong was almost fired for assigning to his students.

An aesthetic defined

I just came across this New York Times article from July, which pins down and gives a name to a style that's been gradually gaining a lot of momentum: the "New Vintage". So that's what you call it.

Factious fonts

An article from Fast Company about Six Fonts that Piss People Off, from Ikea's abandonment of Futura for Verdana in its 2010 catalog, to the Nazis' banning of Fraktur for not being "German" enough, to the continuing vitriol against that most deplorable of typefaces, Comic Sans.

Tonight at Observatory

I'm skipping work for this. Tonight at 7:00, Observatory is hosting its first lecture event: a talk by University of Hawaii at Manoa professor Kathryn Hoffmann entitled "Reveries of Sleeping Beauty: Slumber and Death in Anatomical Museums, Fairground Shows, and Art".





This illustrated talk will follow the paths of sleeping beauties: lovely young women who lie on silk sheeted beds in glass cases in anatomical museums and fairground shows, who recline on sofas in Belgian train stations, and sometimes in the middle of streets. Often the women were nude. Sometimes they were adorned with a piece of jewelry or a bow, and sometimes they wore white dresses. One breathed gently in a glass case on a fairground verandah for nearly a century. Others lay quietly in caskets under flowers. Some were wax, some were real, some were dead, and some merely pretended to be dead. Sometimes, in the imagination of artists like the surrealist Paul Delvaux, they got up and walked about; pretty somnambulists wandering through natural history museums, arcades and streets, through modern cities and ancient Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rhodes.

Using photographs, posters, advertisements, and paintings, the talk will follow models known as “Anatomical Venuses” through one of the great wax anatomical museums of the world (La Specola in Florence) and an extraordinarily long-lived popular museum that traveled the fairground routes of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pierre Spitzner’s Great Anatomical and Ethnological Museum). It will take side trips into some of the visual worlds the Venuses drew from or helped inspire, including fairground sleeping beauty acts, morgue shows, mortuary photography, reliquary displays, and art. In the paths of the sleeping beauties, it is clear that death and slumber, pedagogy and entertainment, science and reverie long shared strange borders.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann is the author of books and numerous articles on the body, including “Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground.” She is Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses on anomalous bodies and the histories of medicine and the fairground. She has received awards for her writing, and lectures frequently for associations, libraries, and museums in the fields of the history of medicine, literature, and art.

Observatory is the new Brooklyn exhibition/event space run by a bunch of my favorite bloggers: Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy, Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras of Curious Expeditions, Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile, Herbert Pfostl of Paper Graveyard, and artists G.F. Newland and James Walsh. It's the newest addition to the little neighborhood of galleries that's quickly becoming one of my favorite spots in the city: adjoining Observatory are the Proteus Gowanus gallery, Cabinet Magazine space, and Morbid Anatomy Library, where I stopped in for tea a couple of weeks ago and had the pleasure of browsing the shelves and meeting Joanna, Michelle, and Dylan.

Anyway, tonight's talk looks to be excellent, and if you're in New York, have the evening free, and actually read this in time to do something about it, I strongly recommend you come by! Plus, it's free and there will be wine. Full event info here.

For some related reading, check out Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties at bioephemera, which discusses a previous lecture given by Dr. Hoffmann.

Fourth annual Halloween roundup

Happy Halloween, all. Here are some offerings in the spirit of the season. Enjoy.

Exhibits

A large collection of vintage Halloween postcards on Flickr.
Via Mira y Calla.






Spookshows.com is a treasure of vintage things suitable for Halloween, like this collection of vintage poison labels, or poster art advertising spook shows.
Via Mira y Calla.







The Art of Mourning is an excellent collection of antiques representing various funeral and mourning mementos and paraphernalia. There are also some articles about mourning art and practices through time.
Via Regina Noctis.









Cabinet Magazine visits the Museum of the Dead, a small church in Palermo that curates a startling display of preserved corpses.

There are no tickets and no reductions for this visit to the underworld. A fat, unspiritual, greasy monk just takes the money and throws it into a basket with unexpected abruptness. A guidebook I buy later dresses up the visit and, after a serious discussion of burial customs in different cultures starting in antiquity, talks about all the artworks lining the stairs going down into the catacombs. I don't notice these important paintings. It seems a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what lies ahead is anything but grim.






Games

Ben Leffler is the talented designer behind the spectacular Exmortis series of games (1 and 2; there's also the horror short Purgatorium). I had hoped there would be an Exmortis 3 ready to offer you for Halloweentime this year, but no, it's still in development. There is, however, Goliath the Soothsayer. Rejoice. Play.
Walkthrough at Jay Is Games.





There's also a new sequel to The Bat Company's horror series, Atrocitys: Atrocitys 2: The Revenge. Point-and-click scarefest. Be warned, subtlety is not in their toolbox.





Scuttlebuggery is the latest flash oddity from super-stylish gothic design studio My Pet Skeleton. It's sort of like a game of liquid soccer played between beetles with drops of absinthe and formaldehyde. Is that clear?





In Zombie Inglor, you are an ordinary man who has been bitten by a zombie, and you have fifty days to find a cure. Saving the village from the zombie infestation would be nice, too. This is a neat little RPG game with adventure and combat elements, with some nice touches like day/night changes, weather, and fully voiced characters.
Via Regina Noctis.





How will you fare when the outbreak occurs and undead roam the streets? Take the Zombie Survival Quiz to test your fitness, wits, temperament, and knowledge.





Video

It's time for the annual pilgrimage to Childrin R Skary for the newest works from this prolific gothic animation studio. Check out the films playing in the theater, or visit author Katy Towell's non-Childrin site, Crookedsixpence.com, where you can find more movies like the gorgeously spooky Never Woke Up.







For a whole pile of Halloween-themed animation, check out Newgrounds Presents Halloween 2008, a Flash film fest and competition from the popular Flash gaming site with ten cash prizes for the best entries. Some notable entries:

The Dark Room is slow, dreamlike, and gory, and features some very nice background locations. Aside from that, it's hard to tell just what happened.





While it may not feature the slickest animation around, Vampiric Wit is a short, humorous entry that wins points for its clever premise.





.Alice. is a moody little piece, short on plot, that aims to recreate the effect of a horror movie haunted highway scene. Very cinematic in style.





Fear.net is a horror-themed video site that offers a mix of full movies, clips and excerpts, shows, shorts, and other videos. It's a slasher/thriller/horror lover's playground. Try the Halloween FEAR Fest for some seasonal fun.
Via Regina Noctis.

ADDENDUM: io9 has just posted a great list of several places to find free horror movies online in addition to Fear.net.

For more, check the "Halloween" label for past years' offerings.

Spots and shadows

This image spooked the hell out of me.

So now I'm linking to the article at Damn Interesting where it came from, about a fellow called Charles Bonnet and the things his grandfather saw and the curious hallucinatory phenomenon to which he gave his name, not only because it is, as always, a damn interesting read, but because I wanted to be able to spook you all with that picture, too.

Cleaning out

In no particular order...

Land+Living highlights DDD (Detroit. Demolition. Disneyland.), an anonymous Detroit group that calls attention to distressed and decaying areas, making them visible by covering building façades in bright orange spray paint. It's a striking commentary on the city's condition -- not to mention a very interesting visual effect.
Via Tropolism.




Zhoen of One Word waxes nostalgic about tea. At least, she did a while ago...I'm not too punctual with these things. But it's a good excuse to link to her.

Did you like the discovery of Kiwa hirsuta? Now it's a plushie. You can make your own!




Sentient Developments has a too-short post about bald women in science fiction. Interesting stuff, although there's much more that could be said. And he forgot about Zhaan.




Sci-fi is a particularly powerful genre in that it can afford to be more experimental in its treatment of virtually any aspect that appears on screen. In science fiction, the weirder the better. And it only makes sense. When you’re trying to portray the future or otherworldliness, it helps to cross traditional boundaries.

In sci-fi films, bald women have conveyed a number of things in addition to desexualization, including masculinity, sexual ambiguity, dehumanization, youthfulness, and innocence. And paradoxically, bald women have also been used to portray an enhanced sense of sexuality and control.

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

Brilliant cartoonist Dylan Meconis (aka quirkybird) has done a series of clever portraits of Battlestar Galactica characters in the Simpsons style.
Via Drawn!.




The First Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards: in which poorly coiffed MySpace members are matched with their Marvel Superhero Alter-Egos, and then mercilessly mocked. The resemblances are quite uncanny. I can't wait for next year's event.
Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.




Think bottled water is pricey and pretentious? How about bottled water that's been sung to?

Since the beginning of time, water has and always will be our most precious resource. The seas and the deep waters of the Earth carry with them the primordial rhythms of life, and water is considered to be the life giving blood of the Universe. As powerful as water is, it is mutable, receptive and sensitive. Water registers and faithfully transmits any frequency it is exposed to. In fact, scientific studies have proven that water is directly effected by the words, sounds and thoughts it is exposed to.

Water exposed to loving words and music showed brilliant, and complex crystallized patterns under the microscope at near freezing temperatures. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative thoughts and words, formed incomplete, asymmetrical patterns. * Over seventy five percent of the human body is made of water, and the Earth is made up of over seventy percent water. The implications of such scientific findings are extraordinary.

Inspired by these studies, H2Om, water with intention was created. The first ever, crystal clear natural spring water infused with the power of intention through the frequencies of words, symbols, music and thought. We gratefully offer you an interactive invitation to drink in and resonate with the vibrational frequencies of Love and Perfect Health.

It appears to be for real. Heaven help us!
Via Foodgoat.

If you'd like to take a trip back to the past, here's a fun CBC news report about a fascinating new phenomenon called "In-ter-net". Two remarks: 1) throughout the segment they call it just "Internet" rather than "the Internet", which is curiously jarring. 2) There's an interesting little dig at America at the end, where the anchor suggests that despite new attempts at regulation, at least north of the border information will remain forever free...
Thanks, Adam!

NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com reports on a city made entirely of biscuits. Mmm.
Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance, who's had a lot of great stuff lately.

Catch of the day

It came from under the sea...





A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet (2,300 meters) deep at a site 900 miles (1,440 kilometers) south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

This is an incredible creature. It hardly looks real...doesn't it look like some kind of alien fauna created in a special effects shop?

Amazing that we're still discovering things like this.

Via 3 Quarks Daily.

Neat

Quite a while ago, Lynn of A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance pointed me to Locust St., which recently finished a great blog series on the Seven Drinks of Mankind, starting with Beer. Inspired by Tom Standage's book A History of the World in Six Glasses, these lengthy posts are well-illustrated, entertaining, and chock-full of cool history and facts. Perhaps the best way to catch all the posts in order is to start with the November archives and work you way back up to January. Of course, whatever you do, don't miss Tea.

Defective Yeti recently had a flash of inspired brilliance, in the form of this great Infocom-esque text adventure version of Bush's presidency. Here's how it all starts off:

Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure
Revision 88 / Serial number 54892

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal.

> EXAMINE CHAIRS
They are two several chairs arranged around the center of the room, along with two couches. Under one couch you find Clinton's shoes.

> FILL SHOES
You are unable to fill Clinton's shoes.

Hilarious.

I don't recall now where I found it, but Grocerylists.org is a strangely entertaining collection of found grocery lists, many of them featuring amusing combinations of items, odd misspellings, repetitions, curious notations, and other quirks. For example: "Squirt Gun, Hot Peppers, Strawberrys, Bee Trap, Pie Pans". For the best, skip right to the top ten lists.

Here's a neat news story: A caricaturist draws a quick mug of the man who robbed him, leading to his swift capture by police.

Via Cynical-C.

The Daily Grail reposts a Globe and Mail article about a new diet snack-food fad...communion wafers, marketed and sold in grocery stores as "Host Pieces", in godless Quebec.

Is nothing sacred in Quebec any more? The answer may lie on the grocery-store shelves of the province, next to the chips, corn puffs, and salty party pretzels.

That's where shoppers can pick up an increasingly popular snack: communion wafers and sheets of communion bread. These paper-thin morsels made from flour and water hark back to Quebec's churchgoing days and the sacred rite of receiving holy communion.

But in today's secular Quebec, the wafers and bread are packaged like peanuts and popcorn - and sold as a distinctly profane snack.

"They melt in your mouth, and they're not fattening, so it's better than junk food," said Françoise Laporte, a white-haired grandmother of 71 who buys packages of Host Pieces at her local IGA in east-end Montreal. "I'm Catholic. This reminds us of mass."

For older Quebeckers, the snacks offer up a form of nostalgia. Surprisingly, however, they're also finding favour with a younger generation that has rarely, if ever, set foot inside a church.

"My son can eat a whole bag while he's watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He's had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."

I want. Via Michelle's Mental Clutter.

Michelle also has a great post with loads of Simpsons links, including a mildly amusing SimpsonMaker character creator, and a really cool Interactive Map of Springfield. Go see!

Random of interest

I like things made out of Legos. I like Escher. So I was happy to discover architecture blog gravestmor's post about this incredibly nifty Lego recreation of Escher's famous staircases. Kind of mindbending.



It was created by Lego artist Andrew Lipson, who specializes in rendering Escher's illusions in solid 3d, and has also done Escher's "Ascending and Descending" and "Belvedere" (featured on Amazing Art). He has his own website, which I couldn't visit because he has exceeded his bandwidth, but I bet it's pretty interesting.




In November, Spacing Photoblog, a Toronto group blog featuring submitted photos on a certain theme, did a series on the abandoned Whitby Psychiatric Hospital. Here is the permalink to the first page, but in order to get the navigation links it seems you have to use this link, which counts backward from the most recent entry so might only be good for today. If you see the title page, good, just click the "previous" link to see the series; otherwise, you might have to use "next" until you see the title page, or just go to the archive to find the start of the series. Sorry I can't give a better link, but anyway, they're some pretty neat photos.




I recently came across the essay "Shakespeare in the Bush", about an anthropologist's experiences with a West African tribe and an evening of storytelling. When she decides to share the tale of Shakespeare's Hamlet around the fire, she discovers some pretty wide cultural gaps as the elders interrupt to make "corrections," reinterpreting and making sense of the narrative on their own terms. It's an interesting read, suggesting that some of literature's "universal" themes aren't quite as universal as we think.

The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, "Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them."

"Why was he no longer their chief?"

"He was dead," I explained. "That is why they were troubled and afraid when the saw him."

"Impossible," began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, "Of course it wasn't the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on."

For the longest time I've been meaning to link to this -- it's a coverpop featuring a few thousand covers from some seventy years of science fiction magazines, arranged in a huge spread by year and hue. The main site features a random coverpop from genres like horror, vintage, or art. Neat concept.




And now, some more Samorost stuff:

Adventure Gamers has a nice interview with Samorost creator Jakub Dvorsky in which he talks about his work, influences, the success of Samorost, other projects, and the meaning of the names amanita and samorost.

E-mental is the new media lab of Tomas Dvorak, creator of the Samorost 2 soundtrack, and there's a page where you can listen to some nice samples of the tracks.

Some of that old-time atheism

A few interesting things I've come across lately.

Bibi recently posted about the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which I'm amazed I haven't heard of before. It's a wonderfully rich and thorough resource, a complete Bible with copious annotations divided into numerous color-coded categories such as Injustice, Absurdity, Cruelty and Violence, Family Values, and Contradictions. There are also illustrations, a discussion board, and links to that other great version of the Bible, The Brick Testament (which I discussed here and here). They have a Koran and Book of Mormon, too.

Stumbling Tongue blogs about faith, and includes a link to a very interesting article about meta-atheism. As the author explains, meta-atheism is the view that "Despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." He then lists eight compelling reasons why this may be so.

A while back, I gave my cat Sidney to my friend LadySusan. Soon after, he got sick and eventually died. LadySusan blogs about his illness and how she talked to God about it, and shares a transcript of their intriguing conversation. The point of all this is to direct you to igod, an amusing chatbot with the tagline "repenting made easy".

While I'm at it, some other links of interest from my collection:

Positive Atheism
Agnosticism/Atheism at About.com
CelebAtheists

Assorted articles

Are you familiar with the life and history of the illustrious photographer Lillian Virginia Mountweazel? No? Well, she doesn't exist -- she is the subject of a fake entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, which was written as copyright protection. Dictionaries do it too, inserting definitions for fake words. A New Yorker article explores one investigator's attempt to locate the spurious entry somewhere within the E's of the New Oxford American Dictionary, with experts weighing in on which of the likely candidates was the made-up word.

So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e” entries in search of the phony. The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster’s Third New International; the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references.

Six potential Mountweazels emerged. They were:

earth loop—n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.
EGD—n. a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass display.
electrofish—v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using electrocution or a weak electric field.
ELSS—abbr. extravehicular life support system.
esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
eurocreep—n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in European Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as their national currency.


I was a player on Ultima Online for a period of time, and I knew that player accounts and sums of in-game gold, usually in denominations of millions, could be traded for real-world cash. What I didn't know is that there is an entire industry of full-time workers in "video game sweatshops" doing nothing but bringing in the gold in pretty much every MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) out there, assets which are then sold off to net a tidy profit for the enterprising entrepreneurs who mastermind it all. An article at 1Up, "Wage Slaves", tells the whole story.

Weeks go by as I chase ghosts and rumors of Chinese workers clicking 12 hours a day. Word has it that 300 farmers are working at computers lined up in airport hangars somewhere in Asia. After all, Lineage II banned certain Chinese IPs for a reason. Finally, I get in contact with a man in his 30s who goes by the name Smooth Criminal. He's a partner in one of the largest sellers of MMORPG gold, and he isn't apologetic. His rap sheet: banned from Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies, and Ultima Online again. He says once someone even traded him a wedding ring worth $2,000 for WOW gold.

Smooth Criminal's game cartel made $1.5 million from Star Wars Galaxies alone last year, and individually, he's made as much as $700,000 in a single year. "[SWG] built my new house, which I paid for in cash," he says. "So when you ring my doorbell, it plays the Star Wars music." Smooth Criminal is in charge of writing programs, finding exploits, and locating in-game "dupes" (bugs for duplicating gold or items). "I have a real job, but when there's a dupe, I call in sick," he says. It costs him more money to actually go to his "real job." "When I dupe," Smooth Criminal adds, "I farm billions on every game server and spread out my activities." He then uses three accounts to launder the gold: a duper account, a filter account, and a delivery account—each created using different IPs, credit cards, and computers. This way, it's hard to trace the source, and the gold comes back clean.


Where London Stood is an interesting article about ruined cityscapes in the futures of science fiction worlds. The article explores the different forms that these scenes take -- overgrown city, sleeping city, blasted city, dying city -- with descriptions and examples of occurrences of these various themes. There is, of course, a nice picture gallery to accompany the list, along with some links.

I think that there are three broad categories into which the vast majority of SF's ruined cities can be placed. The power of all of these comes from a subversion of a familiar landscape. Sobchack's remark about the vastness of alien landscapes in film can be applied in temporal terms - "Our civilization and its technological apparatus is at best a small town set on the edge of an abyss. Watching these films with their abundance of long shots in which human figures move like insects, their insistence on a fathomless landscape, we are forced to a pessimistic view of the worth of technological progress and of man's ability to control his destiny. We are shown human beings set uncomfortably against the vastness and agelessness of the desert and sea, are reminded by the contrast that land and water were here long before us and our cities and towns will be here long before us and our cities and towns and will be here long after we and are artefacts are gone."

More wordplay

Still feeling verbal after that test, so here's a quiz to start...

ellipsis You scored 38% Sociability and 82% Sophistication!

Your life can be difficult because of your insecurities, but you should know that it isn't your fault. YOU didn't ask to be thrown in around thirty times per page in every bodice-ripper on the shelf! Those who overuse you can kiss your . . . you know. You need to learn to hold your head high and glory in your solitude. You really do have excellent, scholarly tastes. You must never forget that your friend, the period, will be there to support you at the end of every sentence where you truly belong, and, if what is left out is as important as what is said, why, then you are as vital as the alphabet!

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 21% on Sociability You scored higher than 94% on Sophistication

Link: The Which Punctuation Mark Are You Test written by Gazda on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Unfortunately, I can't find the blog where I first heard this story...I'll add it later if I come across it again. But Number 2 Pencil has a comprehensive post on the story, and a follow-up. It's about Maria Alquilar, a Miami artist who created a mural mosaic for a Livermore, CA library featuring the images and names of historical figures such writers, artists, and scientists -- only she misspelled eleven of the 175 names. And then got upset when people got upset about it. The San Francisco Chronicle has another short article about it. Mispellings aside, I don't even think the mural looks very nice. Those colors!


A couple of fun Wikipedia word lists: neologisms on the Simpsons, like "embiggen" and "cromulent", and fictional expletives from science fiction and fantasy worlds, like "frell" (from Farscape), or "p'tahk" (that potent Klingon insult). Though I have occasionally savored a geeky curse from the latter list, the former has certainly enriched my vocabulary in many ways.
Simpsons list via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

I may as well mention this Guardian article, "Can you trust Wikipedia?" which casts doubt on Wikipedia's merit by sending an array of experts out to sample various entries that fall within their areas of study, and rate them objectively. The results were not stellar. While occasionally coming up short in fields such as literature and anthropology, Wikipedia's authors are almost invariably experts in one field in particular: pop culture. Whatever its future as an academic reference, I have no doubt that Wikipedia will always remain a top-notch resource in this one regard. And it's still pretty damn good with everything else, anyway.

Reviews and interviews

I turned up this bunch of links that have been mouldering in the folder for some time -- several interesting articles and conversations by and with cool people about the latest in sci-fi, fantasy and fairy tales. Enjoy.

TIME recently had a very nice interview with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman about their new movies out, Serenity and Mirrormask, as well as Firefly, Neil's new book Anansi Boys, and geek culture going mainstream.

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody's into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I've been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I'm holding this science fiction magazine that's got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I'm doing this. That's pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. 'No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!' We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We've been co-opted by the man.

In the Slate article "Fairy Tales in the Age of Terror: What Terry Gilliam helps to remind us about an ancient genre", folklorist Maria Tatar uses Brothers Grimm as a jumping-off point to consider the role of fairy tales in the modern world.

A film about fairy tales and about the two men who collected the traditional German tales that migrated across the Atlantic to become part of our folklore, The Brothers Grimm delivers a startling reminder that the narratives started out as adult entertainment—violent, bawdy, melodramatic improvisations that emerged in the evening hours, when ordinary chores engaged the labor of hands, leaving minds free to wander and wonder. Fairy tales, John Updike has proposed, were the television and pornography of an earlier age—part of a fund of popular culture (including jokes, gossip, news, advice, and folklore) that were told to the rhythms of spinning, weaving, repairing tools, and mending clothes. The hearth, where all generations were present, including children, became the site at which miniature myths were stitched together, tales that took up in symbolic terms anxieties about death, loss, and the perils of daily life but also staged the triumph of the underdog.

Salon has an interview with "Fantastic friends" Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I will read as soon as I can get my hands on it. They discuss their friendship, their respective books, the elusiveness of an authentic English fairy tradition, and the nebulousness of the fantasy genre.

Do you make this material up or do you go back to the folklore?

S.C.: I do go back to the folklore and to Katharine Briggs. That's the only bit of the magic in "Strange & Norrell" that I really researched. English folk tales and fairy beliefs are very fragmentary. Scottish, Irish and Welsh are a bit more developed. They have more remnants to pick at. Obviously, though, you also pick out stories from books you've read as a child. So I can't say I've been absolutely strict about it. It's just what's useful at the moment.

Do you think it's the lack of a developed folk tradition that spurs the imaginations of British writers?

N.G.: We don't know! We can lie, though. We're writers.

S.C.: That's the theory I'm beginning to come up with.

N.G.: It gets really interesting when you start trying to look for English folk tales. You wind up in places like the Appalachians, reading the Jack stories. Except the Jack stories in the Appalachians have no magic. It's all gone. So you think, well, they were telling these stories in England and the king in them would have been a real king, not the rich man at the other end of the road. Reading any book of English folk tales, what you're mostly struck by is the grumblings of the people who in the 19th century went out on the road trying to collect them and discovered that all they had was bits of stuff that had come over from [the Brothers] Grimm or [Charles] Perrault that people had been reading and passing on.

Lots of good stuff. That's all for today.

Emptying out the links folder

"Wooden Mirror" is a work by artist Daniel Rozin. It's pretty amazing -- it's a "mirror" made up of little panels of wood that are tilted up and down by a computer to form an image of whatever is in front of it. There is a Quicktime movie showing how it works.




"Play With Me" is an interactive video/art installation by Van Sowerwine. You can view a video of the installation, but it's better just to play the interactive Quicktime version yourself. From the description on the site: "Enter a child’s play house and sit down. A small girl appears. Engage with her at your own risk. Play With Me is an interactive installation that uses stop-motion animation and sound to create an uncertain reality. Events quickly escalate away from the viewer’s control and a terrible scene unfolds."
Via Thee Temple of Psychick Blah.




A now-old post at Making Light, "Folksongs Are Your Friends", lists at length "Things I've learned from British folk ballads," and made me laugh. It goes on a bit long, but is quite amusing.

If you look at the calendar and discover it’s May, stay home.

The flowing bowl is best quaffed at home. Don’t drink with strangers. Don’t drink alone. Don’t toss the cups or pass the jar about in bars where you haven’t arranged to keep a tab. Drinks of unusual or uncertain provenance should be viewed askance, especially if you’re offered them by charming members of the opposite sex. Finally, never get drunk and pass out in a bar called the “Cape Horn.”

NASA has a page where you can listen to the radio emissions from Saturn picked up by the Cassini probe.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.

The sounds are eerie and, incidentally, sound like a lot of the odder stuff I frequently listen to. I've always been saddened that the Music of the Spheres turned out not to be something real, but maybe this is close enough.
Via Twists and Turns.

52 Projects, a blog about all kinds of doing stuff, proposes "A Not-To-Do-List" which I fear may be more detrimental than helpful to struggling projectors and would-be procrastinators.

Do not clean the toilet.
Do not open a bottle of wine.
Do not start wading through all the magazines you subscribe to but never read.
Do not decide to start a screenplay (unless, of course, that is your project).

I feel like having this blog around might have been helpful back when I was trying to do my senior project...on the other hand, just thinking about this blog and all the busy people who read it make me feel a little tired. I am not a particularly industrious person, you see.

This entry also reminded me of an old entry by reader of depressing books, "writing and the internet and my novel", in which he describes a day's writing routine:

10. feel a little uninspired
11. check e-mail
12. feel bad that there are no new e-mails
13. think about maximizing the manuscript of the novel in microsoft word
14. think briefly about my future
15. feel a little doomed
16. drink the rest of the coffee

If this post isn't enough to get you going, I don't know what is.

Speaking of writing, The Onion's A.V. Club has a great feature, Excursions To The Outer Limits Of Fan Fiction, which delves into such exciting subgenres as Smurfs, Alf, and The Salton Sea fanfiction. The article helpfully provides "number of entries" on Fanfiction.net, "survey," "sample," "representative quote," "sexual tension," and "critical response" for each.

1st Ave Machine is an animation company that does really cool stuff blending nature and machine. And they have robots. Click on "projects" to view their animation, and whatever else you watch, absolutely don't miss the Alias music video "Sixes Last," which features an incredible montage of eerie, beautiful alien plant-creatures.
Via Ursi's Blog.




While I'm posting, I also wanted to mention that the Lynn S of the former Reflections in d minor has moved, and her blog is now A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance. So bookmark her if you haven't already, bookmark her again if you have, and go over and give her a nice blogwarming gift as she gets settled in.