You can read it here at Tor.com. It’s been really hard to sit on this news. I’ve only told a handful of people, so it feels really good to show this post off to everyone. For a post regarding a series I’ve watched over and over, it took a surprisingly long amount of time. Frequently, I found myself wanting to cram in another detail or observation, feeling frustrated that I couldn’t talk about everything that makes Bebop as wonderful with…
I had a really interesting meeting today. I talked with Justin Ferrato, a student of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, about a project that he and his fellow Media Lab students are working on for Nuit Blanche 2010. I don’t want to give away the content of the project, but it sounds really interesting and I’m excited to see the final result. I was asked by a Media Lab faculty member, Susan LK Gorbet, (who I know from OCAD’s…
A while ago, I proposed an SF Signal MindMeld column on anime, and this is the result. My section is by far the longest, but that’s because I spent the weekend watching anime and was feeling re-invigorated about the medium. I had lots to talk about, and I was still pinging about the subject on Monday. I felt a little embarrassed about how long-winded I was, but it’s also heartening to realize how engaged I still am about the topic….
Merry Xmas. Please enjoy. These are the Frosty Zombies. They come courtesy of Dave, who shows them to me every year. This clip is from one of my favourite Supernatural episodes:
I’m going away to finish this book. I have a lot of work to do. Luckily, as of this morning I feel energized to do it. For too long I had been languishing, fretting, freaking. Then I spent yesterday with a rather large cephalopod watching Fullmetal Alchemist. (Because that’s our life: we write and read all day and then break for eight-hour marathon viewings of good anime. It’s a good life. A great life. I suspect what people want when…
A while ago, I Tweeted this message in reply to Adam Rakunas: “While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion.” The initial conversation was about contemporary science fiction fandom, readership, and our influences as writers. During my teenage years, when I was “supposed” to be reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion. Adam pronounced this statement a big fat “WIN,” and then he made a button out of it: While you were reading Tolkien,I was watching Eva by rakdaddy View…
This super-fast robot hand dribbles, throws, and tweezes more effectively than I do. If you could observe the current state of my eyebrows, you would know this to be true. You’ve probably already seen this footage, so I thought I’d show you some eventual applications for super-fast robot hands. (Oh, shut up. That would chafe and you know it.) Warning: Major spoilers below for Stand Alone Complex. In all seriousness, I get really excited when I see stuff like the…
They totally revitalize pop songs that were overplayed in their first week by enmeshing them with meaningful content. Of course, it helps that this vid is probably the best editing job I’ve seen in quite some time. Coming from me that means something; I probably watch at least a vid or two a day on average, with frequent binge sessions when I’m trying to figure out something in a story without consciously thinking about it. In fact, the one con…
Somebody cut a square out of a shopping bag just so that they could smuggle this footage out of China in 1990. It depicts the Kowloon Walled City. The Walled City was an act of spontaneous, collaborative architecture in response to political and social upheaval — a spatial harbinger of what the internet would eventually look like. Naturally, China destroyed it. To get an idea of what the coverage of the City’s destruction was like, watch this: Sidebar: The cheery…
The talented Jetse de Vries asked me to share my thoughts on optimistic science fiction in the anime medium, and I contributed as best I could. Overwhelmingly, anime creates an optimistic sentiment not by depicting a utopian future, but by locating the reason for hope in humanity’s ability to make the right decision — to sacrifice, to embrace, to re-build. In the face of apocalyptic destruction, impossible odds, and a long record of mistakes and misdeeds, the heroes (and anti-heroes)…