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I think there’s a good chance that my entire post for tonight is NSFW, so you’ll have to go below the cut for it…

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I don’t normally post here about the tech deals that I so compulsively shop for, but I’m making an exception today.

It’s the Extreme Arcade Home Arcade Model 9900 on sale at Sears for $599 + $65 shipping.

It’s a stand-alone game machine that loads fifty of the classic arcade games from the Eighties. I have no idea how many quarters I wasted on these games during those years.

Certainly more than this unit costs. If only I’d known to wait…

Centipede!

Super Breakout!

Space Invaders!

It’s got Pong!

And Asteroids!

OMFG! It’s even got Tempest!

Get yours before they’re all gone!

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So, the last piece of published short fiction I had out was the short story, “The Session” in Terri Windling’s anthology, The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors back in 1995. This doesn’t count a piece Rory and I co-wrote back in the early 90’s but which appeared in Revolution SF back in 2005. I’ve been (slowly) writing novels instead.

I had a short fiction career at one point (if one can call a career something that amounted to a)nothing even close to a living wage and b) averaging less than one published story a year.) It wasn’t totally unremarkable. I made it onto the final Hugo Ballot twice and the final Nebula Ballot once. I was (at least in my own mind) a hot young turk. All of my sales were to markets considered “professional” by SFWA. I got the odd fan letter. And I got to meet a lot of cool writers and editors.

But now I’m back at it again and I’m having a rough time. I’m not completely hopeless, I think. I sold a story to the new Tor website which helped my self-esteem a bit. But now I’m working on my latest novel and I’m writing it in chunks that I hope to market as short fiction.

And this is a tricky proposition.

Here is the start of one such tale:

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To the happy list of celebrities who are not afraid to make fun of themselves (William Shatner anyone?) I am delighted to add Meat Loaf. Mr. Loaf not only does an ad for the Cingular Go-Phone, but a full music video of “Paradise by the Go-Phone Light.”

My question: why does Mom enter carrying a leg of lamb?

Our pseudonymous friend at Wonderoom is up to her old tricks, posting one of her fabulous posts. This one is about breathing, banded iron, clocks, and time:

And so I contemplate a hunk of banded iron formation. Glimpsing a world before conscious thought, before much of anything. A too large moon and a mass of algae. Pre-Eden. A world full of so much possibility that it is empty of almost everything. Recorded in bands of alternating hematite and chert. Red and black, formed because the oxygen released by these primeval algae was bonding with iron dissolved in the oceans and forming layers of hematite all over the world. Oscillations of rock, billions of years old.

She posts fairly infrequently, but her posts are always worth reading. If you haven’t put Wonderoom on your RSS feed/ bookmarks page yet, you should.

Scott McCullar was the rhythm guitarist, frequent lead singer, and often song-writer for the late, somewhat- lamented Los Blues Guys. His song ‘The Element of Fire‘, based on the classic Martha Wells novel of the same name, is one of my favorites, though ‘Elvis is Alive‘ was always a huge crowd pleaser.

After tiring of the madness, the groupies, and the endless, hazy parties of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, he became a librarian in Houston. But the spotlight called to him, as it does to us all. Here’s his new movie:

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I grew up in New Mexico, and spent all my time outdoors. Furthermore, I hated shoes, and eschewed them whenever I could. Especially in the summer. I learned early to deal with all manner of barefoot-related issues: how to cross pavement so hot it melted tar; hot to avoid being bitten by red ants; how to deal with goatheads.

Goatheads (also known as puncturevine) are prevalent in New Mexico. They are the red ants of the plant kingdom–they grow swiftly after rains, and are as painful to remove as they are to step on (their thorns are so bad they can puncture bike and even some car tires, I’m told). You quickly learn how to recognize their characteristic leaf and flower pattern.

With practice, you can even pick your way lightly through a sticker patch without too much damage, if you are good at it, by moving from bare spot to bare spot, and stopping occasionally to pull out the one or two thorns that have punctured the soles of your feet. I prided myself on this ability.

Once, though, I wasn’t looking far enough ahead. Somehow, I wandered into a goathead demilitarized zone. One minute I was light-footing through like a sailboat cutting through water, and the next I was stalled: surrounded by a field of green and yellow, filled with goatheads as far as the eye could see (OK, I’m exaggerating. But not much). Worse, the soles of my feet were already caked with stickers.

I stood there, on my tiptoes, trying not to stand on the stickers already in my feet, and yelled, “Help!” till my throat and lungs were raw. Then I cried. Finally, I carefully pulled out as many as I could get without losing my balance and falling over (into thousands more stickers). Then I picked my way through the sticker patch. Because that was the only way I was going to get out of that fix.

I think of that experience sometimes. What it tells me is this: you can make what seem at the time to be all the right choices, and despite that, sometimes, you get stuck in a really awful situation. And in that case, there is no getting around it. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was or what you could have done differently: the only way out is through, and on the way out, you’re going to bleed. So just get it over with.

(But it’s OK to shed tears — friends, it fuckin’ hurts.)

Here is Mrs. Lovett. A cute, pretty, rather sultry Mrs. Lovett, on her way to go see Sweeney Todd last winter (”A Major Disappointment,” she says). When not wearing her hair in tiny buns, she is better known as Sarcasm Girl. And she is, today, 18 years old. Old enough to rock the vote (which she has every intention of doing) but still young enough to cuddle and eat popcorn while watching a movie.

My favorite bumper sticker this week:

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

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On the west side of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, between Sixth and Seventh Streets, stands a statue of a lady in her nightgown . . . firing a cannon.

This statue (which you can see in its full downtown-Austin context via Google StreetView) depicts a real person and event. The lady was Angelina Eberly, and modern-day Austin probably would not be the capital of Texas were it not for her cannon shot – which was the only shot fired during the so-called Archives War of 1842.

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Just read on Irene Gallo’s blog. John Bereky died yesterday.

He was incredible. He never used a computer but over and over again, with each passing year, people mistook his work as CGI. He was a major influence for both traditional and digital artists.

Lots more images here.

One of my annual rituals is a trip to the eye doctor for a checkup. I come from fairly long-lived stock, my blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate are low enough to cause the occasional raised eyebrow in medical professionals. But my mother developed glaucoma when she was in her 40s; my father had a cataract removed when he was in his 80s–just before he began to go blind from macular degeneration. So I take my eyes seriously.

When I was a kid I sometimes played blind, fascinated by Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and eager to try on a soul-trying hardship (so long as I could give it up when called for dinner). You want to believe that you could not only survive, but survive with grace, heroically conquer something like loss of sight. I no longer believe in my ability to be a hero; I would doubtless cope, but not without some spectacular dark nights of the soul.

Which is just another reason to be in awe of my father. Dad will be 95 in June. His current plans include making it to 100 (”At which point I’ll be out of money and you damned kids can support me,” he says). When he was in his mid-80s he went in to have a cataract operation and found, instead, that he had quite advanced “wet” macular degeneration. The wet kind (the kind where blood vessels have been bleeding into the macula, eroding its surface) is the harder to treat, and regeneration is unlikely. Dad did not spend much of his energy repining; instead he’s been aggressive about pursuing care and treatment, and exploring his new world. This is perhaps doubly impressive because he’s been an artist and designer all his life. In fact, in the 50s he was involved in the design and creation of the Perception Research Lab at Princeton; even after the lab was shut down (new department head with other research priorities) he continued to lecture and write about perception. Thus, when his eyesight started to go, Dad was able to speak the language of the eye-doctors. Woe betide the opthalmologist who tries to condescend to my father.

And in keeping with his relentless got-lemons-make-lemonade approach to life, my father has become a writer, and most of what he writes has to do with vision. He has identified some visual phenomena that his doctors didn’t know: macular degeneration erodes your sight from the center out–hold your fists in front of your face and that approximates what happens. You retain peripheral vision, but the center is gone. But rather than that central area being black, Dad’s brain often “fills in” that space, extrapolating from the peripheral data. He’s co-writing an article with his opthalmologist; he spear-heads the annual “Lo-Vision Expo” of visual-assistance aids at the retirement community where he lives.

The guy’s a mensch.

And not surprisingly, he really cares about eyes. As I said, he’ll be 95 in June. What do you give the guy who has pretty much everything he wants or needs, and can’t see it? Eyesight.

Not for him, alas. But this year both of the girls are giving a cataract operation in Dad’s name to someone who would otherwise be blind. For $50 you can give a complete stranger the world, and the eyes to see it. Even if Dad can’t see the gift, I’m pretty certain he’ll love it.

Jack Williamson died a year-and-a-half ago (November 10th, 2006 at the age of 98) but if he’d made it to today, he would be a century old.

May I propose a toast.

His niece, Betty says, “Jack would probably either have a gin and tonic or a tall buttermilk….”

Here’s some of the previous posts we did here about Jack.

And These Are Just the Novels

A Sky Thick With Stars

Laura J. Mixon on the Jack Williamson Memorial Service

Legacy

The House That Jack Built

An Undeserved Honor

<Raises glass> To Jack.

What are you doing on top of this mountain, Old Man?

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Becoming a less-interesting conversationalist, my son.

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I have a whole long essay for EOB in my head that I’ve been working on this week, about the subject of simplifying your inner life in order to become a more whole person. Because I’ve always been interested in knowing damn near everything, and I’ve come to the realization that I know less every year, even though I constantly struggle to learn more. It’s fractured me badly over the years, instead of leading me nearer to completeness, as I once believed it would.

Living inside the Internets as we do has made it worse, of course. I too often am unable to focus on what’s important, because it ALL feels important, and bits and bytes of data are so much more easily accessible than they’ve ever been. I am in a constant feedback loop of data acquisition.

You’re a many-layered and knowledgeable individual like that, too, and that’s why I cherish you. But it’s been a tough decade for us all, and being that smart and aware of everything in the world doesn’t seem to be such a benefit sometimes.

The essay was going to be lengthy and complex, with lots of chewy intellectual content to provoke your commentary. We could still talk about it a lot right now, and maybe even come to some great conclusions. Draw up an action plan. With diagrams and labels, and some pictures, even. Discuss the pros and cons, for there always are pros and cons. Vote on optimal courses of action, maybe.

But I think I’ll just go sit under this tree for awhile instead. We’ll get back to the complicated stuff later, when it’s necessary. If it ever is.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Let go.

Green love.

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One evening several years back, Caroline and the Dude made me watch ‘Still Crazy’. I’d never even heard of it. Mad props to them both. I came away a big fan of the Seventies band ‘Strange Fruit’. The back-story is that there was constant craziness in the band in the old days, culminating in the band’s breaking up and the soon-thereafter death of their lead guitarist, Brian.

Here’s a delightful little making-of-the-movie featurette.

Decades later, the remaining members are cajoled into embarking on a comeback tour to prep for a show at a big festival. At first, it doesn’t go well at all, at all. Bill Nighy, as the frontman, Ray, finally hits his stride at this gig, though:

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Two-Headed Baby struggled with this song quite a bit. I like it a lot, but never could play it properly. I think I’d like to take another whack at it sometime, though. I’ll really learn the riff this time, guys, I swear it.

One of the conflicts in the band centered around the fact that the other band members wouldn’t ever let the bass player sing. I can relate to that.

He finally does get his moment in the spotlight in this next clip. Not to mention the surprise return of Brian, who *gasp* isn’t really dead.

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This really is a helluva movie, gang. It’s funny, sad, sweet, and smart. And we’re all old enough here to appreciate its theme of dreams lost and found.

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EDIT:  Incidentally, if you’d like to see the whole movie on-line, you can start here. Then use your skillz to figure out where to go next.

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