Real time translation is great. It even mostly works, some of the time. Facebook has gotten pretty good at it, from what I see. Friends’ posts in Korean or Japanese translate pretty well. When Arabic friends write in Arabic the translation seems pretty accurate - when they use a western keyboard an a phoneticized short hand, Facebook usually fails. But I don’t hold that against Facebook. They’re trying and doing a pretty good job.

Twitter, on the other hand…

Yeah, not so much.

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Let’s talk about Martin Caidin

Martin who?

You know, Michael Crichton’s contemporary, the other big name writer of adventure stories grounded in science in the 1970s and 80s.

Martin who?

Have you never heard of The Six Million Dollar Man?

Oh, yeah. OK. Martin who?

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Hey, if you haven’t already read Frank Herbert’s Dune, then a) Shame on you. And b) I’m going to spoil the crap out of it for you.

Go read it now.

Then come back here.

I believe that there are at least four ways that you can interpret Dune as you read it (I have a fifth, but it’s kind of trite).

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There’s a conversation going on in my writer’s group about science fiction that I wanted to pull out and discuss with a larger, different audience.

In a nutshell, there’s a large contingence of up-and-coming or as-yet-unpublished writers who believe that the golden age of science fiction was in the 1980s or beyond, and that modern sci-fi isn’t as good.

It’s a conclusion that is hard to argue with, partially because the goalposts can be moved at any time. Still I feel compelled to make a case against this perspective, and I need more space to do so than would be allowed in that group.

So here we go.

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I recently heard that they were going to remake the film Valley Girl (1983), as a musical. I remember that film well (I remember being a little smitten with the titular girl, not shown in the poster). So I decided to re-watch it. Mistake… READ MORE

When I was a kid, I was a model maker, and was absolutely obsessed with Star Wars. Of course those two paths crossed (to someone’s great profit, I’m sure). I started buying modeller magazines to see how to make them look more realistic (I gave up on those magazines quickly because they all seemed too focused on diaramas instead of minute detailing of the vehicles) Along the way, I did learn how to weather and score models.

Yeah, then 1977 happened - that little film called Star Wars - and my focus changed... Read More