Vaguely related thoughts...

Every time I pass by one of those Prince Caspian posters, my principle reaction is "Put down that damn sword and kiss me." The actor is very pretty. It must be "Mayday syndrome," as one of my boyfriends used to put it: every year around this time my interest in guys seems to get much stronger than any other time of the year. It usually fades by mid-June.

On the other hand, I could still watch Mariah Carey wiggle all day long.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Brain, With A Side Order Of Communion Wafers.

( Bad Press, Bad Economics, Bad Religion and, oh, more Bad Religion. )

Book Review: The Void-Captain's Tale, by Norman Spinrad (1983)

In contrast to Charles Runyon's "Deeply Sicko SF" (as determined by the readers of rec.arts.sf.written) about which I blogged the other day, Norman Spinrad is simply a writer's writer, and his book, The Void-Captain's Tale is a masterpiece. His characters have individual, powerful voices, and one can literally feel the number of re-writes Spinrad went through to make sure everyone in his books is unique and special. His cultures are dense, and with just a few special touches-- here, it's the way characters "trade the stories of their names"-- he makes his worlds come alive. Ships jump from star system to star system, and a tradition has grown that the wealthiest passengers don't do cryo but instead help keep the crew from going nuts on the weeks-long voyages by filling the vast, heat-dissapating spaces with balls, gardens, and various "divertissements." There is decadence aplenty within these floating bawdy houses, but it is of a most mundane sort.

The special touch to TVCT is that hyperspace jump requires an organic component. Usually these "pilots," who are emotionally and physically wrecked by the experience, are plucked out of finishing schools already identified as being on a downward spiral, and are offered a chance to make something of themselves and retire young. But the experience of hyperspace is so ecstacy-inducing that, when forciby retired, most pilots go crazy or commit suicide. Sometimes they die en-route, and the captain is forced to pick a volunteer from among the passengers who, untrained and unprepared, is likely to die or destroy the ship with his inexperience.

The pilot of this ship is a such a volunteer, one of the few ever to make it home alive, who liked the experience so much she's still doing it. Unlike other pilots who usually just try to recover from their experience and shun the rest of the crew, she is strong, conscious, arrogant, and brash, and wants to mingle with the crew and passengers. This violation of strict tradition brings out powerful feelings in the Captain, crew, and guests, and those feelings drive this book forward. The tension in this story is simple: the Captain becomes obsessed, almost Ahab-like, with this fascinating pilot and in his downward spiral makes poor decisions that ultimately doom his crew.

Is it "depraved?" Yes, but in a different way: the captain in his obsession demonstrates that quality called "depraved indifference," and Spinrad has done his usual tour-de-force job of showing how a character can get himself into such a position, convincing us each step of the way that, yes, human beings really do think this way, and yes, what we're seeing is a slow, inevitable slide down into madness and no, there's nothing anyone could really have done or forseen to prevent it. But there's nothing to suggest that the universe depicted or any of the other characters in it are anything more than ordinary, sufficiently moral human beings. Great read.

An experiment with design fundamentals that worked

In the absence of any formal plan, I've been doing random exercises from Jim Krause's excellent textbook, Design Basics, and in an exercise on composition he recommends finding magazine photos of landscapes with horizon lines and, with black sheets of paper, cropping the top and bottom of the photograph at various heights to change where the horizon line is with respect to the eye.

Being both lazy and geeky, I instead went to Flickr and found a half-dozen photos tagged with the word "landscape." My main criteria was that I wanted ones where the horizon line was dead center of the photograph. I then called up the photographs in GIMP and cropped them the easy way: by reducing the vertical window and enabling the scroll bar.

Out of six photos, five were improved by a radical crop in one direction or another. The one that did not improve was a street scene where the building blocked a lot of the sky, but even that benefited from a slight crop in one direction or another, moving the horizon line away from the mid-line. The general rule that the center of a photograph is the most boring place to put anything held true even for the gorgeous landscape photos some people put up on flickr.