Betty’s Neighborhood

I did remember my password and it only took two weeks! Go me! I'm not quite a fungus brain after all!

*does a mushroom dance*

I kind of feel like I should put something here.  So there's this:

Some years back, Dr. Andrey Geim succeeded in levitating a frog through magnetic fields.  Briefly, we lived in a world of hovering frogs.  Yesterday, it was revealed that a parallel line of research has achieved the levitation of other small creatures through ultrasound.  From my perspective, that was a strange day.  Yesterday, animals were floating on music you cannot hear.

There's a line in A E Van Vogt's novel THE SILKIE, where it's noted that the Silkies of the title, enhanced humans, have music that sounds like monotone drone to ordinary humans, because they can't hear the ultrasonic variations built into it for superhuman Silkie ears.  This connects with the minor cause celebre earlier in the year concerning messaging devices with sonic tones designed to be inaudible to adults.  Only young ears could pick up the sounds.  It's probably no coincidence that most people of my generation (I'm 38) and beyond have had our hearing wrecked by loud music.  I remember Kevin Shields gloating in an interview that all of us who listened to his band My Bloody Valentine's  "Feed Me With Your Kiss" with the volume cranked up have been rendered deaf as posts by the dissonance and feedback.  Bastard.

I share a conviction with Steven Shaviro, whose most recent book was CONNECTED, that we live in a science fictional world.  Not the one everyone expected, of course -- no jetpacks.  But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect.  Sf has never been about predicting the future.  It's been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.

People have spoken at length over the last few years about the death of sf, and even of the death of futurism.  This isn't new.  In the 1980s, grand masters of the form such as Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley talked of sf losing its way when the common visions of the form were abandoned: Silverberg in particular (author, curiously, of some of sf's most depressing stories) spoke of the cyberpunk/radical hard sf landscape being one he did not choose to inhabit, and so turned to writing fantasy.  Today, sf, like so many arts, is utterly fractured, with several competing movements, none of them gaining much traction, while sales slip, magazines struggle and the written genre slides out of general view, dragged down to Davy Jones' locker by the bony hands of the Western.

I'm a science fiction writer.  I work in many other genres and areas, but first and foremost I think of myself as a writer of sf.  I'm no good at science.  My girlfriend still has to program the video machine for me.  I love science for the fiction in it.  Every great scientific innovation has poetry in it.  In a BBC TV play about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson says upon seeing the assembled DNA double helix for the first time; "I knew it'd be pretty."

The challenge in sf now is, to an extent, the one William Gibson met in PATTERN RECOGNITION by not writing sf.  When we live in the science fiction condition, what's left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer?  It's what the Mundane SF movement (and, my God, what an exciting name) is referring to: if we're living in the science fiction condition, why invent castles in the air?  Especially when it turns out that the space elevator technology for reaching them will see you dead of radiation poisoning before you reach the top, as has recently been deduced -- you can't shield the ribbon from the Van Allen belt, and if you shield the car you pay a weight penalty that not even an array of frog-levitators can alleviate.

I'm thinking about using this site to test small thought pieces like this, about what, for want of a better term, I'm today calling the science fictional condition.  Thinking out loud, anyway.

So livejournal is down. Unfortunately for me I stored a backup of my Nanowrimo story and my novel in progress in there....

0.o

I really hope LJ isn't going to start regressing to its bad ol' days of a couple of years ago when it would crash all the time. But it's the first time in a long time I've had this many errors logging in. Hopefully it'll have resolved itself by the end of the day. Until then, just keep plugging away at the book and figure out someplace else to store a backup copy of it.

You know, in case my comp explodes.

(I am not in the slightest paranoid.)

There are certain actors whose presence I enjoy every moment they are onscreen, yet whose names I never bother to remember. 

These actors mostly portray supporting roles, but it seems to me that they bring an incredible amount of intensity and passion to their performance despite the rarity of headlining. 

They are solid and I know, upon seeing them, that I'm likely to end up a little fascinated with the character they portray.  I'll want to know more about the characters, I'll wonder what shaped them into the forms we're allowed to see.  I'll be a little frustrated because the movie or tv show won't ever answer these questions about them.  I won't ever know those characters, the story isn't about them, even if I would prefer it to be.

The characters they portray have histories, entire lives looking out from their eyes.  These actors make me believe that...and that's something I appreciate.

Actors who fit this criteria for me include (but are not limited to) those whose pictures I've added to this entry.

Alice Krige first won my geekish little heart by seducing Lt.Commander Data in her memorable performance as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact.  She's mesmerizing, but her roles (like a more recent one in Deadwood) always seem to be short-lived.

Emily Watson just makes me stare.every.time.  I don't know what it is about her, but she brings certain physical manerisms into her roles that, like Alice Krige, make it impossible for me to take my eyes off her.

Chris Cooper is just amazing on so many levels.  He's in so many movies...and so rarely anything even remotely approximating a lead character.  Just...He inspires trust.  He can be playing someone vaguely repulsive (as he did in Adaptation) and yet be so charismatic at the same time that I understand...I get the character and am left wanting to know more.

These are three actors whose work I appreciate, yet never seek out.  I'll consistently be surprised to find thay they're in a movie, on a show.  But I've come to realize that it's a very welcome surprise every time.

St. Elsewhere

Gnarls Barkley

Have discovered Gnarls Barkley.  Have also decided that I think I rather like and am amused by Gnarls Barkley.  

*blinks*

I always think I won't like or be interested in new music.  But then again I almost never am exposed to any. 

Damn.  I'm going to have to remember to buy this right around the time I finally cave to Outkast.  *weeps*

The idea of Heath Ledger playing Joker to Christian Bale's Batman doesn't burn. No, not one bit.  They both have those

Christian Bale

...you know...those cheeks with the crease in the right place. 

I like cheek creases, always have.  Cheek creases with the slight roughness of stubble.  Mmm... Want.to.pinch.

So sorry, did I go off on a bit of a tangent there?  Entirely intentional.

Why don't I own Batman Begins yet? 

*makes plans to rewatch Equilibrium tonight*

No seriously, I DO love Equilibrium.  It takes EVERY SINGLE successful Sci-Fi concept of the past 100 years and combines it with ONE original idea to create something that actually is more than a heap of genre cliches.

That's something, don't you think?

I was going to be flippant and say you read kiddie books, but honestly I love books for all ages and was reading adult books as a child and both adult and children/teen books as an adult.

No, that's not what makes me a kid. The fact that I signed up for a GaiaOnline account does. Oh yeah, I have a Gaia. I even set up the journal thingie. I decided to play it like a roleplaying MMO and invented a persona and everything. There, while my Gaia name is Pysali, my roleplaying name is "Tragedy the Wonder Girl" and it's very silly.

Viva la silly!

So Qotd for the 22nd:

What's the most extreme weather you've been in? A memorable storm? Heat wave? Or something else?

While I have to admit, the lousy heat right now makes me feel like I'm perpetually melting, I'd have to say for worst weather it's a toss up.

Back when I lived in Arkansas for a few months I arrived right during their twister season and nothing like having your roommate call you up and tell you, "hey if that box in the kitchen starts to go off, go hide in the closet in my room with the animals" because you know, having a tornado touch down five miles from the house wasn't freaky enough.

Then when I lived in Arizona I arrived to a freakishly early summer that would keep getting hotter and hotter. It eventually got to 114 degrees early morning. It was so bad I was sick the entire time I was down there, really sick.

When I went on vacation to Texas it was a freakish summer. They were having locust issues, so I'd be driving down one of their long roads having to literally windshield wipe the little buggers off because it was like a miniature storm of tiny, splattering green bodies constantly going against the car. Ew.

Then of course I grew up in Rhode Island, land of the cast off storms. Usually we get the crap that's left over after a big hurricane has nailed Florida and the Carolina's. Between aggressive hurricanes, winters in the last few years that have dumped blizzard after blizzard it's been a wild ride. I haven't been around for all the rain they've gotten years past, guess I'm not lucky.

See I'm the kind of gal that would rather it be less humid and raining all the time as opposed to hot and muggy as hell. It's why I moved to Washington State. So far, all the "gloomy rains-all-the-time" predictions all my friends from back home warned me about really hasn't happened. Sure, there are the seasons where it'll drizzle on and off all day, but this place isn't exactly doing the rains-so-hard-you-have-to-pull-over extravaganza I've gotten used to all my life.

I like it. I just wish it'd rain more this summer. It did really nicely the first year I was here. :) I think I just need to get a nice air conditioning unit, something that doesn't "come with" out here. Or a large mass of fans I can situate in front of the fireplace so the cats and I can just lie there comatose all day.

Drainupload

Once upon a time I lived in that house.  My parents built it right around the time I was born; they lived in tents for about a year until they could move in.

Once upon a time the trees would have made a different horizon.  There was an enormous marker tree on the hill immediately to the rear of the house.  It would have dwarfed the entire picture, eaten up a chunk of the sky and you still wouldn't have been able to see the top.  It had a plaque indicating that it was special and not to be cut down, but I suppose that it had grown too high to be seen from the ground because, clearly, it is no longer there.

This picture was taken years after my Mother sold the property.  52 acres of Oregon that I'll never get back.  52 acres that have imprinted themselves indelibly on my soul in both comforting and disconcerting ways.  I never have a nightmare that doesn't take place on that property or within that house, but I also have no memories stronger than the ones I made there.  Good, cherished memories that are stronger even then memories of lovers, friends, or any happy times I've experienced as an adult.  It's as if everything that ever taught me of kindness and joy is tied up in my sense memory of a landscape that no longer exists.

I dug this picture out because I had a flash today of bouncing on a waterbed in the rain.  You see, one of our waterbeds (because there were at least 3 king-sized) developed a fatal leak and the main bag was replaced.  The old free-flow bag was hauled out to one side of the house, mounted on some plywood or somesuch, and filled with water.  It leaked, yes, but it also acted as a marvelous trampoline, a slip-n-slide in the rain and, on hot summer days, a naturally cool lounge where one could spread out with a book or three. 

It never occurred to me until today that having a full (albeit leaky) waterbed in the middle of the yard might be construed as slightly odd.

But Lord, it makes for a great memory.