2014 — 2 June: Monday
When the balloon goes up1 I'm entirely unconvinced that I have any personal wish to survive the ensuing mass extinction. You can, however, trust a North American life science journalist called Annalee Newitz (the lady who co-founded io9.com) to be more pragmatically optimistic, and write a book called "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember" all about surviving. If only her voice was less irritatingly sing-song. Thanks, NPR.
Earwiggo again
I must admit I hadn't realised that Sony 4K video material and Samsung 4K video material isn't cross-compatible. Yet I'm curiously unsurprised. Though I no longer bother to keep count of the number of format wars we've seen (endured? survived?) over the years. Once a company is big enough, dumb enough, and arrogant enough... (Link.)
One of the comments here makes a telling point:
And it's been the same with home video. Blu-ray players were the first backwards-compatible player in an industry that was decades old. VHS, Beta, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-Ray... you had to buy the movie over and over.
Do I feel lucky?
I'm not generally one for tweaking.
Oh, good grief!
A retired cardinal living in luxury in a huge penthouse flat with three nuns taking care of the "domestic work". Classic. (Link.)
I wonder...
... whether programming languages have the same effect. (Link.)
I was reminded while thinking about some of the other post-Apocalypse reading I've done — fictional and non-fictional — of a remark by Stewart Brand:
I put this challenge to anyone who desires the apocalypse: Go to an island and pretend that civilization has destroyed itself. And then build something that is better than the world we know today.
Without electricity? :-)
My favourite...
... rose bush continues to defy my worst efforts at sensible pruning and is quietly setting about the business of producing its next batch of lovely, smelly flowers despite my policy of benign (some might say "lazy") neglect over the last six years or so. Madame Apocalypse (on NPR this morning) touched on bees and the colony collapse disorder that could put a lot of people in a pretty unpollinated pickle. As I was slaughtering the brambles yesterday I was aware of quite a few bees buzzing about their business, but they were all pretty much rugged individualists of the sort that I found catching 40 winks on the roof of my car last Friday.
I very much admire...
... the people who manage to craft graphic novels, films, and TV shows despite the best efforts of the finance-raising, producing, side of the business. Indeed, I've read a number of memoirs, seen several films and documentaries, and listened to numerous directors' commentaries, about the painful state of financial limbo (aka development hell) that can (and doubtless many times has) put paid to numerous projects that I would very much like to have seen. Take, for example, the tortuous process by which the 1998 version of "Great Expectations" came into being from Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón. Art Linson was its producer, and his fine book "What just happened?" touched on it:
When executives are given their first blush of power, it's like an itch that has to be scratched. The need to throw their weight around and act 'creative' is simply irresistible...
Another odd tic that occurs when an executive is given the sweatshirt of authority is the use of the word I instead of you or even
we when referring to the making of movies... It's rare to find an executive these days who will not say things like "Two years ago
when I made [fill in the famous title of your choice] blah blah blah." Directors and writers who actually do the prodigious work for these guys, have to
patiently listen to this drivel with their eyes glazed over waiting to pick up the money. Executives simply confuse making a committee business decision with making a movie. I think it
makes them feel artsy.
It could be argued...
... though not by me, of course, that I have an odd collection of books. This snippet is from an essay called "Growing old disgracefully" that Lord Mancroft popped into a 1969 collection of his pieces called "Booking the Cooks". It almost certainly first appeared in "Punch" in the 1960s:
But in my mid-fifties I still think that the principal pleasure of middle-age is looking back at some of the girls one didn't marry.
I was sorry to learn, via Ansible, of the recent death of Patrick Woodroffe. He was a very fine, and amusing, fantasy artist. Some of my readers might even recall this delicious little aside on page 2 of his 1984 Hallelujah Anyway that I would have scanned, until realising that it was too close to the book's spine and I didn't wish to risk damage. So here's my slightly re-engineered version of it, again:
