Nick Mamatas' Journal

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Help me Internet, you're my only hope!
It's like this: beep beep beep beep beep beep beep

Sound familiar?

Poll #1428331 What's that beeping?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

There's a distant beeping. What is it?

View Answers

Next-door neighbor sleeping through alarm.
8 (12.9%)

Next-door neighbor dying through alarm.
2 (3.2%)

Next-door neighbor tied to a pole in a basement in The City thanks to creepy Internet date.
6 (9.7%)

Surveillance equipment in the wall malfunctioning.
5 (8.1%)

AM radio signal picked up via new filling.
1 (1.6%)

Just plain goin' crazy.
7 (11.3%)

Obama administration psyop against only Berkeley resident who didn't vote Obama.
3 (4.8%)

Beautiful if inexplicable mating song of cable box.
14 (22.6%)

Fascinating new tinnitus symptom.
4 (6.5%)

Kazzie learned how to beep, is beeping.
12 (19.4%)

Some Light Reading
Over at Haikasoru, my pal Eric is blogging about "light novels" and whether Haikasoru titles are light novels or not.

Check it out!

http://www.haikasoru.com/?p=251

And leave some comments!

Mock Up on Mu
It's 2019 and L. Ron Hubbard has the tech. He owns the friggin' MOON, or much of it anyway, but he needs more workers to build a great pyramid of waste plutonium (The Mu Pu Pile!) and so hatches a master plan. Only the recently unbrainwashed Agent C and occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, sixty years after faking his own death, can stop him...thanks to the power of ~~sex magick~~ love.

Utilizing found footage from Flash Gordon serials, documentaries and educational films, and even North by Northwest, collage filmmaker Craig Baldwin presents in thirteen parts Hubbard's attempt to use Marjorie Cameron (Parsons's real-life former wife) to blackmail "Lockheed Martin" (here an individual) into building a spaceport right off the Vegas strip—plenty of people who need "clearing" and will fall for trillion year contracts there—by getting some pics of him wearing a bra. Martin needs Parsons' formula for perfectly reflective mirrors to create space lasers that will expand and cement American hegemony over the world. Parsons is nearly killed, but escapes, and after Cameron has an encounter with Aleister Crowley—he lives with the mole people and mutants in an underground lair—she saves the wounded Parsons and together they and all the mutants, beatniks and hippies rise up to destroy the weapons of mass destruction. Let love rule, baby.

If you're familiar with Parsons (the subject of two biographies that I know of) Mock Up on Mu can actually drag a bit. In addition to collage, Baldwin has filmed actors and built sets and whatnot. Using video and non-synced 16mm film we get a lot of dialogue (voiced by actors other than those on screen) and backstories and even a biography-cum-catechism of Cameron's life as explored by Crowley. The acting isn't great and some of the dialogue—at one point Cameron punctuates Hubbard's megalomanic plan-making by announcing the titles of seemingly apropos films and shows ("Dr Who?" "I Am a Camera" etc)—is a bit silly. The new footage works best when Baldwin uses various rear projection techniques to hint at movement, large crowds, and the surveillance state by mixing stock footage and new material and showing off the seams. The layering of effect is haunting and occasionally hilarious.

As a ritual experience, Mock Up is the teensiest bit too long as well. Sort of like church with a stammering priest. The collages, which allow for and celebrates rapidly shifting identities and also a secret history of rocketry, the military-industrial complex, and Hollywood, absolutely soar. They soar relatively speaking too, given the casting. Michelle Silva (Cameron) Kal Spelletich (who does look like Parsons) and Damon Packard (Hubbard) are all avant-garde filmmakers in their own rights, but only Spelletich has much screen presence as a performer. (Crowley is played by stock footage.) Radical comedian and occasional actor Stoney Burke plays Lockheed Martin very well, but he's not on screen so much.

Geniuses have minor works too. All film, except perhaps for Transformers, is ultimately an exercise in logistics, a battle against finite time and dwindling resources. Sometimes less is more and attempts at more is too much. Avant-garde epic-slash-epoch making is hard, man. Having said that, Mock Up on Mu is dizzying and often laugh-out-loud funny. It's certainly the best two hours of science fiction I've seen in a movie theater in several years. (For fantasy, I'd still say The Fall, which not surprisingly I also saw at the worker-owned Red Vic, is the recent best.) It's the best film I've seen this year. Actually, given the collage, it's the best 200 films I've seen this year.

Sad Nick is sad
Everyone is going to Readercon but me.

Heck, even my friend Shannon is going, only to lug around Vylar's luggage. He asked me if the hotel has cable! He wants to catch up on his NCIS viewing during the con. I don't even know what NCIS is! (I suspect it's about the police if it's off my radar.)

This is me:

:(

Help me help you
If you are one of those people who have linked to one of my blog posts or comments about publishing or writing, could yooooou...

put the URL in a comment below or perhaps remind me of the entries you've liked? I don't tag anything out of sheer laziness (and some of the material predates the widespread use of tags anyway) but I need 'em now.

Thanks!

Let's all band together to change the world!
Latest News

* Fans proved 'I'll be there' for memorial
* Fans across country mourn | And the world44 min
* L.A. wants help paying for Jackson memorial 19 min
* iReport.com: How are you honoring MJ today?
* Time: Places to go to honor Michael Jackson

So...how are YOU honoring MJ today?

No dilly-dallying. If you don't think of some way to honor the man, he may not come back to life in three days!

Behold my giant sandwich!
Note the Mello action figure (from Death Note) on top for size comparison.

It's not my fault. The small sandwiches were $3.50, and this enormous one was $5.50. What was I supposed to do!

Fine, don't look for yourself!
Here it is. See the increasingly strident comments.

Yet another guide for the perplexed
If you prepared and published in the comments section of someone else's blog a lengthy complaint—say, just under 976 words—about how you are not being allowed to speak, you are, in fact, allowed to speak.

No, not this blog. Lookie-loos will have to seek it out, like the root-finding gatherers of old.

Tiny bits of money day
It is as though a tiny sprite or fairy has been helping me all day, doing as best it can with some small amount of pixie dust. To wit:

Summon, Bind, Banish is getting a reprint in an anthology. It'll be Happy Meals for six with that dough.

Shockingly (to me anyway), Under My Roof is chugging along sufficiently well to cough up another royalty check. I suppose the shocking part is that I didn't have to dun my agent to dun the publisher to send a royalty check that was going to end up being one-fifth of what it should have been anyway because of misplaced foreign monies and a ridiculous 40% reserve against returns etc. etc. etc. A couple Cs and change, and it may even show up at my house next week instead of, uh, never!

And, just now, I sold my four-word short story again, and it was a solicited reprint for an anthology of very very short stories. I didn't even have to ask. My joke was always that my four-word story was my best ever per-word payout (two fiddy a word!), but the antho is coughing up twenty-five smackers for it. $8.75 a word and counting!

July's Monday Dance-Off
Well, looking at the feedback for the past few months of dance-off vids, I've come to a couple conclusions.

1. Most of you are terrified of black people.
2. You all like novelty songs.

Well, FINE. Get up in your cubicles and dance to THIS!

Of interest to self-appointed politically correct facsists...
The Times has an interesting article about a series of studies performed to determine whether or not female playwrights are being discriminated against. Some results, albeit results filtered through a newspaper's rhetorical idiom:

*there were twice as many male playwrights as female ones, and that the men tended to be more prolific, turning out more plays

*the work of men and women is produced at the same rate

*Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s.

However, in that study:

*“These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said. ...“Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”

Further:

*. Plays and musicals by women sold 16 percent more tickets a week and were 18 percent more profitable over all...Yet even though shows written by women earned more money, producers did not keep them running any longer than less profitable shows that were written by men.

* Ms. Sands also found plays that feature women — which are more commonly written by women — are also less likely to be produced.

Here's a link to the original paper, available in annoying PDF format.

John Doe of July

John Doe and his Rockin' Band doing "Fourth of July."

Hey, I left the house!
Got a funny email from

badgerbag saying that

rae_beta was in town and wanted to meet me in order to "eat my brain", which is apparently a compliment.

I said sure, and that we should meet at Comic Relief. I figured that if r-b was some weirdo and pulled a knife I could shout, "I work for VIZ! You must save me! Fall upon her blade! Drown her with your blood!" and all the patrons and workers would swarm her. But, of course,

rae_beta wanted to meet me because she works for Dark Horse and is indeed the in-house editor for Lovecraft Unbound, so she could have just shouted, "I work for Dark Horse! Seize him! I need to eat his brain!"

And as it turns out we just left the store quietly, together, and hung out for a bit. It was fun. I met pal Kerick too.

Kenneth Hite says so, so nyah!
If I had Twitter, I'd just tweet this link.

Anyway, *flex*.

Hsm, as we used to say on DinoMUSH
Facebook just coughed up the name of my Somerville landlady as someone I might want to friend on Facebook.

So, does FB just sneak into your email address book or something?

"World" SF in odd places
As people are beginning to keep lists of SF in translation, I thought I'd mention that I just came across "Cull" by Manjula Padmanabhan, which appears in Delhi Noir. It's a near-future science fiction story about a dark future where India is a world power and bad things happen and such.

It is neither noird nor weird-boiled, however.

Three cheers for bathroom reading.

Freelance Writing Money, Part III OR Shocklines Post of the Day!
Hahaha, oh man! Look at this:

Order my novel, [Some Dumb Title], write a concise, one to two paragraph review that explores the story, but does not rehash it or give away key plot points, post to [the Shocklines message board] and I'll send the first reviewer $100.00 (one hundred dollars) through paypal or check. The contest starts 7/1/09 at 8pm and concludes when the book is properly reviewed (see underlined text). Those who have already bought the book are not included in this contest.

Punchline: the novel is only available from his publisher's website. Not even amazon has it yet.