“World Builder” by Bruce Branit is a neat, 10-minute SF film, which I found via Neatorama. “The filming was completed in a single day, but the post-production computer graphics required 2 years.”
Month: March 2009
Download links and BitTorrents of Sita Sings the Blues have gone live, in a variety of resolutions, with more (including DVD-ready files) to come. The download page is being updated with more resources regularly. Get your Sita fix here.
In Roger Zelazny’s Hugo award winning story “Home is the Hangman” there is a line that, in one sentence, captures what has been the primary theme of my life for the last seven months as I have been scrabbling my way out of the pit of Crohn’s disease. “Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.”
I don’t know if everyone’s brain works this way; I can imagine raging against discomforting and unavoidable distractions of the senses in a way that drives productivity rather than retarding it. But that isn’t what happens for me. I am subject to Zelazny’s Toothache. Today the weather in San Antonio could not be more pleasant, and I awoke with an energy and eagerness for my various writing projects that usually prefigures a satisfyingly productive day, one of the days where, instead of fighting for every word, the top of my head will unfold like the fronds of an anemone and easily pluck images from the currents of my fictional world. But then, with no warning (and there is never any warning, or any observable pattern), I feel the fist begin to tighten deep in my abdomen and the tendrils of productivity slam back inside my skull. My entire focus shifts to my physical being, and I head home and crawl into bed and take pills and seek out escapism and do anything else to further the one truly important goal: finding a vector of comfort to cling to.
But if I can’t force my focus onto the areas in which I want to be productive, I can at least experiment with being productive about the things on which I’m focused. Which is the point of this particular post. Just keeping my fingers moving on the keyboard as I wait for the storm to pass.
I suspect I will be writing more about Crohn’s in the future–hopefully with a far more retrospective slant. For now, here’s a link to a comic about Crohn’s disease that Tom Humberstone did for 24-hour Comic Day in 2007. His experience is different in some ways to mine, but page 19 is dead-on.
A couple of days ago the NPR call-in program Talk Of The Nation had a segment on innovation in the troubled economy. I only caught the end of it, but I heard a caller who was starting a business to help people save money by adding a nifty addition to their home water heating setup. The idea is this: instead of bringing the cold water line directly into the water heater, install an uninsulated water tank next to the water heater, and then draw from the top of that tank for the heater. This allows the intake water time to warm to ambient air temperature, thus requiring less energy to further heat it to whatever you have your water heater set to.
I thought this was a very clever idea, and did a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate of what the energy saving should be. For ease of approximation, I make the following assumptions:
• Assume a standard 40-gallon (151 liter) electric water tank, set to warm to 120°F (48.9°C).
• Assume that I use water in such a way that all the water in the tank has time to completely warm to the air temperature before I draw it into the water heater. (Otherwise it would be necessary to model usage, flow rate, bring in Newton’s law of cooling, etc.)
• The table at the right gives the median ground water temperature in the United States as about 55°F (12.8°C). I will use this as temperature of the water going into the heater without the uninsulated tank.
• Finally, assume that the ambient air temperature around the uninsulated tank is a constant 72°F (22.2°C) year round. This is almost certainly a net underestimate where I live, a net overestimate in some places, and probably pretty close to correct if your water heater is in an air conditioned room (but then the energy use of the whole system is more complicated to calculate).
The specific heat of water is 4186 Joules/kilogram, so without the uninsulated tank the energy to heat one water-heater-full is (4186 J/Kg°C)(151 Kg)(48.9-12.8 °C)= about 22.8 million Joules. With the uninsulated tank in the system, the equation changes to (4186 J/Kg°C)(151 Kg)(48.9-22.2 °C)= about 16.9 million Joules. The difference is 5.9 million Joules, or about 1.63 kilowatt hours. Assume that I use one full tank of water per day. The current average price of electricity is 11.47¢/kWh, which amounts to a savings of $5.60 per month.
This is a really rough estimate, but it is enough to convince me that this alteration to home water heating is probably in the class of improvements that will pay for themselves in reasonably finite time. Good on you, clever radio call-in man.
Martin Millar blogs that he is under contract to deliver a sequel to his novel Lonely Werewolf Girl, provisionally entitled Queen Vex. I just read Lonely Werewolf Girl last week and I thoroughly adored it, saying that it should be made into a television miniseries immediately. I even spent some time after I finished it writing, with an eye toward emulation, about interesting things Millar does with tying character motivation to dialog. My only complaint about it was that it didn’t end as neatly as the the other Martin Millar novel I’ve read, the also excellent Good Fairies of New York. So I welcome news that the story is going to continue.
The other exciting news, which I comes via Nalo Hopkinson, is that Beacon Press, the publisher of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is in the process of recruiting an illustrator to produce a graphic novel adaptation for the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication. Graphic novels and Octavia Butler novels are two of my favorite things in the world; I can’t wait to see how these tastes go together.
And you should be finished with your Clarion and/or Clarion West workshop application right about…now.
Well, actually you probably should have finished and uploaded your application a while ago, giving yourself a comfortable cushion of time to correct any problems that might arise with the process. But that isn’t what I did. Around this time a year ago I was furiously pounding out the first science fiction story I had written in years, and it was taking twice as long as I had expected it to, and I couldn’t stop for anything, not even my dog dying, and I finally finished the damn thing and filled out the online forms and uploaded the documents in the middle of the night at my girlfriend’s apartment, eyes barely able to focus on my laptop screen, girlfriend trying to sleep through my typing ten feet behind me. I got my application in with minutes to spare.
Then, for better or worse, it was done. And I was proud of myself. Whether I got accepted or not, I had identified going to Clarion as something that I would value, and I got over any fears I harbored of critique and rejection. I had never seriously submitted for publication before, so it was my first time sending my fiction out to strangers to be judged. That wasn’t a small thing for me, and I suspect it isn’t a small thing for many of you. For a hundred different reasons, just applying can be hard. So, now that the deadline for this year has passed, allow me to say to all the new applicants: well done! I’m proud of you.
Now what?
Well, again, if you do as I did, you should be reading this blog post right about…now. Because after I submitted my application I spent the next several weeks scouring the internet for other applicants. I searched blogs and fora for any recent mention of Clarion. (For the equally obsessive, I recommend Google Blog Search, Icerocket, and any forum dedicated to genre fiction in general or fans of a specific instructor or their work.) I filled a folder with bookmarks to the blogs of everyone I could find who was in the same boat as me, starting the same waiting game. And it seems possible that others may be doing the same thing now and stumbling upon this place. So: If you are reading this and you just applied to one of the workshops (1) congrats on getting it done and (2) leave a comment, let me know who you are.
And good luck!
While we are on the subject of awesome animation, here is a fabulous, live action stop-motion music video. (The song isn’t bad either.) I first saw this on Maureen McHugh’s blog before I had set up this website, and was reminded of it today when I visited Nina Paley’s blog to write the post about Sita Sings The Blues.
Sita Sings The Blues is a beautiful animated movie exploring various versions of the Ramayana, with about five distinctly different visual styles and a soundtrack of 1920s jazz. It was written, edited, directed, conceived, and everything-else-importanted by Nina Paley. Everything else except distributed, of course. Because film distribution companies handle all that stuff. Right?
Not so in this case. Despite a growing mountain of well deserved accolades, Sita Sings The Blues cannot be distributed nationally due to rights issues related to the Annette Henshaw songs in the soundtrack. So Nina is doing that herself too. Check out the link above: she has negotiated and purchased a limited set of rights, enough to let her release her amazing film into the creative commons. Completely free, full, DVD-ready downloads are forthcoming. Also, due to there apparently being special rules for public broadcast stations, though the film can’t have a traditional distribution, WNET in New York is allowed to broadcast it. They will be doing so on March 7, and, more exciting, have already made the full movie available in streaming format from their website. (If you want a little taste before you watch the whole, approx. 90 minute movie, check out the trailer.)
So, Sita Sings The Blues: not only an utterly delightful work of art, but now also a fascinating experiment in movie distribution. I can’t wait for the downloads to go live. I know I will be giving DVDs away as gifts and having at least one viewing party. And I will definitely be dropping some money in the donation jar, because what Nina Paley is doing is new and exciting in about ten different ways at once, and deserves admiration and support.