The moment of truth...

Well, I've got the first ten chapters of Grizelda all intro- and outtroed, ID3 tagged, and wrapped up with a bow. I mailed the first chapter to their submissions people. We'll see what happens...

WALL-E

I just saw WALL-E the other day. Amazing movie - Pixar's still batting 1000. If you haven't seen it, go for the spork scene, and the 2001 reference. They're precious. It's been out for a few weeks, so probably somebody else has already said this, and better than I have, but I can't help making a few observations.


(And I'm going to discuss the ending, so if you don't want a spoiler, don't scroll down.)





• These guys pulled off a movie with almost no dialogue. The first 15 minutes or so were really a classic example of sneakily giving the audience information. The billboards WALL-E passes, the pop-up hologram advertisement, the piles of dead WALL-Es let you figure out what happened without any character telling you anything.
• A rather daring use of live action.
• WALL-E's eyes. They absolutely carry the character, just like ET's eyes did. Notice when WALL-E temporarily loses his memory at the end, his eyes stop moving. You can tell there's nobody home – it's a zombie version of WALL-E. It seems that no matter how not human a character looks, you can pull if off if they've got really great eyes.
• This has got to be the cheeriest post-apocalyptic I have encountered.
• Where did the Axiom people get all those species from that we saw in the ending credits? I suspect they had a gene bank in the hull that nobody was paying attention to. Or maybe they looked that place in Iceland up on the encyclopedia.
• Where do new Axiomites come from? I bet they're test-tube babies, like in Brave New World. Holding hands was such a strange new experience for John and Mary that I hardly think they're doing it the old-fashioned way.
• Are they ever going to revive AUTO? They did with HAL (remember 2010?). What if the encyclopedia turns on them?
• WALL-E has spent 700 years intimately acquainted with trash and you expect me to believe he has never encountered a spork before?

Prognostication

So, I was reading Turing's "Turing Test" essay, and I came across the following passage. Turing has set forth the question, "Can machines think?" and to answer it, he's trying to come up with a definition of "machine" that would rule out human beings.

One might for instance insist that the team of engineers be all of one sex, but this would not really be satisfactory, for it is probably possible to rear a complete individual from a single cell of the skin (say) of a man. To do so would be a feat of biological technique deserving of the very highest praise, but we would not be inclined to regard it as a case of "constructing a thinking machine."

Prescient, no? This guy wrote this in 1950, and he wasn't even a biologist.

Halfway There!

So, this blog groggily crawls itself out of its summer hibernation.

I think I'm about halfway through prepping Grizelda for the airwaves. I'm about done with editing the book and I've recorded up to chapter 20 (out of 30). I've still got most of the sound editing to go as well as the intro and outtro and figuring out stuff like the cover. Looks like I'm right on track for hitting the air in September.

Randall Munroe has outdone himself

"Barack me Obamadeus?"

http://xkcd.com/442/