Barbie: A Subversive Review

 

And, to answer Hans-Georg Moeller, I don't know or care what is authentic. If a product triggers joyful emotions by manipulating my emotions that evolved over millions of years, then I think that's clever of them.

Of course, since I know that the western industrial media complex seeks to sell me on stuff, then if I'm bothered I can choose to not engage.

The caveat being whether or not one has any real choice in a world where physics says everything is determined, even if the variables mean that one can't calculate the outcomes. So saying don't watch Barbie can lead to you watching it.

Yeah, studying physics and quantum mechanics does your head in.

You're welcome.

What Do Scientists Think About UFOs/UAPs?

Worth watching for the statistical analysis of the numbers and what it means for the chances of any unidentified object seen in the sky.

How much money do I actually make as a writer

Title says it all. The guy breaks down the likely earnings for both Trad and Indie authors.

Five Times Interstellar Got Physics Wrong

I so wanted to love Interstellar. Just the pictures of the black hole alone made it a visually stunning movie. But, several things through me out of the story.

The first being the use of the SLS to launch the crew to the orbiting ship. Not because the SLS is in anyway or shape bad, but because it set my level of expectation on the technological assumptions; no single stage to orbit rockets.

Then what so we see later? Single stage to orbit rockets. Not only that, designs that could never carry enough fuel for the Delta-V required to fulfill the mission.

After that the film might have well been Star Wars, which I love, but Interstellar had none of the joy or excitement of the former. As for the plot, again I had no problem with the MacGuffin, but what it wrapped around it was I felt utter trite sentimentality.

And don't get me wrong, I don't mind sentimentality, I do dislike trite story telling.

Indian Summer Rain

This is a notice that I've been invited to write a short story for an anthology. The shift from trying to write my novel, to actually writing a short story to meet the set deadline has rather discombobulated me.

Also, much to my surprise, new ideas for the story are springing into my mind.

So, the words are being put on paper (metaphorically that is), and as all writers know, the words must flow.

This notice is to inform you all that I'm really hard up against a deadline, and any correspondence I owe will be late. I apologize for this delay. Remember the words must flow for stories to be written.

RT: 5,569 words

Picture a clue to amuse, a space filler, or to be ignored: delete as appropriate.

Indignation: Addiction and Hope

Brin doesn't always manage to convert his ideas into practical actions that work, or at least not from what I've seen. His arguments about bets come across differently when looking at them from the other side of the argument. 

They come off as the intellectual equivalent of bullying. At least to me.

There again I look at everything as confrontation between differing perspectives, with negotiation and deescalation  being the prime goal so that that a problem can be worked on cooperatively. But, what do I know?

However, this talk struck a chord; It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift...

Science Fiction: Gatekeeping, Fandom & Genre Stagnation

Caught this, and I have opinions, which are probably not fair given this guy is doing an informal video talk about his opinions. Here's the reply I left.

I'm going to have to go away and think about this. While a lot of the points raised are worth discussing, I found some of the conclusions weak. For example, Sci-Fi as a term, coined by Forrest J. Ackerman, who arguably was the first high profile SF media fan as opposed to SF literature fan.

I used to rankle at SF being called Sci-Fi or skiffy, but nowadays I don't think it really matters because any negative implications from the term have long been overcome by the ubiquity of SF as a genre. Looking down on the term says more about the person looking down on it than the genre; namely intellectual snobbery.

And that's my problem with gatekeepers for what is essentially something that no longer makes any sense in the world as it is now, as compared to the 1930s, the evolution through the genre from the 1940s and 50s, to the new wave of the sixties and early 70s etc.

I tend to agree that fantasy encompassing sword and sorcery, epic fantasy and the such is not trying to emulate the sense of wonder that SF achieves when at its best. And as you say, revolutionary ideas are different to the evolution of tropes.

However, placing publishing as gatekeepers who are upholding the traditions of the genre doesn't stand up to scrutiny. An equally convincing argument can be made that they've held back the genre because their goals are to make profits, not evolve the genre per se. And, I agree these are not mutually contradictory goals, but the evidence is in product on the shelves.

Also, writers like Kristine Kathryn Rusch are self-published, yet also featured in traditional magazines (she is a Hugo award winner back in the 1990s), and the problem is rather diminishment of publishing from corporate buyouts. If anything one can argue that despite the criticism of self-publishing as being slapdash, this is the only area where a writer can write what they want, rather than write to market.

Of course, I would concede that a large number of self-published writers will write to market, but this has always been the case. It is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. As such, there's room for all fiction to reach the market, but the problem I fear you're actually railing against is how to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

That's a problem that I have no answer to, except that broad sweeping generalizations about self-publishing, and arguing from what one prefers has led to the arguments we see in social media. The vastness of cultural products, their accessibility, and becoming jaded from a glut of books to read only leads to a cul-de-sac of refined taste, and and as such becomes largely inaccessible to the general book reader.

TL;DR: There's room for revolutionary stories and re-framed retelling's of old stories.