| Neil Blomkamp, Will You Marry Me? |
[Jan. 2nd, 2010|01:56 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
I’m not sure why I avoid reading io9. I think it’s because I’m so frequently disappointed by science fiction media properties. But I keep winding up there anyway, in no small part because Judd Karlman sends me a link to the site daily, and it’s always something interesting.
Well, he didn’t send me this interview with Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 and several really excellent SF shorts. So there, Judd.
In it, Neill talks about the double-edged sword of large budgets.
In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, Blomkamp made it quite clear that he wants nothing to do with $100 million budgets and major studio releases. The reason for this, he explains, is that he wants to be able to tell his own stories in his own way, and that just isn’t possible when such massive amounts of money are involved.
But that’s just the beginning of the good stuff.
If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn’t come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that’s where the stimuli and influence comes from. But go back and look at something like [Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel] “The Forever War” – that is very much rooted in his experience in Vietnam, that’s where the stimulation comes from.
He even addresses my problems with District 9.
Neill Blomkamp, will you make me Mrs. Blomkamp? |
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| The Power of Ten |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|11:05 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.
The previous post had a couple of seconds of this fantastic film and I had to go root it up, since maybe you haven’t seen it. It could even been that you haven’t seen it because you were born too late. It’s also relevant to Eppy’s link to Merzo, which shows the relative sizes of various science fiction objects, from Yoda and R2 to the Enterprise to a Dyson Sphere. |
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| Pictures Can’t Lie |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|01:12 pm] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.
I’ve always considered the phrase “Pictures can’t lie” to be charmingly naïve. This technology exists now, Photoshop has existed for decades, darkroom techniques have been around for as long as there’s been photography, and there’s always been recontextualization. “You provide the pictures. I’ll provide the war, ” is one of the most famous quotes in journalism, after all.
I have a bit of a “White Hat” view of this. Now an audience knows that they can be fooled. They have to figure out for themselves if they trust the source. |
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| Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 5: Sticky Situations! |
[Sep. 23rd, 2009|09:18 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
01:54:51 long & 110.3 MB big
In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss how to pre-bake-in a situation for the game they’re developing. Many hearts were broken, unforgivable things were said, will they still be friends at the end of this arduously long show? Listen in to find out.
Joshua’s homework (Rob didn’t do his).
- We start of being enthusiastic about Idiocracy
- Rob skipped homework, Joshua didn’t
- Discussing input from Vincent Baker, Simon C., and Doc Holaday
- Charles Stross’s Accelerando
- Futurama
- Transhumanauts!
- John Cassaday and Warren Ellis’s Planetary
- My friend Blake, who had an interesting idea for a game
- The movies Cube and Saw
- Montsegur 1244 and carry: a game about war
- Ganakagok
- 100 Bullets
- Exquisite corpse
- Wildly various spider genetalia
- Twenty Bucks
- Psi Run (or, at least, its forum)
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- Mouse Guard RPG
- Do not look Vincent Baker in the eye
- Our homework: Vomit forth creativity on this project
- Listener homework: Give us some scenarios
Rob’s during-the-show notes
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:
The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is Overlap by Ani DiFranco from the album Out of Range |
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| Buzz Aldrin Is A Smart Dude And People Should Listen To Him |
[Jul. 16th, 2009|11:26 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
I have some real concerns about moon exploration. While I see the value of it being a nearby practice stage for techniques to be used on Mars, the two bodies are really, really different, and going to the Moon will cost us money that we could be using to go farther.
The “practice stage” argument has been swaying me, and I’ve taken the silence of those who know better than I do as an indication that there’s more to it than I know, but no longer. Buzz Aldrin, of the first moon landing, has come forward, saying what I’ve been saying: Let’s go to Mars instead.
But that’s only the part that I already thought of. More importantly, he’s saying to “Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons” and share research between parties. You know, actually work together as a planet. We get to distribute costs, we get to learn at a greater rate, and we get to fucking cooperate, already.
A codicil from Wikipedia:
On September 9, 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel, a proponent of the Apollo moon landing hoax theory, confronted Aldrin outside a Beverly Hills, California hotel. Sibrel said “You’re the one who said you walked on the moon and you didn’t” and called Aldrin “a coward, a liar, and a thief.” Aldrin punched Sibrel in the face. Beverly Hills police and the city’s prosecutor declined to file charges. Sibrel suffered no permanent injuries.
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| Ellie Arroway speaks |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|10:17 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.
It’s no secret that I love the movie Contact. Ellen Arroway, played by Jodi Foster, is one of my favorite scientist characters in fiction. She’s clever, moral, complex, and her motives are deeply human. I had always assumed that she was based on some real life character, but I didn’t know who. It turns out, she’s based on this year’s TED prize winner, Jill Tarter.
I think her fundamental thesis — that the Universe is far larger and weirder than we know, and seems probable that some of the weirdness in that vastness is living weirdness — is excellent. The search alone tells us a lot about ourselves, not to mention what the possible eventual discovery will tell us.
She makes a mistake though, and it’s one I hear often from my fellow intellectuals in positions of privilege: that if we could just set aside the things that make us distinct from each other, we’d be able to somehow work together to achieve enlightenment. But in setting aside those distinctions — those philosophical and procedural differences that make cultures distinct from each other — then we will have lost what makes us human. It is not our ability to agree on a single best mode of thought that makes us great. It is our ability to pull truth and beauty from distinct, often contradictory perspectives.
It is not the dissolution of distinctions that can make us enlightened. It is the recognition that distinctions are lines drawn on the surface of the Universe, not the Universe itself. Erasing the lines just deprives us of the map. |
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| Humans Are Pretty Good People |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|02:15 pm] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
From The Viscous Platypus comes this link to a study in empathy. Robots (using the term very loosely) are built to these specifications:
- Roll forward
- Have the body proportions of a 1-year-old
- Have a flag that says where they would like to go, asking for help
… and people help them. To date, no robots have been lost or damaged.
To me, this shows not only human empathy, but the incredible processing power available to the world by interfacing with that empathy. Think about the distributed processing we could perform but withhold because to use it puts us in jeopardy to use it. And we’re usually right. But somehow, by assuring us that we are not being endangered through our evolved social senses, that processing is tapped.
Perhaps the future is not the Modern ideal of total autonomy, but one of free giving through the robust and extremely high bandwidth interface we’ve slowly developed over the last four million years. It’s given us open-source software, it’s given us a method of donating meaningfully to political causes $20 at a time, and it’s given us the tremendous power of social networking on the Internet. Maybe that power can be tapped for future endeavors of humanity, as well. |
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| Children of Men Is Very Sad |
[Apr. 6th, 2009|01:00 am] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
I just watched Children of Men with Carrie. I’ve been asked if I’ve seen this movie by approximately every single person who’s ever played Shock: and for good reason. But I’d been avoiding it. I was avoiding it because I knew it was going to be good, but the Grid of the movie was all stuff that I felt so strongly about, I was worried that it would come up short of what might have been impossibly high standards.
The Shock is that humans can no longer conceive. In the course of the movie, you discover that it happened across the world over the course of a couple of months. It has no apparent cause.
The Issues are Immigration Policy and Terrorism, synthesized nicely into several threads of xenophobia. It’s very much a post-9/11 movie, but it’s also a movie made by a Mexican director for an American audience.
If you know me, you know that this is a perfect brew of fears for me.
The movie didn’t disappoint me. It’s full of humans acting very, very badly toward each other from the institutional to the personal level in ways you can understand. The world is in despair. You hear the sentiments of the movie echoing your friends, your enemies, talking heads on Fox News, crazy people on your favorite internet fora. At one point, it makes you complicit in a racist statement and then shows you that it was you making that assumption, not the film, not the situation. This character’s humanity is in the balance exactly as much as any other character’s, and it’s defined by their actions and desires, not their obvious otherness.
It’s a sad movie that doesn’t blink. At one point, while watching it, my body physically hurt from the tension. |
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| A New Edition To The Family |
[Mar. 29th, 2009|11:34 pm] |
Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there. 
As Xenon: takes form, I’m discovering a small but elegantly creative “speculative evolution” and “worldbuilding” communities. They’re intensely creative and often collaborative environments, and there’s just as often a set of standards about authorship. You might even say that these communities have developed System for such endeavors.
One such really incredible world is called Snaiad. It’s remarkable not just because of its creativity, but also because of the extraordinary skill with which it’s been created. The paintings are rendered with amazing texture. Some textures, you recognize from animals you know. Some seem to be vegetable. Some body parts look like you’d expect. Others aren’t at all what they look like.
Enjoy your visit to Snaiad. When you get back, I’ll have some comments about other worldbuilding sites and projects, including my own Europa project from 1998, newly edited. |
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