Space monsters

Why are all science fiction movies set in space about creatures? Even in Solaris, which was mostly benign, there were critters. Event Horizon, duh. Sunshine (recently), even 2001 and 2010. Then there are the bevy of Mars movies, like Red Planet and Doom.

Star Trek just invents shit because space is a pretty boring place unless you're getting sucked into a gravity well or there are relativistic particles flying your way. Species 8472. Fluidic Space. Give me a break. I liked Voyager because I liked watching a certain silver jumpsuit.

Why can't we have a sterile tale of man versus nature (where nature ≠ Splorganisms) or man versus himself? I suppose we have Apollo 13, which might be the sole man-versus-himself/man-versus-nature science fiction flick there is, 'cept it wasn't fucking fiction.

SPACE IS NOT FULL OF SCARY MONSTERS.

It's relatively sterile and you can write screenplays and books and short stories without chicks in nighties with guns fighting off evil vampires from the planet Poon. Better yet, write a book like Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space that takes the same concepts (the bifurcation of humanity and their occasional warring and trade) and extrapolates along those lines? Why include the jugglers, the melding plague, the inhibitors, and those godawful green fuckers at the end?

HUMANS ARE INTERESTING TOO.(sometimes. I promise.)

More stupid software tricks

My iBook^WMacbook has been sucking down all the Wumpscut and Velvet Acid Christ tunes I have on the network. Unfortunately, this makes it an absolute pig, and even harder to work with than the screenwriting stuff in Word (strangely, the more complex your template, the more CPU Word chews up. I call this strange, because it's already a beast to begin with; why would they leave out indentation, text coloring, and autocapitalization? Furthermore, how can that use so much CPU on a dual C2D @ 2GHz w/2GB machine?).

So I am using Sandy's laptop (a MBP, dual 2.4 C2D, 2GB) and while it's substantially faster than mine, I'm running 80 processes (one of which is Firefox with three windows totaling fifty tabs) and she's running 63.

What I still can't get over is how fucking enormous it is. There's a gorgeous Sony 17" with 1080i, blu-ray, and what I think is the most incredible display I've ever seen. The laptop itself is even pretty. But holy shit, even my Macbook looms enormous over my work laptop, an HP nc2400, which is just two and a half pounds. For the curious, it runs Ubuntu. I've got an 80GB partition that's getting XPSP2 this coming week.

edit: holy fucking shit is the pre-amp outlet on the powerbook nice compared to my Macbook. Almost no noise on the tougher tracks, and easily five times the amplitude. It also has a connector that veritably snaps into place so the connection is really snug. I'm listening to Leonard Cohen and it's like the good old days of listening on Fruit (my PBG4/1.33) with the Headroom Little amp. I might just trade this little fucker in on a Powerbook for the sound alone. If only there were a 12" Powerbook. And for those wondering what Alex does with 17" of screen, wonder no longer:


Yes. That's Terminal.app set to fill the screen, and vim splitting the windows (:vs) so that I can edit the top and bottom of the document at the same time (or read one while writing the other). Having the real estate is nice, but really what I want is for Word to not suck.

Divergence sometimes not so good.

I've (professionally) argued for homogeneity in environments and heterogeneity. The answer to the question of "which is better?" is a very complicated one. I won't go into details because it's not really relevant to what I have to say. For purposes of writing, heterogeneity is harmful. Writers will get their manuscripts – be they short stories, novels, or something in between – entirely thrown out if they don't meet a formatting standard that agent or editor likes. Further complicating things, there isn't a style that all "novel" editors like, or that all "short story" magazines like, and so on.

So I put together anywhere from about 1,500 words to right about 105,000 words, and the most crucial aspect of the document is that it be single-spaced, Courier, ragged edges, single line breaks, and so on. For some of this, it's not so bad. I now have an MS Word template that allows me to more or less just start from that particular standard (which is thankfully widely accepted).

But this morning something new and ugly started pouring into my head (I've had a horrendous fever the last couple days, make of that what you will). I wanted to write a screenplay. Now, knowing that formatting is importnt, I ask Google for help, and find the ever-so-helpful screenplay.info (which frankly looks like an ad-revenue generation site).

Alas, I take his advice and start writing a screenplay template so that I'll get it right and not accidentally stray too far. We run up against the technical limits of MS Word, however. Let's use, for example, dialogue:

FRANKIE
Good mornin', Bluebird.

JULIE
What? What time is it?

FRANKIE
(continuing)
After six. You're gonna be late again and I don't want to hear it. I'll be upstairs.

That's easy enough, we drag the blue dealybobber thing from the top to set the indentation level to about 2.5 inches. But other stuff isn't at 2.5 inches. It's at 1.6 inches. Let's look again (and remember, HTML is woefully inadequate for this task):

Luscious foliage and rocks, cleft from a nearby cliff cover the armored body of JOHN 117. Sunlight glints off his visor, showing no signs of life.

MASTER SERGEANT JOHNSON and a platoon of marines arrive at the crash site.

JOHNSON
Chief, you okay?

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS MENDOZA
Sir, his suit locked up on impact, but it looked like it saved him. I'll try to bring the MJOLNIR SUIT back online.

The MJOLNIR SUIT stirs, its limbs articulate wildly, culminating in MASTER CHIEF JOHN 117 smacking the left side of his head.

MASTER CHIEF
I'm getting too old for this shit. Will someone hand me a fucking weapon already?

There are so many problems with this I'm not sure where to begin. The first thing of course is that in a screenplay, everyone wants the characters' names to be capitalized. The second is the absolutely absurd indentation of dialogue to damn-near two-thirds of the page. So to say four sentences, I might have to take up four lies. The other thing that is brought up is header. The header is not so complicated, but I have no idea how to tell word to put the header on every page but the first.

For novels, I've been told to use 14-pt Times New Roman, 1.5-spaced, with ragged edges, no header, but a footer with a pp of/pp marker.

For short stories, I explained that above.

I spend more time fucking around with my word processor than I actually spend writing. This really pisses me off. I have a screenplay I could write today, but I'd have to spend a week formatting the fucker. It makes me not want to write it.

I CAN HAS PISTONS?

Today the thought occurs to me, I don't want that engine. I can't make it do the things I want, primarily because the intake and exhaust manifolds are on the same side. And I'm not after 400bhp. I want 600 to the wheels. This means the engine's gotta go. The radiator's gotta go. All the electronics gotta go, because whatever engine goes in there is not going to use 25-year-old equipment. So essentially, bulkhead forward, it's going to be empty. Probably suspension gotta go, too. If I'm going to be replacing the steering rack and moving the suspension around, I can probably get some coilovers in there, too.

The point being, everything will be ripped out. Even the dash. And that's a perfect time to paint the car, which is what I want – matte black. Everything. And the jolly roger on the hood.

Then we put the wheels back in the hubs and it's a rolling chassis and I can take it to AR Fab or whomever, and decide which motor to go with:

1. RB26DETT - it's been done so many times, I really don't want to, but they make silly power.
   
2. SR20DET - haven't seen this in a 280ZX, not that it hasn't been done, but it gives me a lot of room up front for a v-mount intercooler/radiator.
   
3. 7A-GTE - I'm pretty sure this has never been done, unless some wacky kiwi has. Not much torque, but my god, it's a tiny motor, screams like a banshee, and revs to 11k. Turbo that fucker and it's like guided missile. Sort of guided.
   

Hmmmms. All of them have turbos. The car will be a track monster, although with antique plates, it can pretty well drive anywhere it can get to. It will be loud as fuck with a vent-to-atmosphere wastegate and glasspacks. And, I pity the foo driving behind me, eatin my hydrocarbons.

Stupid shell tricks

Every once in a while I come up with something I think is kind of cute. This is one of those:

% curl https://store.puscifer.com/music/playlist9.xspf | \
grep -B 3 'CDATA\[Puscifer\]' | grep mp3 | \
cut -d'>' -f 2 | cut -d'<' -f 1 | sed -e 's/ /%20/g' | \
while read mp3; do curl -O $mp3 ; done

Sometimes the shell still amazes me.