KyleJelle.com

The day there was no news:

John Scalzi compares Speed Racer’s opening weekend with the 1977 Star Wars premier, which brought in roughly the same amount of money in inflation-adjusted dollars.  It doesn’t look good for Speed:

Speed Racer is doomed: There’s no chance that Speed will get up to speed from here. Tomorrow the family audiences that were supposed to go see it will go flock to Prince Caspian instead, and then the weekend after that, Indiana Jones is back. Speed Racer will be in the second-run movie theaters by the first week in June, with nothing to else to look forward to until its financial afterlife on DVD and HBO. All because of two $20 million opening weekends: Its own, and the one Star Wars had, adjusted for inflation, 31 years ago.

Seth Stevenson’s has some advice for young procrastinators:

Dear chronically procrastinating young person,

Slate has asked me to offer you a few words of advice—as I, too, am a procrastinator. Always have been. In college, I’d start 10-page papers after midnight on the day they were due. Half my memories of this period involve screaming at my printer to print faster, ripping the pages from its maw, and then sprinting to my professor’s office with moments to spare, sweat streaming down my face.

Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.

I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.

Boy, I wish I’d heard this advice when I was younger.  It took me an awful long time to figure it out on my own.

By the way, this would constitute my excuse for not blogging lately.

How not to respond to a rejection:

This is NOT a form letter. Your reply is rather generic and offers no insight as to what you want. Unless you had ESP there is now way to know what my material is about.

IF you judge talent on a one page query letter I’m sure you have MISSED a lot in life, especially up and coming writers who need a damn break. [La Gringa notes here: this particular agent asks for a writing sample in addition to a query, something this writer had failed to provide.]

If Spielberg, Poe, or another great came to you would you blow them off too? Without knowing what geniuses they are? IF SO; I’m surprised there are any writers at all with your agency. Are they related to you?

I get the feeling you don’t know talent when it stares you in the face or emails a one page query letter. If you base all your judgements on a one minute note, you are either psychic or don’t have a clue that there is much more to this world than your office or small stable of writers who somehow bribed cajoled or kissed someone’s ass to get there.

See?  They’re doing it wrong.  Here’s how it’s done:

Doctorow and Scalzi, interviewing each other:

Synchronized dancing kittens:

Wow. It’s like it’s Saturday morning and I’m eight again. (Click through for the really big version.)

Let’s see, there’s Ark II, Isis, Jason of Star Command, Space Academy, Shazam!, and Land of the Lost—gotta love those Sleestaks. I was never a big fan of Elektra Woman and Dyna Girl. There are several characters in here that I don’t actually recognize, though I vaguely remember those guys with the skeletons painted on them. I note the stunning absence of The Lost Saucer and the Far Out Space Nuts.

I’d be so afraid to go back and watch any of this now. Seeing how awful Buck Rogers in the 25th Century actually is in SciFi channel reruns compared to my childhood memories of it was enough to convince me to leave some things alone.

Penn & Teller get stung!

This pretty much speaks for itself:

Man, I hope this respectful tone lasts through November.

I don’t expect it, but I can hope, right?

I need this:

Anybody got $5,200.00 plus shipping I could borrow?

Actually, it looks a little too skinny. I doubt if even Bolaji Badejo couldn’t fit into that.

“Yikes!“:

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Never fear, dear readers, we here at KyleJelle.com run a very low stress operation—see last week’s sabbatical—and we get paid accordingly, but at least we have our health.

Quoth John Scalzi:

<cranky writer hat>

– because, look, people: World building is hard. You want us to have to build an entire universe from scratch every single time we write a book? Well, okay. You want us to have to run a marathon every time we walk down to the corner store to get some milk, too? Or maybe assemble a car from the wheels up, every time we want to drive to the mall? We spend all this time building this ginchy universe and its rules, and then you say “Oh, that world again?” No one ever pulls that shit with other genres. People don’t go up to Carl Hiaasen and say “What? Another book on Earth?” And he didn’t even make up that planet! It’s an open source planet! Damn slacker.

</cranky writer hat>

What’s wrong with this picture?

Found at Newscoma.

I know better than this.

War of the Worlds. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I, Robot. Starship Troopers. The Puppetmasters. Watchers. Watchers II. Watchers III. 2010. Dune.

So many great books. So many bad movies. They’ve adapted Dean Koontz’s Watchers three times and still couldn’t produce anything worth… um… watching.

I know better than to get excited over the prospect of a great novel being adapted into a movie.

And yet, as an old-school acolyte of the Shrike cult, this just gives me the shivers in a good way:

Producer Graham King has set up Dan Simmons’ award-winning science fiction book series Hyperion Cantos at Warner Brothers, with Trevor Sands on board to adapt the first two books as one feature, according to The Hollywood Reporter. King is producing via his GK Films banner.

The first book, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1990, while the second, The Fall of Hyperion, was nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel.

Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move through time. The tombs are guarded by a monster called the Shrike, which impales people on metal trees.

King acquired the rights to the series several years ago, but its structure–inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–and its multiple timelines made the task of adapting it into a feature unwieldy and challenging.

I hope that they understand that they really—really—don’t want to piss off the Shrike.

Hey, this is interesting:

CUPERTINO, California—April 3, 2008—Apple® today announced that the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) surpassed Wal-Mart to become the number one music retailer in the US, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. With over 50 million customers, iTunes has sold over four billion songs and features the world’s largest music catalog of over six million songs.

Wow.

Now, I don’t want anybody to get the wrong impression from what I’m about to say. I’m addicted to my iPod. I get twitchy if I don’t listen to it or watch it for more than twelve hours or so. My next computer probably won’t be an Air, but it will be a Mac. And I long for the day when I can replace my aging TX and RAZR with the phone of the gods.

But, really, come on. Apple did this largely on the backs of 128 bit, DRM-laden AACs. Who’s buying this crap? What’s wrong with you people? Go to Amazon. They’ll sell you much higher bit-rate—i.e. better sounding—mp3s with no DRM lock-in whatsoever, and even without the DRM, the mp3 format is still more widely-supported than AAC. This is just wrong.

No, the blog’s not over.  I’ve just been really wrapped up in studying and testing to get a better job.  I’ve been a truck driver for almost twenty years, and I need to find something that doesn’t involve sitting behind a steering wheel anymore, that is, something for which all my years of training and experience do not apply, so it’s been a very full week with no time for blogging.  In any case, I went in for the testing yesterday.  Oddly enough, I seem to have passed everything, which rather surprises me because I was pretty sure I’d flubbed the first one, but the women in H.R. said my results were good.  I shudder to think of what the standards must be for my score to qualify as good, but I know I did well on the rest of it.  That doesn’t mean I get the job—there are seven other candidates—but it does mean I’m still in the race.

So, for those who complained, blogging is now officially resumed.

How could anyone doubt—or vote against—Hillary after watching this magnificent example of her composure under fire?

Quoth Dave Barry:

Whatever happens with the Florida Democratic delegation, neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough delegates to win the nomination. They’re locked in a bitter struggle that I predict will continue right through the Democratic convention, and then through the November presidential election. Next January President McCain will be giving his inaugural address, while somewhere else in America, Clinton and Obama will be holding their 1,387th debate, with the hostility level between them having reached the point where the debate consists entirely of spitting.

Sounds about right.

Space 1899:

The Hugo nominations are out.

Scalzi comments.