#nk:rabbit

[nyomkitten]

Starstruck/Elaine Lee info

not really a rabbit hole (this tag is beginning to mean less “i hyperfixated on this and i have a deep dive to show for it”, and more “i have a few links i’d like to return to or that might be useful to people, as a result of a hyperfixation or not”.

anyway. Dimension 20: “A Starstruck Odyssey”. my love, my life.

this is pretty startery material, but still. for my reference, etc.

The Starstruck Glossary: https://starstruckcomics.com/glossary/a/

The Galactic Girl Guides comics: https://galacticgirlguides.com/2020/04/01/page-1/

(edit: the official merch shop: https://www.zazzle.com/store/starstruckcomics)

Elaine Lee has done (lots of supercool things including) audio adaptations of comics. Full list at https://elainelee.us/?page_id=209 .

TIL that Locke and Key was originally comics by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. and Lee was involved in producing the audio adaptation (available on Audible and voiced by a certain voice actor son of hers).

[nyomkitten]

i am feeling very melancholy (and vaguely unsettled about violating unfair terms of service) after reading these

For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read.

https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/15/digital-books-wear-out-faster-than-physical-books/

Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (Stallman?! wrote fiction!?)

The Domesday book (1086) handwritten on vellum. Providing a complete list of the contents of England. Still usable.

The Domesday book 2nd edition (1986) virtually unreadable due to digital obsolence

Andrew Machan commenting on the IA blog linked above, referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project . It’s literally called the Doomsday project.

[nyomkitten]

yesterday/today's scattered rabbit hole

deeply deeply disappointed about how the first draft of this ended up lost because i was drafting it on tumblr's editor. redoing it in a fragile attempt to get some kind of inner peace.

(i say rabbit hole. it's mostly a collection of articles and quotes i really liked.)

people can be really dismissive of recreation as you hit middle age. After 25, you start to seem a little weird or unserious if you’re still really into, say, roller-skating, Dungeons & Dragons, or seeing Phish live. Real grownups have more pressing demands on their time. … But what is friendship but time spent together? And what are hobbies but love? Is the connection any less deep or real because you found each other through surfing or Fortnite instead of through an app or mutual friends?

Adrienne So reviewing Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, WIRED

~

When you live your life in the closet, there’s a part of you that’s never really human. You’re always worried about getting caught. You’re never transparent about all the parts of who you are. … What was really hard for me to hear was how so many Dalits were afraid to come out.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan interviewed by Lizzie O’Leary, Slate she's an icon. these lines are so powerful and well done. i keep dilly-dallying on whether i have a "right" to claim my caste and queer positions, because of the material privilege of my parents' hard work, but these lines hit hard, so i have more courage to.

~

Eric Ravenscraft, "What is the Metaverse, Exactly?", WIRED No specific paragraphs to quote, but this is a wonderful explainer for how the term is mostly used in hype marketing and pitching copywriting. Which is fine for tech companies doing their visionary thing and getting R&D money. Not so fine when they use said hype to sell overpriced phones and other gadgets to consumers, claiming the (tangible) advancements are so much more than they actually are. Also not fine for the very tenuous blockchain-based currency and art markets, which people easily mistake for 'investments' rather than 'gambling'. (I stole this analogy from Johnny Showbiz's Last Week Tonight, which particular segment he disclaims might age badly, but i think will age rather well.)

Related:

Neal Stephenson coined the term 'metaverse', because of course he did. Here's an essay by him (self-admittedly outdated) that I want to read that compares proprietary and open-source OSes (among other things), and a later interview where he is very funny and also name-drops lots of books i want to read.

Cryptographer and computer scientist Matt Blaze's blog.

~

Marmur has been working in the film industry since the ’90s, but over time grew weary of studios only wanting “the lowest-hanging fruit” and balking at the notion of making anything original. … Name-brand actors and high-concept plots have driven Hollywood success for generations, so why shouldn’t that work for Netflix?

David Sims, "'Netflix Thinks Exactly Like an Old Movie Studio'", The Atlantic (lol, fuck you, milkable IP.)

~

In all the various interviews that I've given, the one element that I stress above all is a lesson that people don't seem to learn — you cannot use time travel as a plot device. You can't use it as a way to get yourself out of a plot. Somebody gets killed, "Oh, we'll just go back in time and stop the bullet from reaching his heart." That's lazy writing. It's too convenient that you happen to have the technology to solve a dramatic problem like that.

You see so many movies that go into the future, and it looks like they tore everything down and started all over again. I love the original Blade Runner, I really do, but there isn't a damn thing in Blade Runner that looks like Los Angeles. But if you were to take somebody from New York in 1955 and bring him to New York today, they would know where all the streets were, they would know how to go to Central Park, and the subways are still going to the same places. Lots of stuff has been torn down and rebuilt, but the grid of the city is exactly the way it's been for over 150 years.

Bob Gale interviewed by Marah Eakin, INVERSE this is a lovely interview and i want to read the rest of the articles in this series at some point. maybe as i watch the things they cover. aside from writing approaches, and an actually constructive critique of the Marvel supermegaultraverse style of writing, it also name-drops movies i want to watch.

~

a nice, short, wholesome article (Ryan Britt for Fatherly) explaining the uniqueness of Tron (the old original one), in terms of its visual approach, VFX, and (perhaps most significantly) its storytelling devices. i have a soft spot for aged sci-fi that looks bad now but was groundbreaking at the time, and this article explains it really well.

~

one of Elora Dodd's reels (can't find the exact one; she might have taken it down) which explains how (heavily paraphrased, with my own thoughts)

cutting your own hair is the most about having control over your appearance. it is also about extending a middle finger to the expectation that you have to look made up, and how you're judged if you're not pretty. it does not matter if the haircut is bad. it matters that you get to have that control over how you present.

~

things i would like to get back to:

alt lit (1, 1.5 , 2)

metafiction and autofiction

aphorism vs epigram

(all rabbit holes here.)

[nyomkitten]

what i did, instead of working, on my first workday of the new year

(all rabbit holes here)

went through an extensive wikipedia rabbit hole which involved:

being very happy that Aly and AJ seem not to be bigoted christians, which started because i’d got “Slow Dancing” on loop. (i just found out that there’s a video for that. spot the COVID masking!)

finding a cool new representation of the ΙΧΘΥΣ (i still can’t read that, i just copy-pasted it): an eight-spoked hollow circle.

learning the difference between an abbreviation (any short form, e.g. abbr.) and an acronym (taken from some starting bits of some words, e.g. NASA, Benelux, radar).

starting down a heraldry rabbit hole (which i should come back to if i ever want to make community t shirts). links: 1 2 3 4

finding out the origin of nil by mouth: a medical direction, originally Latin nil per os. (i just realised it’s familiar because it’s also the title of a Haken song. i should really catch up on Haken discography.)

do i not have ADHD? :P

bonus rabbit holing after work hours:

Locked Out of Heaven (Bruno Mars) x Easy On Me (Adele). what a mashup y’all. this short video format is very annoying sometimes but it’s introduced me to some amazing mashups (PYT x Twerkulator come to mind but there are SO MANY).

this fucking poem (from this gorgeous gorgeous compilation post from @givemearmstopraywith​). (please note: discrepancy between “gender of things” / “gender things” in the last line of the first paragraph.)

O daughters of Jerusalem, the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful. I've been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I'm all one skin like a fish. I'm no more a woman than Christ was a man.

you’re allowed to write like this??!!?! (thanks to Loren for the note that this references ΙΧΘΥΣ !! and now we are full circle. happy new year and good night. i still haven’t pushed a single pixel.)

[nyomkitten]

today’s rabbit hole

(all rabbit holes here)

hellu. i have been really busy and really un-self-disciplined (i had Actual Thots over sunday and monday (yesterday and the day before) but i didn’t have the discipline to make time to do anything about them.

i am supposed to be doing FaCuLtY hAnDbOoK LaYoUt but it’s all Rhianna Pratchett’s fault. she posted on Twitter about Ankh-Morpork’s Glorious Revolution on the 25th of May and of course I had to look that up. (i’ve heard a radio adaptation of Night Watch, the book where this happens, but didn’t retain the date in memory.) in the process of which, I found:

1. today is also Towel Day (2 weeks after Douglas Adams’s passing)

2. THAT TERRY PRATCHETT’S FUCKING MOTTO REFERENCES FUCKING BLUE ÖYSTER CULT. (Terry’s Wiki)

3. that there is a really cool merch & special-edition-books website called https://discworld.com/

4. that I want to letter ‘Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!’, and/or make fan coats-of-arms of the Guilds of Ankh-Morpork, because I found all their mottos. (https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/the-discworld-companion.html) (L-space??!??!?!?!) (And now I want to buy The Discworld Companion in hard copy.)

that is all for now. i hope i finish work at a reasonable time and get to do yesterday’s and today’s nyomdiary and also write (at least very briefly) about the Thots i had.

[nyomkitten]

today’s rabbit holeling

(all rabbit holes here)

this is not a rabbit hole as much as it is a notice to whom it may concern that i found more mildly mindfuckering science fiction stories.

this is the primary culprit. [ID: the cover of the short story anthology Rags and Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales, edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt.]

and the editors, being editors and generally literary people, began name-dropping all kinds of stories and references from the get-go, including this short story that Pratt co-wrote, and which I had to find, and did; although from the description i’d expected it to be a comic strip panel.

also it turns out the stories that the retellings are based on aren’t Grimm Brothers retellings (at least, not all of them are), and i haven’t read or don’t know the broad outlines of most of them. after reading the first story, I hunted down the story it was based on; and I had no idea that main man Forster wrote diss tracks that slap so hard.

anyway, here are links to all the original short stories that the writers in this anthology riff off.

“The Machine Stops” (1909), short fiction by E.M. Forster | download from archive.org. Inspires Carrie Ryan’s “That The Machine May Progress Eternally”

The King of Elfland’s Daughter, novel by Lord Dunsany | from gutenberg.org illustration by Charles Vess

“The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), short story by Rudyard Kipling | gutenberg.org inspires Garth Nix's "Losing Her Divinity"

“Sleeping Beauty” (no version mentioned) | synopsis at Wikipedia inspires Neil Gaiman's "The Sleeper and the Spindle"

Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922), novel by Ernest Bramah | gutenberg.org  illustration by Charles Vess

“The Jolly Corner” (1908), short story by Henry James | gutenberg.org inspires Tim Pratt's “The Cold Corner”

Carmilla (1872), novelette by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu | gutenberg.org inspires Holly Black's “Millcara”

Figures of Earth: A Comedy of Appearances (1921), novel by James Branch Cabell | gutenberg.org illustration by Charles Vess

“The Birthmark” (1843), short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne | read at americanliterature.com inspires Rick Yancey's "When First We Were Gods"

The Castle of Otranto (1764), novel by Horace Walpole | gutenberg.org inspires Margaret Stohl's “Sirocco”

The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), novel by George Meredith | gutenberg.org illustration by Charles Vess

The Awakening (1899), novel by Kate Chopin | read online at katechopin.org , download at gutenberg.org inspires Melissa Marr's “Awakened”

“The Monkey's Paw” (1902), by W. W. Jacob | read online at americanliterature.com inspires Kelley Armstrong's “New Chicago”

The Wood Beyond the World (1894), novel by William Morris | gutenberg.org illustration by Charles Vess

“Rumpelstiltskin”, by the Brothers Grimm | read online at grimmstories.com  inspires Kami Garcia's “The Soul Collector”

The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), epic poem by Sir Edmund Spenser | idk man just check the Wikipedia entry’s External Links section inspires Saladin Ahmed's “Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy”

Goblin Market (1862), poem by Christina Rossetti | read online at poetryfoundation.org illustration by Charles Vess

“The Caged White Werewolf of the Saraban” (1935), by William Seabrook | (is this the correct story? on Vanity Fair) inspires Gene Wolfe's “Uncaged”

Phew. That took longer than I’d intended (so long I’m typing in proper sentence case now). But it’ll come in handy for me if I ever develop the good habit of returning to things I hyperfixate on; and I hope it’ll come in handy for anyone else interested in easy access to these originals.

[nyomkitten]

today’s rabbit hole

started out with some long-overdue GD shitposting (finally) part of which required a high-quality image of the ‘Bubble’ ship from the movie Oblivion. (I promise I’ll finish this project sometime. It’s a lyric poster from this song and involves more Photoshop skills and time than I am able to commit to at a stretch.)

Anyway. I found the website of the visual artist who worked on the movie (because of course This Is A Job Too) and jfc the WORK.

https://danielsimon.com/

It’s so exciting.

He worked on automotive design and product design, andbutalso film and videogame design. The ones that caught my attention (because i am pleb n00b) are his work for Tron: Legacy and, of course, Oblivion. The process sketches! the 3D modeling! the creativity!! my heart and my mouth.

Also found Matt Wallin https://mattwallin.com who’s a VFX designer with a background in ILM. He also co/hosts two interesting-looking podcasts:

FX Guide https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fxguide-the-vfx-show/id154343840

8111 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/8111/id1542670652

it’s very late. i have unfinished office work (and tons of personal obligations) and the vestiges of a cold. i should sleep.