I just wanted to point out to Federations submitters that you should consider the deadline for submission to be 11:59 PM (EST) on Jan. 1. I realized that I never specified, and so some of you might have wondered about the exact deadline. I’m not going to be a Nazi about it, though, so if you end up with a late submission, don’t query, just send it in as per the guidelines; of course, you should make every effort to not be late.
Pursuant to my earlier blog post about whether or not Robocop would be considered a zombie robot, screenwriter and friend-of-the-blog Sam Hamm got me an answer directly from the source: Robocop co-screenwriter Ed Neumeier. Sam says: “[Ed] said that Peter Weller was legally dead before he was transformed into Robocop, so he should count, by your definition, as a zombie robot.” Ah-ha! Victory is mine!
I should point out, however, that Mr. Neumeier thinks the term “zombie cyborg” would be more accurate, which, in all fairness, is totally true. Still, zombie cyborg doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and since the Terminator is called a cyborg when in fact it is just a robot, I feel perfectly justified in continuing to think of and refer to Robocop as a zombie robot.
I just got word that Ted Kostmatka’s story, “N-Words,” which originally appeared in my anthology, Seeds of Change, will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction. I’m hugely delighted for Ted, and am proud to have been the one to publish the story. Congrats, Ted!
Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas or yule-time holiday of your choice. For Xmas, I treated myself to a shiny new MacBook, or rather I bought a shiny new MacBook for my freelance writing/editing business. Also got some stuff from the family, as you would imagine: couple books, some DVDs, hand-knitted scarf, etc.
But anyway, this is a post about Macs, so if you have no interest in that, feel free to move along. I’ve always been a Windows guy, never used a Mac before, but my recent acquisition of an iPhone and my befriending of several folks who own and evangelize about Macs got me thinking about them when the time for a new computer came. Really, it’s all Vista’s fault, though–I would have remained a Windows user solely because of the familiarity, but I really did not want to switch to Vista after all I’d heard about it, and especially since it seems to be a dead-end now, with talk already of what MS’s next OS will be.
Loving the MacBook so far. I got a maxed-out 2.4 Ghz duo 13 inch MacBook. The touchpad on this thing is made of awesome. I’m going to start using this as my primary computer, so I was planning to hook it up to a monitor and get the external keyboard and mouse, etc. for when I’m hunkered down doing serious work. But since there doesn’t seem to be a standalone external MacBook-style touchpad, I don’t know that I’ll be able to bring myself to abandon it for something so clumsy or random as a blaster mouse. I’m still going to hook it up to a monitor, but the touchpad issue is vexing me.
One of the reasons I wanted to write this post is because I wanted to reach out to other Mac users to see what sort of apps they recommend, and I’m especially interested in hearing from PC-to-Mac converts, since that’s what I am.
I’m writing this blog post in MacJournal. It seems okay, but I’m not sold on it yet, and if I want to keep using it, I have to buy it, so I’m interested in some recommendations there. On my Windows machines, I would use Windows Live Writer, which I like quite a lot, but it’s not available on Mac.
One of the funny things you encounter when getting a new computer is how much stuff you’ve got on your computer, and how much of it is unnecessary. I transferred over about 100 GBs of data from my old machine to the Mac, but it was almost all music and audiobooks, so very little of that was actually like important work or whatever. I used this external USB drive I got for Xmas to transfer the data from my old PC to the Mac, and it took like all day to load it up onto the drive, but then when I hooked it up to the Mac, it transferred everything over in like an hour. Because I didn’t want to create all new playlists, I ended up buying iGadget again, for the Mac this time, to grab all of my playlist information off my iPod. Since I did that, I could have saved myself the trouble of copying all that music and could have just downloaded it off the iPod with iGadget. (Which is, incidentally, a super-handy program to have around if you ever need to take stuff off your iPod, like if your hard drive crashes or something.)
I’m currently running this program called BeaTunes that calculates the beats-per-minute of every track. I didn’t even realize iTunes had a category for that; it does, but for some reason there’s no way to calculate it from within iTunes–you have to get another app to do it (or do it yourself, I suppose). I was not surprised to see that the majority of my collection had a rather high BPM number (between 100-140), though I was pretty surprised to see that several Mozart tracks were among the highest in BPM; if that’s accurate, perhaps that’s what it is about it that appeals to me, given the extreme difference between classical music and the metal I typically listen to (though, of course, there are some other parallels).
So between BeaTunes and loading all my music into iTunes in the first place, I’ve been waiting and waiting for those things to finish, though happily this processor is robust enough that I can’t even tell it’s running in the background (whereas my PC would be crawling, I imagine). Of course, I also setup the Mac mail client to download my mail, so that’s been downloading for a couple days now–I’ve had my Gmail account since 2004, so that’s a lot of archived mail. I’m not even going to use the program for managing my email, really; I might use it when I’m offline to read and/or write emails, but primarily it’s just a backup in the event of a Gmail apocalypse. It’s up to about 40,000 emails, and it’s only up to August 2007. Man, how did we ever get along without email?
Just signed and mailed off the contracts for a Romanian edition of Wastelands. As reported by Agent Jenny:
Romanian rights to John Joseph Adams’s WASTELANDS anthology, to SC Nemira, by Jenny Rappaport of the Rappaport Agency on behalf of the L. Perkins Agency, in association with Simona Kessler International Copyright Agency.
There’s a couple other deals pending, but nothing else signed yet. But the Romanian is our first foreign rights deal. It’s a nice milestone to have reached.
I was just having a conversation about whether or not Robocop would in fact be considered a zombie robot. A detractor insists that Robocop was not actually dead when transferred into the robot body. I say he obviously was; did you see how many times he got shot?
In any case: want so you think? zombie robot or something else entirely?
Last week, I mentioned how my fake band (i.e., Rock Band band) Zombie Robot performed in the Funde Razor charity show at NYC’s Village Pourhouse. Alas, we did not win: turns out we came in 9th place (out of 18). You can see the complete results here. Also of interest is #15, Sex Tardis, which Tor.com’s Pablo Defendini played in, Mayorsnake, featuring Tor editorial guy Steven Padnick (#7), and Achievement Whores (#16), featuring my agent Jenny Rappaport, singing a song she’d never heard before (“Don’t Fear the Reaper”). Pablo also provided guest vocals for Band 17 as their vocalist seemed to have left before their slot, and shredded his throat singing “Painkiller” by Judas Priest—the hardest song in the game.
I did not do well on the style points (you can see our judge tally sheet here), though I did attempt to move around, etc. Will have to try harder next time. We played The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which, as you may know, features two long keyboard instrumental sections during which the band doesn’t have any notes to play. We had planned on our vocalist, Jordan Hamessley, talking to the crowd, giving some The Who trivia, etc. in the opening section, but I’m not sure anyone could hear her; I was standing right next to her, and *I* couldn’t hear her (it was quite loud in there). During the mid-song break, there was more banter planned, and also, our guitarist, Matt London, ate a banana, with Jordan yelling at him. Meanwhile, I posted to twitter, which did not impress the judges, though I must say, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who did such a thing in the middle of a song. Our drummer, Chris LaBrunda (agent Jenny’s husband), did not die, which is a good thing and apparently was not at all guaranteed, as The Who drummer Keith Moon apparently actually died immediately after playing that song live. During the song, Matt actually played one of the solos with the guitar behind his head, which is pretty awesome, though I didn’t actually get to see him do it, as I had like notes to play and stuff.
By now most of you have probably heard about Night Shade Books’s partnership with Baen Books to distribute Night Shade titles as e-books via Baen’s WebScriptions store. Well, now there’s even more reason to rejoice: You can now buy e-book versions of The Living Dead* and Wastelands, for just $6.00 each.
* Please note that the e-book version of The Living Dead does not include the following stories: Dan Simmons, "This Year’s Class Picture," Sherman Alexie, "Ghost Dance," and Douglas E. Winter, "Less than Zombie."
If you’re in New York tonight, be sure to swing by the Village Pourhouse to check out my band Zombie Robot, which will be performing our first live gig as part of the Funde Razor charity event for Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity.
From left: Cylon Romero, Fembot Foree, Bishop Savini, and Braineater-1000.
From left: Cylon Romero, Bishop Savini, Fembot Foree, and Braineater-1000
Maybe if I can make this work I’ll blog more often. Probably not but maybe.