Blog – Page 43 – John Joseph Adams

ConTweeting

I value efficiency and convenience very highly, so I’m often thinking of ways to improve upon both.

I was just reading an article in the SFWA Bulletin called “Learn How to Twitter” as I was curious what it would actually say. Something it talked about gave me an idea about convention networking–wouldn’t it be great if we could use Twitter to help organize stuff at conventions? Not for everyone, of course, but for we TwitterFolk. So what you do is, if you’re posting something about a convention while at the convention, you can use the hash mark + con name to make your Tweets findable in Twitter by anyone searching for it. So, for instance:

johnjosephadams: #wiscon anyone know of any parties tonight besides the one in room 256?

And then people can chime in. It would be like bringing the groupmind power of Twitter into the convention. Which would be awesome.

Also, it would be great if the concoms got in on the action and posted notes to #[convention name] if there are changes in the schedule or whatever. Surely at least one person on any concom uses Twitter, no?

And while I’m wishing for technological convention assistance, I think we’re at the point where we should expect and demand good, user-friendly electronic convention program books. I mean, if I create a bunch of program listings in Outlook, including all the information, such as room number, time, panelists, and program description, I can easily setup a whole convention program book, which can then be exported into any number of formats. The thing is–I’m never going to carry around my program book at all times, but I will always carry my iPhone, and I should be able to put the schedule on there with very little effort. This would also be great because I could download it from the website before leaving for the convention and that way I can actually browse through the schedule while traveling there; once I actually get to the convention it can be really hard, with all the people you want to talk to, to actually find time to sit and read through the program book.

Hugo Awards Eligibility

Since the Hugo Award nominations are now open, and since all the cool kids are doing it, I thought I should make note of my eligibility and the eligibility of works I’ve published in 2008.

Novelette

“Judgment Passed” by Jerry Oltion (Wastelands, Jan. 2008)
“How the Day Runs Down” by John Langan (The Living Dead, Sep. 2008)
“Endosymbiont” by Blake Charlton (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)

Short Story

“N-Words” by Ted Kosmatka (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“The Future by Degrees” by Jay Lake (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“Drinking Problem” by K. D. Wentworth (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“A Dance Called Armageddon” by Ken MacLeod (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“Arties Aren’t Stupid” by Jeremiah Tolbert (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“Faceless in Gethsemane” by Mark Budz (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“Spider the Artist” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)
“Resistance” by Tobias S. Buckell (Seeds of Change, Aug. 2008)

Best Editor (Short Form)

John Joseph Adams (Seeds of Change, Wastelands, The Living Dead)*

Best Artist

David Palumbo (The Living Dead)
Daniel Kvasznicza (Wastelands)
John W. Campbell Award

Ted Kosmatka
Blake Charlton

* Hugo Awards rules for this category state: “The editor of at least four (4) anthologies, collections or magazine issues primarily devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which was published in 2008.” Shimmer: The Pirate Issue is my fourth qualifying editorial experience, but it came out in 2007, so I’m not listing it there beside my name, which space is reserved to point out 2008 work.

Hugo Awards Eligibility

Since the Hugo Award nominations are now open, and since all the cool kids are doing it, I thought I should make note of my eligibility and the eligibility of works I’ve published in 2008.

Novelette

Short Story

Best Editor (Short Form)

John Joseph Adams (Seeds of Change, Wastelands, The Living Dead)*

Best Artist

David Palumbo (The Living Dead)
Daniel Kvasznicza (Wastelands)

John W. Campbell Award

Ted Kosmatka
Blake Charlton

Federations Submissions Update

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.

Son of Zombie Robot

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.

“N-Words” to be Reprinted in Dozois Year’s Best

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!

Mac Attack

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?

Romanian Edition of Wastelands

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.

Robocop: a zombie robot?

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?

Zombie Robot update

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.

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