“watching this film is like diving headlong into a disorienting, paranoid world of outer space visitors, grainy super-8 footage of floating trash-bins, and gun-toting bearded cultists from Switzerland”

This film is great fun if you are a lover of the occult, the Fortean or the weird like me. I recommend watching it with a few of your friends and perhaps a chemical relaxant of choice. The rest of my review is here.

My review of FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer is also available. I couldn’t help but compare the book to the TV series, which I watched a bunch of before giving up in frustration:

What I found incredibly frustrating about FlashForward, the television series, was the way it took this fantastic concept and buried it in a slightly futuristic procedural police drama about the brave FBI agents who investigate the crisis. … The deeper metaphysical issues of what it means to see the future were rarely played out to their full potential. Perhaps it’s to be expected, but the two versions of the story have almost diametrically opposed strengths.

It’s interesting to see the contrast between my review and this older SFSite review of the same book. Reviewer Donna McMahon pretty much panned the book back in 2002; she even criticizes some of the things I specifically cite as enjoying. While personal taste obviously plays a big role in any review, I can’t help but wonder if I went a little easy on this book simply because it was so much better than the TV show, and I spent so much time ranting about the TV show’s lost potential while I was watching it.

This may be the first time I’ve actually been reviewed rather than being the reviewer: Paul Graham Raven reviews the 2008 Arse Elektronika anthology, Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep, which features the paper I co-wrote with Reesa Brown, “What is the 21st-Century Novel?” Raven has quite a lot of praise both for my paper and the anthology. Even though I don’t see a penny if you buy it, I really recommend that you check out the anthology for yourselves.  You can also hear a mp3 of my presentation and follow along with a slideshow.

Sadly, the Continuous Coast project, which we discussed extensively in our paper, is quite moribund. Personal issues sank the project in the end, and I doubt it will ever be revived. I hope that people find the ideas we laid out in both the project and the paper useful, and I am curious to see where the 21st-century takes storytelling; I hope to be some small part of that tapestry too. I still mourn the ideas and nifty potential of the project though, and hope that at least some of our notes for it can still be released into the Creative Commons as we always intended them to be, eventually.

I’m feeling slightly discouraged at the moment. A rejection letter combined with a fairly hefty personal setback arrived within a couple days of each other. I’m sitting on the story for another day or two then reevaluating whether to send it out as is. I gotta keep writing anyway. If nothing else, I hope the first meeting of the Houston Art Nerds, which we’ll be scheduling soon, will perk me up again.

I have been working hard on the Continuous Coast project. My story I published earlier this month for the project has been read about 300 times, which isn’t bad for a silly little bed time story on a project no one’s heard of yet. I’ve been trying to line up more bands for Lufton Runner, with some exciting success. I’m trying to find time to build the project’s web presence. I’m helping critique other project members’ work. I’m playing fictals in interactive chats. If I’m not getting as many words on the page, I am trying to be gentle on myself as I am balancing all the above with a number of real life changes and upheavals and Things To Be Done ™ of varying importance.

I need to put some time in on my own words, and even just my own stories for CC, soon.

I did, however, write a poem recently.

I’ve been hard at work lately on the Continuous Coast project. I’m learning drupal in order to build more of the web environment that our fans are using to inteact with the denizens of Mother. It’s slow going and a bit frustrating, but fortunately I have the consulting help of Nathan Eliot of t9productions. With the help of one of our project crew, I also penned a 2,500 word introduction to the world to help bring new contributors up to speed on the world and the philosophy behind the project. I think it will help bring new writers and artists on board.

A lot of my life feels transitional right now. Things are changing. I don’t always know where they are going, and sometimes that’s been stressful. I’m also suffering a bit from the cold — our house is drafty, and cold weather makes me slow and sore. I’m glad we broke out the space heater today.

Today, Reesa, Steve and I spent nearly all of our productive hours creating a map of a city on another world. It was a fairly grueling 12+ hour process, even with breaks to take in an episode of Dexter and eat. The first draft results are impressive, and preliminary photos have been shared with our collaborators. This is a huge step toward the creation of a major goodie for our fans as well as countless other future creations in the Continuous Coast Project. Along the way we mostly decimated three medium pizzas and a lot of snacks.

In honor of the completion of 12 hours of labor, I baked some brownies. I actually used the tollhouse cookie recipe in the pan cookie variation, except I used slightly less chocolate chips (1 and a half cups) and added a generous 3 tablespoons of Dutch Cocoa powder (from the Spice House in Old Town Chicago), as well as a tablespoon of oil to compensate for the cocoa powder. As you can see from the photo, we were happy with the results — of the brownies, but especially of the map!

Since the cocoa bean was first cultivated on Mother, I guess I’ll call them Elms Gate Brownies.

I’ve spent the week in Chicago, where my mom lives. We celebrated a nice thanksgiving yesterday, which I wrote about a little on Words Words Words. We’ve also been shopping for spices and specialty cooking oils. Tonight we’re attending Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.  I’m also looking forward to meeting with several collaborators from Continuous Labs on Saturday. With Amul, I’ll be attending Repo: The Genetic Opera Saturday night. Chicago is fun, but cold.

The last few days have been ones of intense immersion in the ongoing creative project. I’ve been working on it in one form or another almost continuously, whether it’s working with artists, recruiting webtalent, or developing websites. We’ve had some exciting developments recently: although I think few of our readers have noticed, we just launched our first significant story arc; one of our artists gave me an early draft tonight of their depiction of one of the world’s major features; and it looks like I might not have to build the project’s entire web presence on my own, after all.

There’s a lot of other stuff on my mind, not all of it happy, but I’m glad to be creating, to have housemates to create with, and to have a working hot tub to soak in.

Theo Drumsthemoon has recruited my friend Mr. Fang’s band, Inversion Effect, to appear on Halloween at Lufton Runner. Voluptuary Amul Kumar did a great job on the concert poster. I wish I could make it, but I don’t see how I could get to Port Outreach before tickets run out. I’ll be looking forward to the Internet coverage of the show, however, and to talking to Fang at the next Burn event about his recent travel experiences.

In fact, it looks like we’re without plans for Halloween. Is there anything cool happening closer to home — i.e. in Bryan/College Station, Austin, or possibly Houston that we might like to attend? If it’s the kind of thing you aren’t publically advertising, feel free to email me as well: vulpine at pobox dot com.