bunsen_h

One of the things I find most irksome about wearing a face mask is that it impairs communication of emotion via facial expression.

It's a similar problem to that of costume design for things like space suits and body armour in SF visual media.  It's important to have the actors' faces well-lit and visible from the outside, so the audience can see them.  But realistically, practical protective gear for the face and head would have no illumination directed at one's face apart from the incidental lighting from in-helmet displays.  Light on one's face is likely to cause internal reflections and impair one's vision, and that's more important than people around one being able to see one's face.  A large area of transparent material is likely to provide less protection than the equivalent mass/thickness of other material, as well as leaving the occupant vulnerable to being blinded by bright light outside.  (Assuming that there isn't something like Trek's "transparent aluminum", of course, but there's a plausibility gap there.)

But I've thought of a possible practical solution, for fiction at least.  Have the helmet completely opaque, with the occupant seeing via displays, and have the occupant's facial expressions mirrored to the surface via display material.  It could be simplified, something like a caricature; the occupant could make artistic choices regarding some of the details.  When the occupant smiles or frowns, the helmet face "smiles" or "frowns", and so on.  It's a feature that could be turned off or on, depending on the situation.  In combat, one might not want the opponents to see one's "face".  It could even be set up such that a person's helmet display generates "facial expressions" and overlays them on their views of their comrades, based on each person's helmet transmitting the expression data to all the others.  From outside the armour, one sees blank heads; from inside, on the visual monitors, one would see faces.  It would be a little bit tricky to convey to the audience, but not terribly hard, and it could be used to great visual effect if it were done right.  On the command "faces off", everyone in the group is suddenly transformed from having expressive caricatures to having blank heads.

"The Eye of Argon", by Jim Theis, is mocked for... well, many things.  One of the speed-bumps in reading it is the description of the female protagonist as having a "lithe opaque nose".

I've just been reading The Complete Dying Earth, an SFBC 4-in-1 collection of novels by Jack Vance.  It's been sitting on my shelves, unread, for a couple of decades.  For some reason which escapes me at the moment, I was thinking about the classic D&D magic system, in which a magic user memorizes a spell, and then forgets it in the casting.  That premise originated in these stories by Vance, so I figured I'd give them a try.

They're pretty clunky.

I also don't care for the protagonist of many of them.  He's more than a bit sleazy, and has a high opinion of his own cleverness which is not borne out by events.

But I gather that they were popular in their day, so I'm curious as to how they'll play out.  Some were published in F&SF before being fixed up as a novel.

In one of those stories, I just encountered: "a man spare and taut, with a waxen skin, a fragile skull, hooded eyes and a meticulous nose so thin as to be translucent when impinged across a light".

Perhaps this is where Theis drew his inspiration.

Spotted by a friend of mine in Barrhaven, and posted with her permission:

Gimli: 'I don't wish to meet that old man at unawares without an argument ready to hand, that's all.  Let's go!'

Does that look wrong?  Or more precisely, sound wrong?

I enjoyed the audio book version of The Fellowship of the Ring quite a lot.  Reader Rob Inglis has a reasonable range of voices -- nowhere near Luke Daniels, who reads Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles, but that's a very high bar.  So I expected to like his reading of The Two Towers.

But I keep getting thrown out of the story.  He keeps altering the text, including the dialogue, by using contractions.  Frequently.

By some lights I'm something of a purist with regard to Tolkien, no question.  I was lukewarm on Jackson's version of FotR, disliked TTT, and have seen only a few minutes of his RotK -- which was enough to confirm my decision to give it a miss.  I've seen most of the first Hobbit movie, at home for free while I was working on something, so it wasn't completely lost time.  That convinced me that Jackson has no sense with regard to sacrificing plot in favour of ludicrous action sequences.  I saw a few bits of the second Hobbit movie a couple of days ago, and that was enough; I was shrieking in laughter at the fight sequence with the Dwarves barrelling down the river, and the melting of the "gold" in Moria.  I don't know what that stuff was, but it wasn't gold.  Negligible specific heat and heat of fusion; low melting point.

But this audio book's problem is subtler... "just" contractions.  But Tolkien was very careful about character voice.  Some characters speak casually, some always formally, and some change their style of speech depending on circumstance.  To chuck that out is wrong; it significantly affects the characterization.  For Gimli to say "That's all.  Let's go!" just knots up my neck and shoulder muscles.  It's fingernails-on-blackboard stuff, full-on "uncanny valley", who-are-you-and-where-is-the-real-Gimli material.

*sigh*
 

I met Terry Pratchett twice, I think.  The first time, after he'd autographed a couple of books for me, I asked him why Death had addressed Rincewind as "CULLY" in The Colour of Magic.  He seemed a bit surprised that I couldn't even make a good guess, then explained that it was approximately equivalent to "Bub".  This was before the Internet amounted to much.  I gather that other people have been confused about this over the years; it's one of the annotations in the L-Space page about TCoM.

We exchanged a couple of E-mail messages over the years.  Once, I tossed an idea at him: It's mentioned in a couple of places in the Discworld books that light slows down in a magical field, as it does in a material with a higher index of refraction.  Since Dunmanifestin, the home of the Discworld gods at the peak of Cori Celesti (the mountain at the Hub of the Disc) has an extremely high magical field, it would behave rather like a lens — it would produce an effect rather like gravitational lensing in our universe.  He replied that he liked the idea and might use it.  He never did, but there are any number of reasons why authors are wary of using other peoples' ideas.  (I seem to recall that one of the classic SF authors mentioned that extra ideas for a professional writer are somewhat like extra kittens on a farm... not a bad thing, as such, but there isn't a shortage of them.)

When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, I decided that I'd follow the example of Don Knuth's The TEXBook and begin each chapter with a more-or-less relevant quotation.  Two were from Discworld books.  Although such brief excerpts are considered "fair use" for purposes of copyright, I contacted each of the authors to ask permission as well as to let them know that I'd enjoyed their work.  All, including (then-not-yet Sir) Terry, kindly gave their permission.  I started my Appendix section with a quotation from Sourcery, in which the Librarian is repairing some magical books:

The Librarian shook his head and jerked a pre­occupied thumb towards a tray of tools.

'Oook,' he commanded. Rincewind nodded miser­ably, and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.

'What are you doing to it?' he managed.

'Oook.'

'An appendectomy? Oh.'

In recent years, Sir Terry has been a strong advocate for legal assisted suicide, an issue that is finally beginning to get the attention and discussion that it deserves. But I'm glad that he was spared having to make that choice for himself; news reports say that he died at home, surrounded by his family, with his cat sleeping on his bed.

I'll miss his wit, his pointed humour.

At risk of mixing my metaphors to the point of misattribution:

I just watched Peter Bloody Jackson's The Hobbit, splitting my attention with a bit of code work, which was probably for the best.

Good grief.  My mood kept swinging between "Ack!  That makes no sense!  Not even in context!" and outbursts of hilarious laughter at the total absurdity of what I was seeing.  I think that the Necromancer must have resurrected the spirit of Chuck Jones and enslaved him to resume his work at Warner.

ETA: On further reflection, I think it would work very nicely to remix that movie, replacing the current score with "Looney Tunes"-style music and sound effects.  Bilbo falls down, down, down that chasm... with the fading slide-whistle, bonk bonk bonk off the sides, and a distant "paf!" when he hits the bottom, just like the Coyote got in similar circumstances.
 

I have always been somewhat creeped out by commercials that feature animated food or animals urging people to eat them.  See also: Douglas Adams's "Dish of the Day", and Alice being introduced to Mutton and Plum Pudding on the other side of the Looking-Glass; not to mention Paul Gallico's charming children's book Manxmouse.

But recent commercials for M&Ms are even more troubling.  Red M&M doesn't want to be eaten, but people around him talk about eating him, start gnawing on him despite his objections, and eventually stuff him — kicking and yelling — into an oven.

In Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, there's a line: "An intelligent food animal!  Hitler would have fled, retching."  I've always thought that Niven was a bit of an optimist on that point.

I just thought about Gandalf trying to teach at some school of wizardry: "You shall not pass!"
 

I am not a fan of Peter Jackson's work in Tolkien's mythos.

He changes things that don't need to be changed.  He adds action scenes that aren't internally consistent, nor consistent with the rest of the story; he removes thematic elements and chunks of plot that distinguish Tolkien's work from the generic extruded fantasy product of other writers.

Look, I don't object to his removing Tom Bombadil from The Fellowship of the Ring, as such, though it did lead to a series of plot deviations based on the knives that the Hobbits (originally) took from the Barrow-Downs.  (Those changes could have been corrected early in the story, if Jackson had wanted to.)  Bombadil was somewhat incongruous in the original book.  And there's only so much time and complexity that can go into a popular movie (though Jackson could have refrained from adding some dramatic but incongruous action sequences).

I won't complain at all if the Elves of Rivendell aren't doing the "tra-la-la-lally" thing from Tolkien's The Hobbit.  It's cute in a children's book, but it's seriously weird when contrasted with the Elvish people of The Lord of the Rings.  The Hobbit is notionally written by Bilbo, and he's an unreliable narrator — explicitly unreliable, with regard to his taking the Ring from Gollum.  And there's no way that Bilbo's claustrophobic wandering through the tunnels and caves under the Misty Mountains, in total darkness except for a dim glow from his sword and for the greenish glow of Gollum's eyes, could be portrayed in the movie medium.  I accept this; these changes are necessary.

But why do we have to have Gandalf telling Bilbo, in advance, that his sword Sting is of Elvish make and will glow blue when orcs and goblins are near?  Rather than letting Bilbo discover this for himself... and giving him just that little bit more to talk about to himself in the caves in the dark?

"You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated.  After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it." — Jubal Harshaw, in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  That's what I keep thinking about.

I haven't seen the movie, though I probably will after the initial rush has finished.  I've seen some promotional clips, and it seems to keep coming back to Jackson's need to change things that were perfectly fine in the first place, and probably better before the changes than after.
 

In today's mail: a card advertising a luxury condo tower under construction on Cleary Avenue.  The description burbles with grammatical errors, but the really disquieting feature is the name of the builder: "CharlesFort".  This seems unlikely to end well even if no wombats appear.

Also: yet another brochure from Rogers addressed to "Neighbor / 18 Norice St".  Shouldn't that end up in the mailbox at either 16 Norice or 20 Norice?