{"id":849,"date":"2009-11-10T11:21:47","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T19:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=849"},"modified":"2011-07-14T05:44:58","modified_gmt":"2011-07-14T13:44:58","slug":"in-which-i-passionately-lament-the-absence-of-bestiality-in-first-person-shooters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=849","title":{"rendered":"In Which I Passionately Lament the Absence of Bestiality in First Person Shooters."},"content":{"rendered":"

Brief follow-up to my last, strangely-popular post.\u00a0 Someone going by the name of W. Flynn has started a list on Amazon.com: “Authors Who Have Maced a Restaurant<\/a>“. And while I am honored to be in such esteemed company, I can’t help noticing that the list itself is awfully small. I wonder if I could prevail upon those authors in the audience to maybe help Hunter S. and I out a bit and, you know, join the cause.<\/p>\n

Another well-deserved award for courage in the face of adversity: over in France, the winners of the Grand Prix (Prixes? Plural, anybody?) de L’Imaginaire<\/a> were announced at the top of this month, and Gilles Goullet won the best-translation award for Blindsight<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"Goullet_VA\"<\/p>\n

I am losing track of the number of awards Blindsight<\/em>‘s translators have won. The fact that the translations keep winning awards, while the actual source material doesn’t, says it eloquently: the rotation of such a dense work into another language represents a Herculean effort quite apart from any merits Blindsight<\/em> itself may embody.\u00a0 You’d almost need to be a synthesist to pull it off (would you<\/em> know how to convey “Trunclade” in French? How about “pull your eyes over my wool”* in Russian?)<\/p>\n

I’m just waiting for someone to do an English<\/em> translation. That ought to be good.<\/p>\n

\"starshipsofa\"Finally, Tony Smith at Starship Sofa<\/a> has posted a long, rambling, multifaceted conversation between himself, Paul Di Filippo<\/a>, and me, over at The Sofanauts<\/a>. It’s more than an hour long.\u00a0 My voice fails, even once, to acquire that Manly Announcer Baritone I’ve been trying for all these years. We covered a shitload of topics: Cory Doctorow’s latest project in self-publishing, the narrative potential of computer games, and whether it would be a good idea to cast a talking dolphin in the roles of Susan Calvin or Jesus of Nazareth. The subject of testicles came up, not once but twice. I compared our own Squeak Ashby<\/a> to a lima bean, and misrepresented her fiction. Tony told me how much he didn’t like Blindsight.<\/em> Paul dumped a secretary off his lap.\u00a0 And as was perhaps inevitable in a freewheeling conversation lasting over an hour, I let slip a couple of heretofore unreleased details on the subject of a certain publishing house and its schizoid attitude towards the Creative Commons.<\/p>\n

Check it out, if you’ve got 70 minutes to kill. Oh, and don’t worry about something I say early in the interview: I don’t really<\/em> live in a cardboard box on Jarvis Street. Not yet.<\/p>\n

That’s only the dream.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

*In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I ripped off this line (with minor changes) from a Jethro Tull song.\u00a0 Brownie points to the first person who identifies it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brief follow-up to my last, strangely-popular post.\u00a0 Someone going by the name of W. Flynn has started a list on Amazon.com: “Authors Who Have Maced a Restaurant“. And while I am honored to be in such esteemed company, I can’t help noticing that the list itself is awfully small. I wonder if I could prevail […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-public-interface","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2165,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}