{"id":94,"date":"2008-01-25T08:58:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T16:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=94"},"modified":"2008-01-25T08:58:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T16:58:00","slug":"us-and-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=94","title":{"rendered":"Us and Them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not going to dwell on the The Big Paris-Hilton Scale moment that&#8217;s been all over the science blogs for the past day or two, since let&#8217;s face it, Venter&#8217;s new artificial genome is really just another incremental step on the path, and besides, I already <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/2008\/01\/cancer-for-greater-good.html\">mentioned that guy<\/a> recently.   So instead, a potpourri of peteresque and popcultural pointers:<\/p>\n<p><b>Us<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>A few developments on the writing front:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.recordedbooks.com\/\">Recorded Books<\/a> is going to release an audio rendition of <i>Blindsight<\/i> (which is especially cool since evidently these guys put out the <i>only<\/i> single-voice English language narration of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy officially approved by the Tolkien Estate).  If I&#8217;m lucky, they can get Andy Serkis for the performance.<\/li>\n<li>Heyne, the German publisher putting out the translations of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.de\/Blindflug-Peter-Watts\/dp\/3453523644\"><i>Butt Plug <\/i><\/a>and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.de\/Abgrund-Peter-Watts\/dp\/3453524462\/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1201279880&amp;sr=1-3\"><i>Down Hill<\/i><\/a>, have made an offer on <i>Maelstrom<\/i>.  After a bit of haggling over money and my insistence that the book&#8217;s title should be an easy target of juvenile humour once translated, I accepted.  (I suspect we even got more for it than Tor did for the Heyne edition of <i>Starfish<\/i>, although I don&#8217;t know because Tor still hasn&#8217;t told me how much that was.)  (Yes, I&#8217;ve asked.)  This almost makes up for <s>the<\/s> those one-star Amazon reader <s>review <\/s> reviews that just shot <i>Blind Flug<\/i> down from the heady days of unanimous approval it had enjoyed only yesterday  (although the sales rank seems to be doing pretty well over there regardless \u2014 the book&#8217;s grazed the five-hundreds a couple of times, which even accounting for the difference in national populations is probably better than it ever did over here).<\/li>\n<li>It also looks as though a Czech edition of <i>Blindsight<\/i> is in the works from Triton Books.  (On the down side, that <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/2007\/09\/done-deals-fair-warnings.html\">Russian deal<\/a> I mentioned a while back might be a bit shakier than I&#8217;d thought \u2014 at least, they keep telling me that the deal&#8217;s still on but I haven&#8217;t seen a penny of an advance that was due well before the end of last year.  I&#8217;d probably push them harder if the memory of Cronenberg&#8217;s <i>Eastern Promises<\/i> wasn&#8217;t still so fresh in my mind&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>Oh yeah, and some doofus over on Futurismic says <a href=\"http:\/\/futurismic.com\/2008\/01\/16\/rights-for-robots-not-according-to-peter-watts\/\">I&#8217;m all in favour of torture<\/a> and everything.  I&#8217;m not saying he&#8217;s wrong, but jeez.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Them.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t usually serve up link salads, since they&#8217;d generally point to far more popular blogs than mine and thus it would probably be old news to you all anyway.  But today I&#8217;m making an exception, because the following links lead to things that made me grin broadly, and that doesn&#8217;t happen as often as I&#8217;d like.   Also it proves that sometimes I can still &#8220;get&#8221; popular culture, which also doesn\u2019t happen as often as I&#8217;d like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>xkcd serves up the <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/375\/\">ultimate AI dream team<\/a><\/li>\n<li>My Elves Are Different retools <a href=\"http:\/\/myelvesaredifferent.blogspot.com\/2008\/01\/on-cloverfield-spoilery-poem.html\">Flanders Fields<\/a> to contain the word &#8220;douche&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>And finally, I swear, I know <i>people<\/i> who aren&#8217;t this smart:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><object height=\"355\" width=\"425\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/03ykewnc0oE&amp;rel=1\"><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/03ykewnc0oE&amp;rel=1\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" wmode=\"transparent\" height=\"355\" width=\"425\"><\/embed><\/object><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to go work now.  I&#8217;m actually writing prose these days.  Some day, if you behave badly, I may share some of it with you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not going to dwell on the The Big Paris-Hilton Scale moment that&#8217;s been all over the science blogs for the past day or two, since let&#8217;s face it, Venter&#8217;s new artificial genome is really just another incremental step on the path, and besides, I already mentioned that guy recently. So instead, a potpourri of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","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=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}