A Duality of Dysfunction at DragonCon


I was not at DragonCon this year. Actually, I have never been to DragonCon. But Aaron Douglas (aka deck chief Galen Tyrol*) was. And I’ll have you know that he actually requested, nay, even demanded the books you see in his hands, thanks to some subtle psychological manipulation by one adrienne everitt the week before when he was up here in TO. So she brought him the books, and I believe they may have had some beers.

I do not know if ol’ Aaron will ever get around to reading either novel, but perhaps that’s just as well; evidently he’s hoping that his next acting gig will be a little “less dark” than Galactica, in which case Starfish and Blindsight would not be a step in the desired direction anyway. But at least my own dysfunctional characters now share a documented point of intersection with the most gloriously dyfunctional cast o’ characters in televised sf, and that is cool.

BTW, just to head off any misunderstandings, I did not put adi up to this. In fact, I kinda cringed to learn that she was doing it on my behalf; we’re all familiar with those tub-thumping authors who shout ME ME ME at every opportunity, and, well, ewwww. But while I would never pimp my stuff so brazenly to anyone — much less to a prominent community figure who probably gets accosted with this kind of shit all the time — I gotta say, I’m squeeed into the stratosphere that adi did.

*And if any of you have to be told who that is, you have no business on this crawl.



This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 1:34 pm and is filed under public interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Alehkhs
Guest
Alehkhs
15 years ago

Lords of Kobol!

You lucky bastard… that photo is amazing!

Hmmm… I need to get back on the ball with Puppybuckets and pump out some more reviews…

Nix
Guest
Nix
15 years ago

Well, I don’t have a clue who that is. Some actor from some TV programme that I’ve never seen and never will, perhaps? (I last lived in a house with a TV in 1993 and last saw a movie sometime later in that millennium.)

[wikiwiki]

… oh, BSG. Can easily live without it, thanks. Books are better.

Peter Watts
Guest
15 years ago

You do realize we’re talking about the twenty-first century’s reimagination of BSG, right? I’d hate to leave the impression that I was any kind of fan of the execrable seventies-era cheesefest with Lorne Greene.

Keippernicus
Guest
Keippernicus
15 years ago

Ah, and if our culture valued books more maybe this would cause some heavy splash damage.

On a related note the reboot of BSG is probably the greatest source of cognitive dissonance since I reflashed the part of my brain that used to accept religion.

I won’t say anything negative about the series because it is hands down some of the best shit on TV but the premise is still unmistakeably cheesy.

I know, I know, pelt me with rocks and torches if you must. But come on robots that want to be human? Having a 40 year gap to mass produce ships and weapons and they still get tarred up by clunky humans in big hollow Vipers?

I know it wouldn’t be very good TV but if I had a planet full of robot workers, factories and weapons sitting on FTL technology I would think they could have just made a shit load of drones and missiles and overwhelm the slow reproducing humans with sheer brute force.

PS if they really wanted to occupy a bunch of planetary systems why send in attack ships when you could just dump in a big spaceship with a hundred thousand antiship missiles to hang out for a few centuries?

I’m still gonna watch the shit out of it though.

bec-87rb
Guest
bec-87rb
15 years ago

keippernicus,

I hear you, but should we be looking for logic in TV sci fi. TV sci fi, that thinly disguised discussion of whatever the RL anxiety of the moment is? I mean, paranoia, war, and aliens-among-us are the order of the day in the U.S. I haven’t followed BSG completely, having no cable, but what I’ve seen is barely clad social commentary that would have done Swift proud.

In re paranoia, btw… For you blogwaders still thinking about Mr. Watts’ April 2008 post on using fMRI to tell which hand you are going to twitch before you even know, I ran across something yesterday, and I thought of y’all.

“Internally Generated Cell Assembly Sequences in the Rat Hippocampus,” Se 5, 2008, Science. Pastalkova, et al. Probes into rat hippocampii let some guys at Rutgers tell which way the rat was going to run, right or left, 10 to 20 seconds before he did it.

Predicting action via brain activity is apparently hot now, so get some tin foil and line yer hats, people.

Ken
Guest
Ken
15 years ago

Sweet!!

My wife and her friends hung out with the BSG guys for much of the con (ok, mainly her friends did…my wife doesn’t watch BSG. But she hung out with her friends, so she ended up there anyway. *shrug*) She may well have bumped into Adrienne.

My plans for working up some Watts flyers got derailed by last-minute con crap, but I’m SO glad to see that Adrienne did such a great job. Congrats!!

cow_2001
Guest
cow_2001
15 years ago

bec-87rb said…

“TV sci fi, that thinly disguised discussion of whatever the RL anxiety of the moment is? I mean, paranoia, war, and aliens-among-us are the order of the day in the U.S.”

Yep, BSG is 24… IN SPACE.

adicat
Guest
14 years ago

when i googled me this came up *waves at Peter* did you ever hear from Aaron

and for the record, to anyone browsing the crawl, i fully fully pushed Peter into this, and told Aaron i would bring him the books, Peter really had no choice… just sayin’