tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-203820252009-07-11T22:45:10.967-06:00being the ongoing journal of the adventures, exciting and otherwise, of Walter Jon Williams, author, game designer, kenpo maven, scuba fiend, and fantasy Iron Chef.dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.comBlogger655125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-4711835626694806492009-07-09T19:20:00.002-06:002009-07-09T19:29:38.995-06:00

DARPA's attempt to produce a microchip-sized fusion reactor has dropped out of the budget. Chip-scale integration offers precise, micro actuators and high electric field generation at modest power levels that will enable several order of magnitude decreases in the volume needed to accelerate the ions. Furthermore, thermal isolation techniques will enable high efficiency beam to power converters,

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-48718644990123369952009-07-08T22:02:00.004-06:002009-07-08T23:53:25.217-06:00

I've seen most film adaptations of Phantom of the Opera, including the one in Chinese where the singer was a guy (The Phantom Lover, 1995), and I've seen no less than two musical theater adaptations, both of which sucked. So when I saw the original 1911 book by Gaston Leroux at the library, I picked it up out of curiosity. And d'you know what?All the adaptations are better than the original.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-67675096377723859752009-07-02T23:45:00.006-06:002009-07-03T00:43:29.567-06:00

Implied Spaces is now available in mass-market paperback!Y'all probably knew this already, but I didn't. I'm just the author.And, because I haven't nagged you for a while, I'll mention that you can pick up a copy of This Is Not a Game at the same time.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-78694156731615498292009-07-02T22:35:00.002-06:002009-07-02T22:59:23.594-06:00

This weekend features the anniversary of the day we officially decided to kick King George out of town. In a decision largely unrelated to King George, Kathy and I are going to secluded mountaintop retreat for three nights.There may be internet. There may not be. There may be internet but I may not decide to make use of it. Which is by way of saying, I'll probably check you all next week.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-12222583984843502752009-07-02T01:09:00.002-06:002009-07-02T01:13:16.321-06:00

A giant ant colony has taken over the world!The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together.Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-85660369738163358902009-07-02T01:05:00.002-06:002009-07-02T01:08:59.938-06:00

The writer Ian McDowell needs y'all's help. His father, who has just lost a leg, needs to move out of his apartment, where the manager refuses to install modifications to aid the handicapped. (This is legal, apparently.)Ian is raising money by offering a unique item for sale on eBay, a one-of-a-kind hand-written collection featuring original, never-published stories by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link,

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-64347205369439749562009-06-30T21:20:00.003-06:002009-06-30T22:06:55.009-06:00

The lineage of this film is a little unusual: it's a 2005 Korean production with Korean actors, the stunt team is from Hong Kong, the movie was filmed in China, and the screenwriter is someone named Paul Sheen, who has no other credits that I can find. It's no surprise, therefore, that the result is something of a mishmash. It's not bad, in fact the movie's a lot of fun in a no-holds-barred,

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-1539480348303475292009-06-29T22:49:00.003-06:002009-06-29T22:54:57.437-06:00

I admire a brilliant piece of invective as well as the next guy, and the best I've seen in a long time is Matt Taibi's evisceration of Goldman Sachs, which he blames for both the creation, and the collapse, of every financial bubble of the last century. (Wow! Talk about evil!)The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam,

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-11751263663500764142009-06-29T20:26:00.002-06:002009-06-29T20:29:41.849-06:00

Here is our cat Charlie shortly after the catastrophe. It looks like he got totally immersed in water, or had a bucket of water thrown over him, or maybe got sprayed with a hose. I don't know exactly what happened, I wasn't there. I only know that I came home and there he was, on the front porch, looking bedraggled. I suspect that I, or more likely my personal property, will somehow pay for

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-20147364039775992992009-06-28T23:17:00.004-06:002009-06-29T14:37:30.195-06:00

This may be one of a very few films ever to be doomed by excessive devotion to its literary source material. (Watchmen might be another.) The full title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn't the sort of name that Hollywood gives to its films: it's taken from the the Ron Hansen novel upon which the film is based. I read the novel when it came out and it's terrific.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-56169714212463045992009-06-28T22:38:00.003-06:002009-06-28T23:17:02.893-06:00

The Iranian revolution has entered a grim and secret phase. Grim, because the news is of mass arrests, protests being smashed, demonstrators beaten. Secret, because the situation may be resolved--- or not--- by maneuvers within the Iranian power structure that are opaque to those of us in the West.Still, the cries of "Allah o akbar" are louder than ever at night. Three weeks ago, Iranians still

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-26420717888223629212009-06-26T21:38:00.001-06:002009-06-26T21:42:48.423-06:00

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-51348751681072215072009-06-23T21:33:00.004-06:002009-06-23T22:13:19.027-06:00

All the thinking I've been doing about Iran in the last week has brought to mind something that I always thought was kind of obvious, which is that Iran talks big and swaggers rather a lot for a country that has a built-in on-off switch. By which I mean Kharg Island.Kharg Island lies about 25 nautical miles off the coast of Iran, and is the facility from which it ships the vast majority of its

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-4631644848390289962009-06-23T19:15:00.002-06:002009-06-23T19:20:48.357-06:00

Bernard-Henri Levy on Iran:Whatever happens from this point on, nothing will ever be the same in Tehran.Whatever happens, if the protest gains momentum or loses steam, if it ends up prevailing or if the regime succeeds in terrorizing it, he who should now only be called president-non-elect Ahmadinejad will only be an ersatz, illegitimate, weakened president.Whatever happens, whatever the result

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-71437791774553833472009-06-23T00:08:00.002-06:002009-06-23T00:12:36.843-06:00

Simple ways to help Iranian free speech.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-21949061561796108752009-06-22T22:00:00.004-06:002009-06-22T23:03:20.208-06:00

Another long day trying to keep up with events in Iran.For those who wish to help Iranians and dissidents in other nations evade surveillance, check out the Tor Project. Originally a project of the U.S. Navy and now spun off into a freeware company, Tor--- strangely sharing a name with the largest US science fiction publisher--- bounces messages around a distributed network to evade deep packet

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-65079403860709223162009-06-22T00:01:00.005-06:002009-06-22T16:14:10.801-06:00

The other day I found myself on the set of a low-budget film.In recent years I've become interested in video technology for the masses, and how nowadays you can not only make a YouTube video for the change you vacuum up from behind the sofa cushions, but an entire movie. I think the production budget of this feature was rather less than the cost of the single camera that was filming it. This

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-23402173174244006262009-06-19T16:16:00.002-06:002009-06-19T17:07:37.088-06:00

I haven't been posting for a couple days because, well, I have this life. I have friends, family, and a freakin' job. All of this keeps getting in the way of my Internet!I realize this is overturning the natural order, but I'm all perverse that way.I've been following the Iranian revolution via the live blogs set up by Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post. I

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-86121982501781918072009-06-17T14:39:00.002-06:002009-06-17T14:42:08.618-06:00

I was looking through the photo archives yesterday and found this. Which brings us to today's puzzler. A genuine no-prize to the first person who tells me what this is. And--- just for the record--- "a leftover piece of Sixties psychedelia" is not the correct answer.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-42064147778516181032009-06-15T21:23:00.003-06:002009-06-15T21:50:56.262-06:00

Bev Vincent likes my book! I don’t say this lightly: This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams is one of the best novels I’ve read recently. The online store is open.

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-9368831530637773082009-06-15T15:12:00.007-06:002009-06-15T17:11:13.930-06:00

Here we have a video of an Iranian paramilitary before and after he fired randomly into a crowd of protestors, killing at least one person. (Well, they did set fire to his building.) We can see his face. There are people watching this video who probably know where he lives, and who his parents and family are and where they live. I don't think he's got much of a future.There is a scene just like

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-69350094232205967532009-06-15T00:24:00.006-06:002009-06-15T00:52:29.990-06:00

The revolution will not only be televised, it will be downloaded, remixed, Youtubed, Twittered, and set to a soundtrack by the Moody Blues. (Okay, I couldn't bring myself to link to that last one.)On the unlikely chance that my Iranian revolutionary brethren are checking in at this moment, functioning proxy sites may be found at:128.112.139.28 port 3124 please RT 218.128.112.18:8080

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-74186132676800172432009-06-13T20:07:00.006-06:002009-06-13T22:24:54.635-06:00

I have written elsewhere of my experiments with beer-can-up-the-butt chicken. It's tasty, it's ridiculously easy, and it's a lot easier to clean up than if you used your grill's rotisserie attachment. But there are drawbacks as well. It's easy for the chicken to topple over and start a fire or get burned. I'm not sure how healthy it is to eat something that's had a burning hot aluminum object

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-75535051203339852992009-06-10T15:55:00.004-06:002009-06-10T18:25:24.474-06:00

I was reading a fantasy novel the other day, by one of those "widely-acknowledged masters of the genre" we're always hearing about, and the story had a familiar sort of shape.(1) Young woman moves into spooky old house in a small village filled with eccentric relatives and retainers. (2) Spooky things happen. (3) Heroine receives explanation from Local Crone, to-wit: "There are Pixies living in

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20382025.post-53710981033944459752009-06-10T15:45:00.002-06:002009-06-10T15:55:04.386-06:00

News from the World O' Science:We may have seen our first extra-galactic planet. Micro-lensing may have shown that a star in the Andromeda Galaxy has a planet six times the size of Jupiter.The advantage of microlensing is that it works best for more distant objects, so it's ideal for planet hunting in other galaxies. In theory, it should be possible to see Earth-size objects in this way. The

dubjayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09384513739417728991noreply@blogger.com3