--------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300009 Date: 01/27/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 08:45pm \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Books, problems with -=> Quoting Michael Nellis to Michael Tauson <=- MT> Top of the Morning to ya, Bruce! MN> From the bottom of me heart. Hmmm, thought it was bottomless? MT> "Babes in Toyland" Babe or some other one? MN> "George, you're a regular babe in the woods." Ruth. :-) Ah. A Ruth who's a babe, eh? Well, that leaves out Dr. Ruth. Ruth Buzzi? MN> You should check out the film on Babe Ruth starring John Goodman. MN> Great flick. *chuckling* ... I'm not much of a sports afficiando. Except fencing. And ... well ... um ... another one. MT> Hmmm, y'know I always though that was a title better suited MT> to a XXX novel or flick. MN> Good idea. We could call it _I Got Something From You, Babe._ Heh, heh, heh ... Yep. MT> Y'know, I never quite figured out the ganme of baseball. MN> I like Kevin Costner's line from _Bull Durham._ "You throw the ball, MN> you hit the ball, you catch the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes MN> you lose, sometimes you get rained on." Hmmm, a movie about tobacco? Kewl! MT> You're a writer. We learn by our mistakes so the next one MT> is even more spectacular than the last. MN> Saved to my quotes file. Hmmm, someday I gotta see which of my quotes you've kept. MT> MN> quotes I've shamelessly borrowed from real people and not so real MT> MN> people in the name of research. MT> Ooooh, can I be one of the latter? MN> Oh, 'noid! Not another invisible playmate! But of course. They're fun and come in all sizes and stuff. MN> Hmmmm. Come to think of it, since I've never seen you and all this MN> typing hacked up all over my monitor could be just a hallucination MN> anyway. . . . I was OPing on IRC one day (for those who care, Undernet #chat) and someone asked who I was. I replied, "I'm pixels on your screen in no particular order." MN> Okay; deal. Kewl! MN> I thought you picked up . . . oh--never mind. That wasn't my tagline MN> file I posted, it was my KESTREL.QTS file I posted. Hmmm, when was that? Michael ... "Avoidance. That is the first lesson in self-defense." ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300010 Date: 01/28/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 12:28pm \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Panglobal society na -=> Quoting Michael Nellis to Michael Tauson <=- MN> Combustible cars, Bruce. Pintos? That's an odd greeting. MT> "But I am a savage. I wear a thin and ill-fitting cloak we MN> Amen. I may re-use it as a "HEaley-ism" so you can put it in your file. MT> Paraphrased from a [lost in a HD crash] idea file for a MT> novel titled, amusingly enough, _The Savage_. MN> Subtract all relative motion, 'noid. What a bummer. *chuckling* ... It continued spinning but the heads wouldn't move. (Old MFM drive that let the world know when it was doing something productive. I guess it was proud that it could serve or some such thing.) MN> Yeah, I still haven't resurrected that story about the little old MN> jewish lady gassing a brigade of neo-nazis for which I was called a Ah, yes. I remember that one. Something about a continuation of an idea of Heinlein's wasn't it? MN> Some day, maybe. I haven't forgotten her yet. Like I haven't forgotten McKay or Captain Vaskapatya ... etc. On the hook ... what a thing to say about perfectly good characters. MN> * SLMR 2.1a * Desperation and bitterness seem my only friends. Hmmm ... you been looking in my mind again? Or, for that matter, my heart? Michael ... Truth is rarely pure, and never simple. -Oscar Wilde- ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300011 Date: 01/28/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 01:06pm \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Books, problems with -=> Quoting Michael Nellis to Michael Tauson <=- MT> -=> Quoting Bruce to Bruce, because Bruce said to Bruce what Bruce MT> said in the first place <=- Hmmm ... this is scary ... I think I understood that. MT> MN> <<< Continued from previous message >>> MT> Any specific one or just one in general? MN> Pick any half dozen. :-) *snicker* MT> MN> Ooh. You lucky devil. Got anything you can post here in Writing? MT> Um, I have been. MN> Har har. I meant something specific about genetics. :-) Um, I have been. Sorta kinda roundaboutlyish. MT> with so they will eventually converge to the point that mating MT> would be productive. MN> Ah, that's more like it. *chuckling* ... The Iunnae and Terrans. Un-altered Terrans (since they do some genetic tinkering on selected transportees dependent on the world on which they're gonna be dumped). MN> Hmmmm. Yeah, sufficiently close. Both would have to use the same MN> proteins in their genes for starters; both would have to have the same MN> four nucleotides, it seems to me. Or something sufficiently close that *early* tinkering can ensure that things head in the right direction. Don't forget that Creation is only defined in terms of Earth. There are other worlds and no one seems to have mentioned this was only one part of the project - a rather minor part, actually. (Granted the original authors were rather homocentric which may be the reason for that particular spin on the story. ) Assume for a moment that, while the physical universe came from a fairly huge firecracker called the Big Bang, there is nothing that says that there wasn't a previous universe, and that at least one race managed to survive its collapse and the appearance of this one. (Yea, I read the Well World series a lot. ) This gives potential to the idea that the Creator may have been an old race of beings who idled their time away tinkering with life forms - perhaps out of boredom. I don't expect to ever bring this thought into the series, but it is in the back of my mind as I work on it. There is a line in the Bible somewhere which mentions "the sons of God and the daughters of man" which, to me, suggests the possibility of an alien presence at some point in human development. Given this presence was early enough, it could also help explain the convergence of the two races. MT> MN> Something like that, except in this case there won't be a dead body, MT> MN> just a live one. MT> Minor - and easily changed - detail. MN> Hey! That's the main character we're talking about there! You keep MN> your sticky, blood lusting fingers out o' my universe! What do you MN> think you are anyway? An editor? We're all editors. Er, aren't we? Hmmm, main character. Kind of a sticky situation for her to be in, eh? MT> MN> bogus paper. The head X-rays were a bit trickier. MT> Swaps happen ... MN> So do cover ups, and the UFOians who try to debunk them. :-) *chuckling* ... Um, she didn't happen to bump into the planet near some hick town in New Mexico, did she? Um, in 1947? MT> Why Alberta? MN> Gurt 'uge mountains with otherwise mostly empty tracts of big trees. Ah, this is a good thing. Huge trees make for nice toothpicks and leaning-against-things. MN> Especially the mountains, but I'll have to bring them through during MN> high summer. That will mean more hikers and the occasional spotting MN> of a dragonshadow across the face of the moon, but StrongWing will be MN> able to find a suitable ledge low enough down that he won't have to MN> risk going into torpor. Hmmm ... now refresh my memory. What do they eat again? Tourists? Hmmm ... MN> On the upside, that'll add fuel to the UFO hysteria and StrongWing MN> won't have to worry about leaving tracks in the snow. One of the current UFO thingies that's reported is a large slow moving object that looks like a flying wing ... hmmm ... MT> MN> One thing I contemplated was making Sherrilyn heartless. I always MT> Another MP? MN> No, just playing God again. Ahhh, okay. MN> No, except that I want to make sure she doesn't have too human a MN> physiology. Still, I can excuse an epiglottis; it's a handy-dandy MN> survival mechanism. Unless you're partial to choking to death. Here's something that puzzles me. We have this heart and lung arrangement that pumps blood in one and pumps air plus swaps stuff around to/from the blood to make it useful to the rest of the bod. We have a digestive system that also swaps stuff around to/from the blood to make it useful. The engineer in me says that there's got to be a better way to manage all this pumping and swapping. I've already mentioned (I think) a "flow through" heart/lung organ (actually they'd have two for bilateral symmetry.) and I keep going back to the idea that this same arrangement could manage some of, if not all of, the rest of the swappy-swapping with the digesstion process itself done "on the fly". Done properly, there would be no need for an epiglottis since there would only be one passageway initially with the division further in and arranged so choking would be all but impossible. ("Stuff" goes straight, air goes off to the side through a membrane of some sort.) Even if some stuff did get into the breathing passageway, the fact that it is flow-through would reduce the risk of choking enormously. MN> Lot's of fun. A _Gray's Anatomy_ should be de riguer for writers who MN> make species up out of whole cloth. Wonder where I can find one. Hmmm ... If you find a site, lemme know. MT> MN> I have no idea, but the perflourocarbons would probably just replace MN> Why should hemoglobin occur in nature? In fact, do you have MN> any idea what the chances are of hemoglobin forming in nature? No, but I'm sure you'll tell me. MN> It's 1 in 1.35*10^167. See, I knew you would! MN> It did anyway, though, and it's tricky stuff. Out of MN> the 1.35*10^167 possible combinations for the proteins that form MN> hemoglobin, only three work. Only one works correctly. Um, in our physiology. This doesn't say that some totally alien physiology doesn't use some other combination as efficiently. MN> (At least that's what Asimov says, although he obviously MN> couldn't have done the work to prove it.) Heh, probably knocked it off somewhere in his second hundred stories ... MT> Linda (ex-wife person with whom you talked in the ... er, MT> other place) sends her regards ... MN> Hey to Linda. I shall pass that on. MN> * SLMR 2.1a * But then, you know, being wrong's sort of a hobby of MN> mine Heh, Mine too. Actually, of late, it's been a life work. *Sigh* Michael ... Some people act crazy; others aren't acting. ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300012 Date: 01/28/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 01:39pm \/To: MICHAEL NELLIS (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Chinese Hegemony -=> Quoting Michael Nellis to Michael Tauson <=- MN> Hi, Bruce. Howdy, Bruce! MT> could happen to China right now would be a massive outbreak of MT> something deadly to bring the population down to about half. MN> I figure it pretty much the same way. In my Federation I have a MN> declining birthrate due in part to the collapse of the technologized MN> food industry, and due in part to Humano-Lapine Calcivirus Disease. Hmmm, sounds like my First and Second Collapse in a way. Long about 2050, a freak combination of weather patterns wreaks havoc on crops all over Earth. Food shipments become a priority item, and the targets for piracy and terrorists. The UN takes over food distribution world wide (under UNESCO?) then winds up in control of the major military forces (air, land and sea) to ensure the shipments arrive at their designated ports. There is, of course, rebelion at foreign tropops on demestic soil telling people what to do (worldwide, not just in the ultra- paranoid US) but they're put down, at first with minimum force then, later, with extreme prejudice. About the time things are returning to normal, it happens again. But this time around, the UN is a de facto world government (Can we say New World Order? ) and the chaos that happened early on the first time is bypassed. Order is restored again about 15 years after the first situation, just in time for aliens to start ruining the heck out of the countryside and generally being obnoxious, killing off about half the remaining population and performing instantaneous urban renewal on most of the major cities and a few small towns here and there. This is Earth's introduction to the idea that there really is intelligent life beyond the Oort cloud and they've been "invited" into the Empire ... um, after Imperial forces finish tidying up a few loose ends with interlopers aloft. While Earht's a mess, it cements the UN - or, rather, the organization that grows out of the UN - as *the* world government, complete with re-drawing boundries and stuff to arrange the world into "Economic Regions" without regard to national borders. This is all about 250 years before Healey says "Hiya" to the 24th century ... and is glossed over here and there as part of why Earth isn't real happy with non-humans, and rarely invites them to parties. Another part of it is that humans are bigots anyway, and xenophobia is a form of bigotry (from where I sit, at least. YMMV) So, rather than fighting each other over silly things like which is the One True Religion, they gang up on the aliens instead. On the other hand, they're not dumb and grab all the technology they can (which is freely given anyway), only not as part of the Empire, but as an "injured party" in a war they had nothing to do with. (Hmmm, imagine two guys fighting over a lady and the lady gets beat up in the process. That kind of situation. Only on a much larger scale.) Yea, I know. Too much information. Again. *sigh* MN> While I watched that going on I kept chanting my favorite mantra: MN> You'll be so-o-o-o-o-ree! *snicker* MN> A perfect example of butt-headed human stupidity. As I recall, the Plague spread 'cuz it was popular to kill the cats (as witches critters) that were doing a perfectly good job of killing the rats who were the carriers. This isn't a new stupidity, just a refinement of an old one. MN> In my stories I give a forty percent mortality just for the fun of it. Hmmm, overall, between the collapses and the fighting, I knock off about 2/3 of the population. MT> that would involve killing about 500-600 *million* people MN> Ah, screw 'em. They're all gonna die eventually anyway. The only MN> difference is the inconvenience of having 'em all die at the same MN> time. Heh, the world government (which I still haven't named yet) solves this problem by deporting them to the outerworlds. Takes less real estate than mass graves. MT> MN> It's a bit difficult to think of examples before the fact. MT> Er, isn't that what we're supposed to be doing as SF writers? MN> Yes, but never forgetting the lessons of history while doing so. We remember them. But politicians never do. Nor do most people, come to think of it. MT> MN> Dragging this onto topic, however, MT> Spoilsport! MN> Hey, a fang-face has got to have some fun. *snicker* MT> wasn't a conspiracy to drive him bananas. We were supposed to MT> wait until after he actually went over the edge! ) MN> Oh. Oh, yeah. Well, no problem. Now that he knows we'll just have MN> to kill him. Hmmm ... okay. This is a workable solution. MEssy but workable. MT> We have lost the facility to dream. To dare. But what's MT> worse, we have lost the ability to hope. MN> Well, maybe it's just that the voices of those do still dream, dare, MN> and hope are drowned out in the sniveling and whining. *sigh* ... too true. All too true. MN> * He is just a convenient pseudonym for scapegoat purposes? I'm gonna quit telling ya *swipe* ... gets kinda repetitive, y'know? Michael ... And Satan said to God, "But where will *YOU* get a lawyer?" ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300013 Date: 01/28/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 03:18pm \/To: CURTIS JOHNSON (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Books -=> Quoting Curtis Johnson to Michael Tauson <=- CJ> Well, yes, #115 is supposed to be in the middle of the CJ> "island of stability" in high-numbered elements. MT> Yeppers. Some "island" ... CJ> Some "stability"! It's all realtive. Compared to me it's exceptionally stable. MT> Sheesh, a detail. A minor, nit-picking detail. It's MT> stable, isn't it? CJ> The only table one can build with it is periodic. Well, that's a start. Hmmm, actually, a minute is a long time, given some of the transuranic elements have half-lives in the microseconds. It occurs to me that this is enough time to do some chemistry, though what would be subject to question. CJ> I can't recollect if any experimental work was done on CJ> this, but about a decade back the _Sci. Am._ had an article on CJ> what would happen with elements with atomic number somewhere in CJ> the two hundreds. Dems is *big* nucleae. CJ> The cool thing is that the density of these nuclei was CJ> predicted to stress space-time so much that electrons would CJ> spontaneously emerge. Hmmm. And again, hmmm. SF writer sees a way to bend space- time. SF writer sits back and wonders how to do it on a large enough scale to be functional other than creating a few zillion orphan electrons. Hmmm ... electrons mate with anti-electrons to make a puff. Enough e's and -e's makes a big puff against an already distorted s-t continuum ... hmmm ... Darn it, Curtis, you got me thinnin' again! CJ> I haven't heard of this one. Can you elaborate? I'd have to go back to the page again. I didn't save anything from it, other than a few chuckles. CJ> I recall that de Camp's advice for the general reading CJ> mix of a sf writer: equal portions of sf, literature, and CJ> non-fiction (_all_ topics). SF *is* literature. Oh, you mean non-SF fiction. Um, does the Congressional Record count? MT> Nothing comes to mind. SF aliens are obviously better MT> pilots. CJ> There have been crash stories, but again nothing CJ> like ufology legends. Give it time. It'll happen ... even if I have to write the darn thing myself! MT> I don't have the entire John Grimes series anymore and they MT> are hard to find now. They were enjoyable books, though ... CJ> Ah, _Bertram_ Chandler. Silly me, I was thinking of CJ> _Raymond_ Chandler! Heh, common error. I like A. B. Chandler's style ... especially when he had a conversation with Grimes in his own cabin. (He was a tramp skipper and wrote off watch.) I've written a few conversations with Captain Vaskapatya (on GEnie) and have started a few with Healey, but nothing destined for publication. (Although I wouldn't mind a few ... er, "conversations" with Damiana Navarro ...) RE: War of the Worlds ... CJ> Heck, even the movie didn't send people running into the CJ> streets screaming the way the *radio* program did. Nope. But then, people used their imagination more then, unlike now when it seems to be too much effort to do so. CJ> anthology of the Wells Martian invasion, as recounted by Mark CJ> Twain, Kipling, Emily Dickinson, etc. I want it. Ooooh, sounds kewl. MT> Evil seems to be the more prevalent, but I think that's a MT> reflection on humanity in general where "different" is taken as MT> "wrong, bad, evil, etc" thus is something to be avoided at any MT> cost. CJ> Or perhaps a reflection of people fearing the unknown. Hmmm ... I think those are two faces of the same multi- surfaced solid. Although, I see yours as being part of the basis for religion in general - fear of the unknown and realizing there are things beyond human control ... which leaves some superior element/being/force/jujube/whatever in control of them. CJ> Of course, to mainstream writers, science itself is an unknown, CJ> much less xenobiology. *chuckling* ... One of the neat parts of writing science fiction is that it allows speculation. My therapist has a take-apart model of a human brain in her office. Sometimes when I go in, I take it apart and just stare at it for a while, asking the occasional question as I do. And some of those questions are pretty off the wall - such as "Why is the brain all in one place? Sensory input and fast processing - even first-level cache - I can understand, but long term memory doesn't have to be quite so close. Etc." (That one started quite a discussion as to how it all would have to be tied together and what could be distributed with little if any functional loss which, in turn, lead to a discussion on physiology which gave her an opening to start the session. *Sigh* ... I was having so much fun, too. ) MT> Yep. Doesn't reduce its value, though. Hmmm, on MT> reflection, I think my favorite Heinleins are juveniles (or most MT> are), come to think of it ... CJ> direction of the other Michael>. Hmmm, is it time for someone to yell, "INCOMING!"? CJ> That just might be because back then he had to work with CJ> editors. . . Editors and other predatory beasts. An upset readership is a nasty thing to behold, or so I'm told. Michael ... When you wish upon a star - have the appropriate protective gear. ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300014 Date: 01/28/98 From: MICHAEL TAUSON Time: 05:23pm \/To: CURTIS JOHNSON (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Books, problems with -=> Quoting Curtis Johnson to Michael Tauson <=- MT> -=> Quoting Bruce to Bruce, because Bruce said to Bruce what Bruce MT> said in the first place <=- CJ> Et tu, Bruce? Nah, I ain't et yet. Hmmm, on reading this, it should have been directed to the other Bruce. Hopefully he'll picks up on his end. Or picks up his end. Whichever. In the mneantime, however, you might wanna look at my repsonse to him on the same subject. I did however save your response for further study. Thanks! Michael ... I knew the odds were against me, but the evens too??? ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 --- Maximus 3.01 * Origin: SoundingBoard, Pittsburgh PA (1:129/26) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300015 Date: 02/02/98 From: JACK RUTTAN Time: 12:59pm \/To: JERRY BUDINSKI (Read 2 times) Subj: Re: Short Story Contests JR> > 'Round these parts most folks overlook a gaff like that - when they > > happen one at a time. 3 or 4 times regular and you're a twit, but no one > > pinned that one on me yet. JR>Some of us just think it privately. And a "gaff" is something used to >hook fish. :) A "gaffe" is a French mistake ("blague" is a fun word for >the same thing). Hi there, that was a gaffe on my part, and I didn't intend the message to read that I thought you were anything near a "twit." My apologies. JR>Jack R. --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Juxtaposition BBS. Lasalle, Quebec, Canada (1:167/133) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300016 Date: 02/02/98 From: JACK RUTTAN Time: 01:07pm \/To: CURTIS JOHNSON (Read 2 times) Subj: Books On the subject of the foibles of S.F. writers, have you heard the latest news? Arthur C. Clarke's knighthood is being delayed, pending investigation of charges of paedophilia. Seems there might have been more reasons for him to live in Ceylon than just the sun and the sea air. With all this whoopie going on among the famous and powerful, I'm beginning to feel left out. I'll have to cook up some interesting scandal so that I'll be ready when fame calls. Jack R. --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Juxtaposition BBS. Lasalle, Quebec, Canada (1:167/133) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300017 Date: 02/02/98 From: JACK RUTTAN Time: 01:11pm \/To: DON JAMES (Read 2 times) Subj: Slang Vs: Pop. Misusage DJ> Insolent, contemptuous, dear God Jack, I haven't heard that word >hubris since I was hit between the eyes by and English lit professor in >my University days. It wasn't even in the dictionary I possessed at >the time (straightened finances), and I had to go to the library to find Not God, just Co-mod will do in the echo, thanks. And I hope your finances get wavy again. You certainly splurged on sending this message three times! (I do that occasionally. Lapse in reply packet hygiene.) Jack Ruttan --- Maximus/2 3.01 * Origin: Juxtaposition BBS. Lasalle, Quebec, Canada (1:167/133) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 159 WRITING Ref: F2300018 Date: 02/01/98 From: KESTREL T'RAEL Time: 01:44pm \/To: VERN FAULKNER (Read 2 times) Subj: Rights or wrongs? VF> Goes to show - the pen is still mightier than the sword. And that's VF> the *only* way I can justify this off-topic post. Eeek :( There's another one coming... ... If space is a vacuum, who changes the bags?? --- PPoint 2.03 * Origin: Kestrel's Aerie (1:128/202.6)