Categories
Blather Science Fiction and Fantasy

Ever-renewing shipment of Fail

What I told myself is I want to do it, I’ll try do it, the limiting factor is the amount of energy and spirit I have to continuously fail. And writing, not just publishing, writing itself is a process of continous failure. I mean every time I write a sentence, it’s not the pristine sentence I had in my head, it’s a failure. Every time you submit something and it doesn’t come back with, you know, “yes banana, we’ll give you money for this”, it’s failure. So it really is, it’s very easy to quit. But what I kept telling myself is every day I write, every day I don’t quit, I beat the thousand people that did quit that day, and I beat the ten thousand people who didn’t even try that day.

Greg Van Eekhout in Adventures in Scifi Publishing: AISFP 48.

Categories
Resources short

Vector Magic

Vector Magic is an online service that converts bitmap images (like jpegs and GIFs) to vector graphics (like postscript and SVG). It’s not free, but it lets you convert one image for free when you register. I tried it out on the image I use on my about page, and got this.

Now, how do I make that into a T-shirt(*)? Suitable ideas for appropriate text (such as “yes, I am *that* vain!”) also appreciated.

* – Going through my closet yesterday, I discovered I’ve got a total of 91 T-shirts, ranging in age from a couple of weeks to almost 20 years, and in condition from unworn (what weakness possessed me to buy white T-shirts?) to tatters (alas, Elektra: Assassin).

Categories
Comics Resources

And We Laughed And Laughed

Via Rob Macdougall, a link to a Livejournal community of historical interest called Were they hot or not?, which could become the go-to place for finding good-looking dead people.

One of the entries there is for the actor Conrad Veidt, who played the title role in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs. Based on a Victor Hugo melodrama, Roger Ebert described it as “so steeped in Expressionist gloom that it plays like a horror film”. The film was the inspiration for the Batman villain the Joker, and frankly, doesn’t this guy look scarier than Jack Nicholson with prosthetic cheeks?

The Man Who Laughs

Categories
Blather Roleplaying Science Fiction and Fantasy

Olamot! Bigor! At My Doorstep!

Olamot starts today, Bigor starts tomorrow, and both are taking place in the south-east Tel-Aviv, practically within walking distance of my house!

Except, why walk when this is the only parking zone in Tel-Aviv where my resident’s car-sticker allows me to park for free?

Mapa link

Categories
Oddities Resources

Hippie Chimps

From a report in The New Yorker on Bonobos, which contrasts these apes’ public image with how little is actually known about them:

A fact not emphasized in wildlife films is that ape identification is frequently done by zoomed-in inspection of genitals. A lot of the conversation at Lui Kotal’s dinner table dealt with scrotal shading or the shape of a female bonobo’s pink sexual swelling. (“This one is like chewing gum spit out,” Caroline Deimel, the Austrian, once said of a female.)