URL: http://boingboing.net/#85506002
Date: Not supplied
After the talk at UT Austin, I spent Saturday at the Turkey City science
fiction writers' workshop at Bruce Sterling's place. Turkey City is a venerable
science fiction workshop that has spawned many good writers and a lexicon of
science fiction critical terms that is the de facto standard for understanding
what works and what doesn't in a work of science fiction:
Squid on the Mantelpiece
Chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the
first act, they should be fired in the third. In other words, a plot
element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic
emphasis. However, in SF plotting the MacGuffins are often so overwhelming
that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse. It's hard to
properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad's bank overdraft when
a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city. This mismatch between the
conventional dramatic proprieties and SF's extreme, grotesque, or visionary
thematics is known as the "squid on the mantelpiece."
Card Tricks in the Dark
Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punchline of a private
joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia
relevant only to the author. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and
very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose.
(Attr. Tim Powers)
I had the cold from hell all weekend and I'm jetlagged, but I wanted to get
some links up before I hit the sack. Until tomorrow! Link[1] Discuss[2]
[1] http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html
[2] http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/cgivZf3AAhKkk

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URL: http://boingboing.net/#85505995
Date: Not supplied
I've been in Austin all weekend. On Friday, I spoke at the University of Texas
about EFF issues. Jon Lebkowsky was there -- hell, he organized it -- and he
blogged the hell out of the talk:
Entertainment industry has tradition of attacking technology: the piano
roll, the radio (sued by vaudeville), television (would destroy cinema!),
"the Betamax affair"... the latter being the first consumer VCR. In Betamax
case, argued that the ability to make a full copy of a broadcast work would
not be a fair use (in terms of copyright). It was illegal enough that the
VCR should be kept off the market, they argued. The Supreme Court got the
case, and the thing that shook out of it was the Betamax principle: a
technology is legal so long as it has substantial non-infringeing uses.
This principle is under attack.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998. Illegal to defeat a copyright
measure. Regionalization system for DVDs. This is a control that limits
distribution. John Johansen in Norway figured out how to break the content
scrambling system and allows you to move from one region to another,
override copy protection. It was called DeCSS - Johansen is facing trial
for creating a piece of code.
Link[1] (Wes blogged it, too[2]) Discuss[3]
[1] http://www.weblogsky.com/2002_09_01_blarchive.html#85500802
[2] http://wmf.editthispage.com/2002/09/27
[3] http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/4rEePy7RSm38x