Sci-Fi Lingo: No, I'm not talking about words like Ram Drive and Hyperspace. I mean terms that are commonly used in writers groups and writers workshops. Some samples:

"As You Know Bob"
A pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is also known as "Rod and Don dialogue" (attr. Damon Knight) or "maid and butler dialogue" (attr Algis Budrys).

Plot Coupons
The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy plot. The "hero" collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that "the author" can be substituted for "the Gods" in such a work: "The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest." Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance. (Dave Langford)

You Can't Fire Me, I Quit
An attempt to diffuse the reader's incredulity with a pre-emptive strike -- as if by anticipating the reader's objections, the author had somehow answered them. "I would never have believed it, if I hadn't seen it myself!" "It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life!" "It's a one-in-a-million chance, but it's so crazy it just might work!" Surprisingly common, especially in SF. (Attr. John Kessel)


And the one I was guilty of for a long, long time . . .

White Room Syndrome
A clear and common sign of the failure of the author's imagination, most often seen at the beginning of a story, before the setting, background, or characters have gelled. "She awoke in a white room." The 'white room' is a featureless set for which details have yet to be invented -- a failure of invention by the author. The character 'wakes' in order to begin a fresh train of thought -- again, just like the author. This 'white room' opening is generally followed by much earnest pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which can be cut, painlessly.

It remains to be seen whether the "white room" cliche' will fade from use now that most authors confront glowing screens rather than blank white paper.

Yes, I once wrote a story called "The Waiting Room." It ended up about the LA riots. To my credit, the revised version went back to when the story really started, and took all the characters into the waiting room. Unfortunately, the story featured roughly 50 independent characters in 2,000 words.

Or at least that's how it felt when I re-read it a couple of months ago.

Political Discussion: I hate forums for a lot of the same reasons I hate talk radio. But I'm also drawn to them for a lot of the same reasons.

Pretty big news came out yesterday about WMDs. Here's my version of how these discussions are going:

DubyaDude: Hmmm. It appears some WMD components have emerged from Syria. Some Iraqi-trained Al-Qaeda guys wanted to kill a bunch of people.

Patsy4Dems: What are you, a MORON??? Or a Patsy for the Bush team?!?!? THERE WERE NO WMDS! IT'S A CLOSED ISSUE. WE LOOKED AROUND REALLY HARD WHEN WE WALKED INTO IRAQ AND THEY WEREN'T THERE. GEORGE BUSH IS THE BIGGEST LIAR IN THE FREE WORLD!!!!!!!! AND YOU ARE HIS HELLSPAWN!!!!!

KerryChick74: I read in the newspaper last week that Bush only wanted to find the WMDs so he could use them on innocent Iraqis and take their oil. I think it was the New York Times or something.

DubyaDude: Um, but this is new evidence. This is a new news story from yesterday, and kind of a big deal. Did you even read the article? 80,000 dead would be like September 11th ten times over.

Patsy4Dems: So what, now you're implying I can't READ?? You're saying I'm STUPID? GAH!!! You really are hellspawn, calling names like that. Only STUPID, STUPID people call names.

KerryChick74: Oh, so now you're blaming Saddam for September 11th? It was proven unequivocally on a fifteen minute spot on NPR that Saddam and Al-Qaeda were arch enemies. They used to publish comic books in Iraq where Saddam and Osama would fight, just like Batman and the Joker. Saddam used to use Terrorist requests for WMDs as toilet paper.

DubyaDude: Look, as you've pointed out in other threads, we helped Saddam even when he was our enemy when we had to deal with an even greater enemy. And the only people these guys hate more than each other are Americans and Jews. Besides, the last guy who tried to blow up the world trade center holed up in Iraq afterwards. Why do we want to pretend Saddam and these guys weren't on the same page? That's myopic.

Patsy4Dems Your calling me myopic only proves your own closed-minded myopic blind lack of vision.

Uppin' the Ante: The blogosphere just became a whole lot more interesting, all because this man's job put him into a position where it was convenient to start a blog (Yeah, I know, you all wish you had that job).

He's the undisputed funniest man alive. Bookmark him.

To Aid Your Dreams: The trailer for the new M Night movie is online.

Snagging the Intel: Sandefur poses a question on intellectual property: Should you be allowed to sue if somebody comes up with the same idea as you independently, but you came up with it first?

I'm reminded of Babe vs. Gordy scenario. When those two films came out the same year, Gordy got a rep as being a cheap rip-off of Babe that a rival studio had hurriedly cranked out in response to Babe's success.

In reality, Gordy was a project nearly three decades in the making. Tom Lester, cousin Jake from Green Acres, had been shopping around the concept for Gordy for a long time--the inital idea had come from working with Arnold Ziffell, the pig on Green Acres. Getting the movie made was his ultimate dream, and he finally got the picture greenlit with the original producers of Green Acres.

We all know the sad end of that story.

Does anybody need to be sued here? The folks that made Gordy, since Babe came out first? The folks who made Babe, since Gordy had been shopped around longer? Dick King-Smith, who wrote the book Babe was based on back in 1987?

The fact is, you can't copywrite ideas. Only the execution therof.

So where do you cross the line between similarity and rip-off? Lots of people have commented that Nightworld: Lost Souls is a shameless rip-off of Orson Scott Card's novel Lost Boys. But somebody else claims that the storyline exactly follows To Kill a Mockingbird.

I also wonder about historical stuff. Can a lady who wrote a book about the Amistad sue Silverberg for making a movie about the Amistad? Does history become my intellectual property when I write about it? If I write a book about you, and it gets made into a movie, which one of us deserves renumeration? Do you deserve renumeration to a book about you? Do you have intellecutal property rights to acts you have performed, which I chronicle in my book, the way you would to a work of art you created that I reprinted in my book?

I might try to answer these questions if it weren't two in the morning and I didn't have work tommorow. Besides, I haven't seen a single one of the movies I mention here.

But I've read nearly all the books.

Snagging the Clicker: I found my car was broken into last night. There was a baseball bat-shaped hole in the window on the driver's side. And the weird thing was, nothing seemed to be missing from my car. Not my CD player, nothing. Until I went to leave.

They'd taken the remote that unlocks the front gate so you could get in and out.

It didn't take a CSI team to unwrap this scenario--somebody got tired of waiting for somebody to come home or leave and open the gate. They were either a resident who didn't have a remote or a friend of a resident who didn't want to go back and trouble their friend to open the gate for them. So they broke into my car and took my remote. For a twenty dollar remote and the sake of "convenience," they caused hundreds of dollars in damage to my car.

I actually wasn't that bugged by it, though. I was more upset that it was going to cost me the money I was going to spend on a trip up to the workshop Dave Wolverton was going to be doing. But, as luck would have it, the workshop is being moved to exactly when I'm going to be able to afford it again. So it's all good.

But next time, if I promise to leave the window rolled down, will you put the remote back when you're done?

Get Your Movies! Get 'em Piping Hot!: Netflix is talking strategy, including the possibility of downloadable movies starting next year.

Home Court Advantage: Yeah, I watched Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters, mostly for Alton Brown. I've never really been a fan of the original show--I watch food shows to learn, not to be wowed or suprised, and the breakneck pace of Iron Chef makes it hard to follow what's actually being done. Half the time you don't even know when they made half the ingredients in a dish because too much was happening at once.

This version still has all of those disadvantages, but it has a couple of advantages, too. The first is Alton Brown, who could talk about sociology and make it sound interesting if he wanted to. The second is the excellent voice-overs done for the Japanese chefs. A lot better than the voice-overs on the shows they air on Food Network.

I was shocked by Bobby Flay's constant victories--compared with the other chefs, he came across as amateurish, rushing about the kitchen, burning ingredients, cutting himself, asking to be reminded of things. But in the end, it's about taste and appearance, not about grace or smoothness of preperation. So he won both his contests.

Brainteaser: While searching for mind-stretching exercises, I came across this topic. It's a two year old post and probably people who were watching blogs two years ago have hashed this one out already, but it's new to me.

The scenario is this: You're a contestant on a Monte Hall-style game show, and you're shown three doors, behind one of which is Fabulous Prizes. You pick one. The host then opens up one of the two doors you didn't pick, and reveals the booby prize. So now there's two doors left.

The question is this: If he offers you the chance to switch doors, should you take it?

The surprising answer: Yes.

This is counterintuitive. Logic says that, from a probability perspective, it shouldn't make a difference. Two doors equals a fifty-fifty chance, right? So the door you're on is as good a door as any. Change, don't change, it makes no difference.

But that's forgetting one thing--when you selected the door, your chances of being right were only one in three. But if you switch doors, your chances of being right become one in two. You're increasing your chances of being right by almost 17%.

I'm sure you're still dubious. "The moment you open up one door, the odds of your door being right increase from 1 in 3 to being 1 in 2 automatically. It still doesn't make a difference which door you pick."

But in order for that to be true, he would have to open a random door. Remember--if there's three doors, and only one has a prize, there will always be at least one door without a prize, and that's the door he's going to open. So his opening the leftover door first does not actually change the odds of your initial selection. The information he's revealed does not inherently increase the likelihood of your choice being right--the fact that one of the other two doors was prizeless was a given when we made our initial selection. So our door is no more likely to be right now than it was before.

However, the door we DIDN'T choose has better odds. We know that, when showing a booby prize door, this door was not selected.

In other words, that door has a fifty percent chance of being the correct door, while my own door still only has a one in three chance.

Apparently testing bears this out.

UPDATE: I was thinking about how to reconcile the odds that the one door had 1 in 2 odds and the other door had 1 in 3 odds to come up with just one set of odds, when I realized I didn't need to.

For the same reason the odds are still 1 in 3 for the door you picked, the other door still has odds of 2 out of 3.

Think about it this way--imagine there were 10 doors, and you had opened 8 non-prize doors.

Odds are still only 1 in 10 that you're right, because nine out of ten times, it's going to be the other door that's right--only in ten times are you going to get the door right on the first try. So odds are 9 in 10 it's the other door.

Same way here. After opening one door, the other unselected door still embodies the 2 in 3 odds you were wrong.

Pirate Radio: I like Launch on Yahoo!. It's a music player that gives you access to a tremendous variety of music. You can rate by band, by album, by and by song, and then it plays the stuff you like, plus things it thinks you'd like based your ratings. Then you rate what it throws at you, and skip it if you don't like it. Iit ends up with a pretty good sense of what kind of stuff you want.

And I don't even use the pay version, which lets you set "moods," so it won't play that upbeat polka you dig if you're in the mood to wallow in The Cure. They just throw an ad at me after about every fourth song, but they're short and sweet and then you're rockin' again.

Good feature. Use and abuse.