I’m way too excited about this. To be honest I never believed this could be filmed and keep even ten percent of what was in the book, but after seeing V for Vendetta a few years back, which managed to work as a movie while keeping the important parts of Moore’s story intact (even if Moore didn’t like it himself), I have good hopes for Watchmen.
And you?
(Alternative title: Martin shows his ignorance again.)
James Nicoll resurrects a piece of interesting US medical history for the benefit of a silly Livejournal poll, asking his readers their opinion of the Flexner report:
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool. Universities had begun opening and expanding female admissions as part of women’s and co-educational facilities only in the mid-to-latter part of the 19th century with the founding of co-educational Oberlin College in 1833 and private colleges such as Vassar College and Pembroke College.
0wen Hatherley commenting on a half forgotten 1930ties cartoonist, Osbert Lancaster, a fellow with the same sort of progression as Betjeman in moving from Modernist to nostalgic defender of dear old England:
The 1930s work, from Pillar to Post and elsewhere, is still excellent – a precise, droll anatomisation of English building styles, with the admirable aim of making the English actually think about their environment for once. The absurdities of each idiom are neatly pricked, from the ‘Stockbroker Tudor’ pile with its streamline moderne car, glamour girl and adjacent pylon (which, amongst other things reveals just how old postmodernism is); to the ‘Functional Modern’ interior where the Bauhaus aesthete (apparently based on Herbert Read) sits bow-legged on an Aalto stool, oblivious to the fact that his sun-window gives onto pissing rain rather than light-air-openness.
The later cartoons – for the likes of the Daily Express or Anthony Powell’s epics of bourgeois manners, or for the theatre – still have a certain seedy charm, but are far less interesting. The architectural observations stay sharp, but elsewhere it all gets rather flabby. The lurid sexuality which pervades the prurient sketches of ‘permissiveness’ – a skirt never quite covers an arse, breasts always seem to be forcing themselves out of dresses – offers a few moments of interest, although they pale in comparison with the teeming, obsessive visions of Ronald Searle, whose angular lines the 1950s- works superficially resemble – and who is vastly more deserving of the exhibition’s throwing around of the term ‘genius’.
(I hadn’t heard of Lancaster before, but it’ll probably turn out that S. had a pile of his books but threw them out before moving house.)
Questionable Content explains the drawbacks of sentient computers. (You may also want to see this and this to get the full story.
In a completely unrelated story, Chrome, Google’s spiffy new browser has a socalled incognito mode: “For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays, Google Chrome offers the incognito browsing mode. Webpages that you open and files downloaded while you are incognito won’t be logged in your browsing and download histories; all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window. You can browse normally and in incognito mode at the same time by using separate windows.”
An incognito mode to plan surprises. Suuure. Better make sure to wipe the keyboard and screen as well after you’ve “planned”your “surprise”.
Even if he is “like Sims with the funny taken out and replaced with Swamp Thing obsession and random musings on creepy comic shop motards“.
Switching from the War for South Ossetia to a slightly less depressing subject, here’s Warren Ellis on the slow death of the science fiction magazine:
Don’t be daft. Of course print isn’t dead. I make a reasonable living off it. Over in the world of words-and-pictures, I can write 44 pages that do little more than fetishise the English longbow and make a profit. The peculiarities of distributing comics through a firm-sale system — one that is actually open to sf magazines, too, though I don’t doubt the process is difficult for them — have kept the Anglophone medium alive in all its weird breadth for almost thirty years now. Additional distribution systems are of course required, because that market is dependent on new stories opening faster than old stores die, and that’s not a trick that’s yet been pulled off to anyone’s satisfaction. And, you know, I could list a dozen other things wrong with it. And have. But when everyone else is muttering that Print Is Dead, comics continues to quietly move millions of units a month. Last month, I wrote a comic that did in excess of 100,000 copies on firm sale.
[…]
All of which is to say: when I run the sf magazine figures, I’m not saying that Print Is Dead. I’m not even saying that No-One Wants Short Fiction. I’m saying, I’m afraid, that something is wrong with those magazines. Not even, necessarily, with the content. That’s entirely subjective. The objective view seems to me to be inescapable: the packaging and marketing just isn’t working. And I think it’s
probably too late for them now.
I know why the magazines are dying: because they’re incredibly dull and have been for decades while they have ceased to be the centre of the genre for even longer. I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read, at first throught the local library and later the local second hand bookshop and even the specialised science fiction bookshop, but it was books I read, not magazines. There were no sf magazines
were I grew up, just science fiction books talking about them in awe so imagine my disappointment when I got my hands on my first ever sf magazine and it was this dull, grey, tiny wodge of newsprint. There was no need for the stories to be crap, as the magazine itself had already turned me off, looking like nothing so much as some granny orientated low rent Reader’s Digest clone.
To be honest, in my occasional samplings of the socalled big three science fiction magazines, — Analog, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Asimov — I’ve never been particularly impressed by the quality of either the stories or the editorial content. To read the best short story science fiction you don’t need the magazines, you just need to read one or more of the various Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. If these magazines die, I won’t mourn them.