Weekend Thread

by publius

A couple of quick notes for your weekend enjoyment.

1 - Brien Jackson from Below the Fold was kind enough to contact me a while back about doing an email interview, which you can see here. It extends over several days, so some of my answers were from the convention itself.

2 - Last night, the local establishment I patronized had an old-old-old-school Journey arcade game (that you could play for free!). The premise is that Journey's musical instruments have all been stolen and scattered to various parts of outer space. Your job is to control the band members (who all have paper cut-out Journey heads, sort of like South Park) and get the instruments back. Naturally, I took pictures (more below the jump).

Comments

[Walker]

From Wikipedia:

In the "Connect" section of the June 2007 issue of Game Informer magazine, Journey was number 9 on the "Top 10 Worst Licensed Game Ideas (ever)".

[liberal japonicus]

Did you have the urge to flick a lighter and hold it up over your head when you played?

[publius]

it was a truly wretched game to play -- Q-Bert (which I also played) was much better

[Incertus]

I remember that game. It was so bad that local arcades wouldn't get the machine. The only place I remember seeing it was in the atrium of a Howard's, which was like a low-rent Woolworth's in my town. Horrible.

[alexaloysius]

where can one play this video game?

[Incertus]

This isn't video-game related, but the thread is posted under politics, so I feel (somewhat) justified. A colleague of mine, Professor Jane Caputi, at Florida Atlantic University, has been putting together a project she entitled "Political Circus." It's basically a collection of smear merchandise from the last year or so--bumper stickers, quotes, t-shirts, etc.--focused largely on Clinton and Obama, with a handful of McCain items as well. It opened last night, and I took a bunch of pictures. Some of them will be familiar to people who've been paying attention, and some will be new (and shocking, if you're anything like me). Anyway, I have three of images up at the link there, and a link to the flickr set with about 27 total.

[MobiusKlein]

I believe in the 3rd circle of hell.

[joel hanes]

Don't Stop Believing"

[OCSteve]

Reminds me of John Scalzi.

I assume that anyone who likes science fiction already reads Whatever.

[gwangung]

Reminds me of John Scalzi.

Hee hee hee....

[Halteclere]

In the early '80's my father was a part owner of an arcade. When the arcade fad crashed (1984?), most of the games were moved to the basement of our house for storage. The games we had were:

King Kong,
Galaga,
Turbo (the sit-down one),
Black Hole pinball (which I still have),
Wizard of War,
Tempest,
Dig-Dug (absolute worst of the lot),
Frogger,
Ms. Packman (sit-down, table top one),
and Omaga Race

Family gatherings such as Christmas and Thanksgiving were always a hit because the kids would disappear down stairs, never to be seen from again, and the adults could actually carry on adult conversations without being bothered!

Anyway, One Saturday when I was in Junior high I spent morning to evening strait playing Tempest. With this game you were able to resume play if you started a new game within 10 seconds of the old game ending (we had the games set so that no money was needed to play). I had gone farther than I had ever before, and kept beginning a new game over, and over, and over. Before I knew it, it was time for dinner then bed, and I hadn't done a damn thing all day except play that stupid game.

After that I played the games very little, and eventually they were sold and the proceeds divided among the arcade investors. Since then I have had no desire to play video games of any kind, even the graphically fantastic games of today. I wasted a very precious Saturday on them (I treated like gold weekends when school was in session), and have never had the enthusiasm to pick up a joystick since.

[JakeB]

Reminds me, OCSteve. Have you read Robert Buettner's _Orphan_ books? And I see Mark L. Van Name has a new book out. I read the first few pages and realized that Lobo's manner of expressing himself reminds me a little of Gary when he seems particularly grumpy.

[OCSteve]

Have you read Robert Buettner's _Orphan_ books?

On my (long) list.

I read the first few pages and realized that Lobo's manner of expressing himself reminds me a little of Gary when he seems particularly grumpy.

Wait – was that a recommendation?!?

;)

[hf]

Google is your friend. I have never tried the ROM or the emulator and cannot endorse either.

[Gary Farber]

Tempest = good.

"...reminds me a little of Gary when he seems particularly grumpy."

You've never seen me when I'm really grumpy.

I would't be polite.

Okay, there was that one time with DaveC. But I still held back.

Otherwise, I'm occasionally tempted to go for a full-grump persona online, but I wouldn't really like myself in the morning.

[rdldot]

Incidentally, open thread-wise, CSpan has a Lincoln talk with John Hope Franklin on now that is very interesting, in case anyone cares.

[Prodigal]

I used to enjoy playing that game, back in the day.

I picked up their latest album today, which has one disc of new music, and one of them performing classic hits with the new lead singer. There's some really sharp musicianship going on there.

[Gary Farber]

I forget which thread Hartmut was talking about Lem's opinion of science fiction, and expressed his own general lack of knowledge (as I took it, sorry), but here's a pretty good list of pretty good sf books of the last twenty years, by almost any standard I respect.

Anyone is invited to read most of them, and then come back and explain that science fiction writers can't write well.

[liberal japonicus]

Gary, that thread is here. I'm not sure if his assertion was as strong as you make it out to be, but ymwv, I'm sure.

Hartmut seems to know some European science fiction writers and the list(s) you link to seem to be only writers writing in English (the only one I saw who did not write in English was Haruki Murakami, who I highly recommend). If hartmut does come back, I'd ask him to recommend some folks whose originals were not in English and who may or may not have been translated.

[Gary Farber]

"I'm not sure if his assertion was as strong as you make it out to be, but ymwv, I'm sure."

Hartmut: "My own experience with SF lets me believe that there is a lot of truth to that one-liner (It's not a quote)."

The one-liner of Stanislaw Lem's being "Those that have the right ideas can't write and those that can write have no idea," which is a flat absolute, and which Hartmut says he believes "there is a lot of truth to."

Yeah, that seems pretty strong to me.

Thanks for reminding me where the thread was.

[Gary Farber]

"If hartmut does come back, I'd ask him to recommend some folks whose originals were not in English and who may or may not have been translated."

Would that be recommendations of sf with no ideas, or of stuff that's badly written?

[liberal japonicus]

Well, I hope I am not condescending (because Hartmut's English is pretty phenomenal, I think), but I tend to automatically assume that if someone is a non-native speaker and they write something that seems overly strong, they weren't doing that intentionally. YMMV

As for recommendations, I meant science fiction that was originally not in English. Let me plug a book that a friend of mine co-edited that is an anthology of Japanese science fiction if anyone is interested.

[Hartmut]

That one-liner is mine, summing up what I think Lem essentially said (using about a 1000 pages in 1977). What comes closest to him having said that in short is his comment on H.W.Franke's Der Orchideenkäfig. My knowledge of newer SF is indeed limited (although it includes some Gibson*).
Maybe all those awful SF authors migrated to Fantasy in the meantime ;-)
Seriously, if one (as Lem clearly did) considers the mere entertainment value as irrelevant, the general judgement will of course become much harsher. I don't think he would have liked the Hitchhiker, although he and Adams would have got along quite well, I presume (with Asimov he actually made clear that he liked the thinker but not the writer, his view of Bradbury was mixed***).

Would that be recommendations of sf with no ideas, or of stuff that's badly written?
Would you like both combined? ;-)
I would recommend H.W.Franke's short stories (but I doubt that there is an English translation available). Keep away from his novels though! The Perry Rhodan dime novels (at least the older ones) are very entertaining, as are the original Raumpatrouille Orion novels by Hans Kneifel (keep away from the later ones written by other authors).
One unqualified recommendation would be Gisbert Haefs but it would require high German skills (his peculiar style is untranslatable, I think, even for himself who is one of the best German literary translators alive).

*Turtledove is a bit difficult to put in any genre. Some of his alternative history** could qualify as SF but the SF elements are not the main part.
**the dozen books I have read of him until now fall into that category.
***he spoke highly of some stories but criticized him for too much hack writing (well, the same could be said about Poe)