YouTube Can Be Fun... Monty Python v Star Wars

All right, rumours are afoot that a new tale (Kitty Wittgenstein and the Irredeemable Heroine Addicts) is imminent. But, considering the source, one shouldn't hold one's breath.

During the meanwhile, here's Monty Python v Star Wars. Enjoy.

A Crack Commando Unit

More A Team movie news updates. We all know why the original attempts to make this movie were scuttled (oh, lycanthropy, have you ever scuttled a more promising movie project?)

But the latest news on the A Team movie is that Liam Neeson is in line to play the George Peppard role.

"Master Hannibal. What are midichlorians?"

If Only I'd Been Written By... Douglas Hofstadter

Another look at how my life would be different if only I'd had a different author. This time around, Mr Douglas Hofstadter.

According to Wikipedia,

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Of course, this kind of counterfactual translation from one author to another would be perfectly up Mr Hofstadter's literary alley, as even the most casual reader of his works would have noticed.

Hofstadter also invented Hofstadter's Law, which states:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Liebke should probably take Hofstadter's Law into account when he writes my novels.

Of course, if I'd been written by Douglas Hofstadter, here's what would happen:

1. I'd be non-fictional. Or, at the very worst, a fictional character in a non-fictional book. So that's a step up.
2. I'd be involved in actual matters philosophical. Y'know, as opposed to bizarre adventures about werewolves invading the Oscars or conspiracies of lefthanders or whatnot. People would probably be far less likely to try to kill me if Hofstadter wrote me.
3. The puns would be a lot better.

Recommended Reading

• Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - as alluded to in the Wikipedia quote above, the quintessential Hofstadter. It ties together three separate geniuses in three separate fields (Kurt Godel, mathematician, M C Escher, artist and Johann Sebastian Bach, composer) on a variety of levels, while simultaneously exploring the foundations and limits of consciousness
• Metamagical Themas - my favourite Hofstadter book. When he took over Martin Garnder's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, Hofstadter renamed it with the anagramatic title Metamagical Themas. This book is a collection of those columns, covering topics as diverse as nuclear proliferation, a reverse Turing Test and the game of Nomic, a game in which alteration of the rules of the game are a fundamental part of the gameplay (at least, until the rules are changed so they're not)
• Le Ton Beau de Marot - a study of the limits and beauty of translation, as Hofstadter examines, via translations of Ma mignonne, a short poem by French poet Clement Marot, exactly what it means to 'translate'. In the process, he diverges into areas such as artificial intelligence, communication and the extent to which medium and message is intertwined. 

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Related Links

• Douglas Hofstadter's Wikipedia Page
• Douglas Hofstadter's University Page
• Reviews of 'Reviews of This Book'

YouTube Can Be Fun... Bonnie Tyler Interpreted Literally

Liebke once claimed (presumably in jest, although with him one can never be sure) in a 'review' of Tal Bachman's She's So High that he hoped to one day

"... see the scourge of metaphor completely removed from all art."

Here's a glimpse into such a world - the literal version of Bonnie Tyler's music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart:



Funnier than I'd have thought. Maybe Liebke's onto something, as unlikely as that might seem

Nine Hundred And Ninety-Six Short

Y'know, it is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This cliche once inspired the following observation from Liebke in a novel that (shamefully) failed to feature me:

"By my reckoning, if a picture paints a thousand words, then we could probably replace most art galleries with a very small set of books in the corner. Which would free up a lot of space that I could rent out at inflated prices. You know, due to their proximity to great works of art."

All somewhat droll and amusing, I suppose, if you like that kind of thing.

But here's a picture that, rather than a thousand words, warrants only four (two of which are hyphenated): "Pillow-fighting, bikini-wearing Princess Leias"


(image from Eloketh's flickr page, click image for full size)

I, for one, am sufficiently dumbstruck by the image that the remaining 996 words totally elude me. Feel free to help me out.

Blog Posts I Enjoyed... Time Travel via Electronic Literature

Okay. If you've been paying any kind of attention to this site over the past year or so, you know I've just had a time-travel based kind of adventure. Not that I actually travelled through time (apart from the tedious 1 hr/hr standard forward rate), but there was certainly enough time stream manipulation and reality modification to qualify.

If, for some reason, you're looking to have a similar kind of adventure, then I heartily recommend this 2007 post on Writer Response Theory as a starting point. The post discusses Time Travel via Electronic Literature and links through to a number of time travel literary hypertexts and interactive fiction. Go visit. Have your own adventure. I'll be here when you get back. We'll bond.

KW 2 Commentary - Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve - the final chapter - was written in a mad frenzy during the last week of December, 2008. I just scraped it in, penning the final section on the afternoon of New Year's Eve. Luckily, by this stage, it was just a matter of working through the checklist of answers until we got to the end. The only real problem was solving everything in the space remaining. Despite a wordier-than-I'd-like final bit, I just about managed it.

The only new thing I came up with as I wrote this chapter was the idea that The Man In The Hat could be a mutated Platypus Man. Which would explain why KW didn't recognise him until after their little chronodip.

And, this quote:

“I think you’ll find that, even if things are confusing, happening as they did over varying timelines with varying histories and various states of handedness, it all makes sense if you think about it hard enough.”

was pretty much my way of saying, I don't have time or the exposition-inclination to spell out every little step over multiple different timelines, but, heck, if it doesn't quite all add up, it's gone awfully close, hasn't it?

Of course, there were other ramifications of KW's little dip in the chronopool. I'll get to them in future stories.

All in all, I was reasonably happy with the way the sequel turned out. In true sequel fashion, I'm not sure it quite matched the first story. It was certainly more sci-fi heavy, which is perhaps not to the taste of some of the reader who enjoyed the simpler adventure of the first story. But there were lots of good ideas in there (and maybe a few that didn't quite work). If nothing else, writing the sequel taught me something about, well, how hard it is to write decent sequels.

Probably not going to stop me from going for a trilogy, however.

REWRITE NOTES

Are you mad, it's over! No more rewrites. It is what it is.