Google Augmented Reality Glasses

Have you seen these? This is insane! These glasses are both awesome and terrifying at the same time.

Check them out for yourself.

I wonder if his loft has a map…

The streamlining of random questions/tasks one will have instant visual aid in answering/solving will be really, really neat. However this really kicks the end of privacy argument up a few notches.

Imagine it.

“Where is John?”

….locating John…..

John’s current location is his apartment bathroom.

“John, Taco Bell and Jameson shots don’t mix.”

Which John remembers to take off his glasses and feels like he can’t go to the bathroom without the world intruding.

To put my point in more context, I have a Blackberry that I rarely use except for texting. It is almost three years old and was built for the Edge network. Maybe it is my anti-social curmudgeonly outlook on life, but I don’t want to be that connected. Having information that readily available would be nice but at the same time it might be too much.

Then again the ease in which knowledge is placed at ones eyelids has the vast potential for awesome. Hands off, borderline instantaneous information could be so amazingly useful I can barely wrap my head around the applications.

Mark my words, the next step will be implants.

 

Not So Much Progress

Well, I did finish one story but not the meaty story, weekend-writing-goal-fail. I got wrapped up in the first story. It passed with fiancé with relatively little complaint or issue, which is a first. She did have a comment about it not feeling fresh, having done some reflecting I agree – she isn’t a science fiction fan either, color me impressed. I’ve spent some time thinking about how to more explicitly present some elements that I implicitly had woven in. Perhaps I thought I was being clever by being oblique or maybe it was a rookie mistake, I don’t know, I’m still learning. I feel by making the sublte elements more visible I can give the story some mojo, a little more oomph.

Reordering some of the events presented clarity to the evolution of the story. I think in a very short time the story has come a long way, almost unrecognizable from the first draft. I think this short story is stronger, unique, but not different enough to feel weird or terribly unfamiliar.

I’d like to think this story is salable but it ultimately isn’t up to me. Hopefully the untold of hours of slaving in the word mines will start to pay off soon. I still haven’t broken the 1 million word mark but I am pretty close. If you aren’t familiar with the 1 million word rule, it takes that many words to jump the novice fence and into the money making writer club. I don’t know how true that is, I suppose time will tell. I’d like to think every wade through the crap-filled novice river means I am that much closer to catching a keeper and feeding my family, aka student loans – they have hungry mouths.

After reading Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith, I learned some nifty tricks/ideas on how to write a marketable story. One chapter in particular that struck home was the insights into flashbacks. Essentially keep flashbacks short and sweet, or make a chapter. Don’t make this entire weird dialogue in the middle of a moving story where the reader finds themselves magically whisked away, it breaks that magical fantasy land and gets confusing.

Yeah, I’m guilty of that.

I did start editing the meaty story, but I didn’t finish. I ended up cutting the 15k words down to 7k. Cutting flashbacks and streamlining some events really made the difference. I suppose that is the magic of editing. Take 15k words of meh and turning it into 7k words of gold. Still plenty of work left to do, but generally that is where I left things before jumping back into the first story. I need to get that beast slain.

So my new goal is a recycled old goal; finish the second story by this weekend.

What about you penmonkeys, what are your goals?

 

 

Worst Science Fiction Movie Ever

Over at io9 the folks are doing a March Madness bracket on the worst science fiction movies ever. I suggest you head on over to io9 and put your vote in. Some movies are so amazingly pinned together that it is hard to measure how much they sucked because the movie titles are measurements of suck themselves.

Example.

Waterworld v Batman and Robin

How do you pick between those two?  I would reason that Batman and Robin was 3 Waterworlds. Then again I could argue that Waterworld was 3 Batman and Robin. I guess there is a 1:1 ratio there so the pairing makes sense.

I picked Batman and Robin because of the Bat-nipples.

 

GO HERE AND VOTE!!!

 

 

Pretty Much

The real reason the literary snobs turn their noses up at Science Fiction!

I Was Kidding……

So remember my post about the all purpose zombie tool? Well somebody decided to actually make and market one.

Time to break that piggy bank open and squee with nerdy glee.

It is called the The DoubleStar Zombie-X AK-47 and it means serious business ( *insert drum rift*).

AK47 + Chainsaw =

Of course if you are a manly lumberjack that oozes masculinity this can be used to defend yourself from Gentle Ben and hippies. You know, for the kids.

 

The DoubleStar Zombie-X AK-47 is a weapon specially customized to battle zombie hordes by attaching a battery-charged chainsaw to the end of the barrel, as well as a EOTech Zombie Stopper XPS2-Z Holographic Sight which puts a biohazard symbol on your target instead of the classic red dot. DoubleStar hasn’t announced when or if this will go on sale, but its less fancy DSC Zombie Slayer predecessor sells for $1,249.99, so the Zombie-X is likely to be a bit pricier.

I particularly like the holographic sight side mounted, so you can shoot zombies with style.

Source.

Lock-Out Trailer

I passed over this trailer a couple of times before finally just clicking on it. Boy am I glad I did, this movie (or at least Guy Pearce’s character) looks interesting.

1) It takes place in space. If you didn’t know I am a Science Fiction fan. Lets hope they get physics right.

2) The dialogue sounds interesting, even if a little juvenile. Apparently the guy’s wife takes coupons, who knew?

3) This is the most important, it has Satan in it. Lets see if he un-pimps zhe ride.

 

*For those who don’t get #3, here you go:

Science, It Can Do That

A Chinese furniture worker accidentally severed his fingertip.  So what did he do? He flipped the world the bird and went and saw some doctors that said something in Chinese in the ballpark of, “Dude, fuck that. We can grow that back. We got this new way of growing fingertips back, we give your stomach a pig tail and stitch them together. How does that sound?”

“That sounds horrible.”

The doctor shrugged, “We can attach it to your penis.”

“Stomach sounds good.”

In which the man-made a facial expression to the effect of:

and then the doctor said, “I’m super serious.”

So what happened? Well…. Look for yourself.

Read the entire article here.

More Robots

So here is more evidence that some giant spider robot brain is controlling engineers and general crazy people into making more of our future robotic overlords.

What is worse than giant robot spiders? A robot designed after a dinosaur snake.

Yes.

You read that right.

I just used the words robot, dinosaur, and snake in the same sentence. To add that extra flavor of terror to your soul, look at the people compared to the size of the snake.

The snake is called Titanboa, a prehistoric snake found in Columbia a little while back. Apparently it was nearly 2 tons and 45 feet long.

Now there is a robot version, one impervious to fire, bullets, and Jennifer Lopez.

RIP Steve Irwin.

Also, here is a robot controlling a human arm with electrodes.

Apparently robots are teaching humans to do things by shocking the stuffing out of them. If robots had a sense of humor and not a cold lifeless death-centric view of world domination, imagine driving down the street and your car shocking your ass and you start stabbing your face with car keys, just to tickle your car’s transistors. People, this is our future, keep a shotgun handy.

On the plus side, the next time you are driving through Wal-Mart and almost get hit by a car crossing the parking lot the wrong way, you can blame the robots for punching the driver in the face.

 

 

 

 

Spider Robots

So part of my mission in life is to expose the robot apocalypse as it unfolds. I have posted in the past about some human replacing robotic advancements, but now I want to show you a few things that are both awesome but ultimately irrefutable evidence that we are all going to die. To add insult to injury, people are designing our future overlords as spiders.

But wait! There is more. They come in a compliment of different sizes.

We have the pants soiling Godzilla sized spiders.

A beast called La Princesse. This cute gal has scuttled across St. Petersburg, Liverpool, and Yokohama.

Imagine if you will, you are casually strolling down Water Street in Liverpool, England. You look up at a building and see this,

And you realize that regardless of the size, a spider (robotic or not) can make you scream like a little girl. But a gigantic building scaling spider made your ass fall completely off. That is right, your ass just fell off. Now what?

Then to claim your trash ridden rump for unknown spider robot experiments, this little guy picks your ass up and scurries off down a drain pipe to some massive robot spider nest where they do horrible things to fallen off asses, you see this guy.

And your head explodes. In which more little robot spiders come out and collect the brain matter for some tremendous spider robot brain.

You heard it here first.

 

 

To read more about La Princesse, check here.

 

To read more about the tiny robots and what they are actually used for, click here.

 

 

Completed

I completed my short story, queue celebratory music.

*Dances*

Why aren’t you dancing? Start dancing, it is a happy time.

*Dances harder*

DANCE FOR ME!

No? Okay..

Fair enough. Lets move past this, pretend this ugly moment didn’t happen. Not me freaking out on you for your lack of celebration, but my horrendous dancing skills. The pumps and spangles were too much I think.

/red face.

Alright, moving on.

Violence Breeds Violence, Repression Breeds Retaliation is a done deal. I have edited and find it fluid and enjoyable. Next step is to let my editor (fiancé) rip it into pieces and then for me to put it back together. Then I will release it to beta readers and get some feedback. Do some tweaking here, some finagling there and BOOM! Story is ready to be shipped off to be weighed and judged in Writers of the Future.

It feels nice completing a story. Although calling it a short story is a stretch, it is over ten thousand words.

I have a few other stories to work on. I’d give you details on them, but I don’t want to until I am done writing them. Here is a general overview though.

• Another story set in my manuscripts world just like VBV,RBR is.
• Fantasy book project set in some mountains, with a goat and shenanigans.
• Fantasy series with a friend (super-duper secret stuff).
• A fun little science fiction story in which I blow up physics.
• Western with a fun little twist.
• Science fiction in which humans are enslaved, but why is the kicker. (Not Battlefield Earth).

There is more, but these are the stories that I plan on finishing by next Summer. That sounds like a long time, but it isn’t. I have more ideas and stories I want to write than I have time.

Anyhow, time to watch The Walking Dead and get ready for bed.

Hope you all had a good weekend.