Hermenautic Circle blog

(from “Nightmare World” in Weird Tales of the Future #3, by Basil Wolverton, 1952)

Here's a Golden Era starlet in an intimate moment with Tin Tan, the one and only -- if only in piñata form. It's last week. We're on a race up to the moutains on the western flanks of the Distrito Federal, headed to a costume party at a friend's house in tiny San Lorenzo Acopilco, a pueblito in the Cuajimalpa borough just before the border with the Edomex.

Yes, it's very, very cold up there. I was unprepared, in shock for a bit; spent about two hours snuggling with myself on a couch, shivering and cursing my freezing toes, before I could get up a convivir. "You should come in February, it snows up here."

We went down the lane to check out the church, where they were having their big fiesta for San Juditas. Gifts of atole and sweet bread. It felt like a special night, on the cusp of Muertos and Halloween. The orange Harvest full moon.

An interesting and gruesome story of a lampshade made of human skin.

• RT @YoungAmerican S.O. contributor Todd Levin on Jordan, Jesse, Go http://bit.ly/aSEVSe #
• Via @nprnews: Sci-Fi’s Cory Doctorow Separates Self-Publishing Fact From Fiction | http://t.co/zy84Q3t #
• Stuff found in used books, collected and blogged: http://www.forgottenbookmarks.com/ #
• 50 most hated characters in literary history. http://bit.ly/cycO4k #
• Disturbing, delightful and very, very short: Fiction in 25 words or fewer – Boing Boing http://t.co/aZOOuRN #
• Cool video of used-book domino stunt – Boing Boing http://t.co/ZIHzjAK #
• RT @YoungAmerican Great interview with William Gibson, author of “Zero History (and S.O. contributor!) http://bit.ly/byiy65 #
• Vintage rejection form. Fantastic. http://tumblr.com/xr4n54wyi #
• HOWTO use Google AdWords to prototype and test a book title – Boing Boing http://t.co/upOq6NC #

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[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].

I love this story: the polished rock walls of a Catholic church in northern Italy have been found to contain the skull of a dinosaur. "The rock contains what appears to be a horizontal section of a dinosaur’s skull," paleontologist Andrea Tintori explained to Discovery News. "The image looks like a CT scan, and clearly shows the cranium, the nasal cavities, and numerous teeth.”

The skull itself was hewn in two; "indeed," we read, "Tintori found a second section of the same skull in another slab nearby."

[Image: Photo courtesy of Andrea Tintori and Discovery News].

The rock itself—called Broccatello—comes from a fossil-rich quarry in southern Switzerland and dates back to the Jurassic. According to the book Fossil Crinoids, "The Broccatello (from brocade) was given its name by stone masons; this flaming, multicoloured 'marble' has been used in countless Italian and Swiss baroque and rococo churches"—implying, of course, that other fossil finds are waiting to be found in Alpine baroque churches. "In the quarries of Arzo, southern Switzerland," the book continues, "crinoids [the fossilized bodies of ancient marine organisms] account for up to half of the bulk of the Broccatello, which is usually a few metres thick."

In any case, to figure out exactly what kind of dinosaur it is, the rock slab might be removed from the church altogether for 3D imaging in a lab; a new piece of Broccatello rock, mined from southern Switzerland, could be use as its replacement.

The larger idea of discovering something historically new and even terrestrially unexpected in the rocks of a city, or in the walls of the buildings around you—as if the most important fossil site in current geology might someday be the rock walls of a ruined castle and not a cliff face or gorge—brings to mind recent books like Richard Fortey's fantastic Earth: An Intimate History, with its geological introduction to sites like Central Park, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, and the Geologic City Reports (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) by Friends of the Pleistocene. These latter research files present New York City through the lens of its lumpen underpinnings, focusing on bedrock, mineral veins, and salt, not the city's cultural districts or ethnic history.

But, of course, the H.P. Lovecraftian overtones of this story—a monstrous skull in a church wall—are too obvious not to mention: an easy scenario for imagining whole plots and storylines in which the ancient forms of an unknown species are discovered hidden in cathedral masonry, opening previously unimagined horizons of time and radically revising theories of the history of life on earth.

I just absolutely love the idea that a piece of architecture can become a site for paleontological research, framing an unlikely forensic study of the earth's biological past.

Pylon’s Gyrate album came out October 31, 1980. Here’s a live performance of “Recent Title” from a few months later.

Oliver Sacks is working on his backstroke. (Hat tip: Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

[Pop Matters:] Time travel: where, when, and why?

[OS:] I would go back 300 million years or so, for I have always longed to see the earth in its Carboniferous age, long before mammals evolved, or even flowering plants. The planet was the domain of gymnosperms, non-flowering plants, then. There were ferns and tree ferns, and giant Calamites—segmented relatives of today’s horsetails, ten- or 20-meters high. There were huge Lepidodendron, a meter and a half in diameter, related to today’s tiny club mosses. And there were cycads, very similar to those that survive today.

Blonde hairspray, Walgreens. (Boy did it smell foul.)

Trenchcoat, Steve’s.

Short-sleeved button-down and sweater vest, estate sale.

Snowy, née Ike from Dear Mrs. LaRue, Goodwill. Coloring doctored with an entire bottle of Krylon flat white spray paint, Hankins Hardware.

Not visible in photo, but vital:

Plus fours, actually Canadian wool army pants buttoned at the knee, army-navy store.

White socks, several-year-old brown unisex Fluevogs: model’s own.

I make a very worried Tintin. Clearly there were nefarious goings-on going on.

And finally: double Tintin, all the way. (What does it meeeeeeeeaaaaaaan?)

Oh, wow - it’s the Guitar Lessons poster all over again. I want to love this, but seriously, where are the female artists? Joan Jett? Madonna? Stevie Nicks?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1935928155

Tenpole Tudor’s Eddie, Old Bob, Dick and Gary album came out October 31, 1980. Here’s a TV performance of “Wunderbar” from that era.

Basement 5’s In Dub EP came out October 31, 1980. Here’s “Paranoia Claustrophobia Dub.”

The Smithereens’ “Girls About Town” EP came out October 31, 1980. Here’s the title track.

Some gremlins in the works at cruditas.com – seem to be taken care of, now looking for some medieval gremlin recipes.

“There’s probably exactly the same amount of talent out there but for the consumer it’s so much harder to pick through. I find it so daunting that I tend to shy away from the thousands of new bands you read about on Pitchfork every day and just end up listening to Revolver again.”

-

Lawrence Arabia, in “Come Back, “The Man”, All Is Forgiven!” (Mojo)

While I understand the point that Lawrence Arabia is making, the truth is that many people routinely skip the whole ‘see what’s on Pitchfork’ step and just listen to Revolver again. So the question is not only, “how do we choose what to listen to?” but also, “can we encourage people to explore new music?”

How Athol Fugard came to stop drinking.

… from your friends at Significant Objects.

PS: Speaking of Halloween, over at HiLobrow today, S.O.s Joshua Glenn reveals the secret of Boo Berry’s weird new skin flap.

Our humble Pop Pop, who sold shoes for a living, puttered in his garage, and had a smile and a kind word for everyone he encountered, would have been flabbergasted to get such a long and eloquent obituary in his hometown paper. But reporter Kate Linthicum recognized what the people who loved him already knew: Harry Cooper was a true American hero, and a model husband, father, grandfather and friend. We can all learn something from his example.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-harry-cooper-20101031,0,548…

As if we had not strained the voting and digestive calibre of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of ignorant foreigners, we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons. But we stood the former trial— solved it— and, though this is much harder, will, I doubt not, triumphantly solve this.”
—Walt Whitman, from “Christmas Garland in Prose & Verse” (1874)

For more, or less, see Democratic Vistas, preferably in the Ed Folsom edition published by University of Iowa Press. Do ya’ll think I’m being pique? Our Hero of American Studies, Alan Trachtenberg might think otherwise.

“By an extraordinary feat of scholarship and interpretation, Ed Folsom’s new edition of Democratic Vistas presents this difficult work, troubled yet ecstatic, as something of great significance to our own times. With its historical notes and annotated bibliography and the important new scholarship in the introduction, this edition offers both context and tools for analytical interpretation. Folsom has the courage and the scholarly wherewithal to pose the essay’s ringing affirmations of equality and freedom against its shocking failure even so much as to mention the nation’s black population, especially the masses of newly freed ex-slaves. The omission of African Americans from this otherwise eloquent screed on behalf of democracy by the nation’s ‘poet of democracy’ leaves a gaping hole. Scholars and other readers have typically closed their eyes to the implication of this absence, the unavoidable implication of racism; Folsom’s introduction now makes it impossible to ignore this negative moment within the agonized dialectic of Whitman’s thought. Forthright recognition of this deep failure, as Folsom lucidly and humanely shows, makes this work of the era of Reconstruction (also unmentioned by Whitman) all the more cogent and vital for readers today.”—Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University

I believe this, the single greatest musical scene in pre-World War II American cinema (from A Day At The Races (1937)), features, among others Walt Whitman wished would not vote, and whose suffrage he never endorsed, nor celebrated includes the members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra with Ivie Anderson on vocals; the Dandridge Sisters (Dorothy, Vivian and Etta Jones); Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers; and the awesome Troy Brown— ”320 pounds of fun”!

Also, speaking of black suffrage, our good friend, writer and filmmaker Dallas Penn is in Chocolate City this weekend; stay tuned for his triumphant return.— Caz Dolowicz

At the FT, Christopher Somerville on the bats of Petworth (site registration required).

Orange Juice recorded a Peel session broadcast October 30, 1980. Here’s “You Old Eccentric” from it.

I had more to say about Ted Chiang's collection than could fit in the column. I found myself writing a line that felt like a last line, even though I'd only discussed three of its eight stories. (I should note that Chiang's stories tend to be long.)

Chiang's book originally came out in 2002; since then, he's published a short story ("Exhalation") and two longer pieces ("The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" and "The Life Cycle of Software Objects"). I might still write about "Exhalation," which I listened to on the Star Ship Sofa podcast, and which is included in an ambitious and very satisfying SF anthology I plan to cover soon. I'm currently listening to "Merchant" as well (via SSS). "Lifecycle" was published as a book by Subterranean Press, which has also made the full text available online.

Microsoft’s Silverlight dream is over « Tim Anderson’s ITWriting.

In the early days of Silverlight, simply supporting Windows and Mac accounted for most of what people wanted from a cross-platform client. That is no longer the case.

Further, despite a few isolated wins, Silverlight has done nothing to dent the position of Adobe Flash as a cross-platform multimedia and now application runtime. …

Why has not Microsoft done more to support Silverlight? It does look as if reports of internal factions were correct. Why continue the uphill struggle with Silverlight, when a fast HTML 5 browser, in the form of IE9, meets many of the same needs and will work across the Apple and Google platforms without needing a non-standard runtime?

For my latest Astral Weeks column, I look at the fiction of Ted Chiang:

In a genre brimming with more-is-more-ists, Chiang is notable for his sparse publication history. The first story in this book [Stories of Your Life and Others] appeared in 1990 (remember Omni?), the last in 2002, with only three additional fictions appearing since then. In fact, he has more awards (including multiple Hugos and Nebulas) than published works, suggesting he's that rare writer who waits until a story reaches its ideal state before releasing it into the world. (Chiang's even rarer than that: He actually turned down a Hugo nomination for the final story in this volume, the polyphonic "Liking What You See: A Documentary" because he wasn't satisfied with how it came out.)

I was on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show this morning, talking about my contribution to the book Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. You can listen here! (Editor Sean Manning and novelist Sigrid Nuñez were also on.)

What's the real truth about the "cursed" speedway at Talladega? Terry Gilliam uncovers the truth in his spooky short film The Legend of Hallowdega, appearing online Halloween night. You can watch the trailer now, at the link. [Legend of Hallodega]

Drug smuggling civil war dolls x-rayed:

Two 150-year-old dolls have been x-rayed in a bid to discover if they were used by Confederate soldiers to smuggle medical supplies past Union blockades during the U.S. Civil War. It is thought the large dolls – Nina and Lucy Ann – had their hollowed out papier-mache heads stuffed with quinine or morphine for wounded and malaria-stricken Confederate troops.

The "cat scare" is a subcategory of the well-known "jump scare" in horror and science fiction, when our heroes are looking for the Big Bad but find a screaming kitty instead. Do you know where these cat scares come from?

It's Friday evening fun, trivia nerd style. Name the cat scares in this clip - put together by video intern John Siegel - and post more in comments just to make everything more cat-tastic. If you can post video of a good scare that involves other cute animals, bonus points!

This ant, preserved in amber 50 million years ago, is evidence that we may have dramatically misunderstood the environmental history of India.

Until recently, scientists believed that many of the plants and animals in the Indian subcontinent had evolved in isolation from other landmasses, during a period hundreds of thousands of years ago before India smashed into Asia. That crash created the Himalayas, and also - it was believed - brought India's unique set of plants and animals into first contact with those elsewhere in Asia and Europe. Now, however, it looks like "isolated" India actually contained a number of creatures and trees that existed elsewhere on the globe - including places like Australia and Mexico. It appears that India was once a tropical forest.

This has actually deepened the mystery of India's early biosphere, because it's unclear how the landmass acquired such diversity in isolation from other landmasses on the planet.

According to a summary of the study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The array of unique plant and animal species in India are thought to have evolved during the continent's 100 million year northward journey that ended with the massive collision that formed the Himalayas. Jes Rust and colleagues extracted more than 300 pounds of amber from 50 million-year-old deposits in western India, and identified a distinctive chemical signature that suggested the resin was produced by a globally widespread family of tropical trees. The researchers dissolved the amber with solvents and extracted entire preserved specimens of more than 700 ancient insects, arachnids, and crustaceans from more than 55 families, as well as abundant plant and fungal remains. The insects revealed unexpected geographic connections to contemporary species from Asia and Australia, and to ancient ancestors found as far away as Mexico and Central America. The study offers direct fossil evidence that Indian amber contains an early record of a tropical forest with diverse fauna, and that pre-contact India may not have been as biologically isolated as suspected, according to the authors.

Read the full scientific article via PNAS

Above, a shot of an installation by artist Pia Camil, who recently held a residency in an emtpy office space on the 12th floor of the Edificio Miguel E. Abed, on Eje Central in downtown Mexico City.  She hung out a window an enormously long red banner covered in the phrase 'PIA CAMIL FOR SALE.'

A few weeks ago, Camil invited guests up to the studio for a showing of new work and a live performance, with gallerist and musician Brett Schultz. During the set, as Camil pounded on a drum and wailed into a mic, she was connected to the banner hanging outside, tied to it like it was her cape. The sun was setting, it was a windy afternoon, and the banner floated and flapped into the sky over the traffic on Eje Central.

Needless to say, everyone in attendance sighed at some point and thought to themselves, 'Gosh, I love Mexico City.'

Listen to a sample of the performance here. Camil also plays in the local new-noise (or art-rock, or art-noise, or noise Mexicana?) band El Resplandor, which I've seen play a bunch now. Learn more about them here. It's a whole scene in D.F. suddenly, this sound. Who's next?

Here's an interview with Pia in Tomo. She's into "primitive futurism."

The io9 calendar for November science fiction bursts with unprecedented awesomeness. On your movie screens, there's Harry Potter and alien abductions. There's also new Stephen King and tons of author appearances and conventions. The future is here — be prepared!

As always, you can download the io9 calendar as a printable PDF here. And if you have any cool events for November's calendar, drop us a line at calendar@io9.com.

Amazing design and layout by Stephanie Fox, and research/reporting by Michael Ann Dobbs.

Just a quick reminder that next week is the io9 Book Club meeting, where we'll be talking about Catherynne N. Valente's novel Palimpsest. What is this crazy io9 Book Club? Let me tell you about it.

For those unfamiliar with the io9 book club, here's how it works: You read the book. We create a special book club post on io9 when the meeting is in session (it starts Tuesday the 2nd), and everybody talks about the book in comments for a few days. Later that week, we hope that Valente will join us, so you can ask her burning questions you have about the book (and about her new novel, which just came out!).

[Image: A fenced-off, back alley security stair in Toronto, via Google Street View; view larger].

A link on Twitter from Andrew Lovett-Barron led me to this otherwise innocuous fenced-in back alley staircase in Toronto, pictured here via Google Street View (view larger).

There's something oddly compelling about this minor architecture of out-of-place private access—as if implying that buildings could begin blocks and blocks away from where they actually rest in urban space, splayed out into the neighborhoods around them like chain-linked octopi, reaching out with stairways, doors, and catwalks across the roofs and back streets of the city. A Home Depot vernacular stretched to Berlin Wall-like proportions.

You don't like your address, you simply hurl a chain-linked access stair up over and out to whatever street you prefer—and you enter there, turning a key and stepping into a steel maze of steps and ladders, cantilevered walkways and pillared decks. Fifteen minutes later, passing over and beneath ribbons of other parallel geographies, looping down alleys and nesting briefly on thin platforms in the canopies of trees, walking alone in this isolated cocoon like a private enclave in the city, you're home.

It's Friday, which means we could all use a touch of cosmic amazement to kick-start our work-numbed souls. Cue NASA's fantastic art showing the star-making machinery at the core of the galaxy. Even more of it below.

This image, which appeared as NASA's Image of the Day the other day, is not actually a photograph of the Arches star cluster, just to be clear. But it is an artist's impression, based on new infrared impressions from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes, which managed to pierce the dusty core of our galaxy and capture images of this luminous cluster of about 2,000 stars. This is the densest known gathering of young stars in our galaxy. And here's the even more majestic version:

Cathy La Creme’s parody of John Cooper Clarke, “I Married a Cult Figure from Salford,” came out October 29, 1980.

Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:

Carl: They’re everywhere, in every major city and on its outskirts, towering over us and yet barely considered – residential skyscrapers full of lower-income apartments, whole vertical suburbs. In “Out My Window,” National Film Board director Katerina Cizek (a friend of Back to the World’s), has created a beautiful, meditative look at these places and the people who live there, in cities around the world. Much of it is shot in innovative, 360-degree video and viewable in a format that really gives meaning to interactivity. Prepare to spend some time exploring it.

Margaux: A video work right up there with Michael Jackson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Trisha Brown.

Check out the Bechdel Test Movie List. It’s a list of movies that meet the humble requirements below (thanks to Duane Wall):

1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man

Chris: Dan Nadel interviews Daniel Clowes:

Clowes told a story how the first panel he was ever on was comprised of him, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Hernandez, Peter Bagge and Burne Hogarth. Hogarth spent the entire panel yelling at the independent cartoonists on the panel, saying they were horrible artists.

“He spent almost an entire hour saying how we were the worst artists who ever lived,” recalled Clowes. “It was an audience full of young, hipster kids who wanted to see Robert Crumb and Crumb was not saying a word because Hogarth was rambling on. People started yelling out, ‘Shut up, old man!’ and finally Crumb just slowly leaned back in his chair and did a pratfall. Hogarth didn’t miss a beat, though, he just kept on going. I literally did not say a word on that panel.”

Kate Beaton does Dracula. (“We would also like to vote and own property.”)

Larry Levan remixes “C is for Cookie.”

And this tabby will see you in hell.

New Zealand, home to Weta Workshop, is a fantasy/scifi concept art powerhouse. And now, art book White Cloud Worlds showcases all the ways New Zealand artists have brought fantasies to life. We've got a gallery.

The anthology's editors introduce the book:

White Cloud Worlds is a never-before seen collection of science fiction and fantasy artwork from New Zealand, 'The Land of the Long White Cloud'.

Embark upon a journey of exploration into a wealth of visually rich worlds and imaginings, conjured to life by 27 established and emerging artists.

The artists are profiled with a selection of their art accompanied by text written in their own unique voice, sharing their origins, inspirations and a rare glimpse into how they work.

White Cloud Worlds includes written contributions from some of the world's most celebrated leaders in the fields of science fiction and fantasy art, such as Guillermo Del Toro, Richard Taylor, Alan Lee and John Howe.

The book will be available in early November, and you can learn more about the artists and where to get the book on the book website here.

By Greg Broadmore
By Aaron Beck
By Ben Wooten
By Ben Wooten
By The Pict
By Jeremy Bennett
By Gus Hunter

A citation analysis of The New York Times archives reveals that they’re Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger.

The screenplay to the upcoming Deadpool movie leaked online yesterday, and we had a chance to read it. Good news: It's very close to the original comic book in tone and content. Bad news: it wouldn't make a great movie.

Spoilers ahead...

So the script popped up online yesterday at I Heart Chaos, although it seems to have been taken down now. We have no idea whether it's genuine or not, but it certainly appears to be the real thing. It's credited to Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and it's a draft dated from last April — so even if this is the real thing, it's probably been rewritten since then.

As we said earlier, this is pretty close to the original comics, including all the original supporting characters, the scarred face, the costume, the katanas, and the fourth-wall-breaking. If the movie actually gets made according to this script, the legion of Deadpool fans will be in ecstasy.

At the same time, I don't know if a movie based on this script would get a mass audience. It's clearly an R-rated movie, but it's also got a sensibility that's mostly going to appeal to 14-year-old boys. In other words, it could fall into the same trap that doomed Kick-Ass. And indeed, if you've seen the spate of other recent ultra-violent, hyper-stylized comic book movies, including The Losers, Kick-Ass, RED, Wanted, etc., then you've already seen this movie, except for the Deadpool-specific stuff and some pretty demented humor. There are the bullets with things written on them, there are mid-air slowed-down gags that will require tons of CG, etc.

The script is chock full of descriptions for some incredibly complicated action sequences and individual shots — all of which are supposed to be featured in slow-mo. This would be one of those movies which, if you ran all the slow-mo stuff at normal speed, the movie would be half an hour long. The slow-mo is crucial to a lot of the film's best gags, and it's also key to Deadpool's fourth-wall-breaking, as in this one hilarious gag from the opening sequence:

HE TURNS HIS HEAD TO CAMERA FOR THE FIRST TIME, BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL, THE ONLY THING IN THE SCENE THAT'S MOVING:

DEADPOOL shit. Did I leave the stove on?

But you might find yourself getting a bit tired of slow-mo after about halfway through the film.

Like I said, the film's humor is a slightly more skewed and twisted than what you've seen in the other comic-book action-comedies that have come out lately. There's lots of meta-humor, including a ton of jokes about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie where Ryan Reynolds played a poor excuse for Deadpool. Including this bit:

INT. APARTMENT - DAY - PAST

MATCH CUT TO:

...a CLOSE-UP of a Deadpool ACTION FIGURE from 'Wolverine Origins.' Mouth sewn shut. Blades implanted into the wrists. In the exact same POSE we just saw the real Deadpool.

WADE (0.S.) A little piece of me curled up and died the day this came out.

We PULL OUT to reveal that Wade is referring NOT to the action figure, but to WHAMl'S 'Music From the Edge of Heaven' LP, which he is now holding.

He tosses the LP into a near-full TRASH CAN, right on TOP of the Deadpool action figure.

There's also a running gag where Deadpool staples a cut-out magazine photo of Hugh Jackman's face over his hideously scarred face when he goes out in public.

There are tons of running gags, some of which work really well. There's a bizarre Amy Winehouse joke that goes on and on, as Deadpool's fellow thugs bet on whether she'll die before Deadpool does, and we keep seeing flashes of Amy Winehouse almost dying in bizarre circumstances. Other gags fall kind of flat, like Deadpool and his roommate Blind Al trying to put together Ikea furniture and tripping over their Roomba vacuum cleaner. The humor is frequently obnoxious — a lot of the jokes here would be offensive to huge swathes of people who aren't teenage boys — but when it works, it's outstanding.

The film starts out with Wade already scarred, and then we flash back to how he got that way, which allows for long sections during which the audience gets to look at Ryan Reynolds being actually pretty. If you get tired of endless cutting between the present and the past, then you'll get tired of it here. But the "past" timeline has some of the film's best gags, including a bit where the handsome Wade Wilson falls in love with a hooker, Vanessa, and they screw in every possible position and on every holiday:

VANESSA What was this called again?

WADE 'Grass Stains on the Lederhosen.' Next we'll try 'The Angry Pirate.' 'The Arabian Goggles.' Maybe even 'The Tobey Maguire.'

VANESSA How long can you go on like this?!

WADE (shrugs) All year?!

We begin the sing-song melody of the Australian kid band phenom THE WIGGLES' 'ROCKING ON THE SEA.' And...

DISSOLVE INTO:

A MONTAGE of images: SEX around the CALENDAR between WADE and VANESSA, identified by stereotypical costumes and accoutrements from each holiday ...

...and different WEATHER OUTSIDE the WINDOW. The pair has EASTER SEX (easter eggs, bunny ears). FOURTH OF JULY SEX (red, white, and blue bunting, sparklers). HALLOWEEN SEX (jack-o-lanterns). THANKSGIVING SEX (turkey legs, pilgrim hats).

And if this gets made as written, it'll be one of the craziest action movies ever, including lots of bits where Deadpool shoots grenades and rockets in mid-air so they explode prematurely. There's a running cameo by one of the X-Men, Colossus, that never gets old and allows for a different kind of hyperviolence. At one point, Deadpool shoots at a thug's reflection in the mirror, making the bullet ricochet and hit the real thug. It's all very video-gamey, and there's a pleasing level of ADD in the storytelling, especially in the mind-blowing first twenty minutes.

All in all, this script would be the wet dream of Deadpool fans everywhere - who probably aren't a big enough audience to make a movie a box-office hit, sadly. For people who only sorta like Deadpool, or who are tired of slow-mo and CG bullet gags, it'll be a fun movie to see with your friends, or maybe a rental.

Why watch Guided by Voices ten yards away when you can watch them on your camera ten inches away?

SAM COOMES: People used to come to those shows, when it was underground rock, to get loose and lose their shit. Now the motivations are different—they come to make YouTube videos on their iPhones. I don’t know what the fuck is going on…. In your mind you think the older generation is complaining that the kids are too crazy or too weird and they can’t understand it, but now it’s kind of the opposite: The older people today are complaining that the kids are too well-behaved and clean and commercialized. It’s a strange turn of events. Satyricon definitely represents that old era for me.

--from the Willamette Week's oral history of doomed and beloved skanky rock dive Satyricon.

See also the terrifying NYT Sunday Styles piece last week about the iPhone as baby-hypnotist.

Still busy, however! Last week, Clint Catalyst and I jumped into a rented Escalade, zoomed downtown, haphazardly strapped Clint into a chain harness [these things are unrelated], and attended what was likely LA Fashion Week’s best night: the Ashton Michael, Skingraft, and Anthony Franco triple threat show.

Coverage here, a few pictures below, and more after the jump. Do enjoy!

The upstairs lobby of the gorgeous LA Stock Exchange was transformed into a glowing bar, serving up popcorn, tiny cupcakes, candy and beglittered blue drinks.

Skingraft stole the show, opening with a stunning video montage.

Reportedly inspired by ghosts and Africa, this collection was decidedly more necro-futurist than Skingraft’s trademark aero-tribalist. See what I did there? SRS FSHN JRNLZM.

Last year’s military and aviation gear, feathers and buckles gave way to somber head wraps, leather hoods, and minimal draping, much to my delight.

It was a very special night, as evidenced here and here.

Once again, you can read my coverage of the entire show here and see the full gallery after the jump, below.

Always,

Award-winning short story writer Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies and Others, is publishing a series of four flash fiction stories over at Tor.com, written in the style of classic steampunk tales. The first is "A Different Engine."

Illustration by Fyodor Pavlov

It's written as an homage to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's classic steampunk novel, The Difference Engine.

Here is how the story starts:

Nth Iteration: The Compass Rose Tattoo

A phenakistoscope of Ada Lovelace and Carmen Machado, with Machado's companion dog, the brown-and-white pit bull Oliver. They are apparently at a racetrack, although the tableau was no doubt staged at the maker's studio. The two women, clearly on friendly terms, are attired in pale silk gowns and overdresses, billowing out over crinolines but still elegantly simple in effect. They are shown seated at first, on an ornate cast-iron bench in front of a painted scrim, watching the start of an invisible race. They move their gaze to follow the speeding steam gurneys. They stand, caught up in excitement. Carmen puts her hand on Ada's arm, and removes it quickly. Then she surreptitiously dips her hand in Ada's reticule bag, withdraws an Engine card, slips it into a hidden pocket in her own dress, and resumes watching the race. The two women jump about triumphantly, laughing and clapping their hands in an artificial manner. The race has been run and an imaginary purse no doubt won by at least one of them. At the end, Machado turns to hug Lovelace briefly. Her dress dips elegantly low at the back of her neck, and we get a brief glimpse of the famous tattoo between her shoulder blades: a large, elaborate compass rose. Then the two women sit down as they were at the beginning, a slight smile on Machado's face.

You can read the whole thing, and read Gunn's other three stories (the final two will go up early next week) on Tor.com. These stories were written as part of a benefit for Clarion West writers' workshop.

We can't wait to see Cockpit, a movie about evil, mind-controlling aliens who've reached the outer edges of our solar system. The combat scenes look great for an indie - check out the trailer.

Here's the synopsis:

In 2103 mankind is at war with the Tarceds, a hostile alien race that can control our minds. Our brave pilots of the U.E.S. Navy hold them at bay at the outer edge of the galaxy. To bomb them from afar is to win. To see them is to fall under their control. Government agents are dispatched to the Starcraft Carriers to insure all pilots follow this rule of engagement.

via Quiet Earth

The other day, we encouraged you to make self-published science fiction anthology Machine of Death into an Amazon top-seller. Turns out the book did well enough to upset Glenn Beck, who sees it as a symptom of the world's ills.

Beck's book, Broke, also came out on the same day, October 26, and Machine of Death shut it out of the top slot. Here's what Beck had to say on his show when he found out the anthology had beaten him out, according to a transcript at the Machine of Death site:

And I want to tell you that, um…our books are ALWAYS #1. And I find it REALLY fascinating, FASCINATING, that if you go to Amazon.com, Broke is number THREE. And the two books that are ahead of it - one is Keith Richards' Life, which is getting a TON of - you know, that's everywhere.

But this is a book about, you know, how he snorted his father's ashes, after death ... So that… 'culture of death.' And it's an escape into the past, of, you know, the Woodstock stuff.

And then, the #1 book - TODAY, at least - is Machine of Death. And it's a - collected stories about, you know, people who know how they're gonna die. Haowww!

So you have DEATH - I know it's called Life, but what a life it is, really! It's a culture of death! OR, 'How do we restore ourselves?'

These are the - this is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we're headed? We're headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us. Not that the Rolling Stones have destroyed us - I mean, you can't always get what you want. You know what I'm saying? Brown sugar. I have no idea what that means.

[via The Atlantic]

Mark Peckmezian

Mark Peckmezian

Jonathan Lethem goes to the movies (via The Millions).

This week we bring you another sample of the insanity and the hotness going on in io9's Halloween costume show. Check out the amazing craziness in these pictures of your fellow io9ers getting all costumed on your ass.

We want to see your pictures of Halloween! Post your awesome Halloween costume photos (pictures of yourself only, please) in our io9 Halloween costume show gallery and we'll show off the best next week.

via io9 Halloween costume show on Flickr

artemelkila is a damn scary/awesome/gorgeous splicer from Bioshock, and she's even posed in the right location to do some serious damage.
JediPsychologist isn't sure why women don't always dress in the men's Jedi robes because they are obviously completely awesome. We have to agree.
Who doesn't love a Zelda with a matching digital camera? Hollowbarbiedoll649 knows what I'm talking about.
Pee Wee may not be science fiction, but Pee Wee's Playhouse is definitely a fantasy world, gildat20.
Oh Jayne, you are my favorite scifi beefcake icon. Thanks for wearing the hat well, micjwelch.
Bears, rejoice! The Barold is the very definition of minotaur hotness.
TechSean demonstrates his robot costume's KILL KILL KILL mode.

Public radio has become a true creative outlet for writers, journalists, and other observers who aren’t at home in the stuffy, ritualized mainstream media.

Charlie Stross bemoans the dominance of steampunk; Phil Nugent mourns the passing of the Walkman; Ed Park makes my mouth water.