Dryococelus australis, thought extinct for 80 years (image from Wikimedia Commons)

What if you could grow algae in IV bags, farm it massively to release oxygen, and even feed it CO2 through breathing tubes? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could monitor it with smart phones. Yeah, it would, and the HORTUS project is all about that shit.

TSA Is Useless, says this Boingboing post, paraphrasing the statement of a former FBI anti-terrorism expert about the organization’s bloated, inflexible bureaucracy.

Here’s the really cool story of how scientists rediscovered a population of giant stick insects, thought extinct, all living under a single bush on a volcanic spire in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They’ve got them breeding in captivity now, but what do they do next?

Finally, GOOD reported on this bad-ass essay by a 13 year old black student, comparing conditions in her poorly managed school to the efforts of antebellum southern plantation owners to keep their slaves uneducated. Rather than responding in any productive way, the school teachers and administration harassed her until her parents were forced to withdraw her from the school. This was a public school, by the way (which I don’t think should make a difference, but the fact is that private schools are legally allowed to get away with crap like this). Pretty outrageous, but to the kid, I say: way to go. If she was enough of a self starter to pen an essay like this while the kids around her could barely read, she’ll do fine, idiot school administrators be damned.

The player is given three types of blocks: straw, sticks, bricks. The blocks are aware of their location relative to one another. On each level, the player has to build a house for the piglet out of one of the materials. They have a limited number of blocks with which to shape a house.

When they’re done building, the wolf appears and tries to blow down the house. Certain shapes will resist the wolf’s breath; others will be blown over. Parental controls decide how graphical the latter outcome is.

This idea got fired off while I was taking Latitude Research’s Future of Storytelling survey, and it was too fun not to post.

Eclipse Phase: Panopticon. Is that a monkey & an octopus in a pit fight? You bet your sweet ass it is, paatno-san.

The new Eclipse Phase hardcover, Panopticon: A Focused Eye on Transhumanity, Vol. I, went live for PDF sales on DriveThruRPG.net today. It’s available as both a standalone PDF and a Creative Commons-licensed hack pack so that players & GMs can mash up the art for their own use.

Physical copies of Panopticon will be available in  gaming stores (at least in the U.S.) on August 31. Support your FLGS! But if you just can’t wait that long, or don’t have a game store that stocks Eclipse Phase, it’s also available through Indie Press Revolution.

Panopticon features new material on uplifted animals, ubiquitous surveillance, and space habitats (the chapter I co-authored with Justin Kugler). Along with beautiful art and detailed setting information, it’s packed with new morphs, new gear, and new mechanics of use to both players and GMs. This is a great book to own if you’re into the high tech dungeon crawl or political aspects of the game, and the chapter on sentient animals is essential reading if your campaign involves uplifts. And the opening story, El Destino Verde, also written by me, ain’t too shabby, either… in my entirely humble opinion.

# # #

Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring Twenties

Meanwhile, on the fiction front, my story Der Graue Engel appears in Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s. It’s got a little bit of Fritz Lang, a little bit of Cabaret, and a little bit of LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, all turned loose in a Weimar Germany that’s about to hit the skids big time. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book myself, because it’s also got stories by three of my Clarion West 2010 classmates — Frank Ard, John Remy, and Andrew Romine — as well as by Paizo’s fiction editor, the estimable James Sutter. Keen-as-hell art by Galen Dara ices the cake. Our editors, Jaym Gates and Erika Holt, themed their last anthology, Rigor Amortis, around zombie erotica, so I highly doubt they pulled any punches on this one.

All right, enough marketing. I’ve got another chapter of Eclipse Phase: Rimward to polish off tonight…

I’m not sure who created this, but whoever they are, I’d like to shake their hand.

This should be an exciting con. Eclipse Phase is up for four ENnie awards, we’re debuting new products, and we have a full slate of really excellent events on the con program. (I’m biased; I wrote one of them, Doctrine). The EP events are sold out currently, but don’t hesitate to stop by with a generic ticket. Old hands at Gen Con know that a table is sometimes light a player or two for the slot.

And please stop by the booth. We really enjoy talking to people who are interested in the game (heh… as long as you keep stories about your character’s exploits to a minimum).

I’ve also got a batch of stories I’m proud of, along with some intelligent advice on how to make them better. I’d be revising them for submission right now if I weren’t so damned exhausted.

Here’s some of what I learned:

• During Michael Bishop’s week, I got back on the path of beautiful writing. The workshop format for this week was to submit a bunch of short assignments, which would then be read allowed by Mike and given blind critiques. This stirred a bit of competitive spirit in me (which is a confession; they tell you not to do this). It got me ready to run hard and fast, and it gave the people who weren’t used to being critiqued a gentle entry into something that can be pretty rough for some to handle — having one’s work ripped apart.
• During Maureen McHugh’s week, I had a blinding flash of insight about how to structure novel projects, how to think about designing them. It wasn’t anything she taught directly, but Maureen is one of those people who’s so damned smart that stuff she says offhandedly can accidentally rewire your thinking. On my own initiative, I chose this week as a time to get serious about one of my main goals for Clarion — getting better with plot, dramatic tension, and narrative structure. Looking back on the stuff I’ve produced, I think I achieved this goal. No longer will the Spacecrafts workshop have to complain about my plotless narrative experiments! Ha!
• During Nnedi Okoraor’s week, I attained the realization that I am never going back to academia. Yay!
• During Graham Joyce’s week, I worked even more on matters pertaining to plot. Graham is seriously awesome at teaching this stuff. He has a series of great little 30 minute lectures he does on narrative structure that would benefit just about any writer.
• During Ellen Datlow’s week, I learned how to channel Ellen Datlow. So did some of my classmates (and it showed in the following week’s critiquing!). By “channeling Ellen,” I mean developing the ability to question and poke at my own writing during the revision process as if I were an editor trying to make it comprehensible to a reader.
• During Ian McDonald’s week, I stepped back, recovered, and tried to make sense of all I’d learned — and I found that it was good! We were also treated to some of Ian’s thoughts on screen writing and how the rigorous formats of screen- and teleplays can inform narrative structure in fiction.

I’ll probably write more about my Clarion experiences down the road, but the quick summary is:

1. I’m really glad I went.
2. If you’re someone who’s thinking about going, maybe you should. But you need to do it with an open mind. You need to go full of questions. You need to go with confidence in your own work but with a willingness to experiment and change.

I’m glad that I went at the time that I did, when I was mature enough (finally, ha!) to take some of the knocks and roll with  the unexpected, but not yet so set in my ways that I couldn’t use the experience to change and grow. I found the experience really encouraging and absolutely worth taking the time out of my life for.

Now: off to Gen Con!

So it was really cool to learn this morning that, hot on the heels of bringing home the 2010 Origins Award for Best RPG, Eclipse Phase earned four ENnie nods, including nominations for Best Writing and Product of the Year.

How cool. Ten year old me (who wanted nothing in the world more than to be a game designer at TSR — or an astronaut) would be pretty darn psyched. Heck, thirty-six year old me is happy about it, too.

Congratulations to my teammates. It’s sweet indeed when hard work gets a little recognition.