Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Gary Farber has details about IBM typewriters that used proportional fonts as far back as 1951. They also let you create a fancy superscript “th” if you were so inclined.

But check out Gary’s whole argument. And click on his PayPal link, if you’re so inclined. He’s done a real service to the online debate here.

“Bush Campaign Better Thought Out Than Iraq War”

“It takes a Viking to raze a village.”

Tshirt of Edward C. Scarborough,  radiation physicist and hard-sci fi fan, in town from Flower Mound, TX

“Jackson’s Lord of the Ring movies opened up those stories to a new worldwide audience that never had access to them before. I loved that.”

Noreascon
committee member TR Smith, dragging her suitcase through the hall so
she could depart directly for Kosovo on behalf of the State
Department.

“I’m carrying a practice halberd, four feet long with a leather head. Foot soldiers used these to attack knights on horses. A
real halberd would have a metal head and be about two feet longer, but a
real one would be really hard not to kill people with.

Andy aka “Roman dude,” preparing to give a demo for Higgins Armory Sword Guild.

“Andy’s
padded doublet is a style from the late 1400s; mine is from the 1500s.
If you wear them under armor, they have buckles to hold the armor in
place. The demo of fighting in armor is at noon.”

Frank of Phoenix Swords, also on deck to demo some knightly fighting techniques.

“The movie I, Robot
is an action movie–that’s its genre. But aside from that, it’s
faithful to Asimov’s work. It even includes the Zeroth Law of robotics,
which wasn’t present in Asimov’s earliest stories. Robots matured as
Asimov wrote about them.”

John Pellet, nuclear engineer and space-opera fan from Arlington, TX.

Today, I’m headed for the huge sci-fi Worldcon aka Noreascon as a participant, not a blogger. I missed getting Eastern Standard Tribe autographed by Cory Doctorow  at sxsw, so I hope I manage to catch up with him here. BTW, Cory has been posting tons of Flickr photos online.

Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Robert Silverberg, and both Tor-blogging Haydens are also there–wow. I can hardly wait!

Fans of “action” like to watch their hero tested by many long scenes of
biff-bang-pow. Action violence inhabits a narrow range of physical
force–where our hero can show some
impressive courage/endurance, but without sustaining any longterm damage.

In real life, a non-brain-dead villain would shoot the hero rather than to try
to maul him at close range. In real life, human bodies don’t
stand up well against explosions, Uzis, or kicks in the balls, so any
deadly conflict would be over quickly–leaving even the winner with
serious injuries. In fiction, a one-eyed hero with fingers missing
doesn’t satisfy reader hopes for a happy ending.

Dick Francis, whose audience must love marathon suffering,
has used just about every plausible reason (and several implausible
ones too) for a hero to be roughed up but un-murdered by one or more
tough guys. Hoods use fists and feet for “teaching him a lesson.”
Villains abandon him to die in the ocean or a desert or a mine
explosion  but he escapes. Someone flies into a murderous rage and
tries to kill him with bare hands or a snatched-up club but he knocks
the attacker unconscious with his fists.  Someone trying to kill
him (with a knife or ax) is forestalled by a third party’s entry or by
a gruesome industrial accident.

Romance plots, like action plots, work hard to dodge the very, very
obvious
outcomes. Page after page, romance protagonists quiver with unslaked
love and/or lust (luvst?), while chapter after chapter erects (ha ha) new
barriers to bedtime.

Each obstacle must be credible, interesting, serious, hopeless, and something
the author can break down completely in one tumultuous scene near the end of
Chapter 16. Oh, yes, and the barrier should be fresh, not some stale
re-cycling of the “misunderstanding” that could have been cleared up in
Chapter 3 if the hero or heroine had more brains than a bug. (Dick
Francis came up with a novel one in Nerve, where the heroine considers
her first cousin incest-bait.)

How about this solution to both dilemmas: the frustrated romance
heroine finally hauls off and punches the action hero?  This
overcomes all previous plot points, so he–but use your own
imagination. Biff, blam, zowie!