Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 70

COOP’s One Man Show

I’m still guestblogging over at Boing Boing this week (check their guestblog archives).

I couldn’t use the following post because Boing blogger David Pescowitz beat me to the topic. But I thought I’d post my version here anyway.

Transpop hotrod artist (and demonic blogger) COOP has a show opening Friday at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA.

Above is a photo I took of the Master when I visited his studio in April, 2006, , while he was painting one of the new works for this show. As m

Hylozoic Readings

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m going to be over at www.boingboing.net as a guestblogger for the last two weeks of May, 2009. You can find my BoingBoing guestblog posts listed here.

Meanwhile, the following is a list of the upcoming readings to promote my latest novel, Hylozoic.

(Picture from 1982, accepting the first Philip K. Dick Award.)

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Saturday, June 06, 2009.

3 P.M.

Borderlands Books

866 Valencia St.

San Francisco, CA 94110

415.824.8203

MAP

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Sunday, June 07, 2009.
7:30

Hylozoic is Out

I’ll be leaving the Rudy’s Blog planet for the last two weeks of May—

—because I’m going to be a guest blogger on BoingBoing from Monday, May 18, 2009 to Saturday, May 31, 2009. I’ll try for one or two posts a day over there.

It would be nice to have some cool links, so do email suggestions to me, preferably with a subject line of “boing link.” I figure that regular readers of Rudy’s Blog might have a notion of what kinds of links interest me…

The guest blog stint is mainly to promote my new no

Eaton SF Con on Verne the Steampunk

This weekend, we flew to John Wayne Airport in Orange County and rented a car to drive 40 miles bumper to bumper to Riverside, CA, for the Eaton SF Conference, a series of mostly academic talks and panels about science fiction, held at the University of California at Riverside.

[Today’s pictures are still from Wisconsin, as my camera battery was dead in Riverside.:]

The conference is organized by the charming Melissa Conway and other members of the Special Collections department of UC Riverside—th

The Song Fan

I’m just back from visiting my daughter Georgia and her family in Wisconsin. It was fun. We went to a school carnival with a humorous-songs guy, and the kids were cheering.

My granddaughter and I had some fun playing with plastic dinosaurs.

She has a set of paints with a nice traditional picture of a fantasy castle printed on the lid. Schylling products are Made in China. Isn’t that the grooviest picture you’ve ever seen? I like trumpet shapes a lot, their surfaces are made of negatively cu

Garden Painting for “Jim and the Flims”

“The Baby Garden.” Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. April, 2009. Click the picture to see a slightly larger image. More info at my paintings page.

For the last month or so of working on Jim and the Flims, I’ve been nibbling away at a painting of how it’s gonna look when Jim and his new ghost girlfriend Ginnie make it over to the other side, that is, the land of Flimsy, which is both a parallel world with its own natives, as well as being a place where the spirits of some people from our world

Writing About the Afterworld

I’ve been feeling anxious about Jim and the Flims, my novel-in-progress. I think it’s useful to stay in a frame of mind of doing it my way, rather than trying to make it commercial. As has been rather amply demonstrated by my previous eighteen novels, it’s highly unlikely that any novel I ever write will be a giant commercial success. The skittish fen are suspicious of me, and forever more will be. So why should I start groveling and bowdlerizing and self-censoring and hobbling myself—especia

Filoli, “The Soft Machine”

Friday morning we went to see the gardens at Filoli, an estate between San Jose and San Franciso near Woodside, CA. The first view of the gardens, shown above, is perhaps the most impressive. You step through an arched door in a brick wall and there lies—arcadia. Another world. The square-trimmed trees in the background give it an especially magical look.

I reflexively tend to think of viewing gardens as being boring, but it was definitely worth the trip—although it’s good to get there early

Santa Cruz Rollergirls

Last weekend we went to see a bout between two teams of the Santa Cruz Rollergirls at the Santa Cruz Civic Center. What I totally couldn’t believe was that the place was SOLD OUT, and we could barely get tix to get in! People are so frikkin’ organized anymore.

The bout we saw was the Beach Flats Betties vs. the Lost Girls. I might pedantically mention that in Santa Cruz, the Beach Flats is a somewhat low-rent area, and of course “betty” is an old surfer slang term for “woman.” Everyone involv

Rudy’s H+ Article on Wolfram|Alpha

A couple of weeks ago, I did a one and a half hour long phone interview with my favorite computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram. He’s about to launch a new web product called Wolfram|Alpha. It’s a little like a search engine, but unlike an old-style search engine, it does deep background computations in order to calculate the answers that you might actually be looking for.

My written article based on our interview went live today in a cool new webzine called H+ Magazine . H+ is edited my no less