Matt Ruff's Blog, page 50

Apropos of nothing

Via Research Maven and Cute Overload:



Also.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This was finally in stock at Netflix. Lisa proclaims it "watchable, but not enjoyable," which I think is a fair summary.

Some thoughts of my own:

nihilistic_kid  ), I'd have been baffled by Lisbeth's attraction to Mikael. As it is, it's kind of interesting to contemplate how the story could be rewritten to make the relationship plausible. I suspect most of the workable ideas would involve making things even mor...

I'm 45 today

Happy birthday also to Aimee Mann, Pink, Neko Case, Patsy Cline, Peter Sellers, Sid Caeser, Lyndon LaRouche, Antonín Dvořák and Richard the Lionheart.

Survival of the Dead

Maybe I'm just pining for my youth, but after watching this latest installment, I feel like the George Romero slow-zombie series peaked in the late '70s.

The Mongoliad has left the tower

The Neal Stephenson/Greg Bear/Nicole Galland/Mark Teppo online serial novel I first mentioned a while back has officially launched. The home page is here. The free preview content, including a teaser chapter, is here. The FAQ is here. The page with my name on it is here.

Subscriptions start at $5.99 for six months, and grant immediate access to the first full chapter of the story ("Wherein we meet the Sword-Brethren").

Mongoliad apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and other mobile devices are in...

The Mirage: where I'm at

Four months to go until my deadline.

As you know if you’ve been at a reading or a book club and heard me answer The Process Question, when I start working on a novel I generally have a clear idea of what the first several chapters will contain, and I know how the story’s going to end. In between is this much hazier area, with the odd scene or set piece sticking up out of the fog. The fog lifts in stages; by the time I’m done with the first few chapters, I’ll have figured out what’s in the next...

#9

A human foot washed up on a Washington State island Friday morning, raising the tally of feet found on beaches in the Pacific Northwest since 2007 to a total of nine.

And while we're on the subject of history repeating itself:

Alligator surfaces beneath a car in Queens.

Safe Negro Travel Guide, redux

Today''s New York Times has an article about Victor H. Green and The Negro Motorist Green Book, the Jim Crow-era travel guide to black-friendly businesses that served as inspiration for my short story "Safe Negro Travel Guide." I still think it's a great hook, so maybe I'll take another crack at Lovecraft Country once I'm done with The Mirage. In the meantime, author Calvin Alexander Ramsey has written both a children's book and a forthcoming play on the subject.

Medieval copy protection schemes

Sometimes people come to me and ask, "How did medieval filmmakers protect their DVDs from piracy?" And I tell them that since so few households had DVD players during the thousand or so years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance that it really never became much of an issue.

But this is not to say that the medievals didn't face problems safeguarding their intellectual property. Indeed, book owners were so worried about theft and damage to their property that they often i...

Today's useless but still interesting factoid

Former Disney moppet Kim Richards, best known for her role in the original Escape to Witch Mountain, is Paris Hilton's aunt.