Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 136

Bardabunga

I know that “Bardarbunga” sounds like something Silvio Berlusconi might do with one of his teenage girlfriends, but in fact it’s the volcano in Iceland that’s presently erupting. And the “d” isn’t a “d”, it’s a ð, which is to say a thorn, and pronounced like a “th.” (Vikings didn’t mind their Ps and Qs, they minded their ashes and thorns.)
All of which has little to do with today’s video, in Eric Cheng, director of aerial photography for drone maker DJI, flew his Phantom 2 drone so close to th...

Episode Three Goes Live!

Episode Three of the Hardwired serial is now live at iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.
If you have the first two installments, you’ll want this one!
Episode Three comes with special bonus content, an essay explaining why the term “panzerboy” has to do with Belgian butter smugglers.

Reviews Too Late: Young Detective Dee and the Rise of the Sea Dragon

A title like that tells you pretty much all you need to know, neh?
Directed by my onetime creative associate Tsui Hark,Young Detective Dee is a prequel to Tsui’s 2010Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame,which I reviewed a couple years ago. The first film was set at the court of the steely, rather homicidalEmpress Wu (Carina Lau), China’s only reigning empress. Carina Lau still plays the character, but the story is set earlier, when she’s ruling China through her husband, the amia...

Strati-Cumulate

Here’s the Strati, the first car created by a 3D printer.
Well, except for the mechanical bits. The parts that actually make it drive an’ stuff. The parts that make it an actualcar. Those aren’t printed, those are manufactured elsewhere.
But still. Pretty, no?
In the old days, people would buy a frame and engine, and then bring them to a coachmaker who would build a custom body to order. This is like that, only faster and cheaper.
So soon we can all have custom cars. How cool will that be?

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Globalquerque, Part II.

The second night opened with Oumar Konaté from Mali. He’s something of the spokesman for his generation, those who watched their republic overthrown by a military government that was so inept that it promptly handed half the country to a guerrilla army of Islamist fanatics. Within days. If a military government can’t even domilitary well . . .
Oumar came out alone, with an acoustic guitar, then gradually added a bass player, drummer, and electricity. After a while I began to think, “Hmm, big l...

Globalquerque, Part I

This highlight of the weekend was Albuquerque’s world music festival, Globalquerque, held in the Mayan pyramid-shaped Hispanic Cultural Center. Three stages running simultaneously, along with a food area offering ethnic fast food, craft beer, and arts and crafts.
Since three bands were playing simultaneously, I wasn’t able to catch them all, but I got a taste of most of them, along with the craft beer and what they call döner in Turkey and gyros in Greece, except these were from an Egyptian c...

Newly Available

A brief announcement before I get to the actual subject of this post. Angel Station and The Rift are now available on iBooks. There had been some kind of technical issue with Smashwords until I got my very own iBooks account, and now the technical issues don’t exist. Nothing like do-it-yourself. The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories,however, is totally plagued with technical issues, even though these issues don’t seem to exist with any other vendor. Go figure.


But that’s not my actual annou...

Update/Flashback

I’ve been spending long hours updating my web page, which is the sort of task that makes me wish I had an assistant— at least to handle the foul language, because that’s the most repetitive part of the process.
While I continue to wrestle WordPress into submission, please enjoy this composite picture of the solar eclipse I viewed back in November of 2012. I tried to upload this photo then, but the ship was having such bandwidth problems that uploading anything but mere text proved impossible.
P...

The Redcoats Are Silly!

Some poor Grenadier Guardsman is in trouble for, well, this. And all he was trying to do was make his jobless boring. And maybe do a wee little hommage to John Cleese.
You’ve got to hope his officers are at least as tolerant as those fellows in Norway.