Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 248

Fun With Swine Flu

Where has Walter been this week? I hear you ask. I've been in the mountains above Taos with a bunch of friends, eating well, hanging out, and trying to get the hot tub to work. (Stuck valve now fixed.)All was well until yesterday, when one of our number came down with flu-like symptoms and confined himself to our room. This morning, one more friend began to feel badly, and it had to be

Day Four: Hattushas

Part of this was typed on a Turkish keyboard when I was actually in Turkey, so you may find some of the typeface unusual.On our first full day in Ankara we decided to leave town, sınce Obama was vısıtıng and the entıre central cıty would be shut down. (Lıttle dıd we know that he would be arrıvıng late at nıght and the next day was the day when we couldn´t get around. The danged fellow just kept

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Hattushas

Quack As Loud As You Like, Mister Duck! No One Can Hear You!

The recent California Supreme Court ruling recognizes all the gay marriages that took place in California during the period in which they were legal, and also legalizes any other damn thing that gay people want to do except call it "marriage." This has set me to fantasizing about Pat Robertson. (Hey, it was illegal before, okay?)Pat once said that if gay marriage were legalized, then people would

Pleasing Surprise of the Week

Hey! Jo Walton, author of the excellent Small Change alternate histories, who had previously said some nice things about me, now says some nice things about Dread Empire's Fall. When a writer with Walton's talent says I'm good, I just get all squishy inside.

Baad Movie Digest, Volume One

Oh my. It's a plot summary of the Turkish Star Wars.. . . My next best guess is that they’re hit by lasers since they both fall down when a man in armor shows up. Turkish special effects are not what you’d call an exact art, and here the picture is severely scratched up, which I think indicates a failed attempt at scratching a laser-like beam onto the film itself. They’re captured and taken to a

Portrait of the Youngster as an Artist

I was looking through some old photos the other day and found this picture of me, circa 1984. Looking at the image, I recognized the Student Union building at Texas A&M before I noticed the AggieCon badge on my lapel. I was smack in the middle of writing Hardwired when this photo was taken. The picture was taken by Leigh Kennedy and developed and printed in an improvised darkroom in her

The Terror. The Terror.

I was visiting yesterday with some friends, and one of them put on the first ten minutes of Team America: World Police. (For those who haven't seen it, the first ten minutes are the brilliant part of the movie, and after that it's just so-so, except for Kim Jong Il's plaintive little song halfway through.)Imagine my terror when I saw, parodied in the film, some dialog I had just written for my

Reviews Too Late: Twilight

Urban romantic fantasy isn't really my metier, but I thought I'd catch Twilight on pay per view and check what the zeitgeist has been up to while I wasn't looking.Filmed in Pale-O-Vision, Twilight was actually a pretty good movie, as far as that goes. (I mean, it is what it is, you're not going to learn any profound truths in this film.) The plotline was very straightforward and simple, with no