Tad Williams's Blog, page 32
May 16, 2012
The Sad Truth
15 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
I likes to see me some running dogs.
Hound Dogs Running
hounddogsrunning.tumblr.com
14 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
It won’t rob you of anything, it will increase your knowledge and that’s always good. Always.
Everything you need to know about the scientific controversy that could destroy Triceratops
io9.com
The sad truth is that I think about my fish, Clark, a great deal more than he thinks about me.
13 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
12 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
I have about another half hour of, “Saturday — anything is possible!”, then it turns into “I’ve got so much to do today and the day is slipping away…”
Fascinating. I often say, of the attempt to deny marriage equality, “That fight is already lost,” and it appears that now the Republicans are beginning to say it to themselves.
Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues
andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com
May 12, 2012
As Many Big Questions As You Can Shake A Stick At
11 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Speaks for itself, really.
It’s interesting how the internet has turned “Cthulhu” into a common meme, but I’ll bet that 99% of the people who use it haven’t actually read any Lovecraft. Anyway, cool jellyperson, give my regards to the Great Old Ones. Tell them I’ve totally been working for their return, every night after work. Except when I’m watching television. Or reading. Or doing other stuff.
Unusual Sea Creature Believed to Be Rare Jellyfish
www.pawnation.com
10 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Always liked this picture of Elizabeth I. You can definitely see the “don’t-@#%!-with-ME” look that made her a champ.
If my beloved Giants don’t make it to the big dance this year, I am totally rooting for a Nationals vs. Orioles World Series.
Had to share this.
When Obama Endorsed Same-Sex Marriage
whenobamaendorsed.tumblr.com
Very interesting take.
For Christians, President Obama Said Much More Than You Think He Said
blog.mattalgren.com
9 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Charlie and Humphrey. Lifelong companions from my television childhood denied the right to a legitimate relationship because one was a horse and the other a dog.
A thought on marriage. Remember when you’re understandably getting angry at the bigotry of voting against marriage equality, most people who do it aren’t true bigots — they just don’t know many gay or transgendered people and they’re afraid of what they don’t know. That’s why things are changing, but it will still take some time. Be out and about in your community. If someone says something stupid about gay people, make sure to gently but firmly correct them, whether you’re straight or gay. “Actually, I have several gay friends who have wanted to get married for years and it really hurts them that they can’t,” will often do better at changing minds than “God, you’re so stupid it makes me sick.”
Thinking of my North Carolina friends, and my dear departed friend Dave Pierce (a huge Todd fan) here is, I think, an appropriate song. Never give up!
Utopia – Just One Victory (Rockpalast 1-8-77)
Can’t see the video in your RSS reader or email? Click here.
Kids kill me.
Children With Swag
childrenwithswag.tumblr.com
Since review copies of THE DIRTY STREETS OF HEAVEN are starting to drift out, I thought I’d say this now. I’ll repeat it when the actual book comes out in September.
This is a grown-up book. It has sex and violence and lots and lots of swearing. That said, it’s also got magic and humor and monsters and as many Big Questions as you can shake a stick at. But I wouldn’t just hand it to a young kid, like you pretty much can with most of my stuff.
Just thought I’d mention it.
Purpose of life: to constantly reorganize toward maximum fitness. True or false? I’m feeling the need of a re-org.
8 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Travel well, Maurice Sendak.
In the middle of a difficult day, with the death of Maurice Sendak and a sad election result in North Carolina, I thought a little pick-me-up was in order.
Can’t see the video in your RSS reader or email? Click here.
Beautiful. RIP Maurice.
7 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
My favorite Beatle.
I’d run across this before, but this is a simple and quick explanation. Mathematics is magic.
This well-known Egyptian symbol is actually an early math problem
io9.com
Melony, yet deadly.
May 11, 2012
eBooks Update
We’ve added a new page to the site today to provide a convenient reference for Tad’s titles currently available in eBook format.
At present, most of Tad’s titles are available in eBook format in the US, and many are available in other countries. This is a comprehensive listing of all the eBook titles available at the time of this posting. Tad and Deborah are working with their publishers to see that all of his titles are released in eBook format, so if you do not see a specific title listed, please check back. We will update the list as soon as new information is available.
May 8, 2012
Tad Signing at Inklings for Children’s Book Week
From Inkling’s page on Facebook:
Acclaimed fantasy author Tad Williams is coming to Inklings Books & Things for Children’s Book Week!
On Thursday, May 10 at 3:30 pm, Tad Williams will be here signing copies of his children’s fantasy book, Dragons of Ordinary Farm, written with his wife Deborah Beale!
As an added bonus, anyone who buys a book at Inklings during this week will receive a free e-book edition of the sequel, Secrets of Ordinary Farm!
Don’t miss your chance to come meet this prolific (and local) author!
Inklings — Books and Things
Capitola Mall
Capitola, CA 95010
May 7, 2012
Praise for A Stark and Wormy Knight
From Subterranean Press:
We’re closing in on the release for Tad Williams’s newest collection, A Stark and Wormy Knight. The first review has just landed, from Publishers Weekly. And it’s a good one. “Best known for his epic fantasies, Williams offers 11 short stories that demonstrate his versatility with relative brevity. Readers only familiar with Williams’s lengthy sagas will find a pleasant surprise in his ability to handle short work in different genres…”
Limited: 250 signed numbered copies, bound in leather: $60
Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition: $40
Order your copy now before they’re sold out!
Life After Jetlag
6 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Off to play music. Hideously out of practice. Will fake it.
This disturbing image, which looks like something you might find crawling around on the sea floor, covered with stinging spines, sleeps next to me. And when it has been eating gopher guts, as this one recently did, it is a most unpleasant bedfellow.
5 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
This is so astoundingly silly that I thought I should share. Snatched off GorillaMask.
Perfect Strangers: The Video Game
nothingsgonnastopmenow.com
If I had a Phantom Zone projector like Superman does, the Phantom Zone would be full of cats.
4 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Yep.
3 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
This, by the way, is how I think of Singapore (whence I have recently returned) — as Vegas with more interesting food.
The cares of life are getting to me like sand in my shoes and my underwear.
I’ve finally figured out how to alleviate my financial woes. It was right under my nose all the time. I’ve been letting all those children and animals live here FOR FREE.
2 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Wow. I had an idea last night/this morning, while drifting in and out of sleep. That’s the first lifting of the creative fog since Saturday. There’s hope for life after jetlag.
May 2, 2012
Hecticity
1 May 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Finally, a scientific way to track stupidity in populations. If you’re white and you think you’re more discriminated against in America than other ethnic groups, congratulations: you’re officially an idiot. Stand up and be proud!
‘Whites suffer more racism than blacks’: Study shows white people believe they are more discriminate
www.dailymail.co.uk
You might think the right-wingers are crazy, but no…it’s everybody else. And now they understand why Obama is so busy destroying the country by…by…all those country-destroying things he’s doing.
President Obama the Klan Punisher?
maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com
It’s very interesting being jetlagged. I’m more or less human, but the creative functions are shrouded in fog. It really feels like being someone else.
30 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
One world! One love!
Lonely Boy Spoons Cover on Devour.com
They couldn’t break me. They had to let me go.
22 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
21 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
I try not to post too many cute things, but I’m fretting about leaving my family for a week while I go on a trip, so this resonates.
Can’t see the video in your RSS reader or email? Click here.
20 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Trying to get ready to go to Singapore, as well as find some hang-out time with my family. And what am I doing? Sitting in front of a computer. Give me that food pellet, already!
Hecticity — is that a word? Because that’s what I’m in the middle of, a whole bunch of…hectic-ness. It’s hectic as heck here, is what I’m trying to tell you.
19 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
18 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Ignoring things is not automatically a vice; in fact, ignoring things can be a crucial life-enhancing tool. Not to mention that at a basic level, it’s all that allows us to think coherently.
This is a wonderful picture of Bill Clinton and Obama (if it wasn’t staged.)
17 April 2012
Tad’s Mood Today
Interesting as an investigation of how these things go badly, stupidly wrong.
Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report
bradhicks.livejournal.com
April 24, 2012
The Groover’s Grotto: A Fan’s Notes from a Season of Headfeeding
Hi there, having stepped from the Month of (thankfully not quite) Madness and well stuck into a month cruel as Katie (happy Earth — or Eartha Kitt, if you prefer — Day, by the way).
And, yes, things have been busy within and without the Grotto for your reporter, thank you for asking. Through perseverance, talent and the odd bit of luck, I have managed to sink grapples and stakes into a section of the rockface of the Fourth Estate that I’ve hacked away at for…jeez, how long is it? Ages, eons…parsecs?
Specifics, then: I am regularly contributing to Bay Area monthly entertainment freebie guide BAY STAGES, and also to Southern California-based vinyl and music geek bimonthly RECORD COLLECTOR NEWS. Two discerning and tasty reads, both free and online as well as in proper paper form, and both worthy of the widest most possible readership.
Presently though, enough onanistic backslap and on to but some of one’s recent discoveries in pulpy perusals and earbending audio and video evidence. Howzabout this for starters: Lou Reed — Live ‘72 and ‘74 (MVD Video). Reed, in his mid ‘70s Rock and Roll Animal persona, presented himself not unlike a spastic surfer mantis in shades: a radical if brief shape-shift from the newly solo, sedated after-hours troubadour of Transformer and Berlin, in other words. Combined with exciting if conventional hard-rocking revamps of his VU catalog, it certainly got Lou noticed, even if he did eventually head for the ditch in his Metal Machine contraption.
After tantalizingly brief clips in PBS’ Rock And Roll Heart doc., the ‘74 portion (shot at various Euro venues) is close to an entire concert set, with all the favorites: a strutting ‘Sweet Jane’, a majestically doomy ‘Heroin’, a disco drug-jittery ‘Rock And Roll’ and more besides.
One important caveat, though: while the sound quality is choice, the visuals are watchable but way grainy, like a second-third generation dub. Given that some of the same clips show up on YouTube (or even Lou’s own website) in far better shape, it’s a blatant case of shoddy quality control. That said, it’s still a brilliant bit of historical salvage, even if slightly misleading: the ‘72 portion consists of a truncated clip of ‘Heroin’ from that year’s now-legendary Reed/John Cale/Nico reunion concert in Paris, and thus almost an afterthought.
So then: another year, another Bowie bio. Following up Mark Spitz’s turn last year comes Paul Trynka’s David Bowie: Starman (Little, Brown). There’s really nothing hugely revelatory to be found in Trynka’s reportage — certainly nothing on the level of Open Up And Bleed, his previous, pretty-damn-definitive history of Iggy Pop. But there is some value to be found, esp. in his research of DB’s early days as a musician, with jobbing hopefuls and also-rans like the Kon-Rads and The Buzz.
Take care, though, not to favorably mention Big Dave in the presence of longtime alternative/u’ground music commentator Byron Coley. A thorough drawing and quartering of Bowie’s methodology, in fact, actually provides one of the grimy highlights of C’est La Guerre: Early Writings 1978-1983 (Oie De Cravan), a Canadian collection of Coley music writings and biographic pieces.
Coley made his initial presence known through the post-Punk fanzine world of the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s. Via now-venerated indie-minded mags like New York Rocker and Boston’s Take It!, among others, Coley set out a profane but engaging rockcrit shingle, inspired by the Beats and gonzo rock scribes like Richard (Aesthetics Of Rock) Meltzer.
On the surface, Coley’s writing voice at this juncture was fiercely informal unto noble-lit.-savage scatalogy, reinforced by admissions to being ‘a dumb boy’ and ‘stoopid doopid kid’. But don’t be fooled: then as much as now (as seen in his regular pieces for the British music mag Wire), Coley deftly and regularly trips the reader up by inevitably revealing a perceptive and finely tuned critical mind, one capable of traversing far beyond mere gross, epater-le-b brainspew.
Coley ain’t for everyone, especially those who prefer their rock journo in easily palatable dribs, or pretentious, Greil Marcus-style drabs (even if he did manage to worm his way into SPIN Magazine for a few years). But for those suitably inclined, Byron Coley is a treasure and, fingers and toes crossed, this will be only the first of many compendiums.
Meantime, a read that might well appeal to fans of SF/F (as I imagine most of you scoping this site are) is Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (Random House). Austin Texas’s own, Cline is a proud, minutiae-minded pop culture geek, both on stage — as one of the human tentpegs of Austin’s Poetry Slam community — and on page, having co-writ the film Fanboys (even if numerous changes by Hollywood script doctors and suits resulted in Cline all but disowning the finished product).
One fervently hopes better for Ready Player One. For one, it’s as eminently filmable as it is readable. Its plot involves a smart, circumstantially stressed teenager in a post-apocalyptic America thirty years from now, and his habitual escapes into a virtual world obsessed with the ‘80s (the videogame-computer world in partic.), which expands (via a search for a deceased Silicon Valley magnate’s hidden fortune) into a dramatic, surprisingly substantial action-packed epic. Cline clearly knows his stuff inside out, but doesn’t let it get in the way of laying out a mighty fine transistor and microchip-embedded yarn.
Again though, a caveat: for those familiar with such stuff, you will find yourselves in a Pacman and John Hughes-ruled Valhalla. Others may be as future-shocked and flummoxed as Jack Nicholson apocryphally was on first viewing Ferris Bueller. (Who, me?)
Whoa, not even into recent music finds and already out of space: but plenty more anon? You betchum.
MLH
4/23/12
April 21, 2012
Join the Otherland Alpha Team! (Otherland MMO)
Can’t wait for the Otherland MMO to be released? Here’s your chance to get in early as an alpha tester.
And don’t miss the details, below, for your chance to win 1 of 5 lifetime passes to all Otherland Alpha and Beta periods!
Otherland fans… your time has come! We are now recruiting players to become a part of the Otherland Alpha Team. As an alpha tester, you will be asked to focus-test specific game elements, document your user experience and fill out in-depth surveys each week. Alpha testing is hard work, but if you think you have what it takes, fill out the application below and e-mail it to otherland@gamigo.de with the subject “ALPHA-RECRUIT-EN: ”. Slots are limited and not everyone will be selected. Good luck!
For more information and the application, see the forum here.
And an exciting announcement today on the Otherland Facebook page:
THANK YOU for getting us to 2000 LIKES! We are giving away 5 lifetime passes to all Otherland Alpha and Beta periods! The 5 winners of our Tad Williams interview contests will receive this reward! As an added bonus, anyone who enters these contests will receive priority placement in line for the beta tests!
See our earlier post for more about the Video Contest, and Good Luck!
April 18, 2012
Tad Williams Video Interview Contest (Otherland MMO)
This just in from gamigo and as announced on the Otherland MMO Facebook Page:
Win a chance to appear in the upcoming Tad Williams video interview! Film a short video of yourself asking Tad a question about the upcoming Otherland MMO. We will select our 3 favorite videos to play him during the interview and he will respond directly!
Upload your video to YouTube and post the link below or in our forums. Make sure to start the video with a brief introduction (“Hi Tad! This is Diana from New York. ”). This contest closes on Wednesday, April 25th, so start filming right away!
Please note that by posting your video you grant gamigo AG. the right to reproduce your video and all of its contents, as well as use your provided name and information in any upcoming media promotions.
So start planning your question and video now!
UPDATE: Want to ask Tad Williams a question but are camera shy? Otherland NetFeed is hosting a contest to pick 2 text questions for Tad in his upcoming interview! More details here.
And, get your Otherland MMO Wallpaper here, an exclusive from the Otherland Netfeed fansite.
