Came across an interesting clip from an upcoming documentary today, and it seemed like a good jumping off point for tonight’s article.

Warning, the following clip contains Harlan Ellison being himself.

Needless to say, being a writer, I kind of agree with Harlan, although I may be biased.

Also needless to say, he makes his point in the most asshole-like way he possibly can, including a tale of how he verbally abused some random studio flunky because she had the gall to suggest he do something for free.

But buried somewhere in that giant stinking heap of Harlan’s highly toxic personality is a good point or two, I think.

First off, yeah, sure, all the other people agreed to do their DVD stuff for free. That’s because they are all actors who have gone on to do other things and legitimately can think of this as publicity for themselves.

Or they are J. Michael Straczynski and are worshiped as a god by nerds worldwide, and have no need for such petty offerings as “money”.

But writers are just writers, even when they are as (in)famous as Harlan. They need to get paid for what they do, and paying work is scarce in the world of writing (which is why all those “amateurs” have to work for free, Harlan, you douche nozzle) and so every writer is best served by being pretty fierce about getting paid for their work whenever possible.

And it’s not like he is asking for money from some earnest group of hard-working fans who are scraping something together out of love for the show and are putting it all together on their friend’s MacBook Pro because they all work at Starbucks.

This is Warner Brothers here. They can afford to pay, and they should pay, if asked.

That didn’t justify Harlan being such a dick to the nice lady on the phone, though, and I can only hope he is embellishing the story and was not actually that rude to her.

But you never know with a prime dickhead like Harlan. Maybe he was even worse, who knows?

The problem boils down to the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people who want to be writers in the world. It is a job with a high degree of appeal to those of us who are shy and highly verbal and big time readers and/or consumers of other media.

And when you have such an enormous supply with such a (relatively) low demand, it becomes rather heavily a buyer’s market and we poor sellers are left in a very poor bargaining position. Sure, we would all like to be able to demand to be paid for anything we do. Do that as a struggling, unknown writer like millions of others, and you will find yourself unpublished and obscure for the rest of your life.

I know it’s hard for you to remember, Harlan, but there was even a time before you were famous, and when you might well have been willing to work (or even take a piss) for free just to get your name out there.

Of course, you haven’t written jack shit in the last twenty years anyhow, so I supposed you have to lunge for every potential revenue stream you can lest you end up working for a living. By the way, when’s that next Dangerous Visions coming out? Real Soon Now?

Myself, I would love to be a paid writer. What wannabe writer wouldn’t? We all dream of being able to make a comfortable living just typing away and creating our magic, with all the little mundane details of life taken care of by others who are paid to do so. with just the occasional book tour to shake the cobwebs out of our furrowed brows and air out our leather-elbowed tweed jackets. It’s an intellectual’s wet dream, and one I am haphazardly pursuing even just by writing this article.

(I think it might involve getting my shit together enough to take something I wrote and polishing it up so I can send it to the sort of people who publish things. Boy, that’s going to be a tough one. )

And Lord knows, a lot of people are eager to completely ignore the writer’s role in things, and a lot of writers are more than willing to go along with that because of the aforementioned buyer’s market, and, honestly, low self-esteem amongst introverts.

But that does not excuse all those people for trying to cut the writer out of the deal, as thought the parent is the least important part of a childhood.

So pay the writer already!

Still waiting on the Next Big Story Idea, so for now, I will just share with you lovely people all the really neato stuff that I have come across lately.

Let’s start off with a little animated GIF that is sure to surprise you.

Talk about an eye-popping illusion, huh? It really blew my mind when I first saw it. I was expecting that it would be one of those clips you see these days where a 2D object on a piece of paper is turned into a 3D object via some kind of augmented reality trickery.

Instead, what looks like a classic bouncing cube animation from the early days of computer graphics turns out to be a perfectly mundane real world object that just happens to have the power to mess with your mind.

Aren’t optical illusions kick-ass fun? Take this classic “black balls” illusion.

THIS IS NOT AN ANIMATED GIF

for those of you who don’t read captions, let me reiterate : the above picture is not animated in any way. All those little black balls you see blipping around the places where the lines intersect are not really there at all, and are entirely products of your sense being fooled by the graphical trick of the illusion.

Freaky, n’est-ce pas? IT can be fun to mess with your own mind.

The same goes for this pic :

No animation here either, sport!

Despite all appearances, those balls are not animated in any way, either. It looks like they are floating and bobbing in an ocean of green. But they are just sitting there. The motion you see as you scan the pic with your eyes is entirely in your mind.

Now that we’ve got your eyeballs all warmed up and ready for something truly spectacular, feast them on this amazing video clip from America’s Got Talent and a little dance clash performance group called Team iLuminate.

Now remember, this is all taking place live, on stage, in front of America and a studio audience. No CGI or anything. Just…. this.

Now that, my friends, is an act. I mean holy crapsticks. It is impressive enough in video. I can’t imagine what it is like live, happening right in front of you. They cook light and shadow, illumination and contrast, glow strips and black velvet, and made a simply breaktaking visual display out of it.

The act lags somewhat in the middle, but it is still damn impressive. The first time I watched this video and saw the Shiva arms pop up, my eyes nearly popped out of my head and bounced off the screen.

I am a big fan of spectacle for the sense if it is done right, like these folks do it, or like Blue Man Group. There’s nothing wrong at all with making something purely to look amazing. Not everything has to be a multi-layered meaning-laden narrative Dagwood sandwich.

Sometimes, you just want to make people’s eyes go “whoa…. WTF was that?”

And finally, a clip that probably will not amaze your mind, but it definitely will warm your heart and might just blow your mind as well.

This clip shows what a young make orca named Luna learned to do in his attempt to communicate with the strange creatures known as “humans”.

That’s right. In an attempt to communicate with us, Luna learned to mimic the sound of the motorboats that plied the waters around his home.

Does that not just grab your heart and blow your mind? He is trying to talk with us, so he is repeating back to us the sounds we make. The sincere and innocent desire to communicate coupled with the degree of intelligence and mental flexibility that it takes to be able to even imagine trying to communicate with us thusly, let alone actually being able to use his existing vocal apparatus to do a pretty good motorboat impression, just makes me feel like giving an orca a big hug.

Not a good idea, I presume. I can’t even swim.

I wonder what Luna thinks of his attempts? Presumably, without even meaning to, we humans make our motorboat noise right back to him, and so the most primitive form of communication has been established : that of mutual repetition.

You know, like these guys.

Trust me, it’s corny now, but that shit was quite exhilerating back in the seventies. Holy crap, the aliens have Moog synthesizers too! Awesome!

That’s all the neat stuff for now, people. Goodbye!

After talking to you for several hours last night, I came to this conclusion :

You are a lucky, lucky person.

Oh, I know you don’t look at yourself that way, but I assure you, it is true!

I mean, take geography alone.

Here you are, a person living in a small farming town far from the city lights, someone who has never been more than 20 miles from home and who lives in the very house in which he grew up, and indeed was born, and yet you were easily able to assure me that not only was the town you live in the very best town in the very best region on the whole of God’s Green Earth, but that you lived in the nicest part of it with the best people and even the world’s best church bar none.

Imagine! Such luck, to be born in exactly the right place and have the very best of everything in the world right on your doorstep, literally and figuratively. That would be more than enough fortune for anyone!

But of course, your good luck is only beginning! In fact, compared to other factors, this extraordinary piece of luck of being born in, of all the places on the globe, the very very best one, pales into mere serendipity compared to others.

Your racial background, for instance. Through absolutely no effort of your own, you were born into the racial subgroup which just happens to be the clearly and widely acknowledged best one. You are no bigot, of course, and indeed are quite proud of the racial tolerance you have for other, inferior races, and you are quite sure that should a person of another racial makeup ever come to your time, you would treat them with every possible courtesy and respect for the entire time it took to see them on their way again.

That is mighty decent of you, to share your luck like that!

Or your gender. Granted, that was a mere toss of the coin, but still, Lucky Duck that you are, that one came down in your favour too. Yup, yours is the clearly superior gender, and you did not have to even budge one inch to get it.

All this good fortune just rains down on you like golden rain!

Even your profession is clearly the most important, prestigious, and worthy job in the world. I was truly touched by your sincere pity for those forced to labour in other, lesser fields because they were not blessed to be born with both a talent and a liking for the only job truly worth doing, amongst all the hundreds of professions in the world.

Imagine that! Of all the jobs in the world, you just happened to be good at the best one! Truly, nobody else has ever been as lucky as you!

Even your hobbies are, by sheer coincidence, the only truly interesting and illuminating ones in the world. By simply following your natural inclinations, you have spent hours and hours doing exactly the most worthwhile past-times in the whole world.

It’s a wonder other people even bother to try, with you in the world!

And of course, how could I forget your lovely family? The best spouse in the world with whom you have had not one, not two, but three of the absolute best children possible in the whole wide variety of the spectrum of humanity? It truly makes a person sad to think of all the rest of us mere mortals who have to sweat and toil and worry just to achieve a pale shadow of what Lady Luck gives you as a matter of course!

And of course, your politics. Even though you vote exactly how your parents always voted and never even given the slightest thought to the alternatives, you were nevertheless able to assure me, with rock-solid certainty, that your politics represent the only true, worthy, moral path for your country, your region, and your home town, and all others are but misguided mistakes at best and downright malign machinations at worst.

And do I even need to mention your religion? No, I didn’t think so.

So to recap : without having to do a thing, you have the best religion, job, family, politics, home, gender, and everything else in the world, purely by luck.

You are truly the luckiest person alive.

I mean seriously…. what are the odds?

It’s Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint, Fooble-mint gum!

For those of you who are not of Generation X, that is what is known as a reference.

Look it up in some kind of book.

Heya hiya howdy, folks, and welcome to that brief respite from sanity known as the Sunday Fooble Hours, brought to you courtesy of Foobco, the Fun Folks to Know. Remember kids, when you think of asparagus used in suggestive ways, think Foobco!

Then call your doctor.

You know what I love? Random acts of wonder. Things that people do just to add a little sparkle and mystery and magic to the lives of others. Anonymous, selfless, completely sincere acts of public wonderfulness.

Like the odd and mysterious paper sculptures showing up around Edinburgh.

I could be wrong about the motive, of course. Perhaps it’s not an act of public wonder but the inevitable byproduct of a brilliant but tortured orgamist’s all-consuming obsession, and what were are seeing are not works of art donated to the public consciousness but symptoms of a mind slowly coming apart.

But I prefer to think that this person wanted to share their hobby with the world, but in a way that would give people something to talk about and wonder about and that would make their days just a little brighter and more interesting.

Nothing harmful or destructive. Just a something a little different, to make this day unlike all the others. A gift.

Then again, sometimes these sort of things are motivated by a simple need to be heard on a subject of local interest. Say, a local eyesore that desperately needs to go away, so desperately that you are willing to get together with a bunch of friends and perform a simply breathtaking act of public art as commentary.

I am gobstruck with awe for the people who did that. It’s not just a marvelously elegant commentary that anyone seeing it can understand. It is a highly daring and presumably quite dangerous stunt that I am thinking required at least three people to pull off. So it took planning and coordination as well.

All to say “this ugly old thing has got to go”.

I have crazy mad respect for people who are that passionate in their desire to make a statement, and who do it in such a powerful and peaceful way.

After all, it’s not like they destroyed anything of value, nor did they make the ugly old dam any uglier. They just added a very simple comment that hurt nobody but made their point clearly and even somewhat humorously.

Then again, some people don’t need to make statements in order to be heard, because they are the butchest human being alive and other people will do all the telling for them.

Like this guy here.

Quick, someone call Stephen Colbert!

Kind of makes Davey Crockett look like a big fat pussy, doesn’t it?

Sure, he “got him a bar when he was only three”, but did he do it by taking it on bare-handed and ripping out its throat with his teeth?

I didn’t think so.

Animal lover that I am, I have no problem with people defending themselves. I don’t feel bad for the bear. We human beings are top predator for a reason. We are really fucking dangerous. If the animals leave us alone, we can be civilized.

But cross the line and attack us, and suddenly it’s all about the law of the jungle.

Is it just me, or have I completely failed to keep a light and jocular tone this week?

Oh well. Here’s some intensely nerdy humour to lighten the mood.

You remember high school algebra, right?

You see, it’s funny because the square root of negative one is an imaginary number because there can be no number that when multiplied by itself results in a negative number. Square a positive number, you get a positive number. Square a negative number, a negative number times a negative number is always positive, ergo, still a positive number.

So you can see, it can be mathematically demonstrated, without the possibility of error, that the above joke is completely hilarious.

If you still don’t find it funny, you must just hate math.

That’s all the stuff I have for you this week, all you fun people out there. Time to clean up, turn out the lights, lock the doors, and play a little wistfully sad piano music to signal the network that we are done for now.

Seeya next week folks!

Today comes at the end of one hell of a week for mind-bending (and mind-reading!) science. I have had a hell of a time narrowing the field down to only the most neuron-tingling ganglion-tickling future-tastic stories for your edification and stimulation this week.

I mean, take this story about the latest development in the field of rapid prototyping or 3D printing : assault rifle parts, and a freaking Stradivarius!

We will deal with the Strad first. Yes, it happened. Some people took a super precise scan of a genuine Stradivarius violin, the greatest violins ever made, and then someone else printed it out and gave it a try.

How did it sound? You be the judge.

I love the setting. Music in a meadow. Lovely.

As for the sound, it sounds fine to me, but then again what do I know? But nobody is claiming it’s just like the real thing. For one thing, it’s made of industrial plastics, not wood and varnish and so on. It is more the idea of it that is important, the idea that some day, rare and precious objects might well be only a few mouse clicks away.

And also rare and dangerous things. An assault rifle is a highly precise machine, and yet people are taking them apart and scanning parts of them and putting them up on the Internet. We’re far from being able to print our own AK-47s (where would the cordite come from, for one) but the real issue is that the precisely machined, painstakingly designed parts of a modern assault rifle represent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars of research and development, and a future in which anyone can get that for free from the Net is a very different kind of future indeed.

Or how about this? Some highly clever people have come up with a highly promising design for a perpetual hydrogen fuel cell that requires only salt water and fresh water to keep on making hydrogen microbially potentially forever.

I am still not entirely sold on the idea of a hydrogen future, but something like this could certainly make it more of a possibility. The technical details are neat but complicated, but all you need to know is that as long as you have salt water in one side and fresh water in the other, the salinity difference between the two gives the setup the extra juice it needs to keep the microbes happily eating waste and farting out hydrogen.

Yes…. the future may be powered by germ farts. Deal with it.

But neither of those can hold a metaphorical candle, or a real one for that matter (news stories have no hands), to this freaky bit of brain science : the first glimpse into a machine than can actually read your mind and display what you are seeing on a TV screen.

Holy Sixties Science Fiction, man.

Because this is the first good result, the images produced don’t look a whole lot like what the person is actually seeing, but they look enough like it to give anyone the willies.

Check this shit out, kiddies :

Clearly, while nobody would want to watch the reconstruction, it’s only a matter of refining the process before you are getting clearly recognizable images from inside someone’s brain.

This is the sort of science that both blows my mind and scares the shit out of me.

On the positive side, I imagine a future where someone (maybe even someone like little old me) could make a whole movie simply by imagining the images in their mind. And if they can do images, would sound be far behind?

On the negative side, reading someone’s mind is the ultimate violation of privacy imaginable. Even in the most repressive fascist states, despite all their efforts, they could not control what went on inside someone’s mind. In your mind, you were free.

In the future, maybe, not so much.

But as thrilling as that is, for sheer wondrous WTF-ness, nothing beats the big news out of CERN that recent routine neutrino experiments seem to show neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

Gee, Mister Einstein, isn’t that impossible?

Admittedly, this story is a few days old now, and by now, they might well have figured that it was all a case of human error, instrument malfunction, or something else that is completely mundane and stupid and absolutely no fun whatsoever.

But I am hoping against hope that this is totally real and we have just broken one of the biggest rules in physics and a whole new theory will be needed to account for this, because I am the sort of person who is absolutely thrilled by the discovery of the unknown and the moments when we, as a curious species, are forced to go “What the fuh…. this makes no sense at all!” and throw our hands in the air and admit we don’t know everything.

Plus hey, if neutrons can go faster than light, maybe we can too, and what kind of science fiction guy would I be if I was not super excited at the prospect of real, actual FTL?

But mostly, I just love the edges of knowledge, and am thrilled by the discovery of big, fat, juicy mysteries that reveal the majesty and wonder of the universe, and remind us that we are but children in this big complicated universe.

Dark matter. Dark energy. The universe’s expansion speeding up. And now neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

The whole thing makes me downright giddy. It makes me want to laugh and laugh and shout “We don’t know anything! Isn’t it wonderful?”

I imagine others would be more angered or disturbed by this sort of thing. But for a thinker like me, it is the most marvelous thing in the world : a genuine mystery.

Ain’t science neat?

Here it is, another foobtastic Sunday, and under a light gray sky, a herd of brand new foobs comes thundering over the horizon! Lo, from the majestic plains of Foobstar Fells to the gently rolling hills of the Fertile Fooblands stretches a grand and ragged line of Fantastical Funny Friendly Foobs, each one holding the tail of the one in front and having its own tail held by the one behind, and at the front of the herd, tendril flanges proudly a-flapping in the breeze, stands the might and majestic Alpha Foob, and her haram of eighty husbands close (but not too close) behind.

God, I wish Marlin Perkins were alive to film it.

And speaking, as we nearly were, of our friends in the animal kingdom, we have a few fun and frolicsome animal clips to share with you today, gentle readers (and a few of you crusty old farts too). Like this one, which illustrates the comedic potential of a dog’s complete and total lack of self-awareness or irony.

Are those some adorable LOLs or what? A sweet and innocent little doggie plus a little help from our friend Mister Static Electricity and voila, laughs galore. The sight of his pretty white fur poofing out and turning him into a living three dimensional asterisk is funny enough, but combined with his completely innocent and clueless expression (because, after all, he has no idea anything is happening besides everyone paying attention to him for some reason after he gets extra pets) is total comedy gold. Damn near everything with nominal brain function will find that charming and hilarious.

I bet everyone who visits that household gets to see that little trick if they are around for long enough and are making a good impression.

As pet tricks go, it’s a winner.

Sticking with our friendly friends of the canine persuasion, you will be happy to know that recent advances in subtitling technology have allowed us to finally understand what our pets are saying to us, or in this case, one another.

Warning, there’s a lot of doggy noises like barking and howling in this one, so you might wanna turn it down if you have sensitive nerves or cats or both.

The clip is both cute and funny, but a lot more cute than funny, admittedly. The dogs (I think they are Malamutes) are gorgeous and cute as hell, and that is mostly what carries it, although the “dialogue” is funny in parts. Needs an ending though, something to send it off with a punchline or at least a finale.

Perhaps the dog who wants to play calling the other “bitch”. Corny, but what the hell.

It really does seem like they are trying to literally talk to one another, doesn’t it? Because they are not just barking and it’s not quite howling either. It’s “ah-woo-woo-wooing”, for lack of an official term. I imagine living with it is a tad hard on the nerves, but it is interesting to hear for a short clip.

And last on today’s foob parade, we have this little slice of comedy about the weird world in which we live, and how strangely different it is from the far stranger world in which television ads seem to exist.

Having one person in the ad react like a normal person would if their friend suddenly began talking to nobody about some drug is hardly a fresh and original concept. I have seen it done as far back as Uncle Milty, and that’s a long time.

Still, I thought they did a pretty good take on the whole drug commercial thing, and so I decided it was worth sharing. Plus, they keep the madness going fairly well. I like the idea of drug commercial psychosis.

Side effects of reading today’s blog entry may (but shouldn’t) include lightheadedness, drowsiness, feelings of mirth, irritable bowel texts, darkness around the perineum, superego, friendly fire, temporary loss of inhibitions, running off at the mouth like that bitch of a wife my boss has got, unemployment, depression, revelation, and no longer giving the tiniest of fucks about anything.

If these or another other symptoms of absolutely any kind, including imaginary, psychosomatic, or physically impossible, please consult your physician, nurse-practioner, or whoever else you let stick thing in you while you’re naked.

Ask them whether Foobatrex is right for you, or whether it might just be a sex thing.

That’s all for this week, foob fans. Remember, if the women don’t find you handsome, try men. You never know!