I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah
Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda
S-O-D-A, soda
I saw the little runt sitting there on a log
I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said, "Yoda"
Y-O-D-A, Yoda
Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo-Yoda
“Weird Al” Yankovic, Yoda
I appreciate the degree to which fans in Palm Springs wear their hearts on their sleeves.
- Sid
In other news, the state of Massachusetts has put forward a bill that would give convicts the opportunity to reduce their sentences by donating organs - essentially, trading body parts for time.
As often happens, science fiction, in the person of author Larry Niven, has already anticipated this macabre concept and its long term implications. Larry Niven's 1967 story The Jigsaw Man, originally published in Harlan Ellison's revolutionary anthology Dangerous Visions*, posits a future in which the organ banks are always hungry, and as such, the slippery slope that starts with prisoners donating bone marrow ends up with even the most trivial legal offenses - in this case, parking tickets - leading to the guilty party being broken down for parts.
Niven uses this concept in a number of stories, including one from The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in which people who have been cryogenically preserved in hopes of a future cure for their ailments are harvested for their organs - "waking up in pieces", as one character describes it.
In his postscript to the story, Niven makes the following comment:
The organ bank problem used to scare me. The internal logic seems so rigid. But if it were that obvious, the Red Cross would have been finding its blood donors on Death Row, five quarts to a donor, since 1940 A.D. That has not been happening. Perhaps I'm making a big deal out of nothing.
Maybe it only took someone to point out the advantages. In which case, blame it all on Larry Niven.
Well, Larry, it's good of you to take the blame, but I suspect that Massachusetts came up with this idea all on their own - as might have been expected from a science fiction story, all you had to do was to wait for the future to catch up.
- Sid
* Although, to be honest, if I were Ellison, I wouldn't have put The Jigsaw Man in Dangerous Visions, given the collection's New Wave mandate - it's such a standard Niven story
In November of 2022 I decided to stop blogging after sixteen years.
However, in some ways I never stopped. Sixteen years is a long time to do something, and as such I'd gotten into the habit of treating my life as a source of blog content, to the point where sometimes I'd make plans solely because of their potential as fodder for postings. (I realize that this would be commonplace if I was a seasoned influencer, but at the time it was a new concept to me.) As a result, out of habit I kept making notes, saving links, doing screen captures, and taking pictures just as if I was going to post the results - ghost posting, if you will.
And then, a recent conversation about ukulele lessons made me think that maybe I should start blogging again, that my ongoing phantom content creation was me sending myself a message.
So, as of March 24th, 2024, I revived The Infinite Revolution.
However, I still had all of those notes and photos and so on, and it seemed a waste not to use them. (After all, no one wants to have to explain a big gap in their blogging resume.) So, without further ado, I present The Lost Posts, a fragmentary catalogue of my life as a geek between November of 2022 and March 2024 - this post and my "I'm back" posting act as bookends for The Lost Posts - it seemed appropriate to come back with a book metaphor. I'll apologize in advance for any anachronisms, twonkies or similar Coke-bottle-in-the-midden artifacts caused by travelling into the past.
Just to be clear, I'm not going to add the missing posts all at once, but posting them as opportunity and impulse allow. And who knows, at some point I may just remove all three of the posts about the hiatus and my return, and retcon the whole thing.
- Sid
The Infinite Revolution is on indefinite hiatus.
Almost 16 years and 1,127 posts, not including this one - not a bad run, but it's getting to be like work.
Peace out. (Drops mike.)
- Sid
The Doctor : This whole world is swimming in Wi-Fi. We're living in a Wi-Fi soup! Suppose something got inside it. Suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi, harvesting human minds, extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck forever, crying out for help.
Clara Oswin : Isn't that basically Twitter?
The Bells of Saint John, Doctor Who
Well, it certainly is right now. Do you think Elon Musk watches Doctor Who?
- Sid
The concept of Chekov's Gun is fairly well known: it's a philosophy of narrative economy based on the idea that if you have a gun hanging on the wall in a play, it should be fired at some point, or else don't put it there.
I've just finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's 2019 novel Salvation, the first in his Salvation Sequence, and now I think that there needs to be an opposite to Chekov's Gun - Chekov's Fire Axe, if you will. Chekov's Fire Axe needs to say that you can't have a crucial prop appear from nowhere.
Without rehashing the entire plot of Salvation, there's a scene where the main characters are gathered together in the spartan lounge of a research station which has been constructed to investigate a crashed alien spaceship. At a pivotal moment, one of the characters kills another character with a fire axe, thereby revealing that their brain has been replaced with an alien organism.
Okay, wait wait wait. A fire axe?
Fire axes are a pretty specific tool. Their functionality is based around the need for firefighters (or people fighting fires) to chop through doors or other barriers, smash windows, or cut holes in walls or ceilings for ventilation. Why is there a fire axe on a futuristic research station - which is in a vacuum - without a piece of wood in sight, or any possible benefit to chopping through the station walls?
So, Chekov's Fire Axe: IF YOU NEED A SPECIFIC PROP TO ACHIEVE A PLOT POINT, IT SHOULD ALREADY EXIST OR LOGICALLY EXIST IN THE SETTING.
I'm sure that Chekov would approve.
- Sid
