Amusing

A Canadian vignette

Posted on by Patrick

I have this sin­gle scene for a film in my head, very Cana­di­an: a shot of a south­bound V of geese, mov­ing across a pale blue sky. The cam­era pans down to a soli­tary per­son on the ground, stand­ing in the mid­dle of the street, yelling up at them, “Quit­ters! Get back here!”

Film­mak­ers: If you’d like to use this in your film, please let me know. I’m sure we can work some­thing out.

Ficlets

Posted on by Patrick

Some of my short fic­tion — all the stuff I post­ed on Ficlets (RIP), for instance — is licensed with a rather per­mis­sive Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Share­Alike license.  This means that when it turns up on a site like Com­puma­trix, I can’t request that it be tak­en down.

painted by Ron Hartgrove
From Ron Hart­grove’s “Book of Days” project

Not that this both­ers me, real­ly.  My words are being read, and some­times in places I’d nev­er expect.  Maybe it torques me a lit­tle that some­one’s “mon­e­tized” my works, but I have the feel­ing that the mon­ey involved is pret­ty small.  (I don’t know; maybe “Wilma(logima)” is rolling in long green thanks to me.  I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. I also doubt I’ll lose sleep over it.)

Most of the ficlets that I wrote were dashed off in fif­teen min­utes; some­times the hard­est part was trim­ming them down to fit the site’s 1024-char­ac­ter max­i­mum.  I’m glad peo­ple still find them so fascinating.

Places I’ve found my ficlets

I’m sure it’s popped up oth­er places, some of which I’ll even­tu­al­ly stum­ble upon.  Like I said, the Ficlets are licensed per­mis­sive­ly, and I have no inten­tions of try­ing to get any of them tak­en down.  (I’ll do what I can to make sure they’re prop­er­ly attrib­uted, of course.)  I’m just glad peo­ple are enjoy­ing my fiction.

Speak­ing of which:  There’s more fic­tion over here, if you’re inter­est­ed. (The bulk of which, please note, is not CC-licensed.)

“Japan’s first robot buddy cop movie”

Posted on by Patrick

There’s a phrase that makes me perk right up and pay atten­tion. I found this on the Inter­net, thanks to Wil Wheaton, and it struck me that whether or not it’s true, the sto­ry is awesome.

And I quote:

Japan’s first robot bud­dy cop movie, a silent film released in 1919, was shown only once, to an assem­bly of wealthy land own­ers in Tokyo. When the film end­ed, the audi­ence demand for afford­able giant robots to work their fields and con­trol the peas­ants was so insis­tent, emper­or Hiro­hi­to had the only copy of the film impound­ed and destroyed to pre­vent the idea from cap­tur­ing the public’s imagination.

Found via Wil Wheaton’s tum­blr. Go ahead, click through. There’s a great pho­to and everything.