Categories
2012 ARG movies

Let’s play: 2012 movie virals

Okay, time for some fun on someone else’s ARG after all the work on the DESCENDANT

As-you-know-Bob, the 2012 movie from Roland Emmerich of awesome STARGATE fame, is due out later this year. Emmerich is also known for his disaster movies INDEPENDENCE DAY and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

Mmmm, apocalypse. He wants his apocalypse now. There, that’s the apocalypse jokes over with.

2012 will be another disaster movie, with the good old Mayan Long Count final date as the prediction for this movie’s end-times. It shares that and at least one other thing with The Joshua Files: the notion that the 2012 scenario is detailed in a still-to-be-found ‘fifth’ codex of the ancient Maya.

In the 2012 movie though, we’re cutting to the chase: codex, prophetic doom, disaster, one hero to save his family. Y punto. Oh and John Cusack as the lead. John Cusack! Could it be more perfect? I LOVE HIM! In my mind, he’s Jackson Bennett. (This won’t mean anything to you unless you are playing THE DESCENDANT ARG)

Okay so let’s play.

First, watch the teaser trailer for 2012. Fully awesome! Now isn’t that the way you would like to die…watching that terrifying wave washing over the Himalayas? It sure beats dying in a bed.

Then look at the two linked sites: This Is The End and The Institute for Human Continuity

At This Is The End you can watch nutty old Charlie Frost, a character played by Woody Harrelson, ranting on about the end is nigh on his cable TV show. Brilliant!

At the marvellously-named The Institute for Human Continuity you can watch a video report of the discovery of a fifth codex. I also recommend Joshua fans to look at the IHC’s section on E.A.R.T.H Initiative for a round-up of general 2012 hokiness. It’s a big-budget version of the 2012 page on DESCENDANT in-game site Archaeologyconspiracies.com. So definitely check it out!

They don’t seem to mention the Galactic Superwave though. Huh.

The principle of the Institute for Human Continuity is this: when the apocalypse arrives, we’re mostly doomed. There will be a lottery to choose survivors. You can take a number right now. Oooh, pick me!

Some snooty sci-fi folk have criticised this movie’s marketing campaign for being cheesy. But that’s just what a disaster movie requires! You can’t serve up a dish as scary as worldwide terror and doom without a side-dish of daftness. At least, you shouldn’t. Not if you want young people to enjoy it.

Categories
cuba raves salsa youtube

Best. Rueda. Ever.


I think, after spending quite some time on YouTube looking for it, I have unearthed a vid of the best rueda ever.

Filmed in one of those shabby, dilapidated-yet-once-grand Havana buildings, it’s easy to miss how great this is (if you didn’t read the title), because of the lack of an audience and the very plain dress of the dancers – just crisp white cotton dresses for women and shirts and trousers for guys.

But watch for more than a minute and you’ll see what I mean. Unbelievably cool, stylish Cuban dancers full of AZUCAR! and SABOR! and incredble choreography.

Watching this, frankly, makes me feel like:
a) I have basically wasted my life so far by not being able to dance like this, with people like this.
b) The rest of my life will be wasted if I don’t drop everything so that I can dance like this, with people like this.

Not saying I HAVE wasted my life, or that I am about to drop anything. I’m just saying how it makes me feel.

If you adore Cuban salsa, you will understand. Also how badly it makes me want to go back to Cuba. WAHHH!

Categories
raves

Swimming in the snow

Swimming in the snow

Originally uploaded by mgharris

Couldn’t resist a brisk 20 lengths of the outdoor pool…followed by the sauna and minty steam room.

We’re starting to schedule lots of events around the launch of ICE SHOCK. Mainly schools but also at Blackwell’s and the Oxford Literary Festival. And a fringe event at the Oxford Lit Festival, a two-hander with BBC Oxford’s Bill Heine! Will update the events page soonish.
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
ice shock raves translations

A Joshua-themed writing competition for schools

Very happy today for several reasons.

One is that Scholastic have launched a writing competition for schools, in the magazine Junior Education Plus.

On the website and in the magazine you’ll find the first 600 words of a short story – written by me.

To enter the contest, you then write the ending of the story – in 200 words.

The winner gets a signed copy of INVISIBLE CITY (or I guess you could ask for ICE SHOCK if the winner has it already), plus £150 of books for their school.

The story is brilliantly illustrated by Dave Neale and the online interactive version includes turning pages and cool sound effects!

The story is called ‘Stars Fell On Campeche’ and features Josh when he was younger, playing football at some ancient Mayan ruins where his father worked. It was originally one of four prologues I wrote for the opening of INVISIBLE CITY. (In the end we went with the newspaper article about the strange incident at the museum…) 

And the other reason I’m happy is that the German (Frank Boehmert) and Slovakian (Ivan Stefanek) translators of Joshua are reading ICE SHOCK now, getting ready to translate it. Frank even blogged about ICE SHOCK (vielen Dank, Frank!).

Still reading the brilliant “Black Swan” book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I wrote him a fan email yesterday and he replied right away! (I told him that one day, a character in Joshua will quote him…he wrote back that he’s very intrigued…)

Categories
raves

A new guru – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Well, me blog readers. I’m very excited because I have found a new guru AND a new author to devour.

It just goes to show how important news year’s resolutions can be. Mine, as ever, included the resolution to read more books, but this time with the added proviso of some things to give up so as to make time for reading more books.

It’s already paying off. I finished the best novel I’ve read in years – ‘Blindness’ By Jose Saramago. It’s stunningly great and a welcome reminder to me of what constitutes truly great writing. More from Saramago, please!

Now I’m reading “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who may be a genius.

Owing to my nil-by-ears-and-eyes attitude, I missed this book until I saw it on a pile of popular business, economics and science books at Christmas. My poor husband, who despises most gifts unless they arrive in boxes full of wires and take him happy hours  to configure, is usually grudging grateful for a stack of these come Christmas. The title resonated with me because there’s a well-known paper about the difficulty of getting off the publishing slushpile, which also uses the ‘black swan’ metaphor. (‘On the survival of rats in the slushpile’).

Which goes to PROVE that as both Umberto Eco and Taleb say, if a bit of information is important enough to you, IT WILL FIND IT’S WAY TO YOU SOMEHOW.

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” is a book that says what a few people I speak to have been muttering for ages. But he says it extremely well, more thoroughly and with evidence of years of thought and reading to synthesize the argument.

To quote a Sunday Times article:

“To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

Not since Umberto Eco has an academic impressed me so much with his breadth of reading, insight, ideas, vision and humour. Maybe it’s because like Eco, Taleb isn’t a pure ‘academic’. In fact he has little time for them. Especially economists. (Here’s a quote from his Website about people with advanced economics degrees.

 “I am now convinced that an (advanced) economics degree lowers one’s ability to understand the difference between absence of evidence and evidence of absence. Some people need to be locked up, and locked up quickly.”

Could he mean people like Dr. Gordon Brown? Economists with advanced degrees and the power to totally screw a nation’s economy, does he mean people like that?

For some pure genius advice from the man himself on the way to catch a flight, see this terrific profile of Taleb from the Sunday Times.

Considering that Taleb published this book in April 2007 – before the whole credit crunch thing – and seems to have been proven right in his warnings about the insanity of the finance industry, I’ll bet this book has made him as many enemies as friends, And not just amongst academic economists…