Okay, so Norwescon starts (for me) on Wednesday, and...

[solarbird]

Okay, so Norwescon starts Wednesday. I'm getting ready for the daily newsletter, like usual, and for the fanzine library, which I also run.

Right now, the only significant thing left on the newsletter side is collecting random bits of SF and fantasy trivia regarding languages, communications, and communications systems. The convention theme this year is "The Language of Fantasy and Science Fiction," and I've already stripmined things like A Fire Upon the Deep and (to a lesser degree) Lost and I've got some random tidbits from This Island Earth and MST3K, and a few other small random bits.

I want suggestions, if you've got 'em. Other than Star Trek stuff, I mean, unless it's really obscure or something. Drop a comment if you've got something that I might be able to pervertuse to good effect.

Other than that, one of our receipts had this interesting not-really-a-staple-but-looked-like-one-from-the-top fastener of a kind I don't use and have never seen before which totally destroyed our shredder. (Jammed it and broke off a piece of plastic; plastic then jammed in the gears; gears lost several teeth.) On the plus side, I tossed the warranty 120GB drive into our backup server and moved our tape drive to the proper bay. And I got about 3/4 of the shredding done before SURPRISE NO MORE SHREDDER FOR YOU.

Hm. What else? Last night, annathepiper and I went by a couple of parties; a writer's-association party of Anna's and our ex-housemate Ian's birthday party. Ian's house has kind of a bit of an Andor vibe (hi lyonesse!), though part of that is no doubt the impressive hallway mural in the back. I liked the house a lot, it's just an assortment of blocks away from the first house we tried to buy when doing the monster house search last year. It would have been cool if that had worked out. His street has an amazing view of downdown, I really like it - it's in Wallingford, with a straight shot down to the north edge of Lake Union, for anybody who knows what that means.

Mostly it's been that kind of stuff this week. Oh, OS X users should more seriously investigate mplayer for divx and mp42/mp43 data sources. It's a fairly direct port of the *nix version, does fullscreen, is open, and has good performance. La.

Anyway, if you have ideas for the daily 'zine, lemmie know!

Comments

[aerialscribe.livejournal.com]

So I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for re: language but I think you should take a close look at Forbidden Planet for a number of reasons.

1. Features the difficulties of excavating the ruins of an ancient alien race and understanding what they are about.
2. Classic Robbie the Robot, AI and cybernetic communications.
3. Mental/Telepathic communications -- i.e. the monster in the Id, resulting in a pyschokinetic being.
4. And last but not least, very obscure (do a search on NPR because I originally heard the interview there), you should explore the fact that this movie pioneered "electronic music". Originally called "electronic tonalities", the soundtrack was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron. And the Academy Awards refused to consider their soundtrack for an Oscar because they said that the soundtrack "was not a composition and it was not music." They are now, of course, considered the grandparents of electronica.

Hope that gives you something fun for the Con!

[cow.livejournal.com]

I will be at Norwescon on Saturday. We should finally meet. :D

[solarbird]

We should! I'll be, you know, around! And I'll probably have my cell. ^_^

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

I'll hopefully see you too then! :) Dara and I are sharing a room, so there's a good chance of that. :)

[cow.livejournal.com]

Woo! I look forward to it. :)

I have no idea what to weaaaaar! angst etc

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

Anyway, if you have ideas for the daily 'zine, lemmie know!

Well, dunno how much help this is, but I found I site last night with the elven terms used in Dragonlance (I ws bored and trying to find the reverence to the word shalori, when I came across the site... the link is here (http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/fire/518/elvenlang.html) if interested.

Have fun at the con :)

[solarbird]

This is cool - thanks. ^_^

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

anytime :)

[brombear.livejournal.com]

As silly as it might sound, the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has a couple of good discussions on the language barrier, most notably, concerning the "Babel Fish".

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i really miss ian! give him a hug for me :)

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

And for me, Norwescon started this morning, with the Registration Packet Stuffing Party. Now I've already run one event, went home, and am going back this evening for another- IT Integration Test Move-Out.
The main event starts Tuesday afternoon, with the South Truck Run.

[avram]

Samuel Delany’s Babel 17 involves an alien super-language being deciphered by a human poet/linguist.

In Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, there is a culture called the Ascians whose law limits their speech to sentences out of their foundational political text. (It’s a bit like the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek Next Gen, but was written earlier and is far more intelligent.) Chapter 11 of Citadel of the Autarch contains a story told by one of the Ascians, a captured soldier named Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, with interlineated translation by another character.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has both the Babelfish that Brombear mentioned and a bit about the grammatical aspects of time travel. Or maybe that was in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

[avram]

And cripes, Tolkien! The LotR appendices have all sorts of stuff about lanugages, and maybe his essays as well.

And speaking of the Inklings, there’s some stuff about languages in CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy (the protagonist is a philologist), but the philosophy therein is mildly repugnant.

[solarbird]

Thanks! These are cool, but can you zoom in, say, a lot? I've only got two and a half days before the con starts. ^_^

Mostly what I'm hoping for is that people will remind me of things I've read and not thought about, or to get something I can run with immediately without deep context required.

[janne.livejournal.com]

The book that comes to mind is Native Tongue (http://www.feministpress.org/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=55861100995090), in which The Government is desperately trying to communicate with incomprehensible aliens. I seem to recall that it involves some scheme to use babies who haven't learned to talk (human) yet as intermediaries, with lovecraftian splatter-effects as a result. More of a feminist dystopia than standard SF, perhaps...

[janne.livejournal.com]

Ohyes, and C.J.Cherry mustn't be forgotten. She has some weird alien race in the Chanur books with an incredibly intricate language which is only understood by one other alien race which translates it in the form of a huge matrix of words that reads like demented poetry, and from which the lesser races must attempt to glean meaning as best as they can. I did love that concept :)

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, that was the one I was trying to remember!

David Brin did some neat stuff with dolphin and whale language in one of his--IIRC, the dolphin language ended up translated into haiku in English.

There are a bunch of older sf short stories about language, including Asimov's Omnilingual, about finding a period table and using it as the basis for translating. And somebody did a cute one about trying to communicate with aliens who used smell....

Cathy

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

um, periodic table of the elements is what I meant.

[solarbird]

There's another one with a less than completely dissimilar shtick - they put a bunch of kids on an island to learn language (et al) on their own, and aliens show up (unbeknownst to the project managers) and wacky events ensue. Since the ending is happy, it's kind of the opposite of the story you're referencing - I wish I remembered the title or author. (Lame! Lame! Lame! ^_^ )

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't know you guys were still in touch with Ian ... I didn't get an invitation to his party. *sniffsniff* But then, I haven't been in touch with him since he moved away, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Would have liked to have seen the mural. What was it of?

[solarbird]

It reminded me a lot of your stairwell mural at Andor, though not nearly as large, and not as well-executed either, though still executed pretty well. Better lighting would have helped. It was landscapy with a big emphasis on tall nighttime sky.

His bard account is still active on the murknet if you want to drop him a note.

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

As for the languages thing, there's classic Star Wars of course. Perhaps on occasion C3-PO can offer translations of various languages and for evaporation condensers, as translating was his specialty after all. ;)

[solarbird]

George Lucas is a tool of the Blight, teleoperated from the High Beyond! I will process his packets no longer!

( ^_^ )

[risu.livejournal.com]

Have you read the Languages of Pao? If not, I'll try to reread tomorrow so I can give you good excerpts. Its high concept is that the ruler of Pao imposes new languages on his people in hopes of creating effective military and technocratic castes.

Jenna