My poem "The Gambler" is now online at Strange Horizons. It was written in November; its dedicatees are its inspirations and it is close to my favorite of the poems I wrote last fall. Certainly it's dark and icy enough outside still to feel germane.
I watched WarGames (1983) tonight for the first time since middle school; I don't care that it counts DEFCON in the wrong direction or if the real-life command center for NORAD does not so much resemble the bridge of the starship Enterprise, I never cease to be amazed at the fondness for a movie that childhood can hardwire in. It must have been one of my earliest exposures to science onscreen and furnished me with another offbeat archetype, John Wood's Stephen Falken. (Who I thought I was looking at, the first time I met George Dyson. The Pacific Northwest setting didn't help.) What strikes me now as strangest is the possibility that I may belong to the last generation that easily recognizes the technology on which the film runs—the alien hardware of acoustically-coupled modems and rotary payphones, never mind the rooms full of whirring supercomputers. When my father worked at Mass. General Hospital, one of the treats I was rarely allowed was to play in the computer room that belonged to the radiology department, which was chill and slightly dusty, loud with fans, and had panels in the floor, so that I could climb down underneath the banks of machines. He built the computer I learned to type on: black screen, green lettering; a dot-matrix printer with fan-folded paper, perforated and striped in pale green. This is early memory, but accessible to me. I know for a fact my brother remembers nothing before the toaster Mac. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, they fought, and they flew, until suddenly—quite recently—they disappeared. I am not sure this theme of obsolescence and extinction was meant to turn quite so personal.
Which is where my final link comes in. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving: twenty history comics. You may never be able to forget Sylvanus Morley or Benedict Arnold again.
"It looks like someone has thrown a pair of bloomers into the machine."
I watched WarGames (1983) tonight for the first time since middle school; I don't care that it counts DEFCON in the wrong direction or if the real-life command center for NORAD does not so much resemble the bridge of the starship Enterprise, I never cease to be amazed at the fondness for a movie that childhood can hardwire in. It must have been one of my earliest exposures to science onscreen and furnished me with another offbeat archetype, John Wood's Stephen Falken. (Who I thought I was looking at, the first time I met George Dyson. The Pacific Northwest setting didn't help.) What strikes me now as strangest is the possibility that I may belong to the last generation that easily recognizes the technology on which the film runs—the alien hardware of acoustically-coupled modems and rotary payphones, never mind the rooms full of whirring supercomputers. When my father worked at Mass. General Hospital, one of the treats I was rarely allowed was to play in the computer room that belonged to the radiology department, which was chill and slightly dusty, loud with fans, and had panels in the floor, so that I could climb down underneath the banks of machines. He built the computer I learned to type on: black screen, green lettering; a dot-matrix printer with fan-folded paper, perforated and striped in pale green. This is early memory, but accessible to me. I know for a fact my brother remembers nothing before the toaster Mac. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, they fought, and they flew, until suddenly—quite recently—they disappeared. I am not sure this theme of obsolescence and extinction was meant to turn quite so personal.
Which is where my final link comes in. Courtesy of
nineweaving: twenty history comics. You may never be able to forget Sylvanus Morley or Benedict Arnold again."It looks like someone has thrown a pair of bloomers into the machine."
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