m. c. de marco

Via SFScope: Jay Lake will be judging Apex’s Annual Halloween Contest. The word limit is 1,000 words, and submissions (by email) are already open. The theme is Election Horror.

Via del.icio.us sf: an old essay by Michael Wong surveys Brain Bugs, the bum memes of Star Trek and science fiction in general.

Surely no one would be stupid enough to watch the Kobayashi Maru combat simulation in ST2 and conclude that exploding consoles are the principal cause of death for bridge personnel, would they?

I was going to title this post “Zombie Frodo,” but that would imply some horrifying Lord of the Rings/Dawn of the Dead crossover, and this is just a quote I came across in my very slow rereading of the former.

[Sam] took out all the things in his pack. Somehow each of them had become dear to him, if only because he had borne them so far with so much toil. Hardest of all it was to part with his cooking-gear. Tears welled in his eyes at the thought of casting it away.

‘Do you remember that bit of rabbit, Mr. Frodo?’ he said. ‘And our place under the warm bank in Captain Faramir’s country, the day I saw an oliphaunt?’

Groundhog Day is this week’s 99 cent movie rental in the iTunes store. According to Wikipedia,

In 2006, Groundhog Day was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Via plime: Discovery News reports on the successful sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Neanderthal Park is not far behind:

Geneticist David Reich at the Harvard Medical School also agrees that the newly sequenced genome “is exciting and important.”

Via del.icio.us sf: a live-action web comic, The Defenders of Stan, chronicles the misadventures of Stan, the last normal human being in a world of superheroes. If you’ve seen Stan before, Episode 17 is new.

I had to make a slight change to the sffms2rtf beta tonight in order to submit a story in RTF. Apparently a change in PHP5 has made “\f” an escape sequence rather than just the plain RTF characters my program was assuming they were. This caused some excessive spacing and stray characters in the output, which should now be corrected.

Sffms is a LaTeX document class for typesetting fiction manuscripts.