And Liza starts preschool tomorrow.

We stepped outside this morning to take this photo and there was a cool breeze blowing. Nice change of pace to the hot weather we’ve been subjected to most of the summer. The summer is over and I’m glad to see it go. I’d like very much now to settle into a boring routine for at least six months.

I’m pleased to announce Disasterpiece Theatre, a new podcast in which I and my co-host Alex White come up with the worst idea for a movie that we think Hollywood might actually make. We pick a topic, like animal horror, or an actor, like Milla Jovovich, and each come up with a movie that we pitch to the other. Then, in grand Hollywood tradition, we tell each other how wonderful the idea is, but that it still needs a bit of tweaking…. By the end we’ve got some awesomely terrible movie ideas.

Don’t believe me? How about a Betty White and Tracy Morgan buddy dramedy where Tracy raps? Or a period family drama starring Milla Jovovich, Brian Dennehey and Albert Finney in which Milla Jovovich is in the Vietnam war?

By the way, those are some of our less-bad ideas so far.

So head to the website and listen to me and Alex describe our bad movies while our long-suffering producer Brooke Fox tries to rein us in. You can also subscribe through iTunes. We’re also on Twitter, should you wish to tell us your terrible movie idea.

Two of the podcasts I’m involved with are finalists for the 2011 Parsec Awards, which celebrate excellence in speculative fiction-related podcasts. WhatTheCast is up for Best Speculative Fiction Fan or News Podcast (General), and Dragon*Con TV is in the running for the Best Speculative Fiction Comedy/Parody Podcast. I’m excited that both are finalists, especially given the competition in those categories. Come Dragon*Con 2011, we’ll see if we win!

Misty and I have been crazy busy thanks to life and work and kids and everything, so in lieu of actual content, have two videos!

First, what if Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were really a teen coming-of-age comedy?

Second, what if Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic were possessed by the Space Core from Portal 2?

The answer to both questions, of course, is “It would be awesome.”

Now that the Harry Potter movies are over, I expect that there are movie executives scrambling around, trying to discover the next big thing. Since young adult books are still popular, I expect that’ll be their focus — perhaps the Hunger Games trilogy or Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series will garner a huge audience.

I have a humble suggestion: why not re-work the Harry Potter series? After all, with a few tweaks I think you could bring in a whole new audience. To that end, I give you a scene from

RICHIE DAWKINS AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

INT. SHACK BY THE OCEAN – NIGHT

The room in this broken-down shack is dominated by KEMPTID, a giant of a man with an umbrella. He is talking with RICHIE, a young eleven-year-old with round glasses and dark hair.

          KEMPTID
     Y’see, Richie, yer’ a wizard.

          RICHIE
     I’m a what?

          KEMPTID
     A wizard, o’ course, and a thumpin’ good’un, I’d say, once yeh’ve trained up a bit.

          RICHIE
     That makes no logical sense.

          KEMPTID
     What d’yeh mean?

          RICHIE
     Look, there isn’t any such thing as magic. The universe can be perfectly explained by the natural laws of science.

          KEMPTID
          (taken aback)
     But, but yer parents–

          RICHIE
     They died in a car crash.

          KEMPTID
     No. He Who Must Not be Named, a dark wizard, killed ’em!

          RICHIE
     Really? That’s more plausible than a car crash? There are a little over two thousand car-related deaths per annum in the UK. Do the math.

          KEMPTID
     But…but…all th’ letters, Richie! And I c’n do magic with my umbrella!

          RICHIE
     Any stage magician worth his salt could do the same. Your anti-scientific flim-flammery will find no toehold with me, sir. Now shove off. I’ve got a perfectly mundane life as a friendless orphan to live.

—

I’m not sure how to spin this out into eight movies, though. Perhaps I should have taken the approach that Eliezer Yudkowsky took for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Friday, Liza had minor surgery to close an umbilical hernia. Our scene takes place Sunday afternoon.

INT. LIVING ROOM – AFTERNOON

This standard suburban living room is square and has all of its furniture away from the walls, leaving a continuous track around the center of the room. The MAN is in the living room. The GIRL enters and begins running laps around the room.

                    MAN
     Hey, what’re you doing?

                    GIRL
     Running a race. I’m racing my invisible friend Jai Alai.

The GIRL continues to run at top speed.

                    MAN
     Is that hurting your stomach?

                    GIRL
     Yeah. (beat) But I don’t care.

Exeunt omnes

Perhaps you haven’t gotten enough of me on this blog, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, ifMUD, and the many other online places I haunt. Boy, do I have a treat for you! Jason Scott is releasing the full interviews he filmed for his interactive fiction documentary GET LAMP. One of those is mine! Now you can hear me talk about interactive fiction for over half an hour.

I’m really pleased that Jason’s releasing the full interviews. We don’t have a lot of examples of people talking about interactive fiction at length. Jason’s changing that by making these interviews available.

The first time I heard U2 was 1986. A friend let me borrow “The Unforgettable Fire” on cassette tape. I fell in love with “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and was pretty much hooked.

This is my view from the 27th row last night:

The show was UN. BELIEV. ABLE.

It was made better by getting to go with some of the people who know me better than anyone in the world.

Gals, let’s not wait another 20 years to see them again, huh?

A few weekends ago I had the opportunity to give a talk on science and technology to the Nashville Romance Writers of America chapter. Yes, yes, laugh all you want, but romance novels often touch on other genres. I met writers whose books had strong science fiction or suspense elements, and you can bet that they’re interested in science and technology.

I focused my talk on recent technologies and trends that are affecting how we relate to each other. I started with how our sense of privacy is evolving. We’re more willing to share details of our lives than before, and online tools like Twitter and Facebook both encourage that behavior and spread what we say to a much wider audience. Heck, thanks to this blog you know more about my views on parenting than some people who see me multiple hours a day. Much of what we share is innocuous, like what we’re having for lunch, but over time you can learn a lot about someone who’s sharing openly on line.

Now mix that trend with gamification, in which the trappings of games are added to non-game activities. Gamified applications are encouraging us to share even more information online. Foursquare is an excellent example of this. Foursquare lets you use your mobile phone to check into locations like the Five Guys near me. As you check in to places, you earn badges. If you check in at a place more than anyone else, you become the mayor, which encourages other people to check in more there to dethrone you. Being mayor and having badges doesn’t actually net you anything but it doesn’t matter — the net effect is that you’re driven to broadcast your movements to the whole world because the app is exploiting the same psychological quirks that make us pour money into casinos. Ian Bogost has called this trend exploitationware with reason; here, we’re being exploited to share more than we might otherwise do.

Now imagine what happens when two people meet cute. After they get home, do they look up the other person’s profile on Facebook? Do they peruse their Twitter stream? See where they’ve been checking in on Foursquare? All of this raises near endless possibilities for personality-driven conflict and misunderstandings, which serve as fuel for romance novels.

Even when we’re not sharing information with others, our technology is doing that for us. We’ve long been trackable via our cell phones, but to get that information you had to talk to the cell phone company. Now our phones are quietly recording where we’ve been and storing them on the phone. Want to know where your boyfriend or girlfriend have been? You might only need five minutes alone with their phone to find out.

Right now a lot of what we share is manually entered. We upload and tag pictures, identifying the subjects. We write about our day and what we ate. Data mining and improved computer processing power will automate much of that, with the knock-on effect of taking some control out of our hands. Facebook has a giant database of people’s pictures that we’ve given to them and labelled with the name of the people in the pictures. Facebook now uses that information to try to identify people’s faces in new pictures. You don’t have to upload a picture of you drunk at a party; instead, a friend may do so and Facebook will automatically tag it and add it to your feed. Google Goggles draws on Google’s vast database of indexed web pages and pictures to identify items you take a picture of. Researchers are working on apps that, when you take a picture with your smartphone, uses information from your phone and the phones around you to figure out where you are, what you’re doing, and who’s in the photo.

If you put all of this together, you’re much closer to what the science fiction writer Charlie Stross called the lifelog. Imagine recording every word you say and everything you see. Computers translate your speech to text, identify who you’re looking at and what you’re seeing, and index it. Voila, you’ve got a searchable database of your entire life.

Now imagine that information being broadcast. Companies will offer incentives for viewing their products, let alone using them. Social apps will want us sharing our information with our friends and will use the trappings of games to encourage that behavior. The judicial system will use what we record in courts, and employers will want to watch what we do during work hours. A future Google will aggregate all of this information and make much better statistical predictions about how people really behave. Partners can check up on each other. You think we have boundary issues now with Facebook and Twitter? Just you wait.

All of that is going to make how we relate to each other different in weird and somewhat unpredictable ways. And as I said earlier, that’s key to romance novels: how do two people learn about one another and eventually come to fall in love. Now they’ll just do it under the unblinking eye of everyone’s cameras.

Courtesy of “Weird Al” Yankovic:

For you fans of 30 Rock, does Weird Al in this video remind you of anyone? Like, oh, Paul L’Astnamé?