Okay, I’m twelve days late, but I didn’t want to miss commemorating the 60th anniversary of the first publication of Uglies!
Here’s the novel in all its original glory, back in 1959.
In other news, I suck at Photoshop!
Happy belated April 1st.
That is all.
Snorgtees.com has a hoverboard safety T-shirt for sale featuring this logo:
Of course, this warning doesn’t fit in with the canonical Uglies universe rules of hoverboarding, so I felt a quick remix was in order:
Ah. Now doesn’t that feel better?
Still in Texas and having a blast.
Update:
If you’re at TLA, I’m signing Thursday for two different publishers: Penguin (So Yesterday, Peeps, Last Days) at 2PM and S&S (Uglies, etc.) at 3PM. Both at Aisle 6.
If you’re in Houston but not at TLA, there are signed copies of my books waiting at Murder By the Book, 2352 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX 77005.
One of the themes of the Uglies series is transhumanity. In other words, how we humans change when we use technology to alter our minds and bodies in radical ways. Throughout the series I tried to juxtapose the good (special reflexes and pretty health), the bad (being bubbleheaded or cutter-brained), and the ambiguous (manga heads and Radical Honesty) changes that our species is capable of.
At this year’s TED conference athlete Aimee Mullins spoke on that very subject. Aimee has no legs, or rather, she has many legs to choose from. In Uglies terms she is a Diegoan, someone who alters her body at will for practical and aesthetic reasons. She’s also good at talking about these alterations in awesome ways.
So check her out in this very brain-rewiring video.
First, Justine has revealed her paperback cover for How to Ditch Your Fairy. It is generally considered to be the best cover of ALL TIME.
Second, this Wii Balance Controller hack is hoverboard-tastic! These German guys use the Wii data to navigate Google Earth, so it’s like your hoverboarding at about 10 kilometers altitude.
Check it out:
Obviously, this is a fairly crude hack, and Google Earth is too satellite-scale for hoverboard-like action. But imagine a smaller-scale version, where you could board through a cityscape or whatever-scape, whipping around buildings and through trees.
Then imagine a bit of role-playing thrown in, with Specials and Cutters and Smokies and smuggling in the Cure and Rusty Ruin environments, and I think you can see that it would be REALLY COOL.
I’m just saying.
Yes, you read that right, and I’m typing it again, because it’s that much fun:
Manga. Head. Explosive. Goo.
It’s a brand of hair gel made by Garnier, to create those delicious mohawk-tastic heads of hair just like your fave manga characters. Don’t believe me? Here’s the website.
And here’s a classic example of some manga heads:
Ganked from Crystal Tip’s flickr stream. And thank you to Kerri for the heads up on Manga Head Explosive Goo.
Can anybody find a photo of actual Manga Head Explosive Goo in a store? I need to see it.
Okay, now that that’s dealt with, a few more cool images, starting with a SCARY DOLL ALERT!
This is the Italian version of Peeps, published by Fazi. Although Justine can’t look at it, due to her scarydollaphobia, I love it and can’t wait for a matching treatment for The Last Days.
Hey, I just noticed the secret color-coded message in the title, which works in English as well as in Italian. See what I mean? Kewl.
And in Скотт ВеÑтерфельд news, we have Jonathan and Jessica looking very fantastical on the cover of the Russian Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness . . .
I could just look at foreign edition covers all day sometimes. So much easier than, um, writing.
Speaking of which, it’s back to the Leviathan mines for me!
Okay, so it’s been an unusually long time since I posted. This is because I’ve been working very hard on both Leviathan and Mind-Rain, an anthology of essays by YA writers about the Uglies series. (More about this soon. It’s going to be very cool.)
But that hasn’t left me much time to blog. I’ve only blogged, like, twice this year! (So much for that resolution.)
So in consolation, I offer you some very cool fan/fine art from Yuriy Shikhanovich:
Copyright Yuriy Shikhanovich (but cropped by me a little to fit). See the original here.
The match is so close that this photo has a great uncanny valley feel to it. Like your brain almost wants to believe the illusion, but then rejects it. (And it gives new meaning to the word “facebook.”)
And here are some awesome home-brewed Wearable Extras from Becki S.:
Love that hoodie.
Actually, working on Mind-Rain has reminded me of all the cool contributions you guys have made to the series. Both in feedback and suggestions, various threats and rants, and in fan art and discussion. So thanks to everyone who’s pinged me over the years!
Now back to the word mines.
Over at at the Photoshop contest site Worth 1000, someone has taken the concept of manga heads a bit too seriously.
Behold these classic movie stars in horrific manga form:
Anyway, Justine and I are moving into new digs today, so we may be internet-missing for a few days. So don’t expect much in the way of blogging by me for a bit. (Not that I’ve been very good this year so far . . . )
Remember that scene in Uglies with the morphos? When Tally and Shay play with a digital version of their face to see what they’ll look like as pretties?
Well, a group of Israeli computer scientists have developed something similar: a “beautification engine” that automatically renders photos of faces into (supposedly) prettier versions of themselves.
I’m particularly happy with the name “beautification engine,” which is kind of steampunk sounding. Here’s an example of its work:
Interestingly, the software doesn’t smooth wrinkles or blemishes. It changes only facial geometry, while trying to keep the face recognizable. (Being faithful to the original is not something they’d worry about in Tally’s city, of course.) And really, like a lot of these attempts to reduce beauty to numbers, it’s more bland-making than anything else.
Here’s the article about the software in the NY Times, and here’s a slide show of celebrity faces altered by it.
What’s intriguing is how many faces are less pretty after they’ve been run through the software. (Especially Marlon Brando.) This may be because we “know” the celebrities involved, and don’t want them changed.
Or maybe it’s because some of these celebs are already pretties, and “there is no beauty without some strangeness in its proportion.” But the software, which looks kind of bland-making to me, removes that strangeness and actually makes certain people less pretty.
It’s cool that this came out now, though, because one of the biggest sections in Bogus to Bubbly is about the science of beauty. I tried to distill a lot of the research that’s been done, and to explain it in psychological and evolutionary terms in ways relevant to the Uglies series. And frankly, I think my explanations are better, or at least more complete, than those in the Times.
You’ll be able to judge for yourself in less than two weeks, because Bogus comes out October 21! (And yes, some school book fairs are already selling the book.)
Thank you for spotting this article, Sophie and Hiroki!
And one last shout-out from the tour bus: Tonight Justine will be in Kansas City, MO to talk about How to Ditch Your Fairy, with me in tow!
Thursday, 9 October 2008, 7:00PM
Kansas City Library
4801 Main Street
Kansas City, MO
I’ll let in on a little secret: YA authors are political.
After all, our books are all about what the future holds, who’s got power and who hasn’t, and how bullies can and should be taken down. They’re about figuring out your place in the world, and making a stand when things are just plain wrong.
What could be more political than all that?
As novelists, of course, our politics are conveyed by Story, which creates a cushion between our world and the real one. Our characters are figments of our imagination, however human they seem. And that softens our politics around the edges.
Like in movies when the president shows up, and it’s Morgan Freeman instead of George Bush. Because who doesn’t trust Morgan Freeman?
But when it comes to politics, “fictional” doesn’t mean the same as “not real.” Our politics are very real.
And here’s secret number two: teenagers are political too.
Teens understand that power matters. Their lives are controlled in some pretty astonishing ways, both by adults and by each other. (I’ve always said that the success of Uglies is partly thanks to high school being a dystopia: a bell rings and you march to your next station; what you say and wear is monitored; the newspapers are censored—for your own good!)
And teenagers also have a huge stake in the politics outside their schoolhouse. I’ve had lots of fan letters from kids whose father and mothers are in Iraq and Afghanistan. And guess what? There are soldiers there today who were 13 years old when Midnighters came out, so some of them may be my readers. Young people fight wars.
Not planning on signing up? Well, guess what: Young people also foot the bill.
As I said in my last post, when the Secretary of the Treasury asks to borrow $700 billion dollars, you guys are the ones who get to pay it back. Every paycheck in your entire lives will reflect those missing billions.
Read that last sentence again, and tell me you’re not interested in politics.
So I think it’s time to skip the fictions for a moment, and say that I support Senator Barack Obama for president of the United States.
The people in charge right now are sucking at being in charge. And all of you are going to feel it for a long time, longer than me. So it’s time to transform the powers that be—not with a small change, but with a big one.
Now, if you’d rather pretend that Morgan Freeman is the president in Westerblog-land, that’s fine. I won’t be posting here about icky real-world politicians. But if you want to read me and about a zillion other YA authors (including Meg Cabot, John Green, Libba Bray, Cecily von Ziegesar, Robin Wasserman, Megan McCafferty, and Judy Blume) weighing in on the election in bone-rattling detail, check out this new site, YA for Obama. The awesome Maureen Johnson set it up as a place where you can network, learn about issues, and make a difference.
Click here to read my first post for YA4O, in which I do the math, Dess-style. And am joined by Gossip Girl herself!
Because as I said yesterday: “You’re going to spend your entire adult lives in the future, after all. So it’s your job to think about it, worry about it, and read about it.”
Go and rock the world.
Update to everyone around Larchmont, NY: Justine will be promoting her new book, How to Ditch Your Fairy, at The Voracious Reader tomorrow at 1PM.
Saturday, 27 September 2008, 1:00PM
Voracious Reader
1997 Palmer Ave
Larchmont, NY
Sorry for being so long between posts. There’s a good reason, as Justine explains here, we’ve been hiding out at an undisclosed location to finish our next books. In fact, the only reason I’m taking a break is because Leviathan just crossed the 75K word mark!
Pause for woot.
And no sooner do I turn to the internets for relaxation, and what do I see on BoingBoing but manga contact lenses! They’re so totally like the manga heads in Extras that I had to interrupt my fierce writing schedule to show you:
Ahhh!
Okay, my manga heads probably aren’t that scary. But still, I’m glad someone’s trying already. And yes, these are a real product:
Read more about them here at Inventor Spot.
I will be posting more soon . . . promise
