Ravenous Beauty: A Writer's Workshop

William Gibson is the featured article today on Wikipedia. I've never read him. Any of you Beautites have an opinion on him?

To be honest, I've not read Gibson's work either. I saw an episode he wrote for X-Files once, and that's it. I'm a cultured one, huh?

He is on my to-read list though.

edit: oh, and hah at the "Beautites." It works, though. Probably better than "Beauties" (like we're at a miss wisconsin pangeant) or "RBies" (like the restaurant)

Beauties huh? I kind of like the pageant vibe. I think my work would win the swimsuit competition (though it might get schooled come evening gown time).

X-Files was never my bit (heard the movie didn't do too well this time either), so I guess that's one more point lost on culture.

haha. I saw the movie. I didn't love it, but I thought it was enjoyable. But um, I felt like I could write a better movie, you know? That has more to do with me being arrogant than it does with anything else, though.

TV in general is not my forte. X-Files I got into because a friend of mine really loved it, so I gave it a chance. It's a fairly smart show, and some episodes are really great. Some are hokey. But all in all, the characters are interesting and the stories are usually enjoyable, though they do get tedious the further the mythology goes.

The episode Gibson wrote was about computers, and it had a "goth" girl in makeup and some explosions, I remember. The coolest part is the beginning where some guy is sitting in a diner at 3 in the morning, preparing to kill some artificial intelligence thats living on the internet when the AI figures out where he is and "calls" several different gangs and has them all sit down at a diner, each with the promise of something different... and then there's a final call to the cops, who show up last. When they walk in, everyone starts blasting and the guy with the computer is caught in the middle.

One thing I remember appreciating about the X-Files was in an interview with the creator. It's funny how you can like something more when you hear someone talk about it (book club often does that for me) and sometimes you just like them talking about it, not the actual work. (I'm in the second camp when it comes to the X-Files.)

Anyway, the guy said he switched the roles of skeptic and believer because usually it's the man who's the skeptic and the woman who wants to believe. I thought that was neat.

AI will kill us, yet people are still pushing towards its progress. Haven't they read all those books on advanced robots/utopias/dystopias? Or at least seen that episode of the X-Files? New technology will be the new terrorism. I'm with John Updike: "What we need is progress with an escape hatch."

even if you don't like the X-Files, I will say there are some episodes that you might like. Standalone ones that require no previous viewing.

One of the best X-Files episodes is a comedy, done completely campy almost like Ed Wood. It's about a novelist who's researching for his new book about an alien abduction of a young couple. Everyone he interviews, though, gives a different account of the events, and some of them seem pretty crazy:
http://tvliveshows.com/ie.php?id=2830101&iid=9540064

It's pretty funny. You might like it even if you don't like The X-Files.