Old news.

One of the things I intend to misuse this particular forum for is complaining bitterly about the rest of the world's inability to use basic English. I'm aware that my privilege is showing and that this, like one's slip, is not something to be desired; but so very many people use text-based communications these days and if you cannot be bothered to follow basic tenets of a language I feel justified in writing snotty articles about you. Admittedly bowdlerized because hey, this is an actual class.

Here, for example, is a piece dating from May 08 regarding the word "bouillon":

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Dried-up chicken stock formed into cubes is chicken bouillon, not bullion. In fact, stock based on anything reduced into cube (or even goo in a jar) form is bouillon base.

Bullion is quite different. Bullion is precious metals in bulk form. Gold bars are bullion. Chunks o' platinum, also bullion. Stock cubes are bouillon and pronounced as such, bwee-yohn with a silent N. It's French, you doinks. It's bloody simple, and it's such a common mistake it really makes me wonder if some famous American chef went so far into the ghetto as to use bouillon base in a recipe and tell people it was pronounced bull-ee-onn. Because if they did, they deserve to be braised. Slowly.

Consommé is not exactly the same as bouillon. Bouillon is a stock. It is from the French verb bouiller, to boil, and is generally produced from simmering mirepoix (onions, carrots, and celery) and herbs with a chunk of some animal bone/flesh in water for some time. Apparently bouillon is the name for a soup in Haiti as well, but in general terms if one is going to be using bouillon in US/Anglo cookery one is going to be using reconstituted stock. And reconstituted stock is not, expensive as it may be, precious goddamn metal.

Learn this. It is as simple as women/woman or their/they're/their. And it makes you look exactly as stupid when you screw it up.

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To be more proactive and adhere more fully to the spirit of the class, let's have a look at Peter Watts's site, www.rifters.com. Watts is a sci-fi author who does the unimaginable: he posts, or at least in the past has posted, his actual novels for free online. You can read at least parts of his works on rifters.com and I encourage you to get the dead-tree version out of the library because reading on paper really is an experience that differs qualitatively from online; but if nothing else, you can at least get a sense of what he does and how he does it from his site.

I'm running Firefox 3.6.8 on OSX 10.6.3 on a 13-inch screen and the site appears at first misleadingly disorganized: the homepage is black with a single interactive graphic in the middle, review quotes for Watts's work along the top edge, a new-content link at the bottom left, and the following message at the bottom right:

This site is best viewed at a screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater.

Sad, misguided users of Internet Explorer take note:
Javascript must be enabled for these pages to work properly.
Java adds a couple of cool bells and whistles, too.

Content © Peter Watts, 1999-2008

Now, he ought to've updated the copyright data, but I like his style here: he directly addresses one browser's shortcomings and explains what plugins/scripts are necessary for the site to display correctly. If I were Watts I would stick a navbar across the top of the page and move the accolades to the bottom, as they are a little offputting; but what I really love about this site is the interactive graphic. Back in my last job I was tapped to provide a Youthful Point of View for the people responsible for redoing the institute's website, and at that time graphics that contained areas that linked to other sites/pages were known as image maps: I don't know if this is still the case, but Watts's main graphic appears to be an image map, in that you can hover over the various items and it offers you a link to the individual pages.

The graphic shows you at least two sets of data at once: a) the names and organizational relationships of his novels, and b) the dates at which each of them are purported to take place as well as those dates' relation to the current world. His first book, Starfish, is set in 2020; its subsequent and related books Maelstrom and Behemoth take place in 2051 and 2056 respectively. Another work of his, unrelated to the Starfishverse, is listed separately: Blindsight, set in 2082. All of these individual items are linked to the "real world" site/item, which offers you a menu of links to Watts's current and previous works, data about him and his projects, and his linkfarm/blogroll as well as credits for various works. At the bottom of the real world page is an animated graphic of the Earth from orbit, just as it might appear from a spaceship in one of Watts's worlds; above this, in the blackness of what is implied to be space, is the following information:

Your world, and welcome to it.

The rest of this site is a fantasy, albeit not a very pleasant one. This is reality. From here you can look down and watch the lights going out; if you squint, you'll even see the twinkling of firestorms along the west coast. I leave it to you to decide whether the real world is any sort of improvement.

They say I have to keep the site fresh, that you need to be lured back with new content. There's not much I can add to the other pages—how do you update a world that hasn't even happened yet?—but here, in the present, I can drop the pretense and indulge in some of that self-aggrandising tub-thumping we authors are supposed to practise in the name of "self-promotion". So here, for what it's worth, am I: links to biography and blurbs, to credits, to late-breaking news and opinion.

If it's fresh content you're after, keep an eye on these links. In the meantime, take a load off, look down from geosynch, and watch the world turn inexorably to shit.

It's happening way faster than it did in the books.

He's an edgy guy but he isn't whacking you over the head with OMG I AM EDGY CHECK ME OUT. He's just quietly pointing out the shortcomings of the universe in a way that brings to mind interactive graphics in sci-fi movies. You can imagine HAL 9000 offering up data in this format, or any of the interactive computer systems in post-Clarke sci-fi.

More than anything, though, Watts's site reflects Watts's fiction. The same voice that wrote about the self-aggrandising tub-thumping of authors is the voice that makes his novels so desperately appealing and readable. He's true to his own oeuvre even while presenting that oeuvre. It's rare to find an author's site so thoroughly consistent with the author's work.