Long ago while listening to a colloquium at Harvard, I had the glimmer of an idea for a science thriller novel. I've written blogs on that experience which I should resurrect in some fashion. It took me over a decade to write The Krone Experiment and then get it published with modest success in both hardback and paperback. I've since written a sequel, Krone Ascending, and have notions of at least a third in the series, Krone Triumphant.
The next big chapter was when my son, Rob, and I wrote a screenplay, and Rob turned it into a remarkable nearly zero-budget film in the early aughts. He had an Austin-based cast and crew (including UT astronomy grad students) of about 60 people. He killed sheep, sank boats, and destroyed buildings. I played the crazy scientist who is brain dead through most of the film. Rob filmed it all with great energy and imagination on a Canon XL-1 shoulder-hefted digital camera onto MiniDV cassettes. Rob also wrote and recorded the background music, did graphics, and edited the whole thing.
The film had only minimal success in festivals and did not launch Rob's career as a film director as he (and I) had hoped. Things languished, although I nurtured a dream of having the film remade by a "real" production company. I have fitfully tried to promote that over the years without really knowing how to do so.
The decades have brought progress: faster computers, larger drives, automatic closed-captioning, AI, and registration with the Library of Congress. Recently, it all came together with renewed energy. Encouraged by a chance encounter with Google's Gemini chatbot only slightly marred by excess sycophancy, Rob found that there is an enthusiastic fan base for MiniDV film. It turns out there have been only about three dozen full length feature films in the MiniDV format. The Krone Experiment is one of them. Thusly encouraged, Rob released the full film on YouTube on June 9.
The way YouTube works, there must be a minimum number of "watch hours" and subscribers before the film can be monetized. Rob needs it to go viral. As proud father and shameless hustler, I urge you to watch the film, like it, share it, and subscribe (just a button to push) and tell your friends and family and total strangers about it.
The YouTube link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5MyAVU1Pw
If you would like to start with a small dose, the snappy official trailer (to be updated with higher resolution) is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YefApDkjyFI
Rob has recently been recording and posting weekly YouTube segments with his friend and colleague Tom Chamberlain who played CIA staffer Vincent Martinelli in the film. Its called Tom&Rob Chat. They talk (left-leaning) politics, popular culture, history, and film. In their most recent posting, also on June 9, they discuss the developments that led to the film posting. Give that a look if you are interested in behind-the-scenes weeds. The discussion of The Krone Experiment begins at minute 17:27 and runs to 35:41: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJnkzFTn08
It is not directly related, but they then segue into a discussion of Interactive Fiction that you might find interesting.
In other news, I attended a session of the Austin Forum on Science and Society on the burgeoning AI agents that talk to themselves. Anthropic announced its Mythos chatbot that is so effective at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that it was not released to the public. We are watching the "singularity" unfold in real time.
I follow the New York Times coverage of AI developments. Tom Friedman had an interesting opinion piece arguing that rather than competing, the U.S. and China should be working together to control the potentially negative aspects of AI. See Mythos above.
In a conversation at the weekly Westbank Writers group, I discovered that the Writers' League of Texas sponsors awards for books in various genres. While my current project, my father's biography, is not yet ready, I've been trying to engineer the publication of my collection of short travel stories, Tales from a Small Planet (see Blog 29). I submitted "Tales" to that competition. Successes are announced in October.
I had a major disruption in late May. One Saturday morning, I found that neither my Word nor Powerpoint were working. After a welter of emails with the UT IT people, it turned out that Microsoft had changed the licensing of its Office 365 products so that various riffraff like staff, visiting faculty, and emeritus professors no longer had access to the desktop apps, only the online versions. This caused me major heartache. The online version treats footnotes differently and you cannot copy and paste footnotes from that version. I tried to make a backup on Apple Pages, but the footnote structure was not preserved. In trying to copy and paste the draft from online Word to Pages, I inadvertently deleted the entire online book draft. I've now spent three weeks trying to recover the text and footnotes from various versions and backups. The basic solution turned out to be simple, although it took weeks to reveal it. I paid $8 from my emeritus funds to get a license that gives access to the Office 365 desktop apps. I'm now back to using the desktop Word but still struggling to reconcile text and footnotes. A major irritation is that this licensing change was implemented with no warning. Usually, such changes are advertised well in advance with plenty of follow up reminder emails. Pain in the patootie.