G.T. Labs

Jim Ottaviani

A nice welcome to NYC

I’m in town for the MoCCA Arts Festival (signings on both Saturday and Sunday…more details here), and the newspaper of record has welcomed me with this.

Well, not just me, and Batman and Raina Telgemeier are (still) the champions. But it’s nice to see Turing on the list of heroes people want to read about.

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Turing Tour: Where I’ll be talking about “The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded”

I’m going places to promote our book, The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded. Here’s what I know about so far:

Saturday-Sunday, April 2-3

Metropolitan West, NYC (right next to the High Line!)

I’ll be signing on both days wherever beautiful books by Abrams ComicArts are sold. The schedule is here, but in brief:
Saturday, noon-1pm at the First Second booth
Saturday 1-3pm at the Abrams Booth (G235, G 246)
Sunday 11am-1pm and 2-4pm, also at Abrams!
Tuesday, April 12, 7pm
Grainger Engineering Library (1301 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL 61801)

This is my alma mater, and I’m amazed to return as a speaker about a comic book. Undergrad me had no clue how his life would proceed, or how lucky he would be. Sponsored by the library, of course. (Well, not of course, but…of course!)
Thursday, April 21, 7pm
Westgate Shopping Center, 2513 Jackson Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Close to home, and at one of my favorite bookstores. ‘Nuff said.
Thursday, May 5, 7pm

Eastwood – (2820 Towne Center Blvd., Lansing, MI 48912)

Remember Borders when it was indie and great? (If so, you’re probably older and from Ann Arbor, like me. Sorry.) Anyway, Schuler is what it would have evolved into if it had stayed indie and gotten even better. I really like this store, and Whitney hosts great events.

Thursday-Friday, May 12-13
McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

This isn’t open to the general public, but if you’re an ABA member, a librarian, or an educator I’ll see you there! Where?

Thursday, 3-4pm: Signing at the Abrams booth

Friday, 10-11am: Signing at the Abrams booth

Bonus: I’m doing an interview with “Authors’ Voice” at 12:30pm on Thursday, and you can take part. You can also advance order a signed copy through them, at //authorsvoice.net/shop/.
 

Saturday-Sunday, May 14-15
Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street, Toronto CA

It’s been a couple years since I’ve been to TCAF, one of my favorite (favourite!) shows in the world, ever. I can’t wait to return. I’ll give a couple of talks, and sign some books, and then wander around in awe. I really do love this show.

Saturday, 1-2pm: Panel w/Natalie Andrewson (Hinton Theater, Toronto Reference Library) on “Improving Yourself”
Saturday, 2-3pm: Signing area

Sunday, 2:30-3:45: Nonfiction workshop (Writer’s Room, Toronto Reference Library)
Sunday, 3:45-4:45: Signing area

I’ll have some other signing times to share soon, I hope!

Thursday, May 19, 5pm
Hatcher Graduate Library (Room 100)

The home field advantage might mean I sound smarter than usual. I’m not sure of the format, but it might be a presentation, and it might be a straight Q&A with one of my librarian colleagues.

Ann Arbor Book Festival

Saturday, June 18, 1-4pm
The Neutral Zone and the Vault of Midnight

I’ll give a workshop on non-fiction comics at the NZ (1-2pm) and then take part in the Book Crawl at the Vault at 3pm (just crawl in, I think!). See you there!
Saturday-Sunday, June 25-26
Orlando, FL

No schedule yet, but I’ll be there, talking and signing. Unless that conflicts with going to see/hear/bow before Margaret Atwood, who will also be there. In that case you’ll meet my understudy or body double or something. (Okay, not really. I’m a pro, I can comport myself as such.) (I hope.)
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That’s what I know. More as details get firmed up, and plans are revealed to me…this spring Maya B. and her team at Abrams control my destiny!

Alan Turing Audio: Part 2

Back again with a bit more audio in anticipation of the release of our The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded, which comes out Tuesday (March 22). Here are two of my favorite pieces:

If tomorrow you find yourself wondering about the basis for the omnipresent sound effects that run through, over, and under the panels in the second section of the book, wonder no more: Here’s what a Bombe sounds like, courtesy of John Harper & the
Bombe Rebuild Project team and Graham Ellsbury. Leland liked this one a lot, and found it useful too. As I recall, he tweaked my interpretation of how to render that in text-based sound effects to…well, good effect!
Speaking of sounds, in our book, Turing huffs and groans through many miles as a long distance runner. He was good at it–nigh unto Olympic class, in fact–but not elegant. (This was true of many aspects of his life; he did remarkable things, but unlike some geniuses, Turing didn’t always make it look easy.) Here’s Alan Garner, talking about running with Turing.
This bit of audio comes courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” I did a short comic for them a few years ago along with the fantastic artist Natalie Nourigat, that featured bats, philosophers, Stevie Wonder, Dr. Doolittle, and of course, Alan Turing…
It was as much fun as it sounds!

Alan Turing Audio: Part 1

Leland Purvis and my The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded comes out Tuesday, March 22, and I’m excited by that. To warm you up for it, here are two pieces of audio memoir I enjoyed. I’ll offer two more that I like even better tomorrow.

Both of these are courtesy of the British Library’s “Voices of Science” series. As you can imagine, I relied a great deal on British sources for the research behind Turing, and am grateful that there were so many fine ones to work from.
Libraries really are the best thing since slice bread.
(Note that public libraries predate sliced bread by almost 100 years, and university libraries are even older. Yeah, I looked it up.)

Scotland: I visited and I hope you get to visit too

Random notes from a trip to Scotland…

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For Ann Arbor area friends: Driving in Scotland is much like Huron River Drive, but all the time and hillier and curvier and faster and with steeper drop offs on both sides of the road and large trucks coming in from the wrong side just as the road narrows to one lane. And sheep. For hours.
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After a day of seeing amazing feats of Neolithic construction — villages of stone, standing stones of stone, burial mounds of stone, tons of finely honed stone slabs piled on more tons of stoned and finished to near perfection and placed such that they’ve stood for thousands of years — it took four of us three tries before we could cut through our dessert tart using a sharpened stainless steel knife which someone else made, sharpened, and brought to our table.
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We toured a bunch of distilleries, and while this didn’t make us experts in whisky-making, we got well-versed in the process and the generic tour, written from memory and then enhanded with real nouns:
To make whisky you need four kinds of stuff [1]. Grow some of the stuff [2], germinate it, and then stop germinating it by heating. That’s called malting, and you can use other stuff [3] as the heat source if you want.
(Aside: Dry peat, which is basically fetal coal which needs a few million years more gestation, has no scent. It’s the damp peat that you add later that gives the Islay malts their characteristic flavor.)
Now dry and turn the stuff [4], then run it through a thing [5], separating it into husk, grist, and flour. All these parts get mixed with stuff [6] in the mashing stage, and successive washes of varying temperatures extract sugar from the barley. The leftover mash is turned into feed for the approximately 6.022×10^23 sheep and cows in Scotland.
The sugar water that the livestock doesn’t get is the stuff [7], and this heads into washbacks (sometimes made of wood like larch, sometimes metal), and at last, add the stuff [8]. Fermentation begins and, depending on who’s doing it, will last from 40-100 hours. In the process it releases carbon dioxide, and if you stick your head in the washback and take a big sniff you’ll regret it for the next half hour.
At the end of the process you basically have strong beer (7-10% alcohol) which actually tasted more like wine. Up to this point the processes for making beer, wine, and whisky are virtually identical. The difference comes in the next step, where if you do it wrong for beer or wine the end result tastes bad and if you do it wrong for whisky the end result will kill you [9]. Avoid tragedy by running the stuff [10] through the pot and the washback stills successively. These are made of copper and condense out the spirit, and you do this over and over until you get past the foreshots [11] and get to the heart. Carefully monitor the process and draw off the heart, recycling the heads and the tails [12] in later runs to extract all the good stuff. All of this stuff flows through a spirit safe, which is kept under lock and key so nobody can swipe any spirit and sell it without paying taxes.
The fetal whisky now goes into things [13]. The first thing is always made from American bourbon cask oak, charred on the inside first. Then the whisky sits for a minimum of three years, 2% evaporating each year — that 2% is the angel’s share.
(The barrels are monitored closely, since a) they’re valuable, and b) still not taxable, since for a 10 year whisky the accumulated angel’s share would be ~20% and nobody wants to pay taxes on stuff lost to the textbook definition of an act of god.)
Stuff [14] enters the cask to replace the lost whisky, adding stuff [15]. Sometimes there’s another barrel/cask used, typically Spanish sherry, for finishing. Sometimes it just goes straight to the bottle, from which everyone drinks the stuff [16] and is happy.
1. water, barley, yeast, and heat
2. barley
3. peat
4. barley
5. mill
6. water
7. wort
8. yeast
9. …or merely blind you.
10. wash
11. aka the head, aka the dangerous part
12. aka the feints
13. barrels
14. air
15. character
16. Scotch
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Sign coming into Edinburgh: “No hard shoulder next 150 yards.” I expect if I’d looked backwards it would have said “No hard shoulder next 1362 miles.” (It should have.)
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My hiking boots have been fully peated. The nose is awful.

What to do about good reviews and fans: Two quotes from Heinlein

I’m in the middle of the first volume of Patterson’s meticulous biography of Robert Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with His Century: Learning Curve) and among the many interesting things RAH said, in interesting ways, the following two quotes stuck out.

The first one is a downer, but it goes to show that some things don’t change fast enough, sadly enough. Writing to Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1964, he had this to say about behavior he experienced at the hands of people who ostensibly loved science fiction in general and his work in specific:
“The unique problem of organized fandom is one that I have wondered about for many years. Here is a group made up largely of well-intentioned and mentally-interesting people — how is it and why is it that they tolerate among themselves a percentage of utter jerks?–people with no respect for privacy, no hesitation at all about libel and slander, and a sadistic drive to inflict pain. Marion, I do not understand it.”
I’ve been lucky in this, and have encountered few utter jerks. A lot of friends and artists I’ve worked with have not — this is especially true for the women professionals — and I’m clearly no smarter than Heinlein, since I also do not understand it.
On a more positive note (in terms of maintaining sanity) RAH, writing to John W. Campbell in 1941, shows he knew not to be so foolish as to take reviews that glow to heart:
“The write-up made me sound so omniscient that I was tempted to call myself up and ask for some advice and a little coaching.”
I’ve been lucky to get some flattering reviews myself, and I do wonder who that writer is they’re talking about, and could I maybe meet him someday.
The converse is true as well. When someone hates your book (I just noticed my first one-star review for Feynman on Amazon) it doesn’t mean I’m no longer omniscient…I just never was.
Now, back to writing things I hope I can be proud of, and that maybe some other people will like.