MemeMachineGo!

"Moneyball." Boring. A few good moments, some crisp dialogue, but Brad Pitt's character was the only one developed worth a damn. It's the only time I've seen Philip Seymour Hoffman uninteresting, which says much more about how little his character had to do in his 3 minutes or so of screen time than it does about Hoffman.

"The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. I read The Accidental Billionaires afterwards, the book on which it's nominally based. Very little of the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg could be found there, and the book itself has been accused of displaying an anti-Zuckerberg bias. Sorkin has stated in interviews his priority on a compelling story over the facts, and he succeeded by that metric. It was a good story. But I figure if you're making a movie about events just 7 years old, all of whose players are living, it'd be good form to pay a little attention to an honest portrayal. Or not to make it.

"Charlie Wilson's War." (Shortly after seeing it, I managed to misremember the title as "Charlie Parker's War." But Clint Eastwood already made that movie.) Moviegoing happiness is a scene between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman scripted by Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols. I've always felt pretty neutral about Hanks, but he was great here.

REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. Disappointing. Begins like a Neal Stephenson novel, and progressively devolves into a big dumb thriller.

Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart. Fun, brief attempt to explain what mathematicians are talking about when they talk about math, and to survey some cool things in the history of math and in modern mathematics.

The Secret House by David Bodanis. A house serves as a framing device to inspire digressions on all sorts of topics in science, engineering, and the histories thereof. A good book for factoid-lovers.

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. There were a lot of surprises for me in this history of the telegraph, and the parallels to the Internet the author was pursuing were more striking than I expected.

Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow. Anthology of mostly original nominally Lovecraft-inspired stories. Highlights were Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Mongoose" and Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill." Joyce Carol Oates' "Commencement" was a turkey.

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers. Outstanding collection of fantasy stories. Just the thing to tide you over until Hide Me Among the Graves gets here.

On Saturday at Endgame, a game store in Oakland, I saw a used copy of GURPS Dinosaurs, but I didn't get it, because I wasn't sure whether I already had it.

I checked at home, and realized I was confusing it with GURPS Dragons, which I'd bought a few months ago, so I went back and got it.

Ever since, I've had this image of a dinosaur and dragon, brows furrowed, forelimbs akimbo, glaring at me saying "What! You think we all look alike?"

Last night I posted this article to Metafilter" about The Digital Antiquarian blog.

The Digital Antiquarian discusses ludic narrative and has been filling in by bits and pieces an amazing history of recreational computing and adventure gaming. [...]

Highly recommended for geeks who were there in the '70's and '80's, and those who weren't.

From it, I learned that H.G. Wells wrote a wargame (arguably the first) for use with toy soldiers, Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books. And a whole lot of other interesting things, even about topics I thought I knew a lot about.

J.C.R. Licklider began the work at DARPA that led to the ARPAnet. He was also one of the founders of Infocom.

Will Crowther created the first text adventure game and wrote the first routing protocol used by the ARPAnet.

"Internet" and "Interactive fiction" both begin with "inter." Coincidence?

I just read the final volume of Season 8, the comic book continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Verdict: worst season ever, making Season 4 look coherent and tightly-plotted.

As usual, there were diamonds in the rough, especially moments of good dialogue in the issues Whedon was directly involved with. But there was a whole lot of rough.

Spoilers below...

Continue reading "Buffy Season 8" »

Thanks to The Great Comics Sorting/Bagging project, I finally had some entire series in the same place at the same time and could read them all.

One I'd been looking forward to was Strange Detective Tales. During the Universial monster movie craze in the '30's, lots of monsters and various other strange entities ("creeps" they call themselves) moved to LA hoping to sell their stories and make big bucks. Well, the fad passed, but the creep community remained. A detective agency consisting of Renfield and a mad scientist's assistant is the only place creeps seeking justice can go.

The story gets weirder from there, featuring the Green Mafia (the aliens who landed at Roswell), Renfield's ex, and Howard Hughes. The art is Gahan Wilson-esque, and perfect for the tone.

...and it hasn't been collected and its 3 issues will be a pain to find. Sorry about that.

I'd also like to note that the backup story in issue 1 was excellent -- a haunting tale of an aged supervillain whose memory isn't what it used to be, and who doesn't have long to live, calling up his long-retired never-too-bright henchman, trying to figure out whether he'd ever gone through with one of his schemes, installing a failsafe in his body to poison the whole world if he died.

I just got email with the subject "Update your credit card information with PayPal".

And it was really from Paypal.

In the past is another country department, I recently read the first of Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr burglar mystery series, Burglars Can't Be Choosers, from 1977. That's not all that long ago, a year I can remember as an at least modestly sapient being.

And yet there were some drastic reminders of how long ago it was. The narrator sees fit to comment that an elevator didn't have an operator. When musing about the attractive, probably for-show books in an expensive apartment, he thinks that the pages have probably never even been cut. He not only speaks of "loiding" a lock, but he really means celluloid.

It's a decent mystery, with a good twist, and a fun narrative voice, but is replete with the kind of contrivance that so often frustrates me with mystery novels. (I've gotten tired of staging elaborate traps requiring uncannily accurate prediction of how the bad guy will jump. But I'm still reading Nero Wolfe novels, so this tiredness can be overcome by other attractions...)

Lessons from Cesar Milan for dealing with salespeople: someone's going to be the alpha. If it's not you, it's going to be the salesperson.

I just read The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. I knew going in that it made an action hero of Lovecraft. He was presented as a plausible rival for a woman's attentions with one of Providence's most eligible bachelors. Now If you've read anything about Lovecraft, you know that he was a highly dysfunctional person and that this portrayal has veered about as far from the real Lovecraft as it would have had they made him a civil rights activist.

And I was OK with all of that. Action-hero Lovecraft no doubt made a much better character for an action story than accurately-screwed-up Lovecraft. What did bug me is that he was portrayed as loathing Providence, and wishing he could get out of this damn town. This is the guy that has "I am Providence" on his tombstone. If he loved anything in this world besides weird fiction, it was Providence.

The depictions of extra-dimensional horrors were nicely done, though. So, in conclusion, an enjoyable action-horror story having about as much to do with Lovecraft as Lori Lovecraft does.

In recent months, I unexpectedly found my interest in role-playing games, which I haven't played since college, rekindled. I figured that in Berkeley one would be tripping over role-playing groups as soon as one started paying attention.

Not so. In months of trying, I've only managed to play a couple of actual sessions. Many other plans have been scuttled due to cancellation after cancellation. Jobs, kids, houses, obviously, there are lots of perfectly understandable reasons that other things can take priority over playing make-believe.

But it's still disappointing. Anyone local and up for some Trail of Cthulhu?

The Internet Archive and Google Books have lots and lots of old Baedeker's guides available as PDFs. For instance, London and its environs: a handbook for travellers.

• 1887
• 1889
• 1894
• 1898
• 1900
• 1902
• 1905
• 1908
• 1911

Last Saturday, I attended WonderCon, a comics con in San Francisco.

Once was, I had aspirations to attend the San Diego Comic-Con. In the comics world, it has long been the Big One. But I never got around to it, and, in the meantime, it got to be... too big. Now it's dominated by movies and tv and celebrities, with lines for panels going forever, and jammed with people even outside the convention center.

WonderCon is run by Comic-Con's organization, and has been growing by leaps and bounds. Just a few years ago, it fit comfortably in the Oakland Convention Center. But now the convention floor was so packed full of people you couldn't move without jostling and being jostled.

Not this introvert-boy's scene. Here's hoping APE remains marginal.

The sublime Lore Sjöberg gives us this comic about a Buddhist fantasy computer RPG.

I can't afford the Virginia Edition (but I'm sorely tempted anyway), so my consolation is having a saved search on Ebay for "heinlein lot" that emails me whenever there's a new one. And that's why I had email this morning about:

12 pb lot ROBERT A HEINLEIN PAST BEAST LOVE PUPPET L

I've noted previously that I'm not an early adopter of hardware. So I'd been getting by with my stupidphone with a dying battery for a while while marvelling at how much other people are willing to pay for data plan contracts.

Until now. Virgin Mobile is offering a $25/month unlimited data, pretty limited voice (300 minutes), no contract required plan. You have to get a Virgin branded phone; I got the LG Optimus V. Pocahonas got one too; we're paying less than our previous voice plan.

So now a whole new world of text messaging and internet anywhere opens up to me.

Pocahontas and I have taken to texting a lot of what would have made for phone calls before, as well as texting fripperies or emailing photos throughout the day. Suddenly, Twitter makes more sense.

We'd only just gotten digital audio players we liked (the Sansa Clip+); suddenly, the phone makes them redundant.

And I can annoyingly fact-check things on the Net wherever I am.

Still hate capacitive touchscreens. Fitalystamp on my palm was faster, and I was accustomed to getting what I wanted the first time. Now I'm accustomed to making correction after correction. And cleaning the finger smears off my screen every day. Still want to drop a 10-ton anvil on everyone responsible for promoting capacitive touchscreens as the only acceptable choice for anything.

Now I just have to learn to write Android apps. There are some obvious things I'd like to do that don't seem to exist yet.

After excoriating a book yesterday, it's nice to heap praise on a book today.

Among Others by Jo Walton is a tremendous book. Much has been made of its portrayal of a bookish teen's relationship to books, and rightly so. But I'll point out that I passed it to Pocahontas as soon as I was finished -- she didn't have that immersive relationship to books as an adolescent, didn't know most of the references to science fiction and fantasy, and she still liked it (and noted that she understands me better for having read it.)

Most of what I'd like to say about it involves spoilers, below.

Continue reading "Among Others" »

The book of honor for Potlatch was George Stewart's Earth Abides.

What a stinker.

I'm used to making allowances for books written in another time. Heck, I've been reading through all of Lovecraft. But this was a long, slow, painful slog. Our protagonist is the most unlikeable Mary Sue I've ever encountered. Wholly convinced he's the rightful intellectual leader among others, he spends all his time whining about how everyone else should listen to him more about what they should be doing... and not actually doing anything himself.

Then again, it was kind of neat that it prominently featured the UC Berkeley library, from which the copy I read was borrowed. (Stewart was a Berkeley professor, and Berkeley's Bancroft Library holds the George Stewart Papers.)

Not long ago, I bought a remaindered copy of one of Stewart's toponomy books, Names on the Land, and I'm still looking forward to reading it. But I'm not likely to touch his fiction again.

If you were at FOGcon, please tell us what you thought and how we can improve on our on-line survey. And if you're posting con reports, or notes on panels to your blog, please email website@fogcon.org and let us know about it.

There will be a FOGcon 2.

The theme for FOGcon 2012 will be "The Body." Whether the flesh is human or alien, monstrous or beautiful, the joy, terror, weakness, and strength of our physical selves lies at the heart of much speculative fiction.

I'm looking forward to it.

The Hugo nomination deadline is Sunday, 2011-03-26. Since I actually have a Worldcon membership, I can nominate. Now I have to cram to try to figure out what.

The Nebula nominations are one obvious place to look for inspiration (though the qualifying requirements aren't quite the same.) And there's a Hugo recommendation livejournal community, recommendations on SF Awards Watch, a recommendations thread on Scalzi's blog, and Locus' recommended reading list for 2010, recommendations for graphic stories on tor.com, and a list of Campbell award-eligible writers.

Anyone have any other recommendations or suggestions of places to look for recommendations?

FOGcon is gone. There were glitches, but they were mostly small, which I'll count as a great success for an inaugural con.

I attended a kaffeeklatsch with Jeff and Anne VanderMeer (The website is just Jeff's; Anne doesn't seem to have a website. But Jeff has enough web presence for any five people.)

I was Horatio in the Hamlet parlor LARP that John Kim GM-ed. The premise was that Claudius was throwing a going away party for Hamlet before his trip to England, when Laertes burst in demanding to know what was being done about the death of his father, Polonious. Though Laertes, Horatio, and Gertrude were all severely wounded, only Claudius was killed, and the game ended with Hamlet's coronation and marriage to Ophelia. Hamlet, the comedy!

We collected hundreds of books for the SF Outreach Initative, which really thrilled me, given how late it was that we decided to do it and how little advance publicity it had.

I bought Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by the VanderMeers, and Iain M. Banks' collection, The State of the Art directly from their publisher, Night Shade Books. Fast Ships has a Howard Waldrop story that's unavailable elsewhere, and Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bears' "Boojum", to which a story in the Ellen Datlow-edited anthology, Lovecraft Unbound, high on my list of things to get to, is a sequel. I bought Jeff VanderMeer's Monstrous Creatures from its publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press. (They're offering Jeff's first non-fiction collection, Why Should I Cut Your Throat? for free.) And I bought the VanderMeer-edited Steampunk II and Jeff's collection The Third Bear as well as Chaosium's Cthulhu's Dark Cults from my favorite local SF bookstore, The Other Change of Hobbit. And I also picked up several issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, Benjamin Parzybok's Couch from Small Beer Press, and Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow from Prime Books, all generously donated by their publishers as freebies to FOGcon's members.

And I caught up with old friends and made some new ones. All in all, a great time, and I look forward to next year.

I've been busy lately, and one of the things I've been busy with is some volunteer work for FOGcon, a brand new science fiction convention that'll be in San Francisco this weekend, March 11-13.

One of the things I miss about the east coast is Readercon, a con dedicated to sf literature. It was a personal frustration to me that the Bay Area, of all places, didn't have such a thing. My friend Vy actually did something about it, and founded FOGcon, explicitly taking inspiration from Readercon and Wiscon, another of the world's greatest cons.

If you see this and you're going, I'd also like to tell you we're soliciting books for The Science Fiction Outreach Program, which is going to have a booth at the Wondercon comics convention in San Francisco the first weekend of April, where they're going to give books for free to comics fans. Battered copies of old classics are very welcome, as the people staffing the booth will be more likely to be able to talk about them and personally recommend them.

Barnes & Noble is selling refurbished Nooks for $99. The recent update to its firmware has eliminated, to my satisfaction, one of the biggest drawbacks e-ink screens have had: the screen flash and the time it takes to change a page. It's now very noticeably faster, and close enough to instant.

While I remain not a fan of the capacitive touchscreen, and I consider buying DRM-ed books a non-starter, having a pleasant way to read all the public domain and other freely available books and stories out there makes it well worth it.

Instapaper does a pretty amazing job of converting web content for reading on an ebook reader. I've barely scratched how useful it could be for reading long articles or stories not distributed as an epub. Instasaver makes it even easier for Firefox users.

I've now read Starfish, Dracula, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (it was one of several ebooks available free for a limited time through a tor.com promotion), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and a lot of shorter things. I've also taken to reading my writers group's stories for critique on my Nook instead of printing them out.

And I have enough interesting things stacked in it to guarantee I won't run out of reading material on a trip (barring device failure or electrical shortage, of course.)

On balance, I'm happy to have an e-reader.

Yesterday, I did something that rocked my world.

I replaced my library card.

After 15 years in Berkeley, I'd worn the old one out. It was chipped and peeling and feeling brittle. The librarian kindly waived the card-replacement fee -- I'd like to imagine that replacing a worn out card instead of a lost one warmed the cockles of her librarian heart.

With the new cards, you get both a credit card-sized card and a little keychain card, so Pocahontas could take the keychain card and pick up items I have on hold, just like I carry her big one so I can pick up hers. (She's picked up plenty of my hold items, but we had to remember to pass my card back and forth.)

The part that rocked my world is that I also got a new card number. And I don't know what it is. It's how you access your account online, and I could rattle off my old 14-digit library card number more easily than my phone number. And now I have no idea and have to resort to looking.

I've been using the library online more often, because they finally have a feature I've wanted for years -- you can save arbitrary lists of library holdings as reminders of things you'd like to check out some time. Naturally, thought I, you should also be able to ask the system what's on your list that's available at a given branch, so you could leave with it right then and there.

Except you can't. You have to check each item one by one to see what its availability is.

Ah well. It's still a good feature and it has resulted in me using the library more.

I heard of Chris Roberson's Book of Secrets on SF Signal and this excerpt hooked me immediately.

My brother and I once met at a bar, and fell to talking about family. Parents, kids, relatives, the whole sick crew. He took issue with the idea about children being some link to the future, our bid at immortality. Parents, he says, are our true link to eternity. In each of us is a little bit of each of our parents, literally and figuratively, and in each of our parents a bit of theirs, and so on and so forth. All the way back to the Garden of Eden or the Primordial Ooze, depending upon your politics. Looking at our parents reminds us of eternity, he went on, because in them we can see everything that came before. Our parents remind us of the steaming piles of history it took to get to the present moment - in our case, the two of us into that bar on that night at that particular moment. Considering we hadn't looked at our parents since my brother and I were both five years old, watching their caskets being lowered into the ground, shuffling our feet and wishing it would stop raining, it was somewhat surprising. But that's my brother for you.

What that has to do with anything I'm not sure, except to say that it concerns family and eternity, two things which factor greatly into the events of the past week. It began in the bleary-eyed hours of the morning, with a phone in one hand and a telegram in the other, and ended with me watching the setting sun, the secret history of mankind clutched to my chest.

Who wouldn't follow the author anywhere after that? So I did, and I was greatly enjoying the ride. The mystery was engrossing and promising. It had some great characters. But I was ultimately left frustrated and disappointed.

Continue reading "Book of Secrets" »

You want to be a writer? This is your tradition.

I greatly enjoyed Ellen Klages' absolutely charming story In the House of the Seven Librarians about a young girl raised in a library by feral librarians.

I am absolutely in love with the cartoons/illustrated prose of Hyperbole and a Half. My favorite so far is This is why I'll never be an adult.

It just occurred to me to email Jym to recommend it, but then I thought "Say... don't I have a blog?"

A brilliant detail in a science fiction story about which I otherwise remember nothing was that our hero had just gotten the latest TV with an exciting new feature! It was remote controlled by gesture! And so now he had to sit paralytically still to watch anything, lest he accidentally change the channel. (And if you remember that story, please leave a comment and remind me what it was.)

The evolution of telephone voice menus reminds me of this. Listening for the number corresponding to what you wanted was annoying and slow, but it worked reliably once you knew it, and if it was a menu you used regularly, you could quickly skip ahead. But now there's an exciting new feature! You don't have to press buttons! You just say what you want! OK, so now you have a guess the verb problem until you listen to all the choices, which takes as much time as it used to. And you have no idea how many times you'll have to listen a machine say "I didn't quite get that. Please try again." and repeat yourself. But, hey! No buttons!

I just bought a Nook ebook reader. One of the reasons I chose it was that it had a touchscreen. I like touchscreens. In years of using Palm PDAs, I found them quick, reliable, and easy to use. I thought thumb keyboards were a great step backwards -- they make the device bigger and heavier, and are much slower to use than Fitalystamp on my Palm ever was.

But, silly, naïve me, those were the quick, reliable, and easy to use resistive touchscreens of days of yore. That's old and outdated technology now! Now everything's capacitive touchscreens, with an exciting new feature! You don't need to use a stylus! You can use your finger! Sure, your fingertip is blunt and broad and you'll routinely need to try more than once to hit what you wanted, and the touchscreen will get greasy and smeared anytime you use it. But no stylus! Well, you can get a capacitive stylus, but it has to simulate your finger, so it's blunt and broad, too. It doesn't come to a nice, discrete tip like an old stylus did so you could actually reliably hit a nice, discrete location on the screen. But that was old technology! This is new technology! And, in a pinch, you can always rub pork products against your device!

I'm most of the way through The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In practice, the e-ink screen is as good as I had hoped. Noticeably less contrast than a printed page, but the quality of the text is otherwise very nearly as good.

But, just in case I haven't been clear, I loathe the touchscreen so much that I'm thinking about whether to avail myself of the 14-day return period.

As I mentioned, I'm planning to get an e-reader. I thought it'd be neat to make a hardcover book case for it.

The idea of mutilating a book pains me, but I figured I could get over it. That book sitting at the library book sale priced at a nickel isn't doing any other good in the world.

So the very first book I was checking as a candidate because it was a hardcover of about the right size and with a sound binding was a library discard with this bookplate inside the front cover:

Your careful usage of this volume will preserve its value for those who follow you.

Now I feel like a jerk.

An aeon ago, I bought The Bundled Doonesbury, which includes a CD-ROM of all of the strip's first 25 years. I'm pretty sure I tried it on a Windows 95 or 98 machine at the time, found the interface annoying, and gave up on it. It's been a very long time since I've run an instance of either of those OSes, and, for your convenience, the DRM-ed app on the CD doesn't support anything else.

I'm planning to get an e-ink reader some time this summer -- I'm waiting for some of the dust to settle in the price wars. It seems potentially nifty to read the strips there. So I looked into converting the strips into an actually useful format.

Some websearching turned up that a kindly hacker had come to my rescue with a script that converts the image format on the CD to directories of jpegs, which I ought to be able to convert to something readable on any reader out there.

The extra effort is a pain, though; it would have been much moreso without someone having done the hard work already. This, essentially, is why I'm planning to get an e-reader but not any DRM-ed e-books. I don't want to pay extra for the privilege of needing circumlocutions to read my books on different platforms going forward. (Techniques to crack most, maybe all, of currently popular DRM-ed e-book formats can be readily found, but I don't need the bother.)

Night Shade Books and the other publishers of DRM-free science fiction available on WebScription are liable to get a lot more business from me in the near future. (And ManyBooks, but without the payment part.)

In February, I mentioned that the OED's citations for "pirate" as unauthorized publisher go back to 1603.

But I looked up that earliest citation, from Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year. The cited passage occurs in a foreword "to the reader." It's an entertaining rant; I recommend the whole thing. It's hard to excerpt without doing violence to the whole, but here goes:

Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme: doome them euerlastingly to liue among dunces: let them not once lick their lips at the Thespian bowle, but onely be glad (and thanke Apollo for it too) if hereafter (as hitherto they haue alwayes) they may quench their poeticall thirst with small beere.

I can't be sure I'm following everything in the Elizabethan English (and the Latin) fraught with both contemporary and classical allusions. But it really seems as if it's hack writers whom Dekker is characterizing as Word-pirates. I think it's an early day complaint that idiot readers are consuming trashy bestsellers instead of recognizing his artistic genius, not an early day complaint about IP violators.

Density is typically listed in g/cc, but is about the same in pounds/pint.

UC Berkeley Old Style is based on University Old Style designed for the University of California press by type design legend Frederic Goudy. (The terms of use permit "personal use" but with a list of restrictions so long that you're probably violating the terms right now.)

For the past seven years, I've had to bend over backward to wash my hair in my shower. I'm not tall, but the shower head was really low. I'd figured that'd get old as I got old, and dreaded having to hire someone to rip the shower apart to fix it. This AskMe question alerted me to the existence of shower head extensions.

About $13 and 5 minutes of work later, and I'll never have to bend over backward again. Sometimes, there's a really easy fix.

Finally saw Arlo Guthrie in concert. He's a hell of a showman. I was distraught he didn't do Alice's Restaurant, which I consider one of the funniest things ever. I suppose I can understand his being tired of an almost 20-minute piece he must have performed thousands of times.

Things I didn't know: he says the story is mostly true as told. In the 1969 film adaptation, Officer Obie played himself. Guthrie bought Alice Brock's church, as depicted in the song; it's now home to The Guthrie Center. And a serial killer acting as his own attorney played the song in its entirety during his trial. He's on death row now.

To console myself, I bought a CD of The Best of Arlo Guthrie the next day and played it for Pocahontas. I'm gratified to report that she liked it as much as I do, and wanted to listen to it again the day after that.

I still find it surprising that steampunk stuck. The name comes from a small joke of almost 25 years ago. I've greatly admired many of the computer mods, but find it weird it's inspired cosplay. (Then again, I find it weird that anything inspires cosplay.)

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Nova Albion Steampunk Convention in Emeryville. (Emeryville is a tiny city on the San Francisco Bay wedged between Berkeley and Oakland.) I don't go to many cons these days; I figure I'm practically obliged to go when one shows up at my doorstep.

More goggles, corsets, and top hats than you could shake a stick at. (Though some of the costumes seemed to edge into the twenties or thirties. Dieselpunk poseurs.) It's like we're verging on a Victorian phyle. I didn't have a costume, but the book I had on me was Great Expectations, so that ought to count for something.

I went to a couple of panels about the nature of Steampunk, and no one mentioned my own pet theory about its popularity.

A little longer ago than Jeter coined "steampunk", Vinge started talking about the Singularity, and Drexler popularized the idea of self-replicating nanomachines and some sf writers were gripped for a while with the idea that they couldn't talk about the far future without dealing with their inevitability. If there hadn't been a singularity or gray goo apocalypse, then why not? And if there has been one, then who do you write about and how?

This produced some interesting fiction by Vinge, Stross, MacLeod and others, as constraints often can. It seems to have become passé by now.

Maybe we have more pressing concerns. The human population is projected to hit 7 billion this year. But if you talk about overpopulation, you're a crank who hates humanity. Our energy infrastructure continues to depend on burning hydrocarbons. We know they'll run out at some point (or, rather, that the energy cost of retrieving them will eventually exceed the yield) and we don't know when that'll be. But if you talk about anticipating it instead of having blind faith that a technological miracle will save us all, you're a luddite crank. Burning hydrocarbons produces CO2, which predictably traps more heat energy in the atmosphere, creating more extreme weather and climatic conditions. Unchecked, it threatens the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect, in which permafrost and clathrates melt, releasing trapped methane, itself a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. But if you talk about conservation, you're a hairshirt-wearing martyr who hates civilization.

In the face of continued denial, it's hard to be optimistic about anything changing for the better anytime soon.

So how do you write about the future without it being another tedious environmental dystopia? How do you write fun high-tech adventure fiction like they did in the forties, and thirties, and all the way down, back to Verne?

You go all the way down, back to Verne. In 1870, when Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the global population was about one and a quarter billion. We hit two billion around 1925. With the number of people in industralized and industrializing nations as low as it was, it doesn't really matter if you fictionalize vastly increased coal consumption for ridiculous steam-powered devices -- there isn't the population density and time for it to have a significant global effect (not to discount local health and pollution consequences from mining and burning that much coal, but that's a different story.)

So you get your rocketsairships and your robotsclockwork androids and your raygunspneumatic flechette pistols, and keep your mad scientists, and your brave and beautiful heroes and heroines, and your tales of derring-do.

And you don't worry that you're writing about a civilization that's writing a check the world can't cash.

Just like ours.

Title credit: Professor Steamhead.

Routinely, in discussions about unauthorized reproduction, someone will get huffy about using "pirate" to describe a copyright violator instead of an armed robber at sea.

But book piracy is as old as novels. Don Quixote had an unauthorized sequel out before Cervantes' own (like Harry Potter much later.) And the term "pirate" in this sense is as old. The OED says:

A person or company who reproduces or uses the work of another (as a book, recording, computer program, etc.) without authority and esp. in contravention of patent or copyright; a plagiarist. Also: a thing reproduced or used in this way.
[1603 T. DEKKER Wonderfull Yeare sig. A4, Banish these Word-pirates (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme.] 1668 J. HANCOCK Brooks' String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies. 1703 D. DEFOE True-born Englishman in True Collect. I. Explan. Pref. sig. B3v, Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates. 1758 D. GARRICK Let. 4 Dec. (1963) I. 295 But pray what performances have we Exhibited for literary Pirates, which we have rejected from the Original Proprietors? 1822 BYRON Let. 13 Apr. (1979) IX. 142 If you publish the latter in a very cheap edition so as to baffle the pirates by a low price--you will find that it will do.

I'll accept this usage of "pirate."

Some cavillers more specifically object to "pirate" to describe someone who acquires copies known to be unauthorized (e.g., by downloading them) as opposed to those distributing them (e.g., by making them available for download.) But anyone using torrents or most other P2P software is implicitly both. I'm not sure how useful it is to draw a distinction.

This weekend, I finally installed my coat hanger antenna in my attic for better reception, in time for the Lost premiere tonight. If I were any more excited, I'd be getting fitted for a Dharma jumpsuit and preparing Dharma snacks.

Lost might be the most complicated tv show ever, but rest easy: anything you've forgotten, anything you never noticed, and even connections I don't doubt were a surprise to the creators is likely to be found in the Lostpedia.

Mild spoilers for the already broadcast five seasons below.

Continue reading "It's all about the Lost premiere, baby" »

A little while ago, I lamented the ongoing deaths of Berkeley's bookstores. So I'd like to take the chance to actually celebrate some good news. Black Oak Books is back in a new location (and an easy walk from my house.)

I was there today. The staff is still unloading boxes, and look to have a lot of work cut out for them. But it's shaping up to be a nice place.

My flight home from my Xmas travels was purchased with frequent flier miles. For whatever airline pricing logic reason, first class and coach cost the same number of miles. So, for the first time ever, I flew first class.

I will now sound like the rubiest rube to ever fall off a turnip truck.

We were seated first, of course, and could get comfortable while everyone else was still milling about at the gate. There was no concern about whether there'd be space for my carry-on bags. A flight attendant asked if he could check my coat.

The seats are as much better than coach as they always looked. There's elbow room, leg room, and you can actually make it through the flight without touching your neighbor. I could cross my legs. The person on the inside could get past the person on the outside as easily as at a decent movie theatre.

There seemed to be two flight attendants assigned just to the 16 of us in first class. Before lunch, one of them came through with hot towels to wipe our hands with. Then we were asked about salad dressing and whether we'd like the seafood appetizer for the first course. They were served with real metal silverware.

We had a choice of three things for the meal, one of which was vegetarian. In coach, your choice was a turkey sandwich.

For the first time ever on a plane, I didn't have my own water but remained adequately hydrated, because they kept offering us drinks. They served them in real glasses, about twice the volume of the plastic cups in coach.

The dedicated bathroom meant no line. But it wasn't any different from a coach bathroom (and even with only the few of us, it was kind of nasty by the end of the flight.)

Another lack of difference from coach was that the entertainment options were the same fixed programming on the same crappy little lcd screens hanging from the ceiling, too close or too far for half of everyone. I watched an episode of "Big Bang Theory" and otherwise stuck to reading and a crossword puzzle.

In what seemed almost like a parody of what one might imagine first class to be, the flight attendants came through and took ice cream sundae orders. It wasn't an especially good sundae, but like the dog walking on his hind legs, you are surprised to find it done at all.

Toward the end, my jacket was returned to me, and we were first off.

I hadn't realized it for a while, but across the aisle from me was Lewis Black, off to do a New Year's Eve show in San Rafael.

I figured it would make flying suck less. The big surprise was that it made flying not suck.

Pity I'm not rich and it's back to coach for me.