Where My Mouth Is

I did some writing tonight. And then I attacked my website. And I did exactly as I said I would.

Provided all is going well and I am not currently hallucinating, you should see, atop the right sidebar, a link to my TipiT tip jar.

If you feel like tipping me, whether for the content I produce here, for content of mine you've seen elsewhere, or just because you want to feel like a patron of the arts, I would love it if you would do so. Just click on the tip jar and they will take care of the rest.

If you do not feel like tipping me, not a big deal; you are still invited to the party. I write first because I love it and second because I hope to do it professionally; if I'm getting to write I will be satisfied.

As an added incentive for those who are wavering on the tip issue: If you tip me and give me preferred contact info (via the TipiT comment field), I will tell you exactly how I will be spending the money you give me. It's like sponsoring an African child. An African child that enjoys Irish whiskey and the occasional hockey game.

Also, if you have a TipiT account, and want to feel like a part of The Future, TipiT supports tipping via Twitter (and thus via text). Just tweet @tipit @the_real_tyler followed by a number to donate that many dollars. Yes, I am also vague on the mechanics of this; the TipiT folks are a little bad at explaining how the variables in their syntax operate, so I am not sure how they handle contacting you about paying for that donation. I suspect they use a credit card you have set up with your aforementioned TipiT account—if I am wrong, somebody do comment so I can better explain how to experience the future. I just love this idea so much (the concept of being able to tweet a tip to a street busker with a tastefully displayed sign, or a speaker while they are still speaking) that I could not help but try to get in on it. Besides, this gives you a quick way to tip me for my tweets!

And yes, I know the tip jar is a little bit of a sore thumb right now; I'll be editing the template more fully soon, I swear, but life is a tad bit hectic right now. The point is, the tip jar has arrived, and the future with it; and now I am off to go watch Supernatural. Tip in good health!

The Future

I have a lot to do tonight, not the least of which is write. But first I have to make dinner. And before that, even, I have to share this link:

"why i am not afraid to take your money, by amanda fucking palmer".

Preach it, Miss Palmer. Preach it.

For those of you who agree, I'll be trying to install a tip jar on the site a little later this week. For those of you who do not agree: don't tip. Do what seems right to you. The posts and weekly updates and links and snark will all still be here for you, just as well planned out (and occasionally ill thought out) as always.

One request: Please, please do not spam me with drivel like what we found on Craigslist last week, telling us that artists do not deserve money and we out to be grateful for the pittance we receive. I'll come to your house and flog you with a Giger installation.

Serialization and Business Models

in which our author is pinned between his wallet and his dreams

The fine folks over at Pimp My Novel (I'm sorry, I have forgotten the author's name and don't know if they'd appreciate being called "Mr. Pimp") have posted an excellent entry on the return of serialization and the possibility of low-priced short stories as a valid business model.

I am intrigued by these ideas, and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

More specifically, I am wondering if there is something here for me; if maybe I can pull off the kind of business model they are describing with some of my short works, for just $1 or $2—not the kind of prices that'd let me quit my job and buy an island, but the sort that would help me build a fanbase, or have some numbers to spit at possible agents and publishers. I'm not sure if this is worth it, but I tell myself that the worst that happens is I waste a couple hours determining that it's fiscally infeasible.

What does this mean for you? Well, it might mean you get bugged about buying stuff off Amazon in a week or two, or start seeing Amazon buttons in the sidebar off to our right. Also for now it means one or two stories are coming down from the "Selected Writings" section while I go over the old contracts for them and see if they'd be viable candidates for said small-ticket sales. They may just get popped right back up to the Interwebs, but we'll see, on all counts. Rest assured you will be kept updated, my loyal fans and constant readers.

Time to roll the dice, I guess. Let's hope for boxcars.

The Truth about Twitter

I want to make this post longer, because I treasure your hits and have goals for this site. But Paul Constant already made my point for me.

"Paul Constant Reviews Twitter" is an insightful, incisive, and cleverly-written look at Twitter's impact on the Internet and communication.

I'm not sure Twitter will fade away as Constant expects (except in a broad sense), but otherwise I agree with him: Twitter's changed things.

It's challenged writers; it's opened avenues; it's paved the road for a whole new way of doing business and living life, despite its misuse.

Even this post wouldn't be in the format it takes if it weren't for Twitter suggesting 140 characters can be used to convey important ideas.

So I salute Twitter for this noisy but bloodless revolution; and Paul Constant and @amandapalmer for writing it and linking it respectively.

(And yes, every single paragraph is 140 characters long; Constant did it first and I had to see if I could follow his lead. Thank you sir.)

Now tell me: You followed that, didn't you? So how bad can Twitter be? Give it a try; for proof of concept read the #iranelection hashtag.

For now, I have kielbasa to be cooked, laundry to be done, and writing to be wrote. If you want a Twitter primer, DM me. It's worth a try.

Putting Print on Life Support

So, I've avoided talking much about the so-called "death of print" here, mostly because I find the whole debate tiresome. However, said debate came home in the form of me actually seeing a blog post in my little personal social sphere that suggested this death would be a good thing and fully embracing the new era of Open Source information.

I completely disagree, but the discussion on the subject in said post seems to have died out, as blog discussions tend to do within about an hour. And so I blog about it myself.

The discussion stems from this Crain's article, in which the Chief Executive of Dow Jones discusses Google's role in the current dire situation newspapers face, and also confesses the ways in which newspapers allowed Google to help their demise along. I agree with Hinton, on both points: Google is doing serious damage, but the newspapers started it. Unfortunately, the newspapers started it with the best intentions: they started offering their articles online, for free.

This is fantastic. One of the best things about the Internet, as I have often babbled, is its capacity to spread data very far very fast, and to put it in the hands of people who might not have seen it offline. However, this does kind of damage the newspaper's current business model; why pay for it, right? It's right there for free. God knows I don't pay for my RSS feeds from the Times or the chronicle.

Now, newspapers helped to dig this grave. And now they're in danger, and it's possible print editions will become extinct, or at least rare (possibly Print On Demand rather than running off a million copies every morning?). And that is not something I take much issue with; save some trees, leave the paper for more permanent artifacts like textbooks. I don't care if we lose newspapers in a literal, printed-object sense. What I care about losing are two things which are far more important: newspapers as a locus for journalism, and the capacity for writers to get paid for what they do.

While Hinton's language is inflammatory, Google is part of the problem, not just for newspapers but for people getting paid for content generally. Google is one of the big names spearheading the loathsome "exposure as compensation" movement that small-time publishers are getting in on, where an artist or writer's payment for their work is the privilege of being put in a magazine or on a site where people will see it. It is behavior like this that encourages people to think they can and should get everything for free, which of course has nothing to do with the companies backing this movement getting work done for free.

But even beyond my own desire to see myself and my fellow creators getting paid to create, I am worried about the dire consequences for media if newspapers die out. Alternate methods of revenue generation based around free content make perfect sense. Dr. Horrible and FreakAngels are my favorite examples, but those are works of fiction. They are not where we go for information about what is happening in the world right now. As outmoded as print supposedly is (and I disagree that print is the problem, it's the business of print that needs to grow up), I worry that the loss of newspapers will mean the loss of journalistic rigor.

Newspapers have fact-checking, editors, various other mechanisms to (at least theoretically) ensure that the news they publish is the truth. The trouble with the storm of free content is that it's got a very bad signal-to-noise ratio. For every blogger who is a well-trained journalist who practices good rigor you have ten LiveJournal accounts full of vitriolic sensationalism that had their code scraped and slapped up into a tasteful-looking template. At least when the New York Times makes a factual error it tends to get reported on and retracted; relying on Internet sources for our information is how things happen like TMZ.com reporting Jackson died nearly an hour early, and how Australian news sources wind up reporting Jeff Goldblum is dead.

Print is dying because the model needs adjustment; publishers need to be looking at new ways of getting the money to pay themselves and their artists, artists need to be considering new profit models, and newspapers need to start thinking about how they'll get people to pay for their content. The print-on-demand idea could work, new methods of generating ad revenue that could compete with Craigslist, ideas that I'm sure it'd take people more brilliant than me to come up with. But this is not a simple case of survival-of-the-fittest; "free" does not making something more "fit". As a concept and delivery system, the newspaper and book industries need to survive in some form, or the adaptation to the new media is going to be a lot rougher than expected.

Paying for it is not inherently bad, and Open Source is not inherently good, any more than I am inherently a better person because I have a Master's degree or earn a salary that's above the poverty line. Open Source and Internet publishing have the potential to do great things, or to strangle intellectualism just as badly as the current outmoded model; the only difference is that these ideas are (relatively) new and shiny, which has us dazzled into excited complacency. So in that sense, Hinton was wrong to call Google a vampire.

It's more like an angler fish.

(Portions of this piece have been adapted from my comment on the aforementioned defunct discussion thread; my own writing, I assure you, is used with full permission by me, but if it looks familiar, that's why.)

This is important.

This happens to me a lot, and I have learned to accept it. Someone said this better than I was able, this someone being fellow writer-in-waiting, Kat Howard.

The patronage model of artistic endeavor has periodically come up for me, oh, since I first considered the idea of being paid to tell stories; I used to joke, in my most rejection-spackled, miserable moments, that I should email Bill Gates and ask him to pay me to write. And Ms. Palmer's success has me thinking maybe we're coming up on a resurgence of the patronage model, as Ms. Howard suggests: that maybe technologies like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and PayPal and PayPal-like systems will allow for fans to actually directly pay artists. Not merely on a piece-by-piece basis—not $10 for a book, $30 for an art print, $20 for a movie, but to actually create, via donations, a fiscal support network for the creators they love.

Now, the patronage model has its problems; as is often stated, controlling an artist's purse strings also meant that sometimes the artist could be turned into their patron's catspaw. I can imagine, say, my doctor being annoyed that the story he helped pay me to write says something negative about Kaiser Permanente; or the Senator who put a thousand dollars in my pocket wanting me to not deconstruct Washington politics quite so scathingly. And of course, there is the simple fact that Amanda Palmer made that nineteen grand partially because she is Amanda Palmer, and did put out that amazing, Ben Folds-produced album; without the fame she has from the album that has earned her nothing, it's likely her followers on Twitter would not be so numerous and therefore that the people watching her attempts to earn her rent would not have enough people among them who can afford to help.

Of these two issues, the former is the less immediate. The trouble with the patronage model stemmed, to my mind, from a distribution of wealth: using social media as one's personal Lorenzo di Medici, one obviates some or all of the possible political leverage those donations provide. Now at that point the donors could start arguing, against what Neil Gaiman has said, that the artists now really do owe them something; but the hope is that the money would make the artist produce more of the work they want to produce, resulting in higher quality, tighter production schedules, etc. However, possible influence, still a major flaw in the plan.

The latter issue is one I've been discussing lately, and it ties into something I really can't address in this same blog post: the fate of current media and the possible death of the publisher. As it stands, I think that Amanda Palmer (and my favorite example, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible project) are examples of how I expect to start seeing networks, record labels, and marketing firms to be used: as springboards for one's own self-published career. The album and subsequent campaign and touring gave Amanda Palmer the fame to make money off Twitter; Mutant Enemy's network productions put Joss's name on the map boldly enough to get the DVD sales Dr. Horrible needed.

I really think we are coming up on a dismantling and/or rewiring of the current system; on an era of creator-owned content, of greater cultural cross-pollination, of a new publishing and a new journalism. I'm just trying to figure out what shape it'll take; and perhaps more importantly, how to cash in and become ultra-mega-famous, so I can laugh at all you plebeians from my throne of money.

Life as Mystery: The Light Side of Twitter

I used to rail against Twitter, for all the usual reasons. Now I am pretty active in the Twitter community, such as it is. I joined for reasons of networking, initially—no sense in falling behind on the social tools available to me, I figure—but I have found far more delight in it that as a simple tool for self-promotion.

I am lucky enough that my followers do not merely consist of some analog friends and a few bots—there are people on Twitter who I have never met in person, or met only cursorily, who nevertheless follow and respond to what I say. And in reading them, and trying to view my own tweets with fresh eyes, I am fascinated by the insular, uninformative nature of a typical tweet.

People on Twitter do not generally tell you who they are, where they are, what they are doing; tweets do not usually come with footnotes or backstory. They are slices of a person's life served up without context, references to "the trip" or "the girls" or a never-before-mentioned "Bob" that leave the reader just informed enough to know that they probably didn't understand that tweet at all.

Some of this, of course, is part of Twitter's infamously bad signal-to-noise ratio, the "babbling out loud about one's unexceptional life" that has so captivated critics. And certainly, things like my friend @ragaraja's Quotes of the Day or @hodgman's outbursts of surrealism are the highlights of my Twitter experience, along with the occasional innovative uses of the medium.

But those little slices of everyday life, when done right, they are some of the best parts of my Twitter experience. Those tweets feel like little mystery novelettes to me, tiny hints at some greater set of unifying facts. They show me that some lives are exceptional—that for every three office workers there is someone working with deaf college students, or doing freelance art; that there are people of talent finding opeace and success in this world. And beyond that, these tweets help to remind me that as unified as our lives are now, there are parts of us that are not laid bare, that are not served up for public consumption. They remind me of our individuality and the manifold twists and turns that make each life unique: universal truth found in vague nouns.

Even more than this, those tweets make me think; they make me research, and wonder, and shift my brain around trying to contextualize these people, trying to understand as much of the world as I can. They are little reminders of the Socratic definition of wisdom, served up to me fresh every day. And maybe it's overly optimistic of me; but I figure, if I can find little mysteries and hidden smiles in Twitter, the rest of life can't be that difficult.

The Real Problem with Social Networking (and also, I'm a nerd).

As of this posting, I am now on no less than four networking sites--Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, plus the hybridized, partially-network-based LiveJournal and Google Reader--and I am running into a major issue: What do I share where?

This is a problem I first started having with Not Providence (note the subtle pimp) but which has since spread to my Internet experience in general. I give NP a by because I can't know whose feeds are going to overflow on what site and I'd rather maximize exposure, but that's a PR/self-marketing issue, not an issue of Internet etiquette. With things that are not so important as a writing career, I never know how much sharing is too much, or when I've crossed a digital boundary.

Some things are obvious, of course--News items go in Google Reader, short anecdotes of the weird go to Twitter--but where do I mention a new movie, or how I'm feeling, or something of that nature? I'm drowning in options, and what's worse, I feel like every one of my options needs regular care just to make sure it's clear I'm alive and actually a participant in this whole Internet thing. I realize there are programs to allow me to share across multiple networks, but the truth is, I really hate those things. Not only does that sometimes cause glaring mismatches with update styles (though that has lessened somewhat with the removal of Facebook's automatic "is"), but it means that people who follow me on multiple networks are that much more likely to start treating what I say as mindless noise because of its redundancy--something which is already a high risk on Twitter.

And God, if that weren't enough, I really need to update this blog more often.

So here I sit, having just updated everything that needs updating...and both dreading and loving the need to do it all again. Because at least now, once I get this figured out, everything in my slice of the Internet will have a place.

amazonfail: Just to get this out of the way...

I am quite well aware of the amazonfail phenomenon. And of course I have an opinion about it.

For those who are not aware of the situation, what is absolutely known is that Amazon.com, at first slowly and then in a torrent over Easter weekend, removed a multitude of LGBT and abuse-survival books from their rankings. Here are a handful of links: the story at Wikipedia's Amazon.com entry; the blog entry by Mark Probst (an author whose book was de-ranked in the process of this) that Wikipedia claims first brought this into the public eye; the Publisher's Weekly article wherein Amazon blames the situation on a glitch; and a Theory proposed via LiveJournal that makes a fair amount of sense (though the writer could perhaps have been less arrogant about it). The other links I have seen have been histrionic or condescending, depending on the side they take, so I would rather not debut them here (because avoiding bias in a discussion about bias is going to be oh-so-easy to do...).

My personal feeling on the matter is this: Somehow, somewhere, Amazon screwed up. The "Bantown" LJ theory seems plausible, as does some sort of poorly-chosen set of criteria for flagging books as "adult" (akin to when LiveJournal banned a bunch of non-erotic communities a while back). We can argue about Amazon's culpability until the sun goes down, but they definitely made some sort of mistake somewhere, in addition to the even worse mistake of sending what seems like a form letter to Probst instead of really investigating the problem.

Unfortunately, Amazon's mistake hit two of the Internet's major ammo dumps: the LGBT community, and abuse survivors. These are groups who have legitimate grievances as regards their overall treatment, and whom I would never want to see treated as anything but human beings, but which, as a result of their experiences, are liable to react badly and to trigger others not in those groups into temper loss.

So, Amazon screwed up, somehow; and then the Internet opened up a fresh box of berserk rage, and started attacking/boycotting/deriding Amazon. Whatever Amazon did at that point was going to be moot; until they find the actual culprits behind this problem (whether human beings or lines of code), present unassailable evidence that these are the actual culprits and not scapegoats, and find a way to both reverse the problem and take action against those culprits, they will be bearing a massive black eye.

And in the meantime, the attacks against Amazon will get more unreasonable, spurred by corporate stupidity as Amazon flails to mend the gaping hole in its PR; the boycotts will spread, to the point where many accounts lost during this period will never come back; sales may dip, leading to damage to publishers and writers, or sales may barely be affected, leading to a dismissal of a very important group of voices as just more screaming on the Internet. All sides of all debates will think the other sides are even dumber than before, and we will slouch on without any real progress being made. This is how Internet drama goes, with a wide array of rapid coverage forcing people to respond to breaking news before they themselves are certain of what's going on.

In the end, I can only say this: keep buying books, from wherever you think best. And if you have some data to add to this discussion, please, don't hesitate.

The Twitter in Repose

For those who were wondering, given the date: no, really, I am on Twitter now. You can find me under the_real_tyler (seriously, the number of people on Twitter named Tyler Hayes is really kind of absurd). A link to the feed will be forthcoming when I have the time for a site update.

Having been on Twitter just under a week, I have a few observations about the process:

• Twitter is a fascinating medium to work in—the character limitation has been analyzed to death, but I really do find that it both forces a different style of writing than the larger and more robust blog format, and also provides a forum in which to relay those events that might not be worth an entry in a normal blog. I try to think of my Twitter feed as a museum of the strange and hilarious in my life, instead of a series of dissertations on same.


• The signal-to-noise ratio really is as terrible as Internet commentators claim. Even the feeds I really enjoy have a tendency to broadcast minutiae that probably wouldn't have made it to the Internet in any other medium.


• This is not the fault of the tweeters themselves, at least not entirely; there is something about Twitter as a medium that encourages one to tweet about trivial events unworthy of a normal blog. I think an inability to post everything at once and the unconscious (and unintended) fact that those who do not tweet get their tweets buried mean that people will do whatever they can to try to fill the gap.

So, there you have it. I'm tweeting now. Will wonders never cease. Feel free to follow my feed if you like; the only thing official and writing-related to take place over there will be announcements of Not Providence updates, though, so don't feel as though you are obligated. And please listen to this, my solemn promise that I will never subject those of you who choose to avoid Twitter to LoudTwitter or its sister programs--I firmly believe that the nature of a Twitter feed means it should be entirely opt-in, and LoudTwitter circumvents that.

And again, in case you thought that was also an April Fool's joke: screw MySpace.

It's happened

My consumption into the social networking collective is complete with my acquisition of a Twitter account. If you don't want to read through my feelings on the subject, you can just jump to finding me there, as the_real_tyler.

Let me state briefly my beliefs about Twitter: I think that microblogging, at root, is a fantastic concept, and one with a lot of great applications. I also think that most people do not apply it well at all.

Microblogging's two root words suggest Twitter's real function--it's a blog for things too short or too immediate to write a full blog post about. I think that news stations have also made good use of it by having Twitter feeds for their various commentators, as per what Rick Sanchez does with his Twitter account, to create a running dialog about the news items of the day. Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that they should use it to tell everybody about everything they are doing, like a progress bar for the minutiae of their lives. The stereotype of Twitter I have seen has been, more or less, is a 15-minute span of updates consisting of four message, one of which is an in-joke aimed at a user we may not follow and three of which are about their pants.

I am opposed to this use of Twitter. Not because I think it's unacceptable generally--I won't go against my general feelings about free speech--but because I think that it colors everyone's perceptions about Twitter in a way that it shouldn't be. I think Twitter could be a lot more interesting than it is, and I want to do my part to make it so. Plus it feeds into my secret need to be on every social networking site in the world.

Except MySpace. Screw MySpace.

More from the Land of What

Ecofont: the font that uses less ink thanks to imperceptible holes in the letters.

No, really.

Willy Wonka is alive, and he's working as a typographer.

Some link salad, because I care.

• Presenting the newest American hobby sensation: Cornhole. Yeah, I'm twelve.


• Kindle 2's functionality predicted by H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K. Dick. In case, you know, you didn't realize that these guys were geniuses.


• Salon.com's Gary Kamiya, on the death of the news. The irony of an Op-Ed piece complaining about the decline in impartial journalism is not lost on me, but Kamiya makes some interesting--if occasionally obvious or inflammatory--points about the new style of data processing taking over the world. Almost makes me want to buy a New York Times subscription...


• The McNuggetini. I have seen the End Times...


• The world's smallest writing. And what does it say? "S.U.", for "Stanford University". Well, at least we didn't get vain or anything...

More link salad

I swear, a movie review or something else with teeth is coming soon; it's just that it's the day before Valentine's Day, and I have spent the last couple of days trying to work my normal job, write, and pound a weapons-grade cold into submission. But for today, we have a list of revolutions:

• Brazilian tecnobrega. I haven't heard any of the music yet, though I plan to go searching for it just to see if I can understand what the article is trying to describe. What fascinates me is the DIY production and distribution, and the idea of using CDs as advertising rather than as a revenue source. I can't decide if I prefer their methods or not, but given how much I babble about creator-owned content and alternative methods of distribution I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't post this.


• Anarcho-speed-dating. That's an actual quote from the article, and it's a fairly apt description. I can't possibly do this one justice.


• Yes, you really can get dating advice from a nine-year-old boy. The jokes write themselves, I think. And most of them aren't very funny.


• Let's take that cuteness above, and introduce its more horrifying brother, shall we? 13-year-old becomes father? I am praying the Sun got their facts wrong.


• IBM has filed a patent for a "bionic body armor" that will electrocute the wearer into forcibly dodging bullets. I hear the crying of the beta-testers...


• And to end on a high note (if you're a nerd like me): Escape from City 17, a series of short films set in the Half-Life universe. Actually quite well done, I'd have to get serious pedantic to tell which parts were footage from the games and which were their own CGI work. I have not yet found a link to the rest of the series, but it'll get posted as soon as I have it.

Witty Post Title You Probably Don't Get

Link salad, get it while it's fresh.

• India considers banning Google Earth. The story itself is an uncomfortable truth about these kinds of technologies, and while I like to focus on the reaffirming quote on the nature of this double-edged sword, mostly this is here because not sharing it felt too much like me manipulating the reader experience.


• And in ironically timed news, Google debuts a new app that will let smartphone users show others where they are. Speaking of double-edged...


• Spinal Tap to record new material. Elation. I think that's what I feel. I can't help but love niche humor.


• Snarkmarket is pitching curricula for a "new liberal arts". I'm not sure if I find this interesting because it's an indicator of a cultural reformation, or interesting because it smells a little like pretension and presumption. I will, in the end, probably be buying the book.

No-One's That Stupid

Just in case you were concerned, Mattel is not, in fact, spreading the word of Allah. Please put down your pitchforks and torches. Thank you.

More from the Internets

Good morning, Tubeites. Time for some links.

• A new Nightmare on Elm Street, featuring a new Freddy Krueger. The creative team behind this one is apparently well-known for its "reboot films". What sound does an empty well make?


• The government decides to shrink the U.S. Postal Service. This all at once makes me both happy and sad; this seems like part of an inevitable move toward a paper-light world, and a herald of some shifts that I can't help but consider unfortunate. It's not as though the U.S. government has a history of handling technological shifts well...


• Comcast interrupts Super Bowl with porn. This is comedy that writes itself...


• Road sign warns of zombies. Viral marketing. Hur hur hur.

Kill Bill vs. Moby Dick

So.

I've been promising for months.

Here it is.

Why in God's name do I think it's acceptable to apply serious critical thought to Transformers?

I will be kind, and not assume indignation or objection on your part; that's a style of rhetoric I can do without. But I will be addressing the sea of sneers I saw in college, and during my work at the bookstore, and everywhere else; usually sneers associated with trendy beards and carefully unkempt haircuts. The people who will snidely embrace irony but reject Joss Whedon because "He wrote Buffy".

I will keep this simple (and possibly let people down in the process). I believe I can discuss Transformers because I agree, on precisely one, very basic, level, with the deconstructionists: I believe everything is potentially a text.

More precisely, I believe that there are no cultural labels that automatically invalidate something as a valid cultural experience, and that no genre or author or director automatically invalidates the possibility for deeper analysis. I do believe that individual works can turn out to be cultural and critical voids; but I enter every book or film with my critical eye wide and searching, and I try to find what it is people enjoy about any piece of media.

This is, of course, because I am a crusader for speculative fiction. Well, crusader is unfair; crusader implies a level of force of arms that I fail to rally. Maybe "rabble-rouser". I've read sci-fi books that had something worthy to say about the social condition; I've read mainstream fiction with limp prose and all the depth of spun sugar.

Even the most deliberately shallow experience can have depth. Take, for instance, this weekend's experience: Kill Bill. I watched both 1 and 2 this weekend, and I can see, all at once, why people loved it and hated it. I love it for its mythic level of formulaic plot, its cinematography, its contents play and juxtaposition of viewer experience. Without cinematography, the shots go on forever, the dialog is baroque and stilted, and Tarantino has an unreasonable love of surf music. But I enjoy his use of soundtrack and visual quoting and misè-en-scene, and for that, I love it. It has a lot more to say than, oh, Bride Wars.

For all that, I have to risk hypocrisy and point out that, sometimes, there is such a thing as trying to analyze something too carefully. There is a classic horror movie--you may have heard of it--called The Cat People. The final scene involves a black waitress offering a white man some gumbo, which rejects in favor of apple pie. This obvious bit of symbolism triggered a long discussion on the symbolic content of gumbo, spawning the term "gumbo territory". Likewise, there is no excusing an empty movie--I don't care how much money they spent on the CGI dragons. This is why I do not self-identify as a deconstructionist--they fail to differentiate between that that which is mainstream but fascinating and that which is artsy but vapid.

I could go on for a long while about this subject, but it would inevitably turn into one of Those Rants, where I prove just how arrogant and judgmental I can really be, and I don't think any of us need that. The bottom line is, I do not care if the subject is American Revolutionaries, or cancer patients, or clockwork assassins from Mars; if the prose/acting/dialog/cinematography is strong, and if there is metaphor to decipher, I will give it a chance.

And that, folks, is why I won't shut up about Transformers.

P.S. Thanks to the ever-lovely Liz Lacy for inspiring me to finally get off my digital keister and write this post. Read the first post, folks; it's well worth the time.

Rejoice

I hate to bury my last post with month-old news, but given all my ranting on this subject it bears repeating:

All of the Dr. Horrible bills are paid.

Crew, paid off, cast paid off. As of November 29th. Purely through iTunes and DVD sales. I hear a giant middle finger extending.

I really hope that Joss has created a revolution, that creator-owned works and the cutting out of big business really are going to work. There is that part of me that fears saying it when I want to hold a real, professionally-published book of my own in my hands, but I am all for the artist getting their fair share and I think this is a huge step in the right direction.

So bravo, Joss. And bravo to everyone who helped make it happen. (I'll shake my own hand to the tune of fifteen dollars.) Now to see if we can find a way to make it work for novels...

A Single Slice of Internet Vegetation

This is a bit like a radish, I think: small, and if improperly prepared, apt to cause looks of disgust.

Fetal Twittering.

I realize that we here in my ego are apt to babble on endlessly about that thing we refuse to call Web 3.0, and the Internet feeding back into the world, and all the ways in which technology can help to create global community and global culture; but this is not a step forward for any society I want to be a part of. I can't imagine this will be anything but asinine, especially since the prototype currently puts quite a leash on the pregnant mother. We could have spent this money curing cancer, people. Or at least finding something more useful to do with Twitter.

Oliver Postgate, Transformers, and the Need for A Show with a Plot

It's sad that it takes a death to make me post something less than scathing. I like to think it's a microcosmic indictment of the world's condition.

As some of you may have already noticed, Oliver Postgate recently passed away. I did not have the privilege of knowing Mr. Postgate's work; I did not grow up with it, nor even discover it with any depth except via news about his demise. His work seems fantastic, and it strikes me that people of the proper upbringing are reacting to him much the way I (and basically the entire rest of the world) reacted to the death of Jim Henson.

Not to subvert a man's death for my own blogging purposes (metanarrative equals absolution), but the part about Mr. Postgate's death that struck me the hardest was this snippet from the Guardian: "He thought the youngsters were getting a penny-pinching deal, especially in the matter of storytelling."

All death is a tragedy. The death of a creative person is a tragedy. But the death of someone who held this belief and did something about it is a travesty.

As a child of the Eighties, I am spoiled when it comes to children's programming. I used to be a Saturday morning cartoon junkie; I'd wake up early, toast and butter a bagel, pour a glass of juice, and sit down on the floor with my eyes searingly close to the TV so I could enjoy some quality time with my narratives of choice. Then the mid-Nineties rolled through, and I started learning about the joy and heat of late-night gaming sessions, and I started seeing a lot fewer dawns and a lot more half-dead mornings. I had never before experienced waking up from sleeping too much. And while I can easily blame Dungeons & Dragons or the Super Nintendo for this effect, some of it is just this: children's television programming had really, really started to suck.

There are and were exceptions, of course. But everyone seems to think that children are not only eight, but eight, not very bright, and riddled with the most cartoonish version of ADHD. TV shows seemed to focus on hammering home a moral (the environment was really quite popular, with Captain Planet as the nadir) or else just flashing bright colors and fart jokes until the half-hour's up and the kids go home. The Eighties had some of that, but the Eighties also had some shows that I can rewatch as an adult and manage to maintain my lunch, which I cannot say for anything I remember from the Nineties.

So, what was it about the Eighties that was so great? Was it the strong animation? The variety of studios involved in the competition? Maybe both of those helped. But coming at it as an adult, I have to say that Mr. Postgate hit on it—it was the storytelling.

As an example, allow me to hit on the cartoon I've been alluding to for two posts now. If you are someone I converse with on a regular basis, you might have heard some of this. Yes, that's right.

It's time to talk about Transformers.
Nota Bene: Here there be spoilers.



I am one of Those Kids; the ones who were just the right age in 1986 to be seriously damaged when Optimus Prime died. I have the image of orange smoke pouring out of Prowl's mouth burned onto my optic nerve. I got obsessed with reliving this childhood nostalgia recently, and started watching old episodes through DVDs and other more dubious sources; culminating in watching the real Transformers movie this weekend, with a fellow Literature student. Naturally, like any geek, I had to complain; and so here, it was about plot holes. But then I examined them, partially with prodding on my friend's part; and I realized that there was something about Transformers that I had not previously appreciated: it had consistency.

Consider the aforementioned scene with the death of Prowl (as well as, to be fair, Brawn, Ratchet, and Ironhide—raise your hand if that sentence made you wince). These deaths are delivered via the weapons of (who else?) Megatron, Soundwave, and Starscream. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that at least one of the decedents had taken a blast from at least one of the aggressors during the first two seasons of the series, and had come through just needing some repairs. I was annoyed by this, of course; my status as one of Those Kids also means I have the God-given right to carp about how the movie was working hard to sell toys. But making a comment aloud about "Megatron's variable-power arm-cannon" made me really consider those words—and, call me an apologist, but what if those words are actually true?

(The discussion that ensues here is nerdy enough to potentially cause you to develop vision problems, pimples, and possibly virginity. You have been warned.)

The first two seasons of the show take place in the eighties. The Autobots and Decepticons awaken after a crash landing on Earth, and renew an internecine conflict mostly focused around control of Cybertron. Having re-watched the episodes now, there are two issues that constantly come up in that series: power supplies, and parts for repairs. The need for power is in fact most of the driving motivation for the Decepticon plots that form the bulk of the narrative, even though that's just one hurdle in Megatron's ultimate plan—total control of Cybertron. Go back and watch the show, and note how often battles between the Autobots and Decepticons end when one side or the other orders a retreat. I believe the words you want are "a lot". This behavior is never entirely explicated in the series, but it is not difficult to conclude that the Transformers are doing this to conserve resources—and that the deaths in the movie are the result of a twenty-year shift from a battle of resources and attrition to an all-out war.

This consistency within the mythology is, miraculously, further reinforced by some of the spinoffs: Beast Wars and Transformers Animated both make reference to the events of Generation 1, with Animated even using a clip from the first Generation 1 episode when they discuss the history of the Transformers. Animated does casually ignore certain elements, of course—there are clear ways in which the series is a bit of a franchise reboot—but the point is, this sort of consistency is deliberate. The example I gave above is not all that far-fetched.

I could fill a book with examples of how the Transformers universe manages to maintain internal consistency (though it has its continuity errors—notably the Dinobots), but that might bore even me. I will end by getting back to my point, which is that the few series nowadays that seem to have this kind of consistency are deliberately building upon other works--Transformers, comic books, Disney films—and are rarely doing much original world-building. Even series for adults have problems keeping their narrative threads from unwinding; but when I look at shows intended for children I see a noticeable dearth of attention paid to anything more than running gags and shiny colors. And personally, I consider this a travesty; which is why I thank the universe for providing me with old shows on DVD, and why I can be unfamiliar with Mr. Postgate's works and still be saddened at such a blow to children's entertainment.

So, goodbye, Mr. Postgate. I never knew you, but I know you treated children like human beings, and for that I can never thank you enough. Good luck with whatever you've traveled on to, and consider yourself on the list for eventual brain-to-jar conversion.

Next time: Why I don't feel ashamed for writing about Transformers

The Future is Rick Astley

So, here it is, and I realize that there is almost no way that it will stand up to not one but three posts spent stalling; but I actually want to go back to one of those little bouts of dissembling, and talk about the Ultimate Rickroll.

Please understand, I was an early-nineties adopter of the Internet, first via Prodigy then via America Online; I fell in love with the actual, more-or-less direct, browser-based Internet via an FAQ for Final Fantasy VI.

Please also understand that to me, computers are magic. I know CSS and HTML fairly well, I am at least a pretty competent user of most applications and can figure a great many out without an instruction manual; but to me the way in which computers function is almost always alien and confusing on some level, if only at the root level of machine language. So I get a thrill out of new technology and new applications of the old stuff that a power-use might not.

All this is to set the tone for what I have to say about the Ultimate Rickroll, which is that I find it so fascinating because it is such a distillation of what I love about this modern age—the ease of transfer between online and offline realities.

When I started playing with the Internet, the closest thing to grounding the Internet in the offline was email (or, if you want to get technical and more than a little jejune, printouts). While I'm sure there are power users who will tell me you could order things online at that stage, the best I ever found was scans of mail-order catalogs or the occasional roleplaying sourcebook. I remember reading some pretty execrable hypertext fiction at that point, too, and playing a passable but boring online game that purported to be linked to the movie Twelve Monkeys, as well as a few home-brewed RPGs and platformers downloaded off FTP sites. In short, barring non-visual, non-aural contact with a living person, and the occasional file download, what you found online was mostly stuck there.

Then came, at least in my experience, Amazon. A person could go to a website, select a book, pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered to their home. There is a lot to lament about this set-up—the lack of human contact, the damage to independent bookstores—but at the same time, I had to applaud it because it was another way in which online and offline were merging. As major stores started to use websites for their mail-order services, and as Amazon branched out into other things besides books, I could feel myself sliding into the future.

Wednesday night, I had the somewhat strange privilege of visiting uWink. To keep the explanation brief, it is a restaurant wherein touchscreen computers are mounted to each table, and are used to order your food, pay your bill, and play a variety of games by yourself, with your tablemates, or with other groups in the restaurant. When I say it is used to order your food, I mean that it takes the place of the menu and the first half of your encounter with your server; they bring you your food, and your drink refills (which are also ordered via the touchscreen), and they assist you with technical problems. In other words, with the obvious exception of glitches, which the waitstaff are at least nominally equipped to fix, the experience is a seamless integration of local intranet and human interaction; one facilitates the other. It definitely had the light-and-shadow play of something Hollywood trendy, and the food was only pretty good for its price, but there was something glorious about the whole experience. It really did feel like the restaurant of the future, though their future takes some of its cues from The Jetsons, and when I can afford it I'll definitely go there again. I didn't exactly know why this experience made me so giddy—it was not that much of a shift from the normal restaurant experience, except with board games added, but something about the way it was presented, and the simple fact that this was a new application of only semi-modern technology, made it breathtaking.

Then came Thursday, and the Thanksgiving parade, and what I have already termed the Final Rickroll. Go ahead and take a moment to view it, and then I'll explain what I mean.

There we go. Now, the thing about this that took my breath away is that it is one of the next steps in the bridging of the on/offline gap. My aforementioned examples—commerce and service industries—and the other major examples, like online journals or instant messaging programs, are translations of old ideas through new technology. The rickroll, and its predecessor the duckroll, are pranks, yes, but pranks which depend entirely on online technology to work. I can imagine ways in which something like a rickroll could be perpetrated in flesh and blood, totally offline, but by and large the analog rickroll seems like it would be so difficult to pull off as to not be worth the payoff. Then Cartoon Network goes, and manages to stage a real-world rickroll; but here's the kicker for me—that joke wouldn't have worked if we hadn't had the Internet to spread it. It took an online phenomenon and found a way to make it work offline, but its functionality depended on a portion of the viewership understanding what a rickroll was (note, please, that the announcer on the YouTube video I linked says the word "rickroll" but doesn't bother to explain, which I think speaks volumes). In other words, after years of us figuring out how to use the Internet to do what we did anyway, this is a small example of the Internet giving back; and that, in conclusion, is why I have such great appreciation for the Final Rickroll.

We're moving into the future. I mean, we already have a black President; now we just need a flying car.

NaNoWriMo Killed Bambi's Mom

It's November, which, for those of you who pay attention to such things, mean it is National Novel Writing Month. Those of you who pay attention to such things may have also noticed that this is the first mention I have made of NaNoWriMo, five days into it, and that I do not appear to have conceptual lava boiling up out of my head. This is because I am not participating in National Novel Writing Month. And now, unbidden, I will tell you why: because I do not think it is a good idea.

Now, hands off the keyboard; don't get me wrong. I think that NaNoWriMo is a fascinating exercise, and I can imagine that it dragged many people off the couch and away from their fan forum of choice to discover that they have at the very least a power to commit to something large and difficult, and maybe even that they have a bright creative spark within themselves. I participated last year and had the privilege of crossing the finish line; if it were not for NaNoWriMo I may never have written "Somewhere in Barstow", currently ensconced on my Selected Writings page and being considered for rewriting into something larger. However, having crossed the finish line, I do not think I will cross it again.

The majority of the reason is personal, to do with the somewhat fragile and dare I say it fickle nature of my creative process. When I did NaNoWriMo my words flew fast and loose; I spent the majority of the month ahead of schedule and I finished with days to spare. I seem to recall drinking fairly heavily. Then I recall one of the deepest, nastiest, most bleak stretches of cement-gray writer's block I have ever experienced. I don't think I met my writing goals for two months after I finished NaNoWriMo; if I hadn't moved out of the apartment I'd been living in and shaken up my life a bit I am not sure I would have written again until November and despair struck me over the head. I'm not saying NaNoWriMo killed my ability to write, but I am saying that it put me in entirely the wrong headspace for my regular writing.

And this, you see, is what I consider the NaNoWriMo curse: it strongly values quantity. Writing a book for NaNoWriMo requires 1,667 words (you'll wind up with change on that schedule) a day, which is only 300 words shy of what Stephen King expects of himself daily. You may have heard of Stephen King--the man who is a multi-bestseller and who has the fortune to write as a career? The man who thus has 16 or so hours in a day to devote to writing? You see where I'm going, math-wise.

That this is an enormous task is not my point--I think accomplishing something slightly insane in one's life is a perfectly fine goal, and I applaud it as a form of creative, well, recreation. My problem is that there are plenty of people who think that these 50,000 word projects make them novelists, a thought process that is in no way dissuaded by offers, some of them perpetrated with the help of the NaNoWriMo staffers, to print up bound copies of these books. Though the mission statement suggests that this is meant to be a fun challenge, when you get into the process it is easy to believe that what you are doing is writing a serious book.

A serious book, for most people, does not take a month. And a serious book is, with rare exceptions, more than 50,000 words long. Period.

I think NaNoWriMo is a great game and a fascinating creative exercise; and I think it can even be a good launchpad, if you are aware it is a launchpad. But I do not think it is a good tool for a career writer, as it encourages a way of writing that, for most people, is not going to be useful.

I know that sounds elitist, but writing is a skill; unfortunately, creativity and taste are both highly subjective, so it is hard for me to quantify my argument more than I already have. Think of writing like exercise: running that hot for that long will leave you too exhausted to do it again the next day. Jog a little. Walk sometimes. Stop to have some water. Don't expect writing to happen every day, and certainly don't expect it to happen in such large increments. If you do, in the long run, I suspect you will be disappointed.

All that said, I reiterate, NaNoWriMo is great fun; I salute those making the journey this year, and if you've never tried your hand at writing, give it a try. But if you try to tell me this makes you a novelist, I am not responsible for my actions.

By "Content-Rich" We Mean "Total Failure"; or, the issue of Truth in Biography

Saturday morning early, and a cup of coffee in my hand. Last night was the press and heat and crush of two good friends' rehearsal dinner, and today is the calm in the center of the storm before tomorrow's full-fledged ritual experience. And also, I have a post for you.

Like many people who fight for the title of "author", I subscribe to Publisher's Lunch. Some mornings it's just another piece of mail in my inbox, sad to say, and sometimes I just browse for a couple seconds to see if they've added California to their health care plan; but a few mornings ago, I received this, and immediately wished I had said it--if perhaps with a bit more flair.

Journalist Malcolm Knox--who uncovered the lies in Norma Khouri's book--worked with Sudanese refugee and one-time boy soldier Cola Bilkuei on his book COLA'S JOURNEY and was asked to verify the book's accuracy. (Just published in Australia, it is not available elsewhere for now.)

"So what are we left with? Aside from boy soldiers, a priest and a lawyer who knew Cola in Africa, we have the assurances of the Australian government, which gave Cola his first passport and checked on him through cousins who already lived here....

"Ultimately, though, between what could be verified and what lies on the pages of Cola's book, there will always remain a margin where we must simply take his word. Some will ask why any author's word should be trusted. My answer is that if we take such a hard line, we will deprive ourselves of all oral history, of every story that is one person's recollection.

"If we did that, winnowing history to what is documented on official records, swathes of human experience would be lost. What we must do is check what can be checked, then extrapolate from it."

So, I worked in a bookstore during the Oprah-fueled popularity of A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who weren't following, it was lauded as an amazing and disturbing little book, dealing with a man's recovery from multiple addictions. I have not read it, I cannot say anything else authoritatively. Oprah loved the book, and had James Frey on her show to promote it--when it was added to her Book Club it received the expected upsurge of rabid purchasing fever.

Then it came out that James Frey had made some bits of it up.

At this point it devolves into rumors and sound bites--I can't know for certain what is true, and my time in college keeps me from really wanting to stick my neck out on a spurious source. All I know is that the outrage became ridiculous--I remember being nearly slapped in the face with a copy of A Million Little Pieces by a woman shrieking at me, insulting my intellect and chanting "This is not a memoir!" with a variety of different enunciations.

And again, I leap to the defense of a book I haven't read and don't really plan on reading when I say: Please.

It seems certain at this late stage that James Frey embellished. But before we knew that everyone was talking about how vivid and brutal his prose was. And now, it turns out, some of it was fictional. So what?

He was an inspiration to addicts to get off drugs. That's truly wonderful. But I know people who have drawn inspiration from, among other things--Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I pray was fictional in places); the poetry of Emily Dickinson (hypnogogic even when you understand it); Tim Powers' Last Call (urban fantasy); and any one of a dozen classic and canonical texts. If someone falls back into their old ways because an author made part of their book up, how fragile was their inspiration in the first place?

I am primarily a reader of fiction--I break into little internal wars whenever I try to read nonfiction--so perhaps that is why I am having trouble understanding. But what does the grounding in total fact have to do with anything? Why is this applied to books but not to biographical films, which certainly dramatize aspects of the story (see: the presentation of John Nash's condition in A Beautiful Mind; the final scene of Man On The Moon)? Is this an outgrowth of the constant geek tap-dance of reality and physics equations that marks our tearing down of whichever Star Trek iteration we hated? Are we just a culture so divorced from the written word that we have to fact-check everything?

I for one go with what Mr. Knox had the courage to say there, but I take it one step further. Our oldest and most primal stories do not speak to a truth that can be checked; there aren't any footnotes for cosmogony. In an autobiography, you should be concerned about speaking truthfully--but you should be just as concerned about speaking deeply. Frey's story, from my encounters with it, touches the deeper truths of addiction and recovery--and gives us some ghastly little scares to boot; similarly, the story of a boy soldier has a right to focus a little more on the tragedy than on the minutiae. Journalism is, of course, a different animal--but that, like so many things, is for another post.

My Grocery List

New posts two days in a row. Must be a slow week.

So, I said, perhaps cryptically, that I would post today about perception and celebrity, and why it's so awful to not have the latter. I don't really have a witty preamble for you, so let's get started:

I do not react strongly to celebrities.

This is probably because my father is one, albeit not on the same level as a Sarah Palin or a (God forbid) Kid Rock; he was, however, a musician in a famous band, and that meant that my perception of the situation was different than others. To keep it simple and boast-free, I grew up around famous people--not as family, with the exception of my father, but as people who stopped by, who called on the phone, who we complained about at the dinner table the same way anyone else complains about their friends or their boss. The veneer of mystery was off them. They were just people.

Oh, sure, I get nervous around celebrities, but I don't know if my pulse pounds any louder than when I have to talk to a stranger that someone I know thinks well of; it's not so much the aura of Very Famous as it is the concern that I'm going to say something embarrassing to someone smart. If anything is different when talking to celebrities it's the desire to not appear to be just another fan; trying to find the point between complimenting and gushing, the place between being excited and being Screaming Fan #6,778. It's the desire to treat them like normal people with great talents, not gods, that drives any unusual chemical activity celebrities might conjure in my brain.

I say all this both to pad my daily word count, and as a lead-in to my real point, which is, basically, that it's harder to maintain a blog when you're not some kind of famous; and that in some ways, on some blogs, being famous can be a way of cheating.

Now, please do not hear me trashing weblog culture. I have Warren Ellis's blog on a feed; I read Neil Gaiman's blog with respectable frequency; I even check out what Wil Wheaton has to say now and then. And I doubt anyone has missed the link somewhere to the right advertising the Cabinet of Wonders. I don't think celebrities (or at least these celebrities) intentionally leverage their fame to allow themselves easy, content-free blogging. But I do think that fame, Internet-based or otherwise, makes the job of maintaining a blog much, much easier.

For instance, look at Warren Ellis. Alright, now that you're certain someone on this planet thinks you're a bit daft, look at his blog. Read what he posts there, and if you can, read it like it's something being posted by your good friend, rather than a Very Important Author you enjoy. What do you see?

Most likely, you see a few advertisements for his new creative efforts (especially Freakangels, though that may have disappeared of late). But then it starts to get pretty jejune. You see photographs of interesting places. You see compiled tweets. You see him asking you to turn him on to new bands. With the exception of his ads and his World Wide Week idea (which I think is pretty brilliant), his blog probably looks pretty similar to, oh, yours. Yet, Warren Ellis has something that, most likely, you don't:

Comments.

Maybe this is just because I tend to run pretty low on the comments on my blogs, but it seems to me like once you get to blogs being hosted by actual adults, the distribution of comments is dramatically uneven. Warren Ellis has no difficulty getting into double digits and often hits triple, and political blogs can get similar volumes. Even allowing for double posts and for the number of responses that are going to be "yeah" and "LOL" and "/signed", that's still a much higher volume than most. This is, of course, barring highly polemical posts; I got some pretty intense traffic when I was 20 and dumb enough to openly slam one of my friends on LiveJournal (let's not even get into it...).

So, what's the difference? Well, it's two-fold.

One aspect, to be perfectly honest, is that Warren Ellis is a good writer, and a good writer without a track record of writing abysmally. People read his posts because they can count on acerbic wit, news on works by a writer they love, and maybe even something new to read or see or hear. In short, his is a blog that does deserve traffic.

But the other aspect, and you knew this was coming, is that Warren Ellis (and Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman and whoever) is a Very Famous Man. People are tempted to comment on blogs by Very Famous Men, because (or so I perceive it) those comments are imbued with some greater potency because they stand a higher chance of being read by a Very Famous Man, or even (gasp!) replied to by them. Certainly, I was electrified the one time Cherie Priest responded to me, so I don't think I'm entirely off-base here. And it's not merely about wanting a pat on the head--plenty of people disagree with Ellis (Wheaton/Gaiman/etc. etc.) as well, but even that can be its own sort of attempt to garner social prestige: you could be The Person That Showed Warren Ellis What's What. And how cool would that be?

This is the thing I don't entirely get, even given my brush with Cherie Priest. But this is not the thing that bothers me. The thing that bothers me is something deeper that this is just a little glimpse into--the problem is closer to the surface here because the presence of a celebrity guarantees the whole situation greater exposure. And that issue is the desire to be Internet Famous, and the tendency to measure yourself by your comments.

People want comments. I want comments. Comments are what keeps a blog a live, because ultimately, a blog post is the opening of a conversation. Unfortunately, it's a conversation that is alternately much faster than a face-to-face, and much slower. Blogs and blog readers demand their own peculiar schedules, and if comments or new posts fail to conform, the comments will go unanswered, or even worse, the blogs will die. Most bloggers can't even get away with taking a hiatus without their comments vanishing into thin air--I admit I panicked a little when I realized I'd totally missed last week's post. So naturally, the desire is to find a way to (a) update on some sort of regular, relatively acceptable schedule, and (b) make your comment bucket overflow. Sometimes this desire just results in frustration; but more often, this can result in the manufacturing of Internet fame.

We've all encountered a blog that was clearly doing the moral equivalent of post-count whoring: the unnecessary misanthropy, or the constant link-spam with witty little comments, or the recycled political punditry without anything new in the way of viewpoint or research. Whether or not the people writing these blogs are doing so consciously, what they are doing is trying to be someone famous; to fake being famous, because on the Internet it's really easy for fake to become real. This isn't even one or two people, or a dozen people; this is a large percentage of blogs. Really, I think this might be part of the driving force behind the posts we've all been guilty of (including yours truly) that are basically just us rehashing our days and our grocery lists in a grandiose fashion; not that there's anything wrong with those blog posts, but unless your friends don't see you very often those are probably not the things people want to read. But then, Neil Gaiman manages to write about driving kids to school and beekeeping and get a lot of readers, so maybe our banal posts are the things that will win us some accolades...

Really, I have no conclusion here, except that fame does strange things, and even more so the desire to be famous. The Internet just accelerates the cycle, and probably makes it a little harder to burn out on drugs. If I were to conclude, it would be to wonder how to patch the gaps in my posting schedule and the times when I am not inspired to write anything that would make anyone think--and to wonder if by "make anyone think" I really mean "make anyone comment". Is it possible that even the Internet is being powered by the human love of being the one with the biggest (or at least best) number? Unfortunately, I think so.

New Forms of Reference?

These posts keep getting shorter; I wonder if perhaps we are approaching some sort of blog singularity here, where eventually the novels I hope to post will just start magically appearing here for you all to read. The things men dream before their coffee...

What brings me here is actually a Saturday morning breakfast scan of the wonderful and illuminating Cabinet of Wonders. Her recent topic of focus seems to be menageries, and that in and of itself is wonderful (though I shouldn't view pictures of strange animals first thing in the morning, it leads to visualizing how they'd each feel crawling across my bare feet). What really riveted me, though, enough to warrant a post, was a single footnote in the second paragraph: "'the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.' [wiki]" (emphasis mine).

[wiki]. Thrown out as simply and as casually as [3], or [Atlas Shrugged, pp 87-91]. As though this were a thoroughly legitimate bit of academic annotation.

A Google search for "[wiki]" is fruitless, of course, given that the engine won't pay much attention to the brackets; and I don't know enough about Heather MacDougal to know if she's fully plugged in to current mainstream academic endeavor. But nevertheless, she is an eloquent and clearly educated writer, if not necessarily formally so, so I don't think this is necessarily random chance. The reference made by the footnote is relatively clear, if in need of more specification in a bibliography, and the information is exactly the sort one would quote from another source.

Is the war beginning to go quiet? Have mainstream intellectuals begun to accept wikis as a source of real and verifiable data? I'm not wholly overjoyed at the prospect--wikis are a great launchpad, but need at least as much if not more verification of sources to be solid points of reference--but I do love to see this sort of cultural progress in action. Maybe next we'll be seeing it in scholarly essays published online. Or maybe Ms. MacDougal is a fluke, and we'll be going right back to the same internecine war about what should or shouldn't constitute a primary or secondary source. Either way, I'm excited to see what happens next.

Disarray

This one is a bit less essay and a bit more chaos than my typical posts; if you don't like the format I can assure you we'll be back on whatever passes for course next week.

I did not, shock of shocks, get chosen as one of the top three entrants in the Spam Fiction contest. Unfortunate and sad, but I had to expect that, really.

Except of course, now the Doubt Monkey is gnawing at my brain, and I am starting to wonder if this piece of post-zombie political fiction I'm working on is at all going to pull its weight. My goal: to grit my teeth and make myself finish this draft so I can pull out the boning knife and the cauter-saw and spend next week making it into something I'm proud of.

Love. Hate. Excess. The words a writer lives by.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the issue of narrowcast culture. Science fiction and fantasy are the genres that are famous for the problem, but every facet of culture has people whose social lives and leisure time, and sometimes even time outside that, entirely revolve around one core concept. Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons are infamous examples, but the same issue crops up with reality shows (one or all of them), professional wrestling, soap operas, etc. etc. For every cultural phenomenon of moderate weight there are people who hang their lives on it: watch the movies, watch the shows, read the books, buy the t-shirts.

None of these things are inherently bad, unless you are concerned about social cache in the world at large, but it's common for these hobbies to become exclusionary: people who read only Star Trek novels and spend their downtime at work practicing Klingon; people who invest massive amounts of money in putting a wrestling ring in their backyard, and whose every conversation contains the phrase "The Rock says". People will focus some or all of their energy toward one single thing, a thing which they did not create and which, while it may enrich their lives, is being spread over far more of their lives than it should reasonably be expected to cover. Narrowcast culture: the rejection of all aspects of the human experience that do not relate to a single, specific concept, generally some set of connected media artifacts.

Personally, I find this repellent. I understand some degree of focus--I am, after all, spending at least some part of the majority of my days writing, and even more of it embroiled in words. But narrowcast cultural thinking is like societal inbreeding; it separates people into groups even moreso than they already are and it snuffs out ideas, ideas with the potential to cause very big change.

What sort of brain finds this acceptable? What sort of person doesn't go exploring, even in their head? I doubt it is that commonly-cited issue of social rejection and subsequent embrace of a sense of belonging, only because people who are part of the "in-crowd" do this, too. I don't think it is low-income people, because plenty of people who don't ever shut off World of Warcraft make sensible and more-than-sensible money as tech workers. Is the need to belong really this strong? Do people really feel so incomplete and scared that they only want to explore along one well-trodden path? People, to my mind, are machines for making ideas; and it bothers me that so many of them, sci-fi nerd and jock alike, are happiest when they are only regurgitating ideas handed to them by others.

My First Pimp

This was too amazing not to put this out here.

For this weekend, and this weekend only, you can see--absolutely free--Joss Whedon's latest project, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

It's a musical about a super-villain. It's by Joss Whedon. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, along with someone else who should be seen rather than announced as his arch-nemesis. And perhaps better than that, it is Joss Whedon's attempt to start changing the way things are done in show business: Seriously, he has a Master Plan.

So please, enjoy it--act three goes up tomorrow, July 19th, and is only free until July 20th. This is Whedon at his best; I encourage you not to miss out.