Gonna be doing a lot of work on this beast this weekend. Proceed with, uh, caution?

In the meantime, free fiction!

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I’ve been writing science fiction shorts for a workshop I’m doing, trying to get back into fiction writing, and I thought it might be cool if I put some readings up.

Here’s me reading my short story “Transcript of the Best, Most Powerful Symposium Presentation That Is Strong, Funny, and Promises To Respect You In The Morning”

I hope this turns out okay – this is my first time doing anything like this, soooo… let me know. Troubleshooting if you find anything would be good, too.

If this goes well, I’ll start putting others up, maybe early versions of stuff I’m working on, and so forth.

And I’m an author.

Here’s the problem: copyright doesn’t serve any of the semi-noble purposes it was intended to.

I’m writing a book and I wanted to use some great old photos I found. But the magazine they were in had long gone out of business and the photographer, as best I could determine, was dead. None of the big archivers (Corbis, Getty, etc) had bought up an archive that owned the photos.

So we had two choices: skip using them or scan them from the printed material and run them ourselves, and if someone came forward and claimed the rights, we’d have to either pay them off or go to court. We skipped.

These are fifty-year old photos with no locatable owner. And that’s one example – I have a whole folder here with photos I can’t figure out how to clear. It’s crazy. No one’s helped by this situation.

Why? So Disney can keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. The public domain is great! Everyone wins with public domain! I’m seriously thinking about releasing all my short stories (and anything else I can pull this off for) under a Creative Commons license just to avoid inflicting anything like this on future generations.

Here’s why I loved Paris: I went there with some almost-entirely forgotten French and a phrasebook (which I read constantly while we were there). In almost every case, when we were out somewhere, the people at the shops and wherever else were happy to meet me halfway. If I was struggling with something, they’d try to figure out what it was in English. It was so great to try and go as far with French as possible and have them willing to give me the assist when it didn’t get there.

And really, almost everyone we met was like that: kind, happy to talk to us, and I think a little amused that I was trying so hard to speak French.

I went to Paris expecting to not like the French at all, and out of all the people I dealt with, only a couple weren’t great.

That said, here’s how Parisians are dicks:
– Making fun of your pronunceation. It’s a little power trip, where they make a big deal about how you’re not saying words correctly – repeating the thing you said, acting confused, the whole deal. I was in a bakery and asked for two pain aux raissons (these cool pastries with raisins in them) while making the thumb-and-finger “two” and pointing at the pastries I wanted in the display, and the young woman behind the counter made a huge deal about how I wasn’t saying it right. “Poisson?” she asked, which would be fish. She protested that they didn’t have any fish pasteries. Which then would make it really strange for me to ask for fish pasteries, right? And since I’m pointing to something that sounds pretty close to what I asked for, it’s probably a pretty good bet that that’s what I want.

There were people behind me in line and this was embarassing. I did my request again, asking for the pastries, the sign for two, pointing, and she repeated my words with the same confused look. She drew this out for a while.

This is distinct from conversations I had with people who wanted to talk to me about improving my French, which was sometimes pointed but done in a friendly way.

– The indignity of work. This happens everywhere – there were a couple times where I’d walk up to a counter to buy something and the clerk would make a big deal with the body language, huffing as they stood to walk over, sighing as they opened the register. They only work 35 hours a week – come on.

I spent almost almost two weeks in Paris, working my ass off to speak to people, and by the time we left I could have reasonable conversations with shop keepers (including asking them to please speak a little more slowly). I felt really good about it, and it helped make my time in Paris much more fun.

I’m a huge fan of trains.

They’re cool.
They’re environmentally responsible, far more so than air travel.

There’s also a much more complicated argument for redundant systems I want to make here, which is essentially that if you’re overly reliant on any single means of transportation that system becomes an extremely lucrative target, and it makes recovering from any attack dramatically harder. But I’ll skip that.

We took trains from London to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to York, York to Bath, and Bath to Paris by way of London.

London to Edinburgh was great. Looking out on the sea, all the little towns, the English countryside — totally worth it. The only weird thing was because of the bank holiday (they went crazy for the bank holiday, it was bizarre), everyone headed out of London headed out one station, where they caught trains elsewhere. We had a bunch of shorts-wearing jersey-clad guys on the way up, who stood between cars, occasionally making offensive comments to women, and drank beer continuously.

The strange thing, at least to me, was that they were the only group of tattooed people I’d seen in London, and they weren’t young, they were older, middle-aged ways.

Edinburgh-York was fine, except that it was a Virgin train which (seemingly) meant that “quiet car” (no cell phones/needless noise/etc) was entirely ignored, but whatever, you don’t really expect things like that to mean anything, much as you might hope. York-Bath though…

We’re traveling along, minding our own business, when we smell something that smells like loaded baby diaper. It gets worse. People on the train start looking at each other, around at people who just got on, the babies… and it gets worse.

And worse.
And worse.

Later, my wife and I argued over how bad it got – she argued it was the worst smell ever, and I argued that while it wasn’t the worst ever, it was the worst smell I’d ever been exposed to for any length of time.

What was amazing was the response of the people in the car. There was a great reluctance to say anything, much less react visibly, but the smell was so bad people found pretexts to touch their mouth, bring handkerchiefs or other articles of clothing up to cover their noses, until finally many people were openly pinching their noses closed.

This was the great British stiff-upper-lip reserve.

I was, weirdly, reminded of an X-Files episode (weirdly because I didn’t watch the show that often).
Cop: “They say it cuts the smell if you don’t breathe through your mouth.”
Mulder: “They lie.”

I ended up leaving the car, which you’re not really supposed to do because the seat assignment is regimented and standing is as enforced as having a seat (weirdly) so it’s hard to give up a seat even if you’re nauseated by a smell and about to be sick.

I ended up between the cars, unable to take it as almost all the rest of the British endured without complaint. A conductor came by and said to the refugees (and I don’t know how to punctuate this to convey the humor he managed) “There was an accident with a dog. (beat) Allegedly.”

He went through and sprayed something in the car that either
a) removed the smell or
b) deadened the smell sense of car riders

I went back to my seat, now weirdly less smelly than between cars where the stink cloud had moved. A cleaner came on two stations later, and whatever he did, the situation got even better.

Then London-Paris… the thing about trains, if I may, is that being far more economical than air transport, it makes sense to make the seats at least somewhat more spacious. Especially if you’re me and really tall, it seems like an obvious conclusion, trains = more space. But the train through the Chunnell was really cramped and annoying, and its only redeeming value was that it didn’t have the horrible security and general hassle of flying from London to Paris.

Edinburgh was much friendlier than London, though of course it wasn’t nearly as cool. We arrived at the end of the Fringe festival, which meant there were uncountable things going on, shows and street performers and all kinds of stuff. We went and saw “Watson and Oliver” which was really funny, but was also essentially put on in a cargo container with two performers in front of 40 people. It was also strange to sit around and have the performers, their friends, and random assorted hangers-on come by, ask you if you would be around at showtime, or “looking for a show tonight?”

I wanted to stop some of them (“Hey, you’re going on stage in a couple of hours, you should take a break here…”)

I have a criteria for seeing comedy. It must be funny. The whole genre of applause comedy bores me. Whee, politics are so stupid! Clap clap clap clap! The furthest I’ll go in this direction is Lewis Black, who gets a lot of applause but is also really quite sharply funny and willing to make fun of himself.

York was great. It’s also an excellent demonstration of the problem with trying to preserve old cities today. Narrow streets designed to admit one horse carriage, if that, can’t handle car traffic and pedestrians. Trying to build roads through them is a fool’s task, but businesses will demand them (like Nordstrom and Westlake Center!).

So in York, within the walls, there are all these crazy narrow, crooked streets, hordes of people on feet, and annoyed people on cars trying to get around (for some reason), honking their horn.

Just ban the cars from those areas, at least from say 9am-7pm when they can’t safely coexist. I’ll come back to this in a later post.

Bath was okay. Not a lot to see once you’ve taken the walking tour, unless you’re interested in hanging around at the spa. Weather was also really strange while we were there – gusting wind, rain, cold for much of the time.

This lead to a great British moment. I loved the dry, understated British humor every time I came across it, from the Beefeaters at the Tower of London (who described a medal they got for meritous long service as the “Undetected Crime Medal”). In Bath, I tuned into the BBC for the weather and the report, essentially, was “winds between 0-20 kilometers an hour from the west and north, sunny and cloudy with sprinkles and showers” and for the rest of the week, it would continue to be “inconstant”.

I cracked up.

Then we headed to Paris.

After I got back, I looked into whether I could have brought back a box of Cuban cigars, as I wanted to do (nope, ). That ended up with me reading some other stuff, wandering around, and finally I checked out the Department of Justice’s privacy policy which (to sum up) says “we collect standard webstats like your domain, IP address,

In certain circumstances, however, we may take additional steps to identify you based on this information and we may share this information, including your identity, with other government agencies.

Uhhhh… wow. So if I do research for a short story I’m writing, read the Microgram Bulletin, which is totally fascinating, and otherwise poke around the Customs and DEA information, that might be “certain circumstances” where my excessive interest leads to them seeing if my IP is static and then putting me on the super-search list so I get pulled out of line every time I take a flight?

My plan was to sell my MacBook Pro after the road trip, but now that the time’s come, I can’t bring myself to do it, and I find myself finding excuses for using it over my extremely souped-up PC with the sweet LCDs.

Yet I don’t have money and I haven’t decided whether I’m headed back into the job market, so I’m torn. In the last year or so, as I’ve worked on the book continuously, I’ve made a pretty huge mess of my office, and now I’m cleaning that up as I hang around waiting for word on my other book proposals/job possiblities. Which means I’m selling off some of my old treasured RPGs and cool games, which, inevitably, meant I hooked the Dreamcast up again and took it for a spin.

I’ll skip the rant about how cool the Dreamcast was and get to my point — some of those games were gorgeous. Popping in a game that’s six years old, I don’t expect it to look that great, but in some of them – Skies of Arcadia, in particular – the artists did so much with the expressions of the characters, building a style, that it’s beautiful.

I look at some of my favorite old games (like Starflight/etc) and I remember the sense of wonder I felt playing them, but I don’t ever look at screenshots of the old PC/PC-AT games and think “wow, that’s a beautiful CGA game”. But the aliens in Space Invaders are weird and cool and recognizable even today, and some of the old sprites still carry meanings.

It’s a lot like art history. Cave paintings without perspective can move us, and today

There are two major differences, though:
– computer technology’s moved so fast that there’s never been little artistic focus at any point. When EGA supplanted CGA, there weren’t artists that tried to keep working in CGA, but there were still painters after photography was invented (to be overly simplistic about it).
– the history of the art’s quickly destroyed, because incompatibility means you can’t study the works of the past, and copy protection contributes as well. I can’t run Starflight today for a number of reasons, so I’m reduced to seeing screenshots and trying to remember the gameplay (Uhhh… Statement/Question/Posture?).

Both those differences have wider-ranging consequences than we’ve really considered as a society. For one, it means that we’re in a strange position of moving forward and jumping ahead of our breadcrumbs. If I wanted to teach someone about the history of gaming, I’d be able to find some of the orignal arcade games in decent emulation or otherwise, and then I’m screwed for a while before I can even consider walking into the vast grey area of abandonware, then it’s dicey trying to get stuff from then on to run on supported operating systems… so my class would be like
1. The early origins of gaming
2. Games I’d like to show you but can’t for various reasons
3. Half-Life 2!

I’m reminded of the gaps in the history of painting created by wide-scale wars or natural disasters, where we’re left with a couple pieces by someone who was brilliant and supposedly created others.

Video games are art, I have no doubt that this will eventually be recognized by all reasonable people. But while I can buy a book and look at reproductions of Jean Miro paintings, or travel to see them in person, some of the best games, the most influential classics that created genres and thrilled all that played them, are already essentially lost.

That’s horrible, and it’s sad that nothing’s going to happen about it.

London is a great city, and like all great cities, it is amazing and horrible at once. There is a strange sense in visiting London of sifted history. Taking the Underground, even staring at the map of the Underground, there’s an uneasy sense in my chest that London is incomprehensible, that the lines are based on a thousand years of history, and the bump in the diagonal of the Picadilly line is the result of the great fire, or some historical accident that forced a station to be built several blocks away from where one would logically go. I stare at the map and know that in a week, I’m not going to understand the territory, and will be happy when I can read the maps well enough to navigate.

Worse, there was a constant tension trying to get by in London. I have no job right now, and don’t know when, or if, I’ll return to getting a steady paycheck. The prices made me feel uncomfortable everywhere we went. They would look, at first, entirely rational – inexpensive, even, given that we were in one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. £3 for a beer? Why, that’s entirely reasonable at first glance, except that £3 at $1.90/pound means that beer’s about $5.75. The £12 meal is £23.

It provoked a kind of horror that made me afraid to buy things, and sent us into grocery stores and the food department of Marks & Spencer over the corner noodle store. And the food sucked, generally speaking, even without correcting for cost. Finding a decent meal wasn’t hard, but it cost so much that it discouraged exploration.

It takes some of the fun out of vacation when you worry about money. I know that we’re supposed to say “hey, it’s vacation – don’t worry that a bad plate of fish and chips runs £8.50” but in practice, it’s an accumulated mental weight that makes each night a little harder to justify spending.

It’s part of what made London seem more work than vacation. Everyone in London seemed unhappy to be there, as if they were on their way to or at unpleasant jobs that barely paid the bills. Once we talked to them, they were almost all quite chipper and helpful, but taking a train from one place to another felt like joining a funeral procession. One paper estimated that the average London commuter spent 45m each way. I have no way of evaluating whether that’s true or not, but from the looks of it, it seemed to fit: each day, eight hours and then nearly two in transit is a quick way to knock off another day on your way towards death.

From yesterday:
Simpsons episode I’ve seen many times > X-Men 3 > Nacho Libre > Two Weeks Notice [sic]