Aaaaaand now, a beer, or three

I turned in my second Clarion piece today, my second in three days. It’s — I don’t know, I went to my book thing this morning and then wrote for six hours. I’m too close to predict how it’ll go over.

If I was smart, I’d get to work on the next one, but I just can’t do it.

I met Ted Chiang last night! And he was cool. It’s so weird – Nancy Kress is one of my favorite authors ever, and I got to hang out with her for a week, and then I got to talk a little to Chiang, who likely is constantly approached by random people and Clarion students at these vents.

Hate sticker on active.com for spamming

Cascade Bicycle Club uses active.com to do their online registrations, and active charges a lot, is generally annoying, and then spams you even if you said you didn’t want to be spammed. I haaaaaaaaaaate this kind of thing, even more than random dictionary attacks or whatever, because it’s a personal betrayal:

“Hey, do you trust us to handle this transaction?”
“Sure. Here’s some money.”
“Great, do you mind if we bother you with promotional emails?”
“Please don’t.”
“Whoops! Ha ha ha, turns out we don’t care about the second question.”
“Why should we trust you with money if you can’t be trusted with my email?”
“Doesn’t matter! Too late! Suckerrrr!”

The ultimate insult is the disclaimer:

You are currently subscribed to active-offers as: ####. When you registered online with Active.com you requested a free subscription to our weekly email newsletter and promotions. If you would like to unsubscribe from future newsletter mailings send a blank email to: leave-6505228-66413975.39fbc094bfb884879077a3807305d294@news1-active.com or mail to The Active Network, 10182 Telesis Ct, Ste. 300, San Diego, CA 92121.

No, I did not. I never, ever request a free subscription to weekly email newsletters and promotions, you jerks. Way to run a business.

Unexpected development at Clarion West concerning my possible demise

While sitting in the living room working on critiques, Nancy Kress strongly implied she needed “a paperclip and a rifle” so she could shoot me tomorrow in group, and said it with a tone that indicated a certain glee of expectation. There were four witnesses besides me.

Things I’ve learned from being across from a fraternity at Clarion West

This conversation gets repeated throughout the day:

Guy: “Hey, what’s going on?”
Girl: “Nothing.”
Guy: “You going to come by the party later?”
Girl: “There’s a party?”
Guy: “Oh yeah.”
Girl: “When?”
Guy: “Should get going about eight.”
Girl: “Okay, cool.”

Here’s what actually happens: if sufficient people show up by magic, it’s a rocking party, and people are sent out to purchase additional beer. If not enough people show up, it peters out and everyone leaves. But every day they’re fishing, which means that if you’re a girl, the claim that there’s a party actually carries almost no value at all, and since the frat boys are drinking every night, there’s no cost to claiming that there’s a party later.

The rejection code

I heard this morning that one of the scifi mags I apply to has a kind of step-ladder in their rejection language:
– “doesn’t grab” = didn’t read more than a paragraph or two
– “didn’t hold” = didn’t read more than a couple paragraphs
– “didn’t work” = read the whole thing, more or less

Having received all of these, I felt kind of stabbed to hear this, because now I realize that a bunch of them, despite getting nice rejections, didn’t even get read all the way through. Probably.

Clarion West, Day One

I don’t know how much I’ll want to say as I go on, especially about people and related issues, but some random thoughts as end the drought caused in large part by my prep…

– I got to hang out a little with Nancy Kress today, and had a total fanboy moment, and she’s awesome. It’s funny, I’ve done a bunch of book events for Prospectus and now on my own, and I still go “wheeeee!” when I meet Kay Kenyon.

– We’re in an empty sorority house, I’m not supposed to disclose which one, but it’s a strange and weirdly depressing environment. But then, according to the poster, their cumulative GPA sure beats mine.

– I’d forgotten what a shithole the University District is. I lived here for years, I know its charms, but holy crap, between the pan handling, the littering, the general crappy attitude (there are twelve of us! let’s walk four by three! whee!) it makes me long to go hang out on Queen Anne, or Capitol Hill, or… downtown Bellevue, hell.

– The people here rock. So far.

Extended versus expanded memory

This will going to date me as sure as cutting me open and counting my rings. I just dug this notbook up, and it contains a couple pages of notes like

Mem total used free
Conv 640 69 571
Upper 0 0 0
Adapter 128 128 0
XMS 3328 1088 2240
total 4096 1285 2811

device c:\dossetver.exe
device c:\dos\himem.sys
dos = high
files = 30

This is followed by alternate versions of the same format, except optimizing for EMS instead of XMS (emm386.exe, baby)… pages of “devicehigh /L: 2,12048=c:\dos\setver.exe”

I realize, when I look at stuff like this, why I get so annoyed when I look at my task list and see even trivial apps that shouldn’t be running at all (I’m looking at you, Apple) taking 4 megs of memory. It used to take forever to get Wing Commander to run. It was crazy.

I feel like saying “Gamers today. You don’t know how good you’ve got it.” and then pointing at myself and laughing. What in the world drove me to waste days – days! Working on crap like that? Trying to get games to run in DOS back when they were really pushing it was a lot like tearing down and rebuilding your house every time someone came over for dinner.

“What? You need to grate cheese? Oh no!”

And we put up with it! We loved it! Wow, were we all morons.

On power disparity in Google Street View

Here’s something I don’t think has been brought up in all the reactions I’ve seen so far: Google demonstrates the difference in power and respect for government authority. The watchers can go unwatched.

Let’s say that I’m Citizen Derek, and I’m shown on Google Streets bringing something really expensive like a plasma television into my house* — or pick your reason. If I want that picture removed, I can’t do it. Similarly, if Google’s got a super-high-resolution view of my house in Google Earth and I’m worried about a stalker, I’m equally screwed.

But if I’m Vice President Derek, I can get my house blurred off. The government has the ability to achieve a level of privacy that individuals are entirely denied.

This is a reversal of long-standing tradition, that functions of government should be open and that the activities and property of private citizens should be private. This is a very good reason to find the whole exercise unsettling, even if you can’t precisely state why — it is unsettling.

* I own a nine-year old 32″ where the picture bends on the far-left side, if you’re curious

Seeing the looming end of the personal disclosure

Ruskoff’s written about this, but there’s this weird line in public space, where you can either live your life pretty much entirely in public or say nothing at all that isn’t directly book-related.

I see a lot of this related to USSM stuff, and it’s always a little shocking. I drove down to see my parents this morning, and ended up cooking breakfast. When I got back, the game had started, so I tossed up a game thread with a quick note on my lateness… and that became “I live with my mother”

Really? I don’t understand how ticked at me you have to be to say that. But it’s like the flat tire thing – explaining that it took me forever to figure out how to winch down the spare tire on a Grand Caravan became “can’t change a flat” lol ha ha ha.

I’d say that it’s a symptom of internet discourse, but it came out in the Cheater’s Guide book reviews, too, when my acknowledgment to my agent —

Thanks are due to my agent, Sydelle Kramer, who was willing to help me figure out which book idea I could do well with, whip up a good proposal, and find it a home.

was quoted to sound like a three-year project was a get-rich scheme, and then was quoted by people who hadn’t read the book to support that. I mean, the alternative is

I’d like to thank my agent, Sydelle Kramer, for a number of things. First, discussing with me several book concepts, including possible markets for each, which ones suited my interests and strengths, and then …

I don’t write a thank you like that, though.

I guess the larger question is: does being open about this stuff do enough good that it outweighs the annoying stuff, the intentional misreading, all that good stuff? How do you measure that? How long before I get called ‘whiny’ for wondering this in public?

Or am I, like Rushkoff, going to eventually swap HLWT into something blander and work-only?