Snow Shovelin’ Robots
Loyal reader Damaso points this out to us:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5139723/snow-shoveling-robots-where-were-you-during-my-childhood
I knew all that bitching about shoveling snow would pay off.
J
Bullshit
I only work. . .
. . .when the cat says I can.
Right now, Mega Super big Cat Pierre has decided: Enough.
More Shovelin’
The scene from my window this morning:
What we need is for the world’s top scientists to get together and develop robot-snow-shoveling technology, because this shit has got to stop.
Quick Hits
A friend of mine sent this to me, originally found on Fark:
Metallica Likes Bargains
I am still laughing. Maybe you had to be 15 when …And Justice for All came out.
And also too, did you know someone has actually started a Facebook page for The Electric Church? And that I have nothing to do with it? It stuns me. The Always Minty Fresh Jeof Vita sent me the link. I’ve been resisting Facebook for a long time, but I suppose i will have to join now. . .if only to friend my own damn book.
Hey – let’s all join this Facebook page and MAKE IT INTO THE MIGHTIEST FACEBOOK PAGE EVAR, BEFORE WHICH ALL OTHER FACEBOOK PAGES BOW IN TERROR. Or, you know, post pictures and stuff.
Deprecated Elegance
My god, people, it’s freezing out there. The little weather bug on my screen is telling me it’s 17 degrees outside, which I don’t believe. It’s Pluto-like out there. People are literally stepping out of their homes bundled up in 13 layers of modern fabrics and instantly just sitting down on the sidewalk to fall asleep and freeze to death.
At the supermarket checkout a few days ago I saw one of the tabloids declaring that a secret prophecy recently discovered in the tomb of St. Peter informed the horrified world that the End Times began on 1/1/09, and when I went outside in search of coffee this morning, damn, I believed it. The End Times: Now with more cold!
When it’s cold like this, naturally enough, I put on three pairs of socks, lay in a supply of whiskey, and sit on the couch to watch bad movies. Last night I watched The Darjeeling Limited whilst the Duchess was out for the evening. I kinda knew it wasn’t going to be terribly good; Wes Anderson is becoming a tragic figure. I’ve actually never seen Bottle Rocket (because I am lame) but I adored Rushmore; thought The Royal Tenenbaums to be better than most other people thought, apparently; wanted to kill myself after watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; and didn’t even bother seeing TDL in theaters, as I expected it to stink up the place.
Still, Rushmore remains one of my favorite films, so I’ll probably always give Wes a flyer, at least when his movies come on TV for free. So I watched. TDL isn’t a good movie; it’s like watching a New Yorker short story come to life, with boring characters you can’t imagine caring about, prissy little family themes only the people involved in could possibly be affected by, and bizarre dialogue and actions no real person would ever undertake. And this has always been part and parcel of Anderson’s films, but he handled it better in the past, somehow. Maybe it’s just the fact that we all get a little sloppy when we go over the same themes over and over again.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because of the train.
The Darjeeling Limited, in the film, is a fictional train in India which the characters board, and it got me thinking about trains, and how technological advances don’t always improve things. Trains for instance: Sure, planes are faster and cars allow us more freedom of movement, but trains retain a certain majesty and beauty that can never be replaced, no matter how fast our alternatives become.
And this, naturally enough, got me to thinking about Text Adventures.
Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember text Adventures like Zork, Enchanter, or Suspended (all by a company called Infocom). We’re talking late 1970s, early 1980s here. Text Adventures were born out of an era where computers were not graphics powerhouses, and games had to rely on words more than pictures. Ever since PC-manufacturers began pumping out Video cards with lots of RAM and processing power – ever since games like Wolf3D and the like – text adventures became relics, because they used, well, text to create a universe instead of polygons and bump-mapping.
I love Text Adventures, and am only mildly embarrassed to admit it. Oh, I like a good gib-filled FPS game too, but when I was a wee nerd back The Day, I played a lot of TAs, and enjoyed them immensely. This is one example of how technological advances have left something beautiful behind – you don’t need much computing power to run a Text Adventure, but that doesn’t mean anything. TAs are their own little species, and just like trains the pleasures they offer have little to do with the technological advances of the times.
Recently, I’ve been playing with Inform7, which is a programming language specifically for creating Text Adventures using natural language. You program the game using declarative English sentences, like so:
The Stateroom is a room. “Staterooms aboard a spaceship, even one as luxurious as the Thaleia, are tight, cramped affairs, and this one is no exception. There is barely enough room for you and the furniture. The door to the hallway is locked tight for now. East is your bathroom.”
And that’s it, you just created a room with a description. It’s a little more complex than that if you want to create anything interesting, but in general you get by just by typing exactly what you mean, and man, that’s genius. Jeff’s love for programming languages and Text Adventures satisfied all at once! Jeff is, obviously, a nerd.
Naturally, the next thought is, could I write an entire novel as a Text Adventure? The answer is, of course I could. The real question is whether this is a good idea. Personally, I don’t really want interactivity in my stories; I enjoyed TAs as games, not as stories, even though story-telling is obviously a big part of their appeal. But I don’t really want to be responsible for figuring out how the protagonist gets out of a scrape – I want the author to surprise me with the answer while I sit around drinking beer. That’s the ancient covenant we have with authors, and I’m sticking to it.
Of course, making a Text Adventure out of a story you’ve already written, that’s an entirely different matter. . .and might be fun.
Future Suck
Once again we’re hearing a lot about how newspapers are probably going the way of the Dodo, and folks seem pretty confused and alarmed by the prospect. And once again I am underwhelmed. I am also under-alarmed by the demise of our auto industry, the advance of e-book readers, and just about any other new technology-slash-economic condition that threatens a well-established sector of the world.
Behind all of this hand-wringing is, of course, fear; but not fear of a world without newspapers, really. At its core it’s a fear of the unknown. We’ve all grown up with, say, newspapers in our lives. They’re familiar and comfortable, and even folks who haven’t bought a newspaper in their lives are used to having them around. Imagining a world without newspapers is difficult, because we’ve never existed in such a world. It’s easy, then, to imagine that such a world will be worse than the current one, simply because we, as a species, don’t like change. Especially change we have no control over.
Whatever will happen to journalism without newspapers to uphold standards? I suspect new standards will evolve and be upheld, and within a few decades there will be a couple of silver-maned Blogs or web sites that will have taken on some of the burnished air of the respected old source. Newspapers, after all, went through a pretty lengthy period of being unreliable, gossip-mongering pieces of yellow journalism, and even today there are plenty of 20th-century media islands that appear to be run by their owners with something less than journalistic integrity at their heart. So why in the world can’t Blogs do the same job, just without the costly and messy paper delivery model?
It’s just fear. The American auto industry has made some bad decisions, and bad cars, for a while now, and their business model is looking grim. Meh. What about a world without American-made cars? I’m no economist so I’ll take everyone’s word that this would have dire consequences for our economy and long-term survival as a nation, but I wonder if it has to be these companies. Why not a different company? A new company? I mean, there’s sober economic analysis that tells you we must preserve what’s left of our large manufacturing base. And then there’s simple fear where people imagine a world where Ford doesn’t exist and get all squirrelly about it, for no better reason than because it’s been there for their entire lifetime.
A sunny attitude for someone who writes about dystopias, I suppose. I guess I don’t have much faith that civilization will survive indefinitely, and I see Thunderdome in our future – I just don’t see it coming because the newspapers go away, is all.
What should Jeff Read?
Let’s say you received a gift card to a big-box bookstore for the holidays, and you’re mulling over the empire of books you’re gonna buy for FREE! MUHAHAHA! FREE! FREE!
Ahem. Let’s say. Now let’s say you gaze at your pile of unread books and realize you’ve been going pretty heavy on the history and the old, early-20th century fiction, and light on the recent melt-yer-brain SF/F. What would you buy to rectify this situation? Feel free to comment or email your thoughts. I’d appreciate a groupthink on this one, as I don’t want to waste my gift card. And I waste things so easily.
Thanks!
J
Some Stats
Ah, the first week of January, a traditional moment for soul-searching and self-evaluation.
So, first, the little gonzo novel-writing experiment: I’m 19,000 words in, which means, unbelievably, I’m more or less on schedule. And this with the big welter of wasted time that is the holidays right smack in the middle. Is it any good? Well, I don’t think it sucks, but the jury’s out until it’s over.
Second, short story submissions: Those of you who have, inexplicably, been keeping up with this site for more than a year may recall I posted last year about my SS subs. In 2008 I only managed 37 submissions, with one sale. That’s a crappy number of subs, actually, but I’m limited by increasing turn-around times, my own incompetence and laziness, and increasing amount of projects. My goal is always to hit about 75 subs. Now, I force myself to write a short story a month, so I never lack for material to submit, but of course forcing yourself to write a story a month doesn’t necessarily mean you’re writing good stories, as many, many beleaguered editors I’ve submitted to can attest. I know some writers wait for really good ideas to hit them, then write a kick-ass story they labor over for years, then submit it to select markets. If I tried that, I’d have written about 2 stories over my entire life. Just how I’m wired.
Besides, if I did that I wouldn’t have these amusing little posts about numbers, would I?
Rock on.
Year of Everyone’s a Superhero
There’s been a lot of chatter these days about “real-life superheroes (RLSH)”, with essays on Boing Boing and recently in Rolling Stone. Who the hell introduces this stuff into the atmosphere to infect and ruin people, I don’t know, but thank goodness.
Anyway, whilst lurking over at Nick Mamatas‘ Livejournal page, he posted about all this here. Which got me thinking. Hell, we’re living in science fiction now, aren’t we? We could all be superheroes, if we wanted. And if we had nothing better to do, didn’t mind a lot of pain and the risk of early death, and if we didn’t fear prison.
Why not? As some have pointed out before me, The Batman doesn’t have any magic, he’s just got billions of dollars and a martial arts discipline beyond belief. If any of us could afford to have those wonderful doohickies designed, tested, and mass produced, we could also be destroying $1.5 million in property while apprehending a single mugger.
In many many ways we’ve entered a period in history where technology is rapidly granting powers and abilities to folks who in years past would have been denied such things. From the mundane (self-publishing, personal computers) to the amazing (genetic manipulation, face transplants), we’re living in a time when a lot of stuff that used to be wild fantasy is becoming hard reality – why not superheroes? It makes sense. Vigilantism has always existed; now it can be combined with all sorts of James Bondian tech and powerful communication grids.
And, apparently, silly costumes: What’s amazing about a lot of the “real life superheroes” is the fact that while they may seem perfectly serious about helping their communities and fighting crime in practical, effective ways, they also seem waayyyy too eager to put on a Halloween costume while doing it. Why? I don’t know. The costumes invariably look ridiculous, can’t possibly serve any practical purpose, and open up the “hero” to mockery and humiliation. I mean, a man wearing jeans and a T-shirt, wielding a tire-iron, breaks up a mugging? Hero. A man in a latex home-sewn suit designed to look like a frog or something, wielding a tire-iron painted green, breaks up a mugging? A freak who did something heroic.
Of course, I may simply be jealous, as my only plausible alter-ego would be Whiskey Man, who douses varmints with liquor until they pass out. And my costume choices are not good. And plus also too my physical training is, uh, a little sub-par, and no one likes to see a superhero slumped against an alley wall, weeping and clutching his side and whining about a stitch.
Happy New Year
Happy New Year, everyone. Wanted to get that in before I’m, er, overserved. Let’s do our best to make sure 2009 is nothing like the Sci Fi we write and read, ‘kay?
L
J