Whistling in the Dark

Is it weird that I'm significantly more affected by the death of Billy Mays than the deaths of David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson?

Maybe it's because the latter were celebrities, living the celebrity life, but Billy Mays was at heart just a big cheerful guy who sold stuff.

Or maybe it's because Billy Mays kind of reminds me of Frank.

I dunno. I'll admit, I'm a fan of Discovery Channel's Pitchmen, but I never thought I'd feel badly to hear the guy who hawked Zorbeez had died.

...but I have my machine back. Weds and I have observed the 1-year mark well. And beyond that....

Well, Weds and I are talking. Weds is amazing to talk to, when it comes to things.

It's time to get back to work. It's time to start building shit again.

I am in... a good mood.

My computer has gone back in for repairs, having elected to stop booting mid-last week. I'm on a variety of loaners, but I'm therefore behind on e-mail, reading journal type stuff, webcomics type stuff -- almost everything, really.

I'll be back when I can be, but in the meantime, please see any absence of response in the context of my not hearing, not any lack of caring. 

This is something of a followup from yesterday. I was asked if I also did scenes or other bits to help me work out worldbuilding. The answer then was yes, and here's some of the evidence of that

Specifically, this is a scene set in one of those alternate universes -- one where the physics is set to fantasy/exotic instead of 'science fiction.' The high concept is relatively simple -- assume for the moment that the gods of the world were all real and struggled for dominance, and assume that the Greek Pantheon got that dominance around 13 B.C. and never let go. All the other gods are still out there, but they pretty much (happily or not) live under the dominance of the Greeks.

So. Here's a little ditty set in that setting, just to help get a feel for the world. I have to give action Mason Kramer a credit and a thank-you as part of this. And of course I'll stick the whole thing behind a cut lest the world become a dark and forbidding place. Later on, when I set up my writing groups on Dreamwidth so they'll pass through, stuff like this will be stuck on the writing filter and those not interested won't have to see.

As for how this differs from... writing with Intent (as in, Intent of Publication) -- well, this is in a way the textual equivalent of sketchbook pages. Before I can actually write about this world, I have to try a few things out, see how they run, feel how the characters feel, explore a few things... it's like doing six different sketches of a character in a sketchbook -- they're all a bit rough, perhaps, but they give the artist a chance to work out what works best visually for the character before drawing him 'for real.'

For now, please click through if you actually are interested, and please enjoy the cheese plate.

 

( Let's all do the City-State Rag! )

So I'm kicking around ideas for a setting. It may be an RPG setting, it may be a fiction setting. It has some antecedents going all the way back to 1998 or so when I floated an idea or two of picking up the Intellectual Property for the old Pacesetter system Timemaster. (At the time, the money they wanted was far more than I was willing to spend -- it may be that they've made more in the ten years since by selling PDF versions on RPG Now, but they haven't actually produced a new product for it since 1991, more is the pity.) Things have finally gelled in my brain, forming a very, very different take on the concept of intrauniversal/spatiotemporal adventure, with a healthy dose of Space Opera and a bit of Doctor Who for good measure.

And so I'm worldbuilding as I let the actual story gel, if it's going to be fiction, or the world proper gel if it's going to be a setting.

Worldbuilding is incredible amounts of fun, and very very dangerous. It's very dangerous because it's incredible amounts of fun. The problem is, you end up getting a level of detail on your fictional or RPG world that far exceeds your capacity to put it into your work, and the process of worldbuilding is satisfying in a way that is very similar to -- and scratches the same itch as -- writing.

Only it's completely worthless beyond your own brain.

Take this setting. You know it's intrauniversal. You know it's time travel. That's a start, right? Right. Now, the mechanism of how they hop from one alternate universe to another might interest you.

What is not going to interest you... is the coordinate/navigational system used to do so.

But I've got it down. I've got it down, in fact, to a freaking science. I know that the posthumans who first built the technology have sixteen fingers instead of ten, so everything's in Hexadecimal. I know how to create unique identifiers for alternate universes that have meaning for me even if they're just jumbles of hex code for everyone else. I have a standardized ISAN unit (ISAN standing for Interfleet Standard Altiversal Nomenclature) of measure for everything from position to alternate timeline to dimension.

In fact, I know that if one of my (hypothetical -- remember, I'm not actually writing this dumb story or world yet) heroes punches in the following coordinates manually into his system--
--they would arrive almost exactly at the place of my birth just in time to watch me be born. With absolutely none of the above pulled out of my ass. It all makes sense in the context of the system in question.

This information will never be useful to anyone, ever, including me.

Seriously. I can't put a jumble like that into a story. If I feature an action packed chrononautical navigation scene, no one's going to spout off hex code. If I put this system into an RPG, it would never, ever be used and in fact would be held of as an example of needless crunch for no reason.

And yet, I love it.

(This is not an invitation for Shut Up And Write comments, by the way. The actual writing isn't anywhere near in a 'start putting words down' state. This is just an observation, and it is mine.)

Monday was the 1 year anniversary of Wednesday crossing the border into the United States, at the time on a K-Visa, for fianceés. For the first time in our relationship, we were on a trip to unify our households against our upcoming marriage.

For the first time in our relationship, our time together was not potentially measured in weeks, or days, or hours, but in years.

Since that day (well, technically a couple of days before while we packed her stuff up in Ottawa, but I have a poetic thing going here), there has not been a single day when Wednesday and I have not been in the same room. There has not been a single day that we have not touched, have not spoken in person, have not embraced, and have not kissed.

Not one day.

For the last year and two days, Wednesday has not been "my Canadian girlfriend" or "my long distance relationship." Wednesday has been the person I share my life with.

Next month, Wednesday and I will celebrate the first anniversary of our marriage in Las Vegas. But more quietly we've been celebrating for the last few days. Celebrating our lives joining. Celebrating our coming together and not having to leave.

For the last year, we have been Home.

I am the luckiest bastard on the face of this planet.

I had a bad gout flare last week -- my worst in years, and in an entirely new place. My left knee.

My usual meds didn't touch it. It got worse instead of better. I went on high grade anti-inflammatories and steroids to work on it.

There have been some side effects, though the pain is much better now. One is what you expect when you dump a fuck-ton of NSAIDs in your stomach for a week -- diarrhea, some discomfort in the stomach lining. And last night I don't think I put fifteen minutes of sleep in a row together.

I don't think I'm going out today. But on the other side of things, now I need to stay awake for the day, so I can get to sleep in a reasonable amount of time to get up tomorrow and work, then do things I was going to do today.

I'm ready for my android body now.

I have lost writing before.

It's nothing new, of course. Everybody loses writing. In the early days of home computing we all learned to back our floppy disks up because we had that one disk fail, and in those days that one 5 and a half inch disk contained your entire electronic existence. Every poem, every story, every badly rendered scene you'd never show anyone and every piece of absolute literary gold you were positive would one day redeem all of humanity through its profundity. Losing your floppy disk was like having a chunk of your brain cut out.

In more recent years, it's happened less often. But... well, I'm hard on computers. I'm hard on computers and I'm hard on computer media. I've had multiple complete hard drive failures in the last ten years, and sometimes, I've lost things. Important things and unimportant things. And years later -- years later -- I find myself scouring old repositories looking for them.

So I've become paranoid.

I have a Mac, so I have Time Machine, and it backs up every variation automatically. I have a backup image for my whole hard drive I use as well. But for my actual writing folder -- the folder where all my creative work lives -- I have a subversion repository and every now and again I back that whole freaking thing up to a server in another state.

Just in case.

I have no point, save that I just backed it up again, and it occurred to me... I've become paranoid. I've reached the point where I am so afraid of losing bits of writing I do -- regardless of quality -- that my backup procedures have become almost absurdly redundant. And yet somehow I know -- I know that if I have a true failure... the one thing I need will somehow not be backed up anywhere. It will magically slip through the cracks.

I know this will happen. I know it. And I know that whatever I lost I could easily have saved, if I had only just.... X.

I spend my life trying to figure out what 'X' is.

This too is a spoilery spoilsport of spoiling.

( And outrage in five... four... three... two.... )

There was an excellent, if spoilery, review and critical commentary on Star Trek here. I got this particular link from action buddy chadu.

However, as excellent as that essay was, I disagreed with it. At length.

It's pretty criticism-crunchy stuff. On the other hand, it's been how long since I dirtied up Websnark with 2,500 words of rambling?

This is just spoilery enough that I'll put it behind the cut of cutting.

( Chekov! )

I sit in a meeting. The meeting has good coffee. The coffee is flavored. The people are nice though some of the topics are tense.

It is a meeting. Like many other meetings. We talk and become empassioned and have arguments and within a week we won't remember anything we said. There have been thousands of them since I came here. There will be thousands more.

I am just plain tired.

Star Trek was amazing. Well done, utterly satisfying, and Jesus Christ, when did Chekov become awesome?

I am very, very happy with this movie.

Thanks to monumentally good sales I am now the owner of a 'Peek.' This is a remarkably useful unitasker (to use the Alton Brownism) that gives a fellow access to e-mail essentially everywhere. In other words, it gives the key advantages of a Blackberry without the monumental cost or the need to press a freaking brick to my ear when taking a cell phone call.

This post is my test of the Peek and my 'post by e-mail' system. Exciting, isn't it?

Though I do not live there, in my heart I'm always from Maine.

I love Maine. I love its contentiousness. I love its idiosyncratic pride in itself. I love its trees. I love its lakes. Put in the right stew, I even love its potatoes.

And sometimes, just sometimes, Maine makes me even prouder.

That's my state. I'm from there.

In my day job, we work a lot with cloned images. We create an image for a given model of computer, for example, and use it to quickly put our standard software build onto that model. In the summer, we spend an inordinate amount of time cloning computers -- wiping them clean of their grum, and making them identical.

The thing is, that 'identical' nature of our clones never lasts. From the first day our users have their cloned machines, they deviate from their original basis. Sometimes dramatically. And when we do repairs, we can't just blithely assume nothing has changed on the computer, even on the applications or systems level. Though the machines started as clones, they become individual almost immediately. They shape themselves to their users and their environment.

Which is the point we're at with Dreamwidth versus Livejournal.

In one sense, I've created a clone of my Livejournal account. My interests are up on Dreamwidth, now. My posts are on Dreamwidth. Even the comments I've received have been magically replicated. Locked posts on Livejournal are now locked posts on Dreamwidth. And so on, and so it goes. The two accounts are now clones of one another.

Or they were. But such things don't last. They never can.

My account on Dreamwidth is demiurgent . My account on Livejournal is also demiurgent . When I post, it goes to both accounts, locking them both if I protect the entry. But when folks comment on my entries, from the point of synchronization forward, those comments will be on one side of the divide or the other.

Right now, Dreamwidth is tiny. It remains to be seen if it will develop the critical mass to survive. Livejournal, for all its issues, is huge. It has that critical mass. Maybe that will change, between Dreamwidth or the other various code forks. We have seen the beginnings of diaspora, and that way leads to decline. It always does. By crossposting between accounts, I hedge against fragmentation -- but that doesn't mean I'm having a conversation that includes Dreamwidth friends and Livejournal friends. That means I'm having two separate conversations.

I pulled all my old entries into Dreamwidth against the unlikely possibility that Livejournal will implode and take all the stuff we've done with it. Right now, if one of the two services was to fail, it's more likely to be Dreamwidth -- so my crossposting will have the effect of saving my stuff to Livejournal as well. Either way, I'm proof against loss. That's all to the good.

But the hard thing to remember, for me at least, is that these really are two separate things, not one big one. A minor thing? Maybe. But a real one.

The next step in the replication process is to pull my entries et al over. We'll see how it goes.

My dreamwidth account (demiurgent , naturally enough) is up and running. And, as I mentioned, it's configured to crosspost at livejournal automatically. Which means, among other things, that I'm going to start using Dreamwidth to post things unless it turns out not to work well.

As I said in my last post on the subject, I'm doing this because... well, because I want to make sure that everyone who wants to be in touch with me can be, even if they drop out of LJ.

Otherwise, I don't anticipate much changing how I use these posts -- it's just, they'll be in two places instead of one.

So, you know. Sampo.

Okay, it's official. I would in fact like a spare Dreamwidth code if someone has one.

The crossposting functionality is what got me. As near as I can tell, you can post to Dreamwidth and it will automatically post to Livejournal. While Dreamwidth won't be able to truly import the LJ userbase, this means I'll be able to post to a single service and have my posts show up at both, and that would be... nice.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on how real life murdering pirates are souring all the fun of dressing up and doing Robert Newton imitations.

I've had fun with "Talk Like A Pirate" day like a lot of people have. It's fun to shout 'Arr, matey' and make references to scuppering on a handspike else and all the rest. But it's always seemed a little weird to me -- almost as weird as the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have been, with their convoluted Pirate code and the weirdass sense that somehow we weren't talking about people who did horrible things because they wanted your shit. I hear about all the good things from pirate culture, like the funds that pirate ships would set up to compensate crewmembers for the injuries they suffered while attacking, sacking, pillaging and sinking ships and murdering their passengers and crew, or how ships were set up as democracies so the crew had the chance to elect the captain who was best at selecting targets to sack, murder and sink. Really, it was all about the sense of freedom, of living life as they chose on the open seas! The whole "killing people and taking their shit" thing? That was no big deal.

A few years back, on one enterprising Talk Like A Pirate day, I elected to do something different. I thought I'd write something close to what a pirate would actually say -- not what Robert Newton would say (the depiction of Pirates in the popular media was established by Walt Disney in the fifties and reinforced by Walt Disney in the last ten years. Real life pirates talked like... well, talked like sailors, often of questionable literacy. No 'Pieces of Eight' or stuff.) It wasn't an angry post and it wasn't a post telling folks to stop shouting 'arr.' It was just another way to talk like a pirate -- e.g., talk like someone who wanted to take your shit and was more than happy to kill you if that's what it would take.

Some folks really liked it -- they saw it, as they said, as being creative or trying to stretch the definition. Others thought I was being... well, a poop. (I think that's when I made my Poop icon.) I also got some e-mail that was... unflattering. I was, so they said, being a downer.

In subsequent years, I either quoted actual songs from the golden age of piracy or just didn't play. Not because I dislike fun, but because I had something of a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed... I don't know, less fun to talk like a pirate when I felt a societal requirement to pretend pirates weren't... well, bad people who did bad things.

And now, suddenly, piracy is getting a bad rap, because honest to God pirates have re-entered the public consciousness (they had always been around, mind -- Somali piracy didn't start in 2008) and the people they were killing or kidnapping had started to be white Americans instead of black Somalis or brown Indonesians. So reading an article written about Mark Summers -- one of the founders of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" -- describing how he's pissed off because real life criminals are making acting like a fake criminal less palatable seems... well, it seems astoundingly insensitive. Saying that there should be different words for 'pirates' and 'piracy' today because you want to mythologize the crime they're committing just seems to miss the point.

There have been a baker's dozen piracy incidents in the last two weeks. Sometimes pirates have been warded off by shipboard anti-piracy measures, Sometimes the pirates have boarded ships, taken what they want and left. Sometimes the pirates have kidnapped crew off the ships. Sometimes they have seized the vessels in toto, to bring to port, repaint and sell. Actual murder is rare these days, but happens.

Look, have fun cosplaying. Honestly. Shout "Arr, Jim-Boy" all you like. I was a Renn Faire actor -- I know how much fun it can be. When the 19th of September rolls around, have a grand old time with it.

But let's have some perspective, shall we? We're talking about killers who take peoples' shit. We're not talking about folk heroes or Keith Richards impersonators or free wheeling anarchists who'd never harm a hair on a pretty girl's head. Pirates aren't like that.

And you know what? They never were.