Chrononautic Log

September 29, 2005

The evidence:

But apart from the manifest military history/RPG geekery of it — what if Rasputin’s high constitution had allowed him to make his final saving throw against poison? [UPDATE: Oops. Obviously he DID make his saving throw. He died of hit point loss from knives or whatever it was] — I’m not aware of an especial correlation [of alternate history] with right-wingery.

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What if Derrida had been raised by analytic philosophers? No one writes these things because the [alternate history] genre belongs to the military historians. Sad, sad.

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Not unless we find it plausible to conceive of History as Mind, in a quite robustly clinical sense, i.e. to the point where it would make sense to lay History out on the couch or give it a Voight-Mein Kampf empathy test. ‘Tell me only the good things you remember — about the Jews.’

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This sounds like a wonderful new slogan for the NRA: guns don’t kill people, History kills people.

. . . [A] Japanese-style monster movie. It starts with the Face of History (afflicted with a neurotic tic) moving over the waters, after it is awakened by deep, Ursprunglich phenomenological testing. The monster surfaces from the depths and moves in on Tokyo.

The anxious officer barks into his bulky field phone: ‘History is attacking the city!’ Guns fire. But the bullets bounce off History’s thick hide. Grooooonk!

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And here I thought teratology was still totally Airwolf.

(All this in one article and comment thread! I could go on, but hey, it’s all out there.)

Okay, maybe it’s just me.

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September 28, 2005

I think we’ve now had several definitive takes on the “gods powered by belief” idea. For a while it was an okay solution to the “So I want to write a contemporary story about Athena or Yahweh or Hanuman or some other god with a penchant for direct and obvious interference in human affairs, but first I have to explain the lack of such direct and obvious interference in the near past” problem, but it’s run its course now; it’s up there on the trope shelf next to the ray guns, humanoid AIs, collectible artifacts and color-coded orders of chivalry and magic. Any new ideas? What else have we got?

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Substitute reader for player, author for developer, book for game, trope for mechanic, and so on — and keep one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button — and the “genre addiction / genre life cycle” musings here explain a lot. For instance:

What we see here is the consolidation of game designs tropes over the life cycle of the genre. Early examples within a genre tend to have a wildly diverse spectrum of game mechanics tropes that appeal to a broader spectrum of players readers. As the genre matures, the game mechanics tropes become more standardized and the needs of the genre addicts more homogenized. As the market segment consolidates and standardizes, the majority of the players readers are well served. They get more polished games books that have greater depth. Who could argue that a tightly polished game book like Warcraft A Game of Thrones is a bad thing?

. . . [However, when] you recycle the same standardized game mechanics tropes, you put players readers at severe risk of burnout on a genre. There are only so many FPS epic fantasies many people can play read before they don’t want to play read them any more. This is less of a problem for the super hardcore players readers. However, it is a substantial problem for the less hardcore players readers.

As the less hardcore players readers burn out on the game mechanics tropes of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game reading market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.

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And it’s in National Geographic, so you know it’s true.

The study team reports that the severed tentacle repeatedly gripped the boat deck and crew after it was hauled aboard.

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At least, as reported by his fellow Foolscap guests of honor. Scroll down to the 1:20PM entry, Foolscap, and work your way down.

(Now I’m almost sorry I didn’t go. Sorta.)

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And when you’re done with that, read Fafblog on Kurzweil. Wooooooeeeeeeoooooo!

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I’m kinda bogged down with this apartment stuff, but in the mean time, go read this interview Chris Nakashima-Brown did with Bruce Sterling, about J.G. Ballard. Not only is it full of Ballardian neo- post-existentialist goodness, it’s Sterling, so it’s full of snappy one-liners like this one:

Well, science fiction’s a form of popular culture. But if you’d look at most science-fiction practitioners, they basically come across like a Nashville hat act. They’re hicks.

Truer words . . . myself included, naturally.

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September 22, 2005

So, I know I’m lousy about removing my laundry from the communal laundry room in a timely fashion. But is stealing my clothes really the most appropriate way to communicate to me that my laundry habits have become a problem for you?

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Update: And, yes, it was the apartment manager.

At least she didn’t try to give me a lecture along with my laundry. I’d probably be posting this from jail.

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Update (9/22): And today I came home to a note threatening me with eviction on grounds of violating my lease agreement by harassing my fellow residents — to wit, my “threatening” note. The text of said note, for reference:

To the person or persons unknown who made off with my laundry: I appreciate your strength of feeling, and I apologize, sincerely, for any inconvenience my cavalier laundry habits may have caused you.

That said — and particularly given that you made no other attempt to communicate your displeasure to me — I consider the theft of my clothes to be a thoroughly disproportionate and highly inappropriate response. A simple note in the laundry basket would have been sufficient.

Please return my clothes to the laundry room and spare us both any further unpleasantness.

I’ll be evicted if I don’t comply within ten days. Comply with what, I’m not exactly sure.

I was going to move anyway.

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(This is mostly in answer to Ben.)

I never used any software in the 90s that was as painful to install, configure, use, or (god help us) upgrade as Apache or Postfix. I’m sure it was out there, but I wasn’t using it. (Admittedly, there are people who like mucking around in configuration files. I understand how such people could consider administering Apache to be less painful than administering, say, AppleShare. However, I am no longer one of these people.) I can’t speak to Google Earth because it only runs on Windows. But I’m not claiming that nobody today is writing good desktop software, or that the state of the art in desktop software hasn’t moved forward. I’m bitching about the state of the art in server and client/server software.

SQL and I had our honeymoon. We still see each other from time to time, but the romance has long since gone out of the relationship. What’s not to like about MT being on mysql is that I don’t want to have to learn to be a mysql administrator just so I can have a blog. Admittedly, I’ve managed to get away without having to learn to be a mysql administrator so far, but the price of that is never being able to upgrade it or back it up. (For the record, all commercial RDBMSs that I’ve ever worked with suck from this point of view, too.) Likewise, the fact that you can hack the scripts MT is made of is certainly handy, but since I didn’t go to the trouble of, say, setting up a source control system and a test environment before I started hacking it, I now can’t remember what I’ve changed and when it comes to upgrading I have, again, screwed myself.

As far as local vs. remote goes — well, I’ve been lucky, I guess. In twenty years I’ve never actually destroyed my own computer, or even come particularly close. And since we’re still five or ten years away (as the Glasgow Internet Experience showed) from me being able to access my stuff anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world, I prefer to keep the files I might want to look at where I can get at them. (Email is another story. But the primary use case for email is when I definitely am connected, not when I mgiht-or-might-not be.)

Also, when it comes to remote file management, there’s this:

Figure 1. Why I don’t use any of my Linux accounts as my primary file storage.

Admittedly, there probably is a way around this, too, like WebDAV or something. Or Samba. Or God-knows-what. But all of that comes around, again, to administering more server software. Which is what I’m sick of.

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P.S.: And while the folks at Six Apart have done as well as anybody could expect with the web interface to MT, can I just say, for the record, how much fun it is to edit large rich-text documents like this one in a web browser text area? No fun at all, that’s how much.

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September 21, 2005

So, during this discussion over at Jed’s place, I figured out that my annoyance with MT is mostly tied up with my annoyance with administering a Linux box, particularly remotely, and with a vague feeling that I’d like my important files and other data to be on a machine I have physical access to, preferably in formats that are easy to understand, back up, fix problems with, etc. (Which, among other things, kind of means “not in a database,” particularly not in a database like MySQL that I barely know how to use and that I don’t have very good tools for.)

There’s this truism in technology that the new thing is always good at being the new thing and bad at being the old thing. PDAs are good at being PDAs, bad at being personal computers. CDs are good (relatively) at fitting on bookshelves and maintaining their sound fidelity over time, bad at displaying cover art and liner notes and at satisfying the sort of ears good enough to insist on the warm humanistic glow of a tube amp. MP3s are good at being traded on the Internet and carried around in your pocket, even worse at displaying cover art and keeping audiofreaks happy.

What I’ve realized — over a decade or so of this Internet thing, a decade or so of giving the free software people the benefit of the doubt, etc., etc. — is that, basically, postmodern, server-based, internet-related software all sucks at being old-fashioned desktop software. Even the stuff you pay money for is broken in all sorts of ways that you wouldn’t have put up with in a DOS or System 7 program from the mid-90s.

At this point I’m supposed to say “on the other hand” and talk about all the stuff that the postmodern software can do that the mid-90s software can’t. (Such you reading this, with no intervention by me. FrameMaker isn’t so good at that.)

But you know, I’m not gonna. I’m just going to whine about it.

Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

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September 15, 2005

It’s going to take me more than a quick blog post from work to explicate my sudden yet deep-rooted resentment of Ivan Tribble. In the mean time, though, the Tensor’s “The Paradox of Japan” is a must-read. And absolutely accurate. (Barzak, you back me up.)

As the nation emerged from occupation in the 1950’s with its new and unique constitution, in which it forsook the practice of war for all time, it seemed poised to chart a course different from that of any other nation. Just how different was more surprising than anyone expected.

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September 14, 2005

Don’t make me go get a Ph. D., you condescending little fearmonger.

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I don’t know what provisions my state of birth has for honoring members of the California National Guard, but this makes me proud to be a Californian. Hell, I’ll even stop talking smack about Orange County.

The National Guard team of searchers was about to call in a “DB,” or dead body, at 1927 Lopez St. in the Broadmoor district when Lt. Frederick Fell decided to investigate.

In the past few days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on.

The morticians will remove the deceased later.

But Fell broke the rules and ordered his men to bash open the door, launching a series of events that would save a man's life and revitalize California Task Force 5 from Orange County. In the past two days, the 80-member task force had identified seven dead bodies in the same neighborhood, and they had rescued no one.

But Tuesday, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina smacked this aging community in the face, an unconscious and emaciated man identified as Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, was rescued. The man is expected to survive.

 . . . When they crashed through the door, Hollingsworth didn't move. But he was breathing.

National Guard medics draped an IV bag over his ceiling fan, but his veins were too weak to support the needle. They pulled him out of the house and laid him on the sidewalk. He looked as if he weighed less than 80 pounds.

Task Force 5 sent a team that included Dr. Peter Czuleger, an emergency-room doctor at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, to the scene. Czuleger didn’t have the proper equipment, so he improvised, using a short needle to pierce the vein under Hollingsworth's clavicle.

“It’s like trying to climb into a third-story window with a stepladder,“ Czuleger said.

Once the IV was in place, medics were able to pump 2 liters of saline solution into the man.

The hospital attendants hadn’t expected to see a survivor 16 days after the storm.

“They were surprised at the hospital that anyone in his condition would still be alive,” Czuleger said. “In 24 hours, he would have been dead.“

— “Survivor rescued 16 days after the hurricane”, Orange County Register (Registration required, but Bugmenot has them on file.)

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On eBay. Not really being auctioned, per se, unfortunately (unfortunately for whom? Don’t ask me) and it looks like they didn’t sell.

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September 12, 2005

Many of you already know this — indeed undoubtedly knew about it well before I did. But the rest of you must be told.

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September 11, 2005

My new blog. Courtesy of the Flangitizer.

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September 5, 2005

1. To readers of Analog’s Blog’s Eye View who came here expecting science fiction. It’s been a science-fictional couple of weeks, but not in a way that’s conducive to talking about science fiction, if you know what I mean. For SF-related blogging, check out the Art and Infernokrusher archives.
2. To CascadiaCon attendees, for not putting in more than an evanescent apparition Saturday evening. It’s been a crazy summer, and I needed the long weekend to unwind. Next year in Anaheim!

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September 2, 2005

I read y’all’s blogs and I can’t decide whether I should feel lucky for not having cable, or irresponsible for not exposing myself to the full force of the coverage.

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September 1, 2005

From Knight-Ridder: “Federal government wasn’t ready for Katrina, disaster experts say.”

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.

Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.

FEMA wasn’t alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.

Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.

Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay,” Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

The Army Corps’ New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

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