The truth about commercialism, gluttony and peace on Earth

The truth is that it is all good. If some aspect of it makes you happy, go with it. By the same token, can we enjoy this happy time of year without bemoaning aspects of it that don't seem sufficiently pure?

Commercialism is cool: who doesn't like getting new things they have wanted? In our house, it's like everyone has a second birthday on Christmas. People in my house put off getting things they want for months leading up to Christmas, so getting the items is quite the thrill. But at least no one goes around complaining that others are not being commercial enough.

Gluttony is glorious. Being post-food myself, this doesn't matter much to me. Actually this is one area where no one really objects that much. I guess, given my food rants in the past, I would be the one to say something like 'hey, does an obese country really need this?' but since Christmas isn't only about food, it's not that big a deal. There are people who do complain that others are not gluttonizing enough, and they need to chill.

Peace is positive. Just let go the whole 'this is only about my religion alone'. Christians attempting to own Christmas are being silly because underneath their claims is the historical fact that their guy was born in spring or summer. Every faith and culture has a winter holiday, and if they didn't, they made sure to get themselves one. Come one, come all.

In the immortal words of Sheryl Crow, if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad. So live it up, because January and February are coming, and they blow chunks.

Trackball heaven: is this the Lair's future?

See the 7 Logitech trackballs! See the 8 screens (4 suspended) in the front-viewing-area-thingie?

The next step for the Lair 1.0 is to fill that big empty expanse on the desk. Oh, come on, don't act surprised. Did you think that I would never want to play any games in the Lair? I would want it to look like a slightly less insane and majorly less cluttered version of this.

I'm not saying I would ever construct something like this, but check out this from a Yahoo! Games article on a guy who plays 36 World of Warcraft characters at the same time on 11 computers. It's called multiboxing, because he has a separate account for each one. That's one way to have a grand time without any friends!

But let's focus on the hardware here, people, okay? Here's another look:


(Any insinuation or accusation that this computing gear orgy is shown here in part to make anything I want to do seem minor by comparison is spurious, scurrilous and preposterous.)

The truth about me and football fandom

Beginning in 1984, I swung from mild apathy toward pro football to rabid interest. I watched the San Francisco 49ers offense glide through the season in such a groove that I was shell-shocked. Joe Montana was so cool, in the zone, and he spread the ball around everywhere. The offense's timing and execution was brilliant: I had never seen a group of people act so closely in concert. And the D was tough, led by the hard-hitting Ronnie Lott.

I began to pay attention to all the exciting football going on during that era: the epic Giants-49ers duels, Bo Jackson, LT, run and shoot, the hapless Oilers and Bills and Patriots. But a perfectly thrown pass, a Barry Sanders juke or a Ronnie Lott hit are things of beauty. I played Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl III (Special Edition) and knew every roster. I played Front Page Sports Football Pro, made my own playbook, built my own league based on historical NFL teams (Rochester Jeffersons, anyone?), etc.

Lately, the fan-focused fantasy football has really ruined much of my interest. The sport is no longer about teams and group psychology, it's about players' individual performances. Most of the fans now root only for the running back on one team and the wide receiver on the other because of their league. Do they care which team wins so long as their guys rack up the points? Yes, fanta-football allows the fans to participate more, in a Vegas sense, but it tackles the idea of it being a team sport.

Free agency has killed football too. Players are not together long enough to learn the playbook and play together. The constant shuffling of players due to injuries, which are way too common, and free agency means that there are no more offensive or defensive philosophies. One season a team has an aggressive D, the next they are on their heels because their explosive linebacker is on IR. Coaches have become just a front office tool seemingly along for the ride, but no longer in control of much.

This has brought parity to the NFL, but also a lot of boredom. Yes, you may not know who will win any given game, but who cares? A lot of games look like the quality of NFL Europe. And there are no dominant teams. Most cycle between mediocre and abysmal, with little reason for the change. Other teams go on a run for one season, and then stink up the place the next. Going from 6-10 to 10-6 to 6-10? Come on, it's random chance. The Super Bowl winners seem to be drawn randomly any more.

Maybe it is me. I just don't have the desire to sit through 3 hours of a game. At 58:00 into a close Monday Night Game, I turned it off. Just wasn't worth the effort. Either way, I'm done with pro football. I'll spread my very low attention to sports more evenly among them.

But, I have to admit, playing the old Tecmo Super Bowl on the web (see link above) was fun. My 1991 49ers beat the 1991 Bills 36-28 (yeah, the controls were hard to get the hang of).

Macllenium Falconbook

The truth is, I don't know what to make of Apple anymore.

The MacBook's hard drive died midway of this past week. I was angry, frustrated and ready to chuck the thing and go get a cheapie netbook. There have been a number of other problems with this computer in the past. But it is only 2.5 yrs old. The chipping plastic topcase I could live with, but a dead MacBroke is no good.

Worst, I lost about two weeks worth of work on the novel. Yes, it was backed up, but I generally back up once a month or so. Oh, and I should mention that those were two really good weeks. I had finished going through the novel completely and was revisiting sections I flagged for needing more work. It was starting to feel like the end stage of a draft where I feel like all I can do is mess it up. Also, I had a bunch of 'stickies', notes to myself on lots of stuff, that are now gone forever.

I took the MacBroke to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. Got there 1/2 hour earlier than my appointed time, but they took me early. (It was three days after HDD death that I could get the reservation: I don't know what this says about the volume of problems and repairs going on with Apple products.) They diagnosed that the HDD was D-E-D dead, which meant the files were lost. But because there was a run of bad drives a while back, this was a beyond warranty freebie for me.

When they tested the new drive, the hardware test failed on a temperature sensor, no doubt a leftover problem from the heat fan death problem from last year. That, and the topcase, will be repaired for free when I take it back in. But they got the computer back to me on the same day.

I have to say that I was floored. I figured that I would be out $50-100 on a new drive and another $100 for labor or whatever. But the Apple service was excellent, especially in fixing problems where they could have shrugged off culpability like any other corporation or tried to squeeze me for some more money. ("Mark, your flux capacitor also looks like it might go. That will be another $300.")

It has cost me nothing to have this computer fixed yet. $0. Beyond the original price, all I've spent is about $80 to quadruple the RAM. It may very well be a lemon that needs a Wookie to bang on it with a hydrospanner once in a while, but it has it where it counts: the technical support.

I write to you today on the MacBook, while it is in between stops at the Genius Bar. So far, so good. It flies once again, but every time I pull the hyperdrive lever, my heart jumps into my throat.

Oh, and the new MacBooks? Totally awesome. The glass trackpad with NO buttons is pure genius. If they put one into the MacBook Air 2.0, whenever that comes around, I would be hard-pressed to ignore it as a possible successor to the whitest hunk of junk in the galaxy.

Applesauce Bar stands at 55% apple awesomeness, 45% watery hype.

Out-parented by a 9 year old

I don't usually talk about the smaller Trackballs, but you'll see there's no harm done in this post.

My son was in the tub, washing his hair, while I worked with his older sister on fractions, divisions and decimals outside the bathroom. He started crying and yelling. I checked on him and he said that he got shampoo in his eyes.

So I told him to lay back in the water and get the shampoo off his head and out of his eyes. I gave him a washcloth to clean off his face. He just kept crying.

In rushes his sister, who takes the washcloth, tells him it's okay, soothes him, and starts cleaning his face. This 9 year old girl went completely into mom mode.

I stood there, useless.

And yes, she calmed him down, got the shampoo off his face and hair. I doubt she even noticed what she was doing. I stood there in awe. Kudos to Mini Trackball.

The truth about the word 'oral'.

I was recently reminded at work about how we regularly misuse the word 'oral'. In this case, it was a job description that mentioned giving 'oral presentations' and 'written and oral' something or others.

Now, I will admit that using the word oral or orally to refer to something spoken is completely allowed by dictionaries and common usage. It's just that I think it's time to change that.

When people hear the word 'oral' or orally, they think of two things, and neither has to do with verbal or spoken communication. They have to do with a person's mouth. The first, which I'm sure jumped into your brain the second you read this post's title is, well, I'll get to that in a second. The second thing you thought of is health care related to the mouth. Oral hygiene, oral care, Orajel, take this medication orally, etc. It's a nice clinical description for the mouth, and it covers the teeth, tongue, gums, etc. It doesn't refer to the voice box, which actually produces the words. You can measure body temperature with a thermometer orally or anally. Come to think of it, the word 'oral' is a nice compliment to 'anal'. The intake and the exhaust portals, if you will.

Which leads me back to the first thing you thought of regarding the word oral: oral sex. Come on, admit it. Not that there's anything wrong with thinking of oral sex first. It's not even your fault; the only time the word 'oral' gets used in the media anymore is to try to politely describe this act in as clinical a term as possible. Like crime reports, or newspaper articles, etc. Whenever one hears or reads the word 'oral' these days, one is fully expecting to hear it followed by 'sex.'

That's why it makes no sense to refer to spoken or verbal communication as oral. Oral belongs to health and sex now. It just does. So lets make a clean break. After all, we don't refer to written communication as 'manual' even though it has to be performed with the hands, one way or another. The hands are the means, the writing is the medium, and for communication, the medium matters. By the same token, referring to communication as something coming out of one's mouth is irrelevant; the mouth is just the means. The medium is the voice, the audio transmission: spoken or verbal. And verbal is never used in connection with clinical health (again, oral) or sexual contexts (it's called phone sex or pillow talk).

Verbal communication, not oral. Spread the word. Verbally, and in writing.

Update on the math journey in public school

Last school year, I kept track of how many days math was missed in Minnie Trackball's 3rd grade. After a few weeks at the start of the year, she managed to have it nearly every day, until the end of school. Then it kind of just petered out.

Fourth grade has stepped things up in terms of homework and subject matter. Minnie has moved up a level in math and will be skipping 4th grade math for the most part. We are real proud of her and she's really excited. So far, the obligatory two weeks of no math, to do assessments and such, is over. Math class assignments and homework have started to flow.

The math changes are part of a trend we've noticed when it comes to school. As the academics increase, there is a sorting out that happens. The kids who put in the effort seem to be pulling ahead; the parents who were so bent on having a gifted kindergartner are becoming more realistic about what their kids can do, especially if they fall a bit behind. Grades and standardized test scores make things pretty clear. Sweat equity seems to be a growing factor in success at school. And that can only be a good sign.

Lair 1.0 Pics

For your viewing pleasure:

The desk and chair: (the shiny stuff is vapor-lock that holds the insulation in and moisture out; the house was built that way and it is not a cool sci-fi effect that I put up)



The embryonic theater area and library (ignore the luggage shelf and storage container 'walls'):



Lair security courtesy of Star Trek and Star Wars models (an Incom T-65 X-Wing below):


The Pirate Lego sound stage:

The town is under attack:


By pirates at sea:


Apparently at night or a late, cloudy evening (sigh).

ISO modern supernatural baddies

The humanized supernatural is a huge thing right now. Fantasy romances featuring vampires, werewolves, the undead, etc. are a big hit. Most of the focus is on vampires. The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer features a teenage girl who falls for a vampire and it's sitting atop the Amazon best seller list. There are tons of other fiction genres that have leapt into supernatural angles to spice up old plots. Now HBO has a new series, True Blood, which is a Southern Gothic vamp soap opera.

As a result, vampires just don't seem that scary anymore. They are emotionally vulnerable, thoroughly humanized, even enviable. They have issues, personalities and goals. These angles are entertaining, but it reduces them in a way. In fact, all the supernatural monsters seem trite, played out, overused. Maybe we have humanized too much, or maybe the world has changed in a way that they no longer have a grip on us. We've turned them into another class of superheroes, really. Which may be cool, but it's not scary.

These types of things used to be scary, viscerally scary. The very thought of some supernatural monster would drive a spike of fear into your heart. They were tied to the old Joseph Campbell archetypes and represented threats to the very fabric of human society:

• Vampires subvert morality, especially for women, and they are death incarnate.
  
• Werewolves represent losing control, and the threat of spreading that loss of control.
• Zombies represent a loss of personality, a loss of self that can't be stopped and is highly contagious. As rotting corpses, they also represent disease and death.
  
• Witches are strong confident women with power over men, threatening the patriarchy.
• Ghosts are the past come back to haunt the guilty
  

I think we need a new set of supernatural baddies that can actually scare us. I don't know what those baddies would be, but they should be things or beings that scare the crap out of us just by their very existence. In the next post I'm going to throw some ideas out about what those things might be.

That's just how I scroll

You can surf your usual rounds of sites until your eyes bleed or your hand breaks off at the wrist from all the clicky-clicky. Staying on top of one's interest areas, keeping in touch with people, following the news and can seem endless and overwhelming. I can't stand to be uninformed, but am lazy enough to want the informing process to be fast and efficient. I suspect you do too. There is a better way.

I realize that I have arrived late to many innovations in this area, but am probably ahead of the curve for this blog's less geeky readers, so here we go. People sometimes express amazement that I know so much, but it's simply because I try to quickly find information. So I will detail how I do this and hopefully give you ideas on how to better manage your own info flows.

iGoogle: At the base of all this is The Google. I have a gmail account, this blog and a couple of other things from Google. It is all tied together by my iGoogle page: a web page custom designed to dump all the information I want, how I want it, in one place. iGoogle allows you to set up tabbed pages where you can house different types of information. And there's always a Google search box there if you need it. Check out the tech tab from my iGoogle page below:


The Home tab has my three main web communication tools: gmail inbox, Twitter and Google Reader. I rarely interact with these three programs outside of this home tab. I've made the tab my home page, so whenever I fire up The Firefox, I see email, twitter and new blog posts all on one screen, along with weather, calendar, Google docs and a few other things. There's a theme of background photos that I set to put a pic of Hawaii that matches the time of day. The Tech tab has a Matrix background: yes, each tab has a pic that matches the theme.

Google Reader is a program that avoids the endless clicking among all the blogs you want to follow to see if any has a new post. You 'subscribe' to the blogs you want to by searching for them. The reader will show you all of the unread posts from any of those blogs, and will let you read them right there in the Reader.

RSS feeds: Tired of clicking from the New York Times, to your hometown rag, to Weather.com, and then back to NYT to check for breaking news? You can add gadgets that have feeds from all over the web on one tab. The screenshot above shows that I have both Gizmodo and Engadget RSS feeds on my Tech tab. While at most you get a handful of headlines, you can click on the title bar and go directly to the website if you want in a separate window.

There's many other ways to create webpages that house your customized nozzle on the firehose of web content. I'm just showing you how I scroll. Your mileage may vary.

Passing the Bechdel Test

Charles Stross, sci-fi writer extraordinaire, references a test for misogyny in movies, courtesy of a comic strip by Alison Bechdel (who credits someone named Liz Wallace). The test is:

1) there are at least two female characters
2) who talk to each other about
3) something other than men.

Charlie applied this test to his own fiction and found that some of it passed, and some of it didn't. He has sworn to pay more attention to how female characters are portrayed, even at the expense of possibly turning his work into movies.

Since I have much less fiction to test than Charlie (and that is the closest this fanboy will ever come to comparing himself with Mr. Stross), this was much easier to check. Crashpoint Cascade, the novel in progress, passes. There are at least two scenes off the top of my head that meet the test, and ironically, none of the women in the first scene are in the second. I made a point of having as many female characters in the novel as male, in part because the story has some utopian elements, including more gender equity, but more importantly, because those characters just are female, just like some are angry, some are happy, some are evil and some are good.

Making the right choices subconsciously or unintentionally

Back when I was younger, I felt like I could go into any of a number of different careers. My guidelines in choosing a career were simple: I didn't pay much attention to earnings potential, industry growth, portability, advancement or even scheduling. I was all about what interested me, what I excelled at.

In retrospect, I really lucked out. At one point, I seriously toyed with pursuing journalism. I was the editor of my high school newspaper and even did Journalism Explorers and got to hang out at the local paper's newsroom. Journalism was always a low paid, badly scheduled career. I chose not to go that route because I got more interested in public policy. Twelve years later, the journalism field is collapsing as its business plan falls apart. Media organizations are hemorraging money and journalists have been laid off in droves. Plus, the pay and hours still suck. Good choice on me.

I also toyed with joining the legal profession. Even did Law Explorers in high school, got to hang with real attorneys and judges and excelled at a mock trial. Took constitutional law in college and liked it. But it just didn't excite me, the pre-laws in college were irritating and as Tom Hanks once put it, being a lawyer means having homework all the time. Plus the hours suck, the hourly pay can be pretty bad, but it is highly portable. Fair choice on me.

I went into public policy expecting low to moderate pay, no portability and lousy hours. Most policy jobs involve horrible hours in exchange for doing really important (or seemingly important) work. The burnout rate is pretty high. The pay turned out to be higher (especially on an hourly scale) than I expected, the portability is nearly nonexistent and the hours are manageable in some spots, like the spot I'm in. The burnout potential is there, but it's mostly because of the hours and work that turns out not to be important. I've avoided that for the most part. Good choice on me.

The funny thing about career choices is how some of your mildly held preferences bubble up and become more important over time. I was willing to trade off money for decent hours, and substance over appearance. I have the Gen X trait of wanting work/life balance.

Having a good amount of work experience now, to me there are few office jobs with crazy hours that seem remotely worth the tradeoff. Much of the time, the culture of 24/7 work is a perpetual fire drill done mostly for appearances' sake. Humans are not very productive beyond eight hours, other than in looking busy. Over time, it's that kind of work culture that increasingly I have found ridiculous.

This has so far kept me from toying with politics, software development and entertainment because of the lousy hours and work/life imbalance. But it's not a big deal, because those fire drill cultures drive me nuts. I like having down time each night, to vary my mental frequencies and recharge in one area while focusing on another. Good choice on me.

Digging to the truth

So I'm still in a rewrite of Crashpoint Cascade. And I'm plowing through this scene, feeling itchy because it's not right. It's not immediate enough, it's like a rough draft that I hadn't noticed is a rough draft.

It's a scene around a picnic table, with a number of characters, some of them minor. One of them is trying to convince the rest to stick with him through a political crisis. So a few characters just pop up out of nowhere who were at the table the whole time but I just had not focused on them. And they start talking, pulling the scene in other directions.

Before I know it, the scene is going off the rails. I've got some new characters raising issues that don't fit, I don't know why they're saying things, where they're going with various positions and statements. Chaos. but some of it is interesting, and a little voice says not to throw those tidbits away.

And then I move a paragraph that had made the whole narrative disjunctive. And pieces start to fall into place. Motives appear, things start to make sense. I realize that the true scene was there all along, lurking somewhere in my subconcious. It needed to be pried out slowly and carefully. There's a process to make this happen. I must keep doing it and not rushing to get so many pages done per day.

30 Years later, the Trackball rolls into the Lair

Today is the Trackball's birthday. It's funny that as one ages, that a whole bunch of old birthday traditions no longer have much interest while new ones appear.

• The donut breakfast? The soda for lunch? The large amounts of cake, the favorite food for dinner? I'm post food (ignoring lunch today).
• The money that financed summer entertainment? I'm self-financed and almost post money.
• The Legos? I bring my own.
• Celebrating the day on the day, regardless of how convenient? Now I wait for the weekend

It's not that the idea of the birthday has diminished as the birthdays rack up. The same level of excitement is there, it's just redirected to bigger objects. To the gift I have given myself: my own personal lair. A dream many years in coming true. It's 1.0, but it's done. Ever since seeing the Batcave as a 5 year old, I have wanted my own lair.

New birthday tradition: chilling out in your own personalized Lair.

Cardinal Glick meets his Invisible Avenger in the Sky

While I was away at Sesame Place, dodging water rides, thunderstorms and heaps of unhealthy American food, George Carlin died. Maybe it was fitting that I spent 2 days in a place that he would have abhorred and loved at the same time. After all, he did narrate the Thomas The Tank Engine videos and was wildly considered a very gentle person.

It should come as no surprise that the Trackball regards the man who portrayed Cardinal Glick in Kevin Smith's Dogma (the character who replaced the crucifix with the thumbs-up Buddy Christ) as a demigod. George Carlin was the truth, wrapped in humor. As a teen in the late 1980s, Carlin was already a god to me when I was old enough to see his material. He was controversial and funny. But he also seemed like a cool guy who would be fun to hang with and watch humanity pass by, if only for the commentary. Yes, I did see his short-lived Fox sitcom and Jersey Girl.

His observational humor was eye-opening. He had a way of taking human reality and revealing its absurdities in ways that I had never thought of before. And he always stuck with the truth, the way he saw it, even if it offended, fell flat or was ignored. In a way, he made you face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable (like his characterizing of belief in a god as believing in having your own personal invisible avenger in the sky) and his gentleness and his humor helped you get comfy with it.

His naughty humor was liberating. They're just words, he pointed out, but it was clear he loved language and words in particular. He was as much a poet of the stand-up world and television world as he was a performer. He just snagged the Twain Prize for American Humor, and when I saw the bio pieces on him I thought it was because he was due to receive it, not because it was an obit. Shit.

Kevin Smith and Jerry Seinfeld, who could be considered the descendants of naughty Carlin and observational Carlin, have both written tributes to him which you should read. The best I can say is that the Twain of our time has passed and will be sorely missed by this fan.

The truth about neckties

I just finished Scott Westerfeld's excellent YA novel "So Yesterday" which tackles who decides what is cool and fashionable in the teenage worlds of sneakers and clothing. Inside is a bit of a history of the necktie that posits that neckties came about because of the Little Ice Age. Everyone in Europe wore scarves all the time because it was freezing so bad the Vikings died out in Greenland. Neckties have been popular for centuries since then but they have no reason or purpose to exist. The bowtie and cravat have already fallen, but the necktie, with it's oversized shirt collar, continues to survive. You know I hate hollow traditions like that.

Combine this with a conversation I had with a geo-physicist on my bus one day about silly-easy things we could do to help the environment. She mentioned over-air conditioning DC to account for winter business wear that we insist on wearing in the summer. Like long-sleeved shirts, neckties and suit jackets.

Today was a triple digit day in DC, and schools and houses across the area had their AC conk out due to overwork. It may be time to rethink cinching our necks tight under a thick collar that likely has a t-shirt underneath. Even though the necktie culture is well entrenched. Even though the short-sleeve dress shirt is outdated. Even though the hip substitute for a tie is a sport jacket, which is decidedly less cool in the summer. Even though most office climate decisions are made by bosses, who are likely jacketed and tied and sweating men. Even though it makes younger workers look older, more serious and older workers look younger (imagine your boss in a t-shirt and shorts as opposed to a figure slimming navy blue suit and tie). Even though being formally dressed in DC is code for seriousness, as those in the most expensive ties and suits make the most unserious claims.

In one sense, wearing a necktie has desensitized people to seeing a sharp dressed man. What used to be reserved for super-formal occasions (Bond, James Bond) is now boring. And not wearing a necktie looks cool, hip, at least in DC. I'm impressed five times more often by the shirt and jacket hipster than the sharp, neato tie. Supposedly the ever encroaching biz-casual has threatened the neck tie, but that's a neckwear apocalypse that never quite seems to arrive.

Maybe I'm exposing some misplaced West Coast roots, but I think a t-shirt with a sport jacket and uncreased pants should be fine for anyone in a geek job. Yeah, the oversized collars, on shirts so transparent you have to wear an undershirt, probably have to go as well. Save the ties for the prom, the wedding, the funeral, the big presentation/occasion. We need a new idea of business wear that complements the changing environment. I don't know what that is.

As for me, I may try to limit the routine necktie wearing (does anyone care where I work if I wear a tie?) and keeping the AC off this summer in my office. The truth is that I can't escape the necktie entirely, and don't mind them that much, but it's time to usher those things into oblivion.

Balticon wrap-up and Indy review

A good time was had by all the Trackballs at Balticon 42. The little trackballs bonded with friends of mine quite a bit and Dr. Trackball bought some jewelry and didn't seem horrified by the huge amounts of geekery. I got to do a lot of hanging out with cool people and hit and missed on good and bad panels.

The whole weekend was capped off by seeing Indiana Jones. My mini-review (with spoilers): good movie, the only wrong note in the whole thing was the space alien storyline. Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of the alien crutch. I blame George Lucas, who insisted on mimicking 1950s alien films even though Spielberg and Ford objected for almost two decades, because they knew it wasn't appropriate for Indiana Jones. What do space aliens have to do with archeology? But to get a movie done, they had to cave. At the end there were two movies going on: Spielberg and Ford's story about Indy and his family, and Lucas' about aliens.

It would have been much better if it had been Indy versus the Soviets to find the Fountain of Youth (ironic, and have Indy refuse it's powers) or some other South American religious/mythical artifact. Tie it in with the Cold War fights in that part of the world (heck, set it in Cuba, two years before the revolution and have Indy run into Fidel). Ah, but they had to let George insist on his bad story idea. There's a whole odd dynamic between Lucas and Spielberg in which Steven bows to George, despite being the much better storyteller and possibly filmmaker.

Off to Balticon

Geeks all across Maryland, DC, Virginia will pack their geeky bags for Balticon 42, including yours truly. I always get the feeling that I am not geeky enough to belong, despite my geek cred in the real world among the non-geeks. You could say I'm a geek and a geek fanboy, in that I think geeks are cool and don't feel worthy. No physical science degree, no comics pedigree, no l33t hacker skillz, no RPG XP, no publications. But somehow the tribe doesn't kick me out.

Every year, Balticon is like a checkpoint on the writing career such as it is. So here's a progress report:

Short fiction sold: 0.
Short stories drafted: 1.
Short stories reviewed by outside readers: 1.
Novels being drafted: 1.
Novel drafts completed: 1.
Novel drafts reviewed by outside readers: 1.
Novel drafts in rewrite: 1.
Query letters sent: 0.

Not very impressive, and a few years ago, I might have become mightily discouraged at the glacial pace of things. But some experience in crafting quality things suggests that time to get things right is time well spent, especially when building expertise and new skills. It's supposed to take ten years to become an expert in something. The Crashpoint Cascade has been in production seriously since about 2003, so I'm halfway there, right?

The Shiniest RPG in the 'Verse?

Just stumbled across this in my travels around the Cortex. Looks shiny. But are there enough Browncoats out there to sustain it? Maybe there will be some at Balticon. I'm not sure I have time enough anymore for RPG play, what with keeping my own ship flying, writing, video games and all, but I hope somebody does.

The Truth about Video Games

The release of the widely hailed Grand Theft Auto IV indicates what a sea change has happened in how society treats video games. GTA was ignored, GTA II (the first I ever played) got a smattering of negative press, and GTA III was treated as if it were a dire threat to national security. GTA IV is being treated as an entertainment and artistic masterpiece. Oh, how the times have changed.

Video games seem to be a major point of contention for this generation of adult males. Regarded as a childish pastime that every young woman instantly writes off as temporary but soon finds is not, video gaming has become a sore point and a cause for celebration at the same time. The truth is that video games are like any other entertainment: capable of greatness, culture-changing and yet prone to misuse by those who take everything too far, including those looking for easy scapegoats.

No longer is the video game the ridiculous boogeyman blamed for school shootings, carpal tunnel or empty bowling alleys (no, that would be guns, the mouse and the cell phone). But it is the culprit of the male college freshman who stays in his room for days, hiding from the unfamiliar campus, skipping class and ultimately dropping out. Being able to socialize with high school buds via email, texting and social networking also are crutches to make staying in his high school and parents' world so comfy.

Ah, but video games have risen in social status too, as us males of the first video gaming generation have ascended to positions of influence in industry, media and entertainment. And the games have gotten pretty good, in part because they don't take themselves too seriously. Why not celebrate them? They are the first and only completely interactive form of entertainment: mentally challenging and entertaining in ways completely unlike previous forms.

Cases in point would be games coming up in the near future:
Lego Batman: Play with a Lego Batman. If this is half as fun as Lego Star Wars, yum.
Lego Indiana Jones: See above
Spore: Be the (intelligent?) designer of an organism that evolves and eventually flies to other planets from Will Wright, the guy who created Sim City and the Sims.

And in a sign that games are supplanting movies, comics and books in some ways:
Ghostbusters: in lieu of another sequel
Star Wars: the Force Unleashed: Be Vader's apprentice in a brand new chapter that takes place between the trilogies, with a super realistic physics engine.